Female Cop Executes Her Partner & 2 Siblings, Returns to the Crime Scene as Responding Officer……

Also breaking at this hour, former NOPD officer Antoinette Frank, who is scheduled to be executed, was denied clemency today. It was an emotional hearing that ended in a split decision by the four-member Louisiana Board of Pardons. In 1995, Frank was convicted of first-degree murder after a fellow NOPD officer and two workers were killed at a family restaurant in New Orleans East.

Now 52, Antoinette Frank is the only woman facing execution in Louisiana. In the early morning hours of March 4th, 1995, three people were executed inside of a Vietnamese restaurant in New Orleans East. The victims included two young siblings who worked in their families business and an off-duty police officer working security.

What made this crime particularly chilling was not just its brutality, but the identity of the killer and the brazen audacity of what followed. The perpetrator returned to the crime scene shortly after the murders, arriving in a police patrol car with lights flashing, pretending to be a responding officer. She walked through the blood-soaked restaurant past the bodies of people she had just killed and approached a traumatized survivor who had hidden in a walk-in freezer during the attack.

With remarkable composure, the killer asked the survivor what had happened as if she had just arrived to help. The survivors’ response cut through the performance with devastating clarity. “You saw what happened. You killed my brother and sister.” In that moment, the carefully constructed deception collapsed.

 The perpetrator was Antoinette Frank, a 23-year-old New Orleans police officer who had worked security at the same restaurant for months. She had been welcomed into the Vu family’s lives, treated almost as a daughter, given birthday presents and extra money when she needed it. The family had trusted her completely.

Officer Ronald Williams, her colleague who lay dead behind the bar, had trusted her as his partner. That trust had been repaid with betrayal and execution-style murders. Frank’s case would become one of the most notorious crimes in New Orleans history. A shocking betrayal that came to symbolize the dysfunction and corruption plaguing the New Orleans Police Department in the mid-1990s.

This was an era when the NOPD was hemorrhaging officers to scandal, when murderers and drug dealers wore badges, and when the department’s desperate need for personnel led to catastrophic failures in hiring and oversight. Frank’s crimes struck at the heart of public trust in law enforcement. She had used her badge not to protect and serve, but to facilitate robbery and murder.

She had exploited the access her uniform provided, the authority her position commanded, and the trust her victims had placed in her. Three decades later, Frank remains in that same institution, having spent more than half her life awaiting execution. In 2025, as Louisiana resumed executions after a 15-year hiatus, and Attorney General Liz Murrill pushed aggressively to schedule Frank’s execution date, the questions surrounding her case have only intensified.

But before we examine whether Antoinette Frank should live or die, there is a story that needs to be told. A story about a girl from Opelousas, Louisiana, who was choked and thrown across a room by her father when she was 2 years old, who was raped by him from age 9 into her 20s, who dreamed of becoming a police officer to escape a nightmare that no one would help her leave.

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 Antoinette Renee Frank was born on April 30th, 1971, in Opelousas, Louisiana, a small town of approximately 18,000 people in St. Landry Parish. She was born into what appeared from the outside to be an ordinary working-class family. Her father, Adam Frank Sr., worked for the telephone company, providing a modest but stable income.

 Her mother, Mary Ann Frank, tried to maintain a semblance of normalcy in a household that was anything but normal. Antoinette had two brothers, including Adam Frank Jr., who would later become a fugitive wanted by local authorities. The family lived in poverty, moving between Opelousas and New Orleans during Antoinette’s childhood before eventually settling back in Opelousas for her final years of high school.

 But behind the facade of this working-class family lurked a nightmare that would shape Antoinette’s entire life. Her father, Adam Frank Sr., was a Vietnam War veteran who returned from combat psychologically shattered. Like hundreds of thousands of other Vietnam veterans, Adam suffered from severe post-traumatic stress disorder, though PTSD would not be formally recognized as a diagnosis until 1980, years after his service ended.

 The horrors he experienced in Southeast Asia followed him home, manifesting in violent rages, paranoid behavior, and an inability to distinguish between the war zone and his own living room. The terror began when Antoinette was barely more than an infant. Veterans Administration [clears throat] clinical records from October 3rd, 1973, when Antoinette was just 2 years old, documented that Adam Frank had choked his daughter and thrown her across the room during one of his violent episodes.

The VA doctors treating Adam for his PTSD noted these incidents of child abuse in their records. The reports were explicit and alarming. The VA recommended that Antoinette be removed from her father’s custody for her own safety, but somehow no action was taken. No Child Protective Services intervened. No family members removed her from danger.

 Instead, she remained in Adam Frank’s control, and the abuse that had started when she was a toddler only intensified as the years passed. The Frank household became a war zone. Adam Frank, unable to process his combat trauma, recreated the atmosphere of constant danger and imminent death that had defined his time in Vietnam. He booby-trapped the family home, placing sharp wooden stakes through floor vents and covering them with rugs so that anyone walking across the floor might step through and impale their foot.

