Sue Thomas

Ohio-born author and former FBI agent. She was mostly deaf by 18 months and trained with speech therapists to help her speaking voice. She became an expert lip-reader. Thomas started out at the FBI in 1979 as a fingerprint examiner. She then became a lip-reader for an undercover surveillance team and spent almost four years working for the FBI, until 1983. In 1990, she published her autobiography, Silent Night, which became a TV series, Sue Thomas, F.B. Eye. A golden retriever stood in during the run of the program for Thomas' own hearing dog at the time, a golden retriever named Levi. In 2001, Thomas was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. In 2020, she received a lung cancer diagnosis but as of 2021, she claims that she is cancer-free and when not at home in a log cabin in Vermont, she travels with her service dog, a yellow lab named Sir "Rodney" the Great, as well as with a full-time associate.