Antoinette Frank

Antoinette Renee Frank (born April 30, 1971)

Irvin Bryant, a civil sheriff in 1995, testified that on the evening of February 4, he observed a stopped police vehicle with its lights flashing. Bryant thought the officer was making a traffic stop, but as he got closer, he saw the officer and two black men fighting on the side of the road. At that time, Wallace broke away, ran, and picked up a TEC-9 semi-automatic weapon off the grass. Bryant ordered Wallace to drop the gun, which he did immediately and was restrained; Lacaze then lunged toward Wallace, but Bryant grabbed him. Frank informed him that Lacaze was with her and ordered him released. Despite his involvement in the altercation, Bryant was never questioned by police, and he never gave a formal statement.^[5]

Restaurant robbery murders

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On March 4, 1995, Frank and Lacaze visited Kim Anh, a Vietnamese restaurant run by the Vu family in New Orleans East. Frank worked off-duty as a security guard. As the employees cleaned the closed restaurant, Chau Vu went into the kitchen to count money and entered the dining room of the restaurant to pay Ronald Austin Williams II. Williams was a colleague of Frank who had been working as the security guard that night to supplement his policeman's salary. He joined the New Orleans Police Department in 1991 and was a married father of two.^[6] When Chau went to pay Williams, Chau noticed Frank approaching the restaurant.

Frank and Lacaze had been at the restaurant twice earlier in the night to get leftover food to eat. When Chau had let her out on the last visit, she could not find the front door key, and with Frank returning for the third time, she sensed something was wrong. Chau ran to the kitchen to hide the money in the microwave. Frank entered the front door using the key she had stolen from the restaurant earlier and walked quickly past Williams, pushing Chau, Chau's brother Quoc, and a restaurant employee into the doorway of the restaurant's kitchen. Williams started to follow, hoping to find out what was happening when shots rang out. Lacaze had slipped behind Williams and shot him in the neck, severing his spinal cord and instantly paralyzing him. As Williams fell, Lacaze continued to shoot him in the head and back, mortally wounding him. As Frank turned back to the restaurant dining room, Chau grabbed Quoc to hide somewhere.

Chau, Quoc, and the employee hid in the rear of a large walk-in

The robbers fled the restaurant, and Frank dropped Lacaze off at a nearby apartment complex, both knowing that witnesses were left behind. Frank heard the 911 call on her portable police radio saying that an officer was down at the Kim Anh restaurant. She borrowed a patrol car and returned to the scene. Posing as a responding officer, she intended to kill Chau and Quoc to ensure there would be no witnesses. Parking in the rear, Frank entered through the restaurant's back door and made her way through the kitchen to the dining room, where Chau waited for help at the front door. As Chau fled through the restaurant's front door to the safety of arriving officers, Frank immediately identified herself as a police officer. Chau told Frank she knew what she had done and cried to the officers that Frank had committed the crimes.

Eddie Rantz, the homicide detective who worked the case, believed Frank and Lacaze planned the robbery to get revenge on Williams. Frank believed Williams was shortchanging her on hours and pay at the Kim Anh, and wanted revenge. Rantz subsequently described Frank as the most cold-hearted person he had ever encountered in three decades as an officer.

Frank and Lacaze were indicted by an Orleans Parish grand jury on April 28, 1995. Their trials were severed, and Lacaze was tried first on July 17–21, 1995, before Judge Frank Marullo. He was found guilty as charged and sentenced to death. His main tip-off had been using Williams' Chevron credit card at a Chevron station in Gretna just minutes after the robbery and murders.^[7]

Frank's trial began on September 5, 1995, also before Marullo. Although Frank's attorneys had

Officer Williams was interred in Lake Lawn Metairie Cemetery on March 7, 1995. His name was inscribed on the Memorial Wall at The National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial in Washington D.C.[11]

Initially, the Vu family kept the restaurant open at the site of the tragedy in New Orleans East for a decade, until suffering flood damage from