These traps served no practical purpose except to create an environment where every step could result in pain, where vigilance was required at all times, where safety was an illusion. He killed family pets in front of his children, demonstrating his absolute power over life and death within the household. Dogs and cats that the children had loved and cared for were executed as the family watched, a brutal lesson in helplessness and control.

Adam Frank’s threats of murder were not idle. On multiple occasions, he forced the entire family into the car and drove to railroad tracks, parking the vehicle directly on the rails. He would sit there for hours while trains approached, his family trapped inside, never knowing if this would be the time he refused to move.

The psychological torture of these incidents, the certainty that death was approaching, combined with the slim hope that he might change his mind at the last moment, created a level of terror that few people can imagine. Other times, he would turn on the gas in the kitchen while the family was present, filling the house with fumes, once again placing them at the edge of death.

 These were not accidents or momentary lapses in judgment. They were deliberate acts of psychological warfare against his own family, designed to maintain absolute control through fear of imminent death. When Antoinette was 9 years old, the abuse took on a new and even more horrific dimension. Her father began sexually molesting her. Soon after the molestation had escalated to full rape.

 This sexual abuse continued relentlessly throughout her adolescence and into her 20s. The rapes resulted in three pregnancies, each time her father forcing her to undergo an abortion to hide the evidence of his crimes. Antoinette was not only a victim of incest, but a prisoner forced to endure repeated sexual violence from the person who should have been her protector.

During these episodes of abuse, Antoinette’s mind developed a defense mechanism called dissociation. She would separate psychologically from what was happening to her body, experiencing the rapes as if they were happening to someone else or watching from outside herself. This dissociation was a survival technique, but it would leave lasting psychological damage.

 As a teenager, Antoinette made several desperate attempts to escape. She tried to kill herself multiple times, seeing death as preferable to the life she was living. Each suicide attempt failed, leaving her trapped in the same hell. She also tried to run away, fleeing the house in hopes of finding safety elsewhere, but Adam Frank always found her. He always brought her back.

 And when he did, the punishment for trying to leave was severe, reinforcing the lesson that escape was impossible. When Antoinette was in her mid-teens, her mother, Mary Ann, and her siblings finally left the household, abandoning her to her father’s sole control. Whether they left to save themselves or simply could no longer endure the violence is unclear.

But the result was devastating for Antoinette. Now truly alone with her abuser, the violence and sexual abuse intensified dramatically. With no other family members present to witness his actions or provide even minimal protection, Adam Frank’s control over his daughter became total and complete. He forced her to ask his permission to use the bathroom, stripping away even the most basic human dignity and bodily autonomy.

 He began presenting her to neighbors and friends as if she were his wife rather than his daughter, openly displaying the incestuous relationship without shame. To outsiders who might have questioned this arrangement, he would explain that Antoinette was his spouse. And some neighbors apparently accepted this explanation without investigating further or reporting their suspicions to authorities.

The isolation was absolute. Antoinette had no one to turn to, no one who would help her, no escape from the daily nightmare. Despite the daily chaos of violence and sexual abuse at home, Antoinette Frank clung to one unwavering dream. She wanted to become a police officer. This ambition emerged when she was still a young girl, perhaps as a fantasy of becoming the protector she never had, or as a way to gain the power and authority that might finally make her safe.

From childhood, law enforcement represented everything she lacked: authority, respect, control, and the ability to help others avoid the suffering she endured. At age 16, while still trapped in her father’s house and enduring his continued sexual abuse, Antoinette joined the New Orleans Police Explorer Post 560.

These programs introduce young people to law enforcement careers, providing exposure to police work and mentorship from officers. For Antoinette, participation offered a rare escape from her home life, a few hours each week when she could imagine a different future. She also participated in the Opelousas Junior Police Program, further demonstrating her consistent interest in law enforcement.

During this period, she wrote a letter expressing her desire to join the police force. I perceive myself to be a strong young woman with guts and who is willing to endure any obstacles to become the best law enforcement officer I can be. The tragic irony of these words, written by a teenager enduring horrific obstacles daily in the form of rape and abuse but unable to name them or seek help, would only become apparent decades later.

Antoinette also attended Opelousas High School, completing her 11th and 12th grades as a college preparatory student. School records show she passed all her college prep courses, demonstrating academic capability despite the trauma at home. However, her time at Opelousas High was marked by almost complete social isolation.

 She made virtually no impression on teachers, fellow students, or administrators. When reporters later asked about her, school officials had to check records to confirm she had even attended. One homeroom teacher, Mrs. Hertz, recalled, “She didn’t make any impression on me, good or bad.” Antoinette does not appear in any yearbooks during her years there, as if she had been a ghost moving through the hallways, present but invisible.

After graduating from Opelousas High School in 1989, Antoinette enrolled at Delgado Community College in New Orleans, Louisiana’s oldest and largest community college. Delgado offered affordable education with open enrollment, making it accessible to students from disadvantaged backgrounds. For a young woman from poverty seeking to eventually enter law enforcement, Delgado represented an opportunity to gain education credentials while working toward her ultimate goal of joining the police academy.

