On May 21, 1991, in the third-floor men’s room at the University of Chicago Divinity School, a student noticed a hand dangling beneath one of the partitions, already turning blue. In the fourth stall, Ioan Petru Culianu, a Romanian professor of religious history, had been shot once through the head and left to die in a pool of his own blood, his pants still down. His killer was never caught, and the motive seemed to lie in some macabre interplay of politics and passion—the sort of fate that, in the American imagination, could only befall a foreigner. Some believed…