Sanborn, Linda

When a family member and neighbors reported not seeing her for over a week, police went to her Chicago apartment on 16 Nov. 1987 and found her body, hands and feet bound with twine and dead for over a week, and that the apartment had been ransacked. Investigations by the police, including an officer who knew sign language and was familiar with the deaf community, looked first at a former deaf roommate who had moved out a couple of weeks before, but soon zeroed in on the deaf boyfriends of the two girls. The two young men eventually confessed to burglarizing the place while Sanborn slept; when she awoke during the burglary, they tied her up and suffocated her to death with a pillow to prevent her from identifying them to the police. Danny Lord was tried and sentenced to 60 years of prison for suffocating Sanborn, and Scott Nilsson drew 35 years in prison as an accomplice to the robbery and murder.