After more than a week of testimony, Cook County prosecutors rested their case Monday in the trial of a former Northwestern professor accused in the gruesome stabbing of his boyfriend.
Now the defense takes center stage. Later this week, the defendant, Wyndham Lathem, is expected to take the stand.
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Prosecutors charged Lathem with first-degree murder in what they say was a vicious premeditated attack on his young lover, Trenton Cornell, in July 2017, saying he and accomplice Andrew Warren ambushed Cornell in Lathem’s apartment and then went on the lam. Warren testified last week that he and Lathem had plans to kill each other in a premeditated death pact, and that Lathem was speaking generally about killing others as well. Lathem began the attack on Cornell, then Warren ultimately joined in, he testified.
Lathem’s defense, however, told jurors in opening statements that Warren was the only killer, characterizing him as a gold-digger and catfisher who killed Cornell in a jealous frenzy during a meth-fueled threesome after initiating an online romance with Lathem. Warren acted alone but framed Lathem in his statements to police and prosecutors, they said.
The trial is expected to last for most of the week, with prosecutors likely to call at least one more witness in rebuttal to defense testimony.
Jurors began their day Monday viewing graphic photos from Cornell’s autopsy. Cook County’s chief medical examiner, Dr. Ponni Arunkumar, testified that Cornell suffered 79 different stab and slice wounds, several of which could have been fatal on their own.
At least one juror physically recoiled at the sight of Cornell’s throat, which had been sliced in a jagged line all the way across his neck. Cornell’s jugular vein was severed, Arunkumar testified.
He bled out so thoroughly that doctors could not find enough blood in his veins or heart to send out for a toxicology test, Arunkumar said. Instead, they gathered blood that had pooled in his body — making it difficult to determine the true level of drugs in his system, Arunkumar testified.
But the material that was tested showed high levels of methamphetamine, she said. The defense is expected to argue that Cornell had taken meth shortly before being stabbed, making it unlikely that he was presumably asleep in bed, as Warren described last week.
The defense’s first witness, pharmacologist Dr. James Thomas O’Donnell, testified Monday afternoon that in his opinion it would be physiologically impossible for Cornell to have been asleep at the time.
“With such a high level and what we know the drug does to the brain chemicals, it’s like turning the volume up as high as it will go, or turning the microwave up as high as it will go,” O’Donnell said. “It just energizes, charges everything up. The body doesn’t sleep that way.”
Detectable levels of meth in the blood can increase after death, O’Donnell said, but he noted that even accounting for that, Cornell had an amount in his system that indicates he was a regular user of the drug and took it within a few hours of his death.