However, her studies were interrupted before she could complete a degree. Court records indicate her education was cut short by her arrest in 1995, suggesting she may have been taking classes sporadically while working and dealing with her chaotic home situation. During these post-high school years in her late teens and early 20s, Antoinette remained trapped under her father’s control in the same abusive situation that had defined her childhood.

Adam Frank would disappear from her life under mysterious circumstances in 1993. The dream of becoming a police officer had sustained her through years of abuse, providing a goal to work toward and a future to imagine. But the trauma she had experienced left her psychologically damaged in ways she did not fully understand and certainly could not articulate to others.

The dissociation she had learned as a survival technique, her inability to form healthy relationships, the lack of normal developmental experiences, the absence of anyone who had ever truly protected her, all of these factors meant that even as she moved toward achieving her childhood dream, she was fundamentally unprepared for the realities of police work and dangerously vulnerable to manipulation.

In early 1992, when Antoinette Frank was 20 years old, she took the first concrete step toward achieving her childhood dream. She submitted her application to the New Orleans Police Department, ready to become the protector she had always wanted to be. She had no way of knowing that this decision would set in motion a chain of events leading to one of the most notorious crimes in New Orleans history.

Her application immediately encountered serious problems. The NOPD’s applicant investigation unit discovered that Antoinette Frank had been fired from her job at Walmart. When questioned about this termination, she lied, claiming the separation had been voluntary. Being caught in a lie on a police application is typically disqualifying, as honesty and integrity are essential for officers who testify in court and handle evidence.

Beyond this lie, Frank’s application raised additional concerns when she was required to complete standardized psychological evaluations. She scored poorly on not one but two separate psychological evaluations, a highly unusual result. Most applicants who fail one test are simply rejected.

 The psychologist who reviewed her scores recommended a formal psychiatric interview before any hiring decision. Dr. Philip Scurria, a board-certified psychiatrist, conducted a comprehensive evaluation of Frank on 14 characteristics relevant to police work, including judgment, emotional stability, impulse control, and capacity to handle stress.

 His assessment was damning. He rated Frank as unacceptable or below average in most categories. In his written report, Dr. Scurria stated that Frank seemed shallow and superficial, indicating a lack of emotional depth that suggested possible narcissistic or antisocial personality traits. His recommendation was unequivocal.

 Antoinette Frank should not be hired by the New Orleans Police Department under any circumstances. This should have ended Frank’s police career before it started. She had lied on her application, failed two psychological tests, and been evaluated by a psychiatrist who explicitly stated she was unsuitable for law enforcement. Under normal circumstances, her application would have been rejected definitively.

But the New Orleans Police Department in the early 1990s was anything but normal. The city was in crisis, experiencing levels of violent crime that earned it the designation of murder capital of the United States in 1994. The NOPD was hemorrhaging officers faster than it could recruit replacements, creating a chronic and desperate shortage of personnel.

Faced with this perfect storm, NOPD administrators prioritized filling positions over maintaining standards. There was also a political dimension. City officials believed that increasing the number of African American officers would help ease racial tensions between the predominantly black community and a police force that had historically been whiter than the population it served.

Antoinette Frank, as a black female candidate, represented an opportunity to improve department diversity statistics. In this context of desperation, institutional dysfunction, and political pressure, Frank was given an extraordinary second chance. Despite Dr. Scurria’s warnings and the failed evaluations, she was allowed to reapply.

On her second application, she somehow passed the evaluations that had previously disqualified her. In February 1993, Antoinette Frank was hired by the NOPD and admitted to the police academy. At the academy, Frank initially seemed to justify the department’s decision. The academy environment was structured, predictable, and controlled.

 Instructors presented material in classroom settings and conducted simulations where outcomes were largely predetermined. In this environment where success meant following instructions, memorizing procedures, and performing adequately in simulations, Frank excelled. She demonstrated competence in classroom training, showing she could learn legal codes, department policies, and tactical principles.

When Frank graduated from the police academy, she had achieved a ranking near the top of her class. This academic success seemed to validate the department’s decision to ignore Dr. Scurria’s warnings. But the police academy could not replicate the chaos, uncertainty, and split-second decision-making required on the streets of a city experiencing epidemic violent crime.

 The gap between classroom success and street performance became apparent almost immediately once Frank hit the streets as a sworn officer. The officers who worked alongside Frank quickly recognized that something was wrong. Despite her academy success, Frank seemed to have little understanding of what police work actually entailed.

 Her colleagues described her as shy and timid, characteristics that were dangerous in situations requiring immediate, decisive action. She lacked the aggressive, confident demeanor that effective street officers develop. When faced with confrontational situations, Frank hesitated or froze, leaving her partners to handle incidents she should have been addressing.

Her indecisiveness made her a liability, the kind of partner other officers did not want to work with because they could not count on her to back them up. At times, Frank’s behavior went beyond incompetence into what her colleagues considered irrational territory. She would make decisions that did not make tactical sense or react emotionally in circumstances that required professional detachment.