In 1993, a year and a half before the murders at the Kim Anh, Frank's father had stayed at her home for a time before she then reported him missing. In November 1995, a month after she received her first death sentence, a dog led police to find a human skull with a bullet hole buried under Frank's house. In a 2005 retrospective, Chuck Hustmyre said, "As for those human bones unearthed beneath Frank's house, so far, authorities have made no serious effort to identify them. The 10-year-old case, they say, remains under investigation."^[13]

Police and prosecutors believe that the skull was that of Adam Frank, and that Antoinette murdered him. However, since she is already on death row for the Kim Anh murders, they have made no effort to try her for her father's death.^[3]

On October 18, 2006, Frank's lawyers argued before the Louisiana Supreme Court that her death sentence should be overturned because she was denied state-funded experts to help prepare for the sentencing phase of the trial. They argued that the defense needed to conduct "an investigation into the defendant's background for possible mitigating evidence." Frank's attorneys introduced the testimony of psychiatrists who said that possible traumatic events in Frank's childhood could have affected her behavior at the time of the murders and she may have been suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. A psychiatrist retained by the state disagreed that Frank showed symptoms of trauma; he agreed with the diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder with antisocial tendencies given to Frank by doctors at the Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women. On May 22, 2007, the Louisiana Supreme Court ruled 5–2 that the death penalty should be upheld.^[14]

On April 22, 2008, District Judge Frank Marullo signed the death warrant for Antoinette Frank. According to the warrant, Frank was scheduled for

On September 11, 2008, the day that the state supreme court stay was to end, a new death warrant was signed by the same judge. According to this second warrant, Frank was scheduled for execution by lethal injection on December 8, 2008.[16] In a new round of appeals, defense attorneys argued they had had too little time to review the voluminous record before the deadline for filing appeals. The state supreme court ruled on the case again. Their decision, made public November 25, 2008 effectively voided the death warrant signed by Judge Marullo in September.^[17]

In September 2009, Frank's lawyers moved to have Judge Marullo removed from Frank's ongoing post-conviction appeals on grounds of bias, given that he had already signed two death warrants for her. Louisiana state Judge Laurie White heard the motion in September 2009 and, on January 3, 2010, ruled that Marullo should not be taken off the case. Frank's attorney stated she would appeal the ruling to the state's supreme court, which had already overruled both of Marullo's death warrants.

On July 23, 2015, retired district judge Michael Kirby threw out Rogers Lacaze's conviction and sentence and ordered a new trial. Kirby said that Lacaze deserved a new trial because one of the jurors hid the fact that he was a Louisiana state trooper and previously worked as a railroad policeman. At the time, commissioned law enforcement officers were legally barred from sitting on a jury. Kirby wrote that while he felt the evidence of Lacaze's guilt was "overwhelming", the juror misconduct amounted to a "structural defect" and a "violation of a constitutional right so basic to a fair trial" that the only remedy was a new trial. Kirby's ruling has no effect on Frank's conviction.[22]^[23] An appellate court later overturned the new trial order for Lacaze. 4th Circuit appellate judges Edwin Lombard, Paul Bonin and Madeleine Landrieu ruled "After review of the state's writ application in light of the applicable law and arguments of the parties, we find that the trial court erred in finding that the seating of Mr. Settle on the defendant's jury was a structural error entitling him to a new trial".^[24]

Frank was profiled in an episode of Deadly Women in 2009,^[2] Snapped: Killer Couples in 2015,^[3] and I'd Kill For You in 2016.

In November 2020, TV One debuted a movie inspired by Antoinette Frank called Blood On Her Badge Archived November 24, 2020, at the Wayback Machine.

LCIW was damaged by 2016 flooding, so its prisoners, including Frank, were moved to other prisons.^[25]

Lacaze was re-sentenced to life imprisonment without parole on December 13, 2019.^[26] Lacaze is serving his sentence at the Louisiana State Penitentiary ("Angola") in West Feliciana Parish.

On 13 October 2023, Frank's appeal for clemency was rejected during a meeting of Louisiana's pardon board.^[27]

See also

• List of women on death row in the United States

References

Citations