A woman was sentenced to 58 years in prison Wednesday for killing her landlord and dismembering the body after being told she was being evicted.
Sandra Kolalou, 38, was convicted in April of murdering 69-year-old Frances Walker. She faced a maximum sentence of more than 150 years in prison, Cook County prosecutors said.
In handing down the sentence, Judge Ursula Walowski repeatedly called Kolalou’s actions “horrific” and said the evidence presented against her at the trial was substantial.
Walker’s family said they were pleased by the judge’s ruling, which will keep Kolalou behind bars into her 90s. “Sandra asked the judge for mercy, but she didn’t give my sister any mercy,” Frances Walker’s sister Benita Walker told reporters after the hearing.
Kolalou continued to deny that she murdered Walker in her statement to the court, while also saying she hoped Walker’s family would receive some closure.
“I do want the families to know, from the bottom of my heart, I had nothing to do with Fran’s death,” Kolalou said.
Kolalou used much of her statement to accuse the sheriff’s office of mistreatment while she was being held at the Cook County Jail, saying she had been threatened, made fun of and harassed for her Muslim faith by correctional officers.
But earlier in the hearing, a correctional officer said Kolalou had attacked her last fall, scratching her face and causing her to break her ankle.
Prosecutors also called a senior sheriff’s official who said Kolalou was was found guilty at 11 disciplinary hearings for her conduct, which included repeatedly threatening and sexually harassing correctional officers.
The sheriff’s office claimed Kolalou told a correctional officer to “look her up” and threatened to do the officer “as she did with the landlord.”
Kolalou had been renting a room in Walker’s converted two-flat building in the Arcadia Terrace neighborhood, but had been told she was being evicted after getting into disputes with other tenants.
Prosecutors accused Kolalou of killing Walker during a heated argument overheard by another tenant on Oct. 9, 2022. Tenants in the building became concerned about Walker’s well-being the next day and called police.
Kolalou was briefly detained by officers while carrying a garbage bag to a tow truck that she had called to take her to Foster Beach, where she said her car had broken down.
She was released after police quickly searched the apartment and found nothing to arrest her on.
Some of the building's tenants followed Kolalou to the beach and called police again after she was seen putting the garbage bag in a waste container, which was later found to contain rags soaked with Walker’s blood.
Kolalou was taken into custody by police who were trailing the tow truck after the driver claimed Kolalou threatened him with a knife.
A more thorough search of the Walker’s building led to investigators discovering the landlord’s severed head, arms and legs in a freezer.
Her torso has never been recovered, but video played at trial showed Kolalou hauling a large suitcase to her car that day, which prosecutors said they believed she threw into Montrose Harbor.
At the trial, Kolalou’s defense frequently suggested that she was being framed for the murder and didn’t know that a bag she was seen throwing away contained bloody rags — a claim that Walowski said “no reasonable person” could believe in light of the evidence presented at trial.
In victim impact statements, the family of Walker told the judge of her abilities as a pianist and how she played the organ for nearly a dozen churches on the Northwest Side.
Walker's family and her community “are all now more alone,” her brother Arnold Walker said.