As early as August 1993, just months after completing the academy, her supervisors were discussing sending her back for additional training. She was placed under frequent supervisory review, meaning her supervisors were documenting her performance problems and trying to determine if she could be salvaged or should be terminated.

The consensus among those who worked with Frank was clear. She did not have the temperament, decisiveness, or understanding necessary to be an effective officer. However, Frank occasionally showed glimpses of capability in very specific contexts. She won several Officer of the Month awards from the local Kiwanis Club for community engagement work.

These awards were based on her interactions with citizens in non-confrontational, non-emergency settings. When working community policing assignments that involved talking with residents or attending neighborhood meetings, Frank could be effective. Her gentler demeanor, which was a weakness in confrontational situations, became an asset in community outreach.

 Fellow officers noted that she had an extremely gentle touch with the public in these controlled settings and showed genuine concern for people during routine, non-threatening interactions. As Frank struggled to perform the basic functions of her job throughout 1993 and 1994, another factor was emerging that would prove even more dangerous than her incompetence.

Her profound loneliness and vulnerability to manipulation. She had never developed healthy relationship patterns or learned to recognize dangerous people. The abuse she suffered had left her psychologically damaged in ways that made her susceptible to exactly the kind of violent, controlling man she was about to meet.

That meeting would come on November 25th, 1994, when Frank responded to a routine call that would change everything. On November 25th, 1994, approximately 18 months after Antoinette Frank joined the NOPD and began her troubled career as a patrol officer, she responded to a call involving a shooting victim in one of New Orleans’ most dangerous neighborhoods.

The victim lying on the street was Rogers Joseph Lacaze, an 18-year-old who had been shot during a street altercation. For Frank, it was just another call in a city where gun violence was routine. For Lacaze, it was another brush with death in a life already defined by violence.

 Neither could have known that this chance encounter between a failing police officer and a teenage drug dealer would lead to one of the most notorious crimes in New Orleans’ history. Lacaze was already well-known to police as a drug dealer operating in New Orleans’ Ninth Ward, one of the city’s poorest and most crime-plagued areas.

 Born on August 13th, 1976, Lacaze had grown up in circumstances that bore some similarities to Frank’s own difficult childhood, though his path had taken a different trajectory. He had grown up without a father, experiencing the poverty, violence, and lack of opportunity that characterized life in the Ninth Ward during the 1980s and 1990s.

Lacaze stood just 5 ft 2 in tall and weighed 135 lb. Despite his small stature, he cultivated an intimidating image. He wore his caps backward and his pants sagging. His most distinctive feature was a mouthful of gold teeth that flashed when he smiled. People in the neighborhood knew him as a gangster, someone involved in the drug trade and not to be crossed.

The night of November 25th, 1994, someone shot Lacaze on the street. Officer Antoinette Frank responded to the call and took his statement. According to investigators from the Department of Public Safety and Corrections, this was the first contact between the two. Frank, however, would later claim they had met 8 months before the shooting, suggesting their relationship began much earlier.

What started as Frank taking a statement from a shooting victim evolved into something more complex. Frank told colleagues she was trying to turn Lacaze’s life around, to guide him away from dealing drugs and toward a legitimate path. Whether she believed this herself or whether it was simply a justification for what was happening, but the relationship continued.

 Within weeks, other NOPD officers began noticing the association. They saw Lacaze driving Frank’s Ford Torino. They observed him moving her police unit when she was investigating accidents. Frank introduced Lacaze to people as her nephew, though everyone who knew them understood this was not true. On some occasions, she introduced him as a trainee, bringing him along on calls as if he were learning to be a police officer.

Frank and Lacaze began pulling over motorists together while she was in uniform and he was in her patrol car. Witnesses would later testify that the pair robbed people during these stops, using Frank’s badge and authority to steal from civilians. The rookie cop was not just dating a known criminal, she was actively participating in crimes with him.

On February 4th, 1995, exactly 1 month before the crime that would define both their lives, Lacaze demonstrated just how dangerous he could be. Frank was on patrol when she stopped her vehicle. Lacaze jumped out carrying a TEC-9 semi-automatic pistol. He had gotten into an argument with a man named Anthony Wallace at a party earlier that night, and now Lacaze wanted revenge.

Irvin Bryant, a civil sheriff, witnessed the incident. He initially thought Frank was conducting a traffic stop, but as he got closer, he saw Frank and two men fighting on the side of the road. Wallace broke away from the struggle, ran a short distance, and picked up the TEC-9 from the grass where Lacaze had dropped it.

 Bryant ordered Wallace to drop the weapon, which he did immediately. Bryant restrained Wallace until backup arrived. Lacaze tried to lunge at Wallace while Bryant held him, but Bryant grabbed Lacaze as well. Frank then informed Bryant that Lacaze was with her and ordered Bryant to release him. Despite witnessing what appeared to be a violent confrontation involving a semi-automatic weapon, Bryant let Lacaze go on Frank’s authority as a police officer.

