The robbery, Frank said, was all LaCaze's idea. He'd been talking about it for a couple of weeks. She just went along with it because she didn't know what else to do. Although ballistic evidence later proved the same 9mm pistol was used to kill all three victims, Frank refused to admit to shooting Williams. She blamed that murder on LaCaze.
Detectives found LaCaze at his brother's apartment in Gretna just a few hours after the murders. It turned out that about forty-five minutes after LaCaze left Kim Anh, he used Williams's credit card to buy fifteen dollars worth of gas at a station three blocks from his brother's apartment. After his arrest, LaCaze admitted that he went into the restaurant with a gun but denied that he shot anyone. Frank, he said, committed all three murders. He just happened to be there.
Rogers LaCaze went on trial in July 1995. He decided to take the stand in his own defense. It was a bad move. Against his attorney's advice, LaCaze, a high school dropout with an IQ later measured in the low seventies, pitted himself against lead prosecutor Glen Woods. Woods is a soft-spoken, contemplative man, but he has a mind like a scalpel, a tool he has used to slice people apart on the witness stand. In the battle of wits with Glen Woods, Rogers LaCaze was unarmed.
In the end, LaCaze was reduced to blubbering on the stand and begged the jury to spare his life. "I did not pull no trigger and kill them people," he pleaded. "I don't even know them people."
Seeking justice for "them people" was one of the defining moments of Woods's career. "They were people, they had a life, they had aspirations, they had dreams," he says. The jury convicted LaCaze of murder and recommended he be put to death.
Antoinette Frank went on trial two months later. After prosecutors Glen Woods and Elizabeth Teel rested the state's case against Frank, her lawyers essentially gave up. Although they'd subpoenaed nearly forty witnesses, they didn't call a single one.
The jury took forty minutes to convict Frank on three counts of first-degree murder.They too recommended the death penalty. Woods said,"It would have been a mockery ofjustice if Antoinette Frank was to walk away without getting the death penalty."
In October 1995, Judge Frank Marullo sentenced Antoinette Frank to death by lethal injection. LaCaze received the same sentence.
A month later, a dog found the remains of a human skeleton buried under Frank's house. It was the same house she shared for a while with her father. Frank had reported her father missing a year and a half before the murders at the Kim Anh restaurant.There was a bullet hole in the unearthed skull.
A decade after the case that rocked the New Orleans Police Department to its foundation and outraged the city and the nation, much has changed.
Under Pennington, the police department completely revamped its hiring practices. It weeded out bad officers and hired good ones. Under Supt. Eddie Compass, the healing process continues.
Still, as bad as the old hiring system was, in the case of Antoinette Frank, it worked-at least initially.The police department had at least four obvious indicators of Frank's unsuitability for the job before they hired her: lying on her application and during her pre-employment interview, two failed psychological evaluations, her disastrous interview with the department psychiatrist, her strange disappearance and suicide note-all were well-known to the NOPD before they offered Frank a job. So why did they hire her?
In the early 1990s, the department was severely shorthanded. They needed anybody who could fit into a police uniform. Crime was ripping the city apart. In 1994, the year before the Kim Anh murders, New Orleans was the murder capital of the United States. The residency requirement restricted the department to hiring only those applicants who lived within Orleans Parish. (That policy still prevents NOPD from hiring well-qualified officers who live in surrounding parishes.)
And in a city that often simmers with racial tensions,Antoinette Frank, a black woman, fit the profile they were looking for. Hiring her allowed the police department to chalk up one more hash mark for its nonexistent, never-talked-about quota system.
As to why she committed the crime, Frank now says it's her father's fault. She claims to have suffered through years of emotional, physical, and sexual abuse at his hands; it's a claim she only recently started making. But a psychiatrist who examined Frank in
1995 and 1999 said she showed symptoms of "narcissistic personality disorder with antisocial features." According to the psychiatrist, Frank exhibits a lack of empathy toward others as well as a feeling of entitlement, flies into rages, and is manipulative in relationships.
Rogers LaCaze has a simpler diagnosis. In a letter from prison, he wrote, "Antoinette is crazy. Hell, she killed her own dad and buried him under her house."
After twenty-seven years on the job, Eddie Rantz retired. He went to law school. Sometimes he still thinks about the case and about Antoinette Frank. "She is, without a doubt, the most cold-hearted person I've ever met," Rantz says.
Prosecutors Glen Woods and Elizabeth Teel are both in private practice. Teel says the LaCaze and Frank trials were the most traumatic of her career. "I'd be lying if I said it wasn't personal," she says. In his office, Glen Woods keeps a picture of Ha and Cuong Vu. "It's shocking the way they died," he says.The picture reminds him of the evil that exists in the world.
Mary Williams, wife of Officer Ronnie Williams, is busy raising their two sons, Christopher and Patrick. She has grown very close to the Vu family. They see each other often.
The Vus still own the Kim Anh restaurant.
Antoinette Frank and Rogers LaCaze are on death row, still blaming everyone else, including each other, for what happened.
As for those human bones unearthed beneath Frank's house, so far, authorities have made no serious effort to identify them. The ten-year-old case, they say, remains under investigation.
Cuck Hustmyre is a freelance journalist in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Before embarking upon a career as a writer, he spent twenty-two years in law enforcement and retired as a special agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF). This story is based on his book Killer with a Badge (Penguin, 2004). His articles have appeared in a variety of publications, including the Washington
Post, the Baton Rouge Advocate, Law & Order magazine, Homeland Security Today, and Court TV's
Despite being jaded by more than twenty years in law enforcement, I'm still shocked by this crime. Cops are human. I know it all too well. They sometimes do stupid things. They sometimes get in trouble.They sometimes end up in jail. But a police officer planning the execution-style murder of a fellow officer is something I never would have thought possible. In the two years I researched this story, I think I uncovered everything that could be uncovered about how Antoinette Frank became a police officer and about how she and Rogers LaCaze committed a crime so brutal, so senseless, and so shocking. But what I did not uncover, at least not to my own satisfaction, was why Antoinette Frank did what she did. I can-and do in the article and in the book-speculate about her motivation. Greed and anger, I suspect, played a major role. Greed is certainly why Rogers LaCaze got involved. But nothing in Antoinette Frank's past indicated excessive amounts of either. So why did she plan and participate in the murder of a fellow police officer, an officer she worked with every day, an officer she knew she could rely on to risk his life to save hers? Looking back, I think maybe I was searching too hard for an answer. Maybe it was right in front of me the whole time. Maybe Sgt. Eddie Rantz and Rogers LaCaze are right about the one thing they agree on. Maybe Antoinette Frank is just crazy as hell. Just ask her dad.