For most, a 60-year prison sentence marks the end of a person’s financial life. But for one Illinois woman, despite being convicted of one of the state’s most gruesome murders, she will spend the next six decades behind bars as a multi-millionaire. It’s the rare, bizarre case of a woman who destroyed a life, only to have her bank account commissary filled by the city she terrorized.
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To make sense of how something like this could happen, it all began back in March 2018 when Sandra Kolalou, also known as Sandra White, was hit by a CTA bus while walking in a Chicago crosswalk, CBS News reported. She claimed she suffered orthopedic and neurological injuries, plus lower back and leg pain.
She filed a personal injury lawsuit against the CTA and bus driver Tyrone Bynum on Feb. 25, 2019. Bynum and the CTA admitted negligence in the civil case, and a jury trial to determine damage followed.
Fast forward to October 2022. Kolalou was renting a room from 69-year-old Frances Walker’s rooming house at 5919 N. Washtenaw Ave. Two days after Walker received complaints about Kolalou from fellow tenants, an eviction notice was placed on her door.
On Oct. 10, 2022, tenants said they heard screams around 2:30 a.m., suspected something serious had happened to Walker and texted her, “Are you OK?” Concerns about Walker’s safety grew after tenants said she wasn’t heard from, the outlet reported at the time.
As Chicago police searched Walker’s home, where 36-year-old Kolalou had rented a room, they found Walker’s head, arms and legs stuffed inside a kitchen freezer, officials said. Tenants of the home also told authorities that they found traces of blood in Kolalou’s room and followed her to a beach, where they witnessed Kolalou tossing plastic bags into the water, The Chicago Sun Times reported.
Two years later, Kolalou was convicted of murdering Walker, “a person that nobody could ever say anything bad” about. She was found guilty on all counts, including first-degree murder and concealment of a homicide.
Despite her nearly 60-year sentence, Kolalou is walking into the prison yard with a $3 million CTA settlement in her pocket, turning a bus accident into a taxpayer-funded windfall that follows her behind bars.
The jury awarded Kolalou $2.8 million, with $400,000 for future medical care and $500,000 for future loss of normal life. The CTA argued that the trial should have been postponed until the murder case concluded and that jurors should have been told Kolalou might spend the rest of her life in prison, making future damages speculative.
Despite being charged for Walker’s murder, a Cook County Circuit Court judge ruled that her incarceration had no relevance to the lawsuit against the CTA.
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