Wallace was arrested and charged with attempted murder and armed robbery based on the incident. Bryant was never questioned by police about what he had seen that night. He never gave a formal statement. The incident was swept aside, just another example of Officer Frank’s increasingly troubling behavior being overlooked by a department that had ignored every warning about her from the beginning.

While Antoinette Frank’s life was spiraling toward catastrophe, another story was unfolding in New Orleans East. The Vu family had built their American dream from scratch, embodying the immigrant success story through hard work and determination. The family patriarch, Bich Vu, immigrated to the United States from Vietnam in 1981, seeking opportunity and safety after the fall of Saigon and the years of turmoil that followed.

His wife, Muoi Nguyen, and their children followed a decade later in 1991, finally reuniting the family after years of separation. Together, they opened the Kim Anh Restaurant on Bullard Avenue in New Orleans East, a Vietnamese restaurant that would become their livelihood and the center of their family’s life in America.

The restaurant was more than just a business for the Vu family. It was a family enterprise where multiple generations worked side by side, building something together in their new country. Muoi Nguyen and Bich Vu were the owners, but their children were deeply involved in every aspect of the operation. Four of their children worked at the restaurant: Chau Vu, Quoc Vu, Ha Vu, and Quang Vu.

The family lived modestly and distrusted banks, preferring to keep their business proceeds in cash at the restaurant. This practice, common among immigrant families from countries with unstable banking systems, would later make them a target. Ha Vu, at 24 years old, was the eldest of the siblings working at the restaurant.

She was deeply religious and had been considering becoming a nun, drawn to a life of service and spiritual devotion. Her younger brother Quang, just 17 years old, was an altar boy at St. Bridget Catholic Church and played high school football. Like his sister, Quang had religious aspirations and wanted to become a priest.

Both were hard-working young people who put in long hours at the family business while maintaining their education and spiritual development. Their sister Chau, 23 years old at the time of the murders, managed much of the restaurant’s day-to-day operations. Her brother Quoc also worked long shifts and another family member, Vu Vu, worked as a waitress.

The Kim On was open until 1:00 a.m. most nights, serving late-night diners in a part of the city where the restaurant business could be challenging. The neighborhood had its share of crime, which led the Vu family to hire off-duty New Orleans police officers as security guards. Having uniformed officers present during business hours provided protection and gave customers peace of mind.

 It was through this security arrangement that the Vu family first met Antoinette Frank and Ronald Williams, two NOPD officers who worked off-duty details at the restaurant to supplement their police salaries. The Vu family welcomed Frank warmly, treating her almost like a member of their own family.

 They appreciated her work as a security guard and developed genuine affection for her. On Frank’s birthday, the Vus gave her presents. When she mentioned needing money, they would give her extra cash beyond her security pay. They cooked for her and included her in their family life. Chau Vu would later describe Frank as a real sweet woman before the murders, someone they trusted completely.

The Vus extended the same warmth to the other officer who worked security at their restaurant, Ronald Austin Williams the 6th. They had no reason to suspect that one of the two friendly police officers they had welcomed into their lives was planning to destroy them. Williams was everything that Antoinette Frank was not as a police officer, dedicated, respected, and genuinely committed to serving his community.

Born and raised in New Orleans, he graduated from Brother Martin High School in 1987, where he was well-liked for his friendly demeanor and strong work ethic. After graduation, Williams married his high school sweetheart, Mary A. Burris, whose family lived across the street from the Williams family home.

 It was a neighborhood romance that blossomed into a lasting partnership. Williams joined the New Orleans Police Department in 1991, beginning a career he took seriously despite the challenges and dangers it presented. By 1995, Williams was 25 years old and the father of two young sons. Christopher had been born in 1989 when Williams was still establishing himself as a young husband and soon-to-be police officer.

The couple’s second son, Patrick, was born in February 1995, just 1 week before the incident that will change multiple lives. Williams worked hard to support his growing family, taking on off-duty security details to supplement his modest police salary. Like many NOPD officers at the time, Williams found it necessary to work these additional jobs to make ends meet given the department’s notoriously low pay scale.

 The Kim On restaurant was located on Bullard Boulevard in New Orleans East, not far from where Williams had grown up and where his and Mary’s families still lived. The security job there was convenient and relatively safe compared to some off-duty work. Williams and Frank were sometimes paired as partners during their regular police duties, and they also worked security together at the restaurant.

Williams was described by fellow officers as a devoted policeman who took his responsibilities seriously. The Vu family grew very close to Williams, considering him a member of their extended family. He was reliable, professional, and genuine in his interactions with them. However, Williams had growing concerns about Antoinette Frank.

In late February 1995, when Frank began bringing Rogers Lacaze to the restaurant and introducing him as her nephew, Williams became suspicious. Chau Vu later recalled that after one of Frank’s visits with Lacaze, Williams told her that he did not trust Frank. Williams acknowledged to Chau that he allowed Frank to work security with him because other officers were not available most of the time, but his unease was apparent.

Williams’ instincts were correct, but he could not have imagined the extent of the danger Frank posed. What he sensed as suspicious behavior was actually something far more sinister. Frank and Rogers Lacaze were actively planning to rob the restaurant he was sworn to protect. On the night of March 3rd, 1995, Williams would report for his security shift at the Kim On restaurant in uniform, armed with his service weapon, and prepared to protect the Vu family and their business as he had done many times before.

He had no way of knowing that his partner, the person who should have had his back, was planning to kill him. The exact moment when Frank decided to betray the family that had treated her with such kindness remains unclear, but investigators later concluded that the plan had been in development for weeks leading up to March 4th, 1995.

Frank’s intimate knowledge of the restaurant’s operations made her an ideal inside person for such a crime. She knew the Vu family’s habits, including their practice of keeping large amounts of cash on the premises. She knew the layout of the building, the locations of entrances and exits, and the security measures in place.

 Most importantly, she knew that the family trusted her completely and that Officer Williams trusted her as well. During late February 1995, Frank began bringing Lacaze around the Kim On restaurant, introducing him to the Vu family as her nephew. This was part of the preparation, familiarizing Lacaze with the location and the people they planned to victimize.

 The Vu family received Lacaze warmly as they did anyone Frank brought around. Chau Vu later noticed details about Lacaze during these visits, his short stature, his gold-capped teeth, and the fact that he carried a cell phone. She also observed that Lacaze seemed to be studying the layout of the restaurant, staring at family members as they moved through their routines.

At the time, these observations seemed merely curious. In retrospect, they were evidence of a predator surveying his territory before an attack. It was also believed that Frank had an additional motive beyond simple robbery. Rants concluded that Frank wanted revenge on the Vu family because she believed they were shortchanging her on hours and pay for her security work.

Whether this perceived slight was real or imagined, it apparently festered in Frank’s mind, adding a personal dimension to what might otherwise have been a purely financial crime. Frank felt entitled to more than the Vus were paying her despite their generosity toward her. This sense of entitlement, combined with her apparent lack of empathy, made her capable of planning violence against people who considered her a friend.

Frank’s acquisition of the murder weapon revealed her calculated approach. She obtained a 9-mm pistol from the NOPD evidence room using her position as a police officer to access a weapon that should have been securely stored. Frank also attempted to purchase 9-mm ammunition for Lacaze at Walmart. When questioned about this later, she stated that she was a police officer and saw nothing wrong with buying ammunition.

The relationship between Frank and Lacaze during this planning phase was complex. Frank brought insider knowledge, police authority, and access to the target. Together, they formed a deadly partnership with each providing what the other lacked. By the evening of March 3rd, 1995, their plan was ready to be executed. The pieces were in place.

The weapon was obtained. The target was selected. All that remained was waiting for the right moment. That moment would come on what began as a typical Friday evening at the Kim On restaurant. The dinner rush came and went, and as the night progressed into the early morning hours, the crowd thinned out. At approxima

tely 9:00 p.m. that evening, while business was still active, Antoinette Frank called the Kim On from her duty station at the 7th District Police Station. Chau Vu answered the phone. Frank asked if she was needed for security that night. Chau informed her that Officer Williams was already there with them, so Frank’s services were not required.

This phone call established that Frank knew Williams was working security that night. Business was slower than usual that evening, and around 11:00 p.m., the restaurant’s co-owner, Huong Vu Nguyen, made a decision to close early. Before leaving, Nguyen laid out $10,000 in cash on a table in the staff section of the restaurant.

This money was designated for upcoming expenses, specifically plumbing repairs and parking lot expansion. She had no way of knowing that this visible display of cash would seal her children’s fate. Nguyen went home, leaving her children and a waitress to close up the restaurant and complete the end-of-night cleaning.

Six employees remained in the building as midnight approached: Chau Vu, Quoc Vu, Ha Vu, Quang Vu, Vu Vu, and Officer Ronald Williams, who was working his security shift in uniform. Frank’s police shift ended at the same time, 11:00 p.m. After getting off duty, she returned home and changed out of her uniform.

She then picked up Rogers Lacaze and drove to the Kim On restaurant in her red and white Ford Torino. They arrived around midnight. Lacaze remained in the car while Frank entered the restaurant and ordered cold drinks. While waiting for the beverages, Frank started a conversation with Williams, casually mentioning that Lacaze was outside and describing him as her nephew.

She told them she and Lacaze were going to a midnight movie screening. Frank and Lacaze left shortly after receiving the drinks, and their departure seemed unremarkable to those inside the restaurant. At approximately 12:15 a.m. on March 4th, Frank called the restaurant again, this time placing a food order.

When Chau Vu saw Frank’s red and white Torino pull into the parking lot for the second time that night, something felt wrong to her. She sensed danger, though she could not articulate exactly why. Frank and Lacaze entered the restaurant together this time. Frank introduced Lacaze to the kitchen staff, again claiming he was her nephew.

The remaining workers brought the food out in to-go containers, but Frank and Lacaze chose to eat inside the restaurant rather than leaving. The two customers finished eating and exited the restaurant without completing their meals. Frank and Chau continued talking outside briefly. Frank inquired whether she needed to come in for the next day’s security detail.

After consulting with Williams, Chau told her it was not necessary. After Frank and Lacaze left, Williams confided to Chau that he did not trust Frank. He explained that he only allowed her to work security with him because other officers were not usually available. This conversation represented Williams’s final warning, though Chau did not yet understand how urgent it was.

When Frank’s Torino appeared in the parking lot for the third time that night, returning just before 2:00 a.m., Chau Vu’s earlier sense of foreboding intensified. She knew immediately that something was very wrong. Her instincts, honed by years of running a business in a challenging neighborhood, told her that this third visit was not innocent.

She ran to the kitchen to hide the $10,000 her mother had left on the table, quickly placing the cash in the microwave, where it would not be immediately visible. Chau then returned to the front of the restaurant, her heart racing. She did not know yet that she was about to witness the murder of her siblings and the destruction of her family’s American dream.

The final act of betrayal was about to begin. At approximately 1:45 a.m. on March 4th, 1995, Antoinette Frank opened the front door of the Kim On restaurant using a key she had stolen earlier in the evening. She walked quickly past Ronald Williams, who was in the dining area, and pushed Chau Vu, her brother Quoc, and the waitress Vu Vu toward the kitchen area.

Williams, confused by Frank’s aggressive behavior and the presence of a stranger behind her, began following and asking questions. Before he could understand what was happening, Rogers Lacaze snuck up behind him. Lacaze raised a 9-mm pistol and fired three shots into Williams in rapid succession. The first shot struck him in the back of the neck, severing his spine and dropping him immediately.

As Williams fell, Lacaze stood over him and fired a second shot into the back of his head at close range. He then shot Williams once more in the spine as he lay helpless on the floor. Lacaze then rifled through Williams’s pockets and stole his wallet, which contained his Chevron credit card. The gunshots that killed Williams distracted Frank momentarily, causing her to lose sight of Chau, Quoc, and Vu.

The three employees ran to the kitchen, and Chau, showing quick thinking in a moment of terror, grabbed her brother and the waitress and led them into a large walk-in cooler. As they ran, Chau and Quoc shouted for Ha and Quang to follow them into the cooler, but the younger siblings did not move from where they stood in the kitchen.

Once inside the cooler, Chau shut the door and turned off the lights before crouching down with her brother and Vu. Through a small glass window in the cooler door, they had a partial view of both the dining area and the kitchen. From their hiding place, Chau and Quoc watched in horror as Frank, now carrying Lacaze’s gun, paced through the kitchen with Lacaze beside her.

The two searched through areas where the Vu family usually kept money, growing increasingly frustrated when they could not find the $10,000. Frank walked back to the front of the restaurant and stole the cordless phone from the bar before returning to the kitchen, eliminating the family’s ability to call for help.

Chau and Quoc lost sight of Frank and Lacaze as they moved to the area where Ha and Quang were last [music] seen, beyond the limited view provided by the cooler window. Ha Vu and Quang Vu had been forced to their knees in the kitchen. Both siblings had seen Chau hide the money in the microwave, but initially they kept quiet, remaining in a prayer position with their heads bowed.

Frank and Lacaze demanded to know where the money was hidden. When the siblings did not immediately answer, Frank pistol-whipped Quang once across the head. After a few minutes of interrogation and searching, Frank and Lacaze found the $10,000 in the microwave. Having obtained what they came for, a reasonable criminal might have fled, but Frank and Lacaze were not reasonable criminals.

 What happened next was pure execution. Chau and Quoc heard 10 gunshots in close succession echoing through the restaurant. Although they could not see who fired the shots from their position in the cooler, Quang was shot six times, with bullets striking his head, chest, stomach, right arm, and right leg. Quang remained alive after the first volley of shots.

 When he lay on the floor in a fetal position, moaning in pain, Frank fired at him again to finish him. Ha was shot four times, once in the head and three times in her right arm and right leg. Both victims were found on their knees with their heads near the floor, having been executed while in a position of prayer. After the killings, Frank and Lacaze searched the restaurant for the remaining witnesses, but they could not find Chau, Quoc, and Vu in their hiding place.

Eventually, the killers fled the scene. From inside the cooler, Chau watched Frank’s car drive away. Even then, she waited several minutes, terrified that they might return, before she dared to emerge. When Chau Vu finally crawled out of the walk-in cooler, she confronted a scene of horror that would haunt her for the rest of her life.

 She found her brother Quang and sister Ha dead in the kitchen. Their bodies still in the positions where they had been executed. Blood pooled around them on the floor of the room where they had worked every day, preparing food for the family business. Moving toward the dining area, Chau discovered Officer Ronald Williams lying face down behind the bar in a pool of blood.

All three were beyond help. Frank had taken the restaurant’s cordless phone, so Chau grabbed her purse from the bar, which contained her mobile phone. Fearing that Frank and Lacaze might return, Chau went back into the cooler before attempting to call for help. Her first two attempts to dial the emergency number failed when the line disconnected. At 1:48 a.m.

, she successfully called a friend and managed to say, “The police officer was killed,” before asking him to call the police. Meanwhile, Quoc Vu had run out of the restaurant to a friend’s house to make a second emergency call. At 1:50 a.m., he reached an emergency operator and reported that an NOPD officer named Antoinette and an unknown man had shot up the Kim On restaurant where he worked.

This crucial detail, identifying Frank by name in the immediate aftermath of the murders, would later become key evidence. Frank, who had been monitoring police radio communications, heard the emergency dispatch reporting an officer down at the Kim On restaurant. She made the calculated decision to return to the scene, arriving as the first responding officer.

She parked her car in the rear lot of the restaurant. From inside the cooler, where she had returned after making her call, Chau saw Frank’s vehicle arrive. She was suspicious immediately because she saw only one car and a single officer. A second unmarked police car arrived at 1:52 a.m. containing NOPD officers Wayne Farve and Reginald Jack.

When Chau saw these two officers emerge from their vehicle, she finally felt safe enough to run out of the building. Frank followed after her. A third police car stopped near Chau, and Officer Yvonne Farve emerged and ran to intercept the traumatized young woman. The other responding officers were from different precincts and did not know Frank personally.

She identified herself as a police officer and told them that the perpetrators were at the back of the building. Officers searched but found only the bodies of Williams and the two Vu siblings. No suspects were present. In the presence of Officer Yvonne Fareve, Frank continued her performance, feigning ignorance about what had happened.

 She approached Chau and asked her what had transpired at the restaurant. Chau’s response was direct and devastating. You were there. You saw what happened. You killed my brother and sister. This accusation, made in front of other officers just minutes after the murders, immediately shifted the investigation’s focus onto Frank.

 She was separated from the other witnesses and questioned at the scene. Frank initially told investigators that she had been off duty and happened to be in the area when she heard the radio call. She claimed she arrived and found the victims but did not witness the shooting. This story quickly fell apart under questioning. 30 minutes after the initial response, homicide detectives Eddie Rantz and Marco Demma arrived at the scene to take charge of the investigation.

Rantz, a veteran detective with 27 years of experience, began questioning Frank in detail. She changed her story, now claiming that she had been present during the shooting as a customer and had helped the staff escape through the back door. She said she drove back to the police station alone before returning to the scene.

Rantz immediately noticed a problem with this narrative. The back door was locked from the inside, making it impossible for anyone to have exited that way. When confronted with this contradiction, Frank implicated Rogers Lacaze for the first time, claiming he was responsible for the shootings.

 Frank assured detectives she was unarmed, but when they searched her, they found a .38 caliber revolver she had not mentioned. The accumulation of lies and inconsistencies convinced Rantz that he was not questioning a witness but a suspect. Antoinette Frank and Rogers Lacaze were both arrested on the morning of March 4th, 1995 and taken to New Orleans Police Department Headquarters for formal interrogation.

At the station, faced with eyewitness testimony from Chau Vu and mounting evidence of her involvement, Frank’s web of lies finally collapsed. With a tape recorder running, Frank provided a confession that detailed her role in the murders. She admitted to shooting Ha Vu and Quang Vu in the kitchen of the Kim Anh restaurant, though she attempted to shift primary responsibility onto Lacaze.

In her confession, Frank claimed that Lacaze had killed Officer Ronald Williams. She maintained that Lacaze forced her to shoot the Vu siblings under threat of death, holding a gun to her head and coercing her participation. However, Frank’s coercion defense was undermined by facts she could not explain.

 Investigators pressed her on obvious inconsistencies. If Lacaze was forcing her to participate at gunpoint, why had she not called for help using her police radio, which had been found in her personal vehicle? As a trained police officer with a radio and a weapon, she had multiple opportunities to summon assistance or defend the victims.

 Frank had no satisfactory answer to these questions. Her claim that she was a victim herself rang hollow in light of her active participation in planning and executing the robbery. The evidence painted a picture not of a coerced participant but of an active partner in premeditated murder. Additional evidence quickly connected both Frank and Lacaze to the crime scene.

Crucially, Mary Williams, the widow of the murdered officer, reported that her husband’s Chevron credit card had been used shortly after the murders. Surveillance footage and transaction records showed Rogers Lacaze purchasing gasoline with Williams’s stolen credit card at a Chevron station in Gretna just minutes after fleeing the Kim Anh restaurant.

 This timeline proved Lacaze’s presence at the murder scene and his theft from Williams’s body. The casual use of a dead police officer’s credit card demonstrated the callousness of both perpetrators. Frank was believed to be the first New Orleans police officer ever charged with killing a fellow officer. This distinction, while historically significant, provided no comfort to the shattered families of the victims.

The arrest of a police officer for such a heinous crime sent shockwaves through the New Orleans Police Department and the wider community. Police Superintendent Richard Pennington, who had only recently taken charge of the troubled department, held a news conference on the morning of March 4th to address the unprecedented situation.

He announced, “We’re going to continue to clean the department up of corrupt police officers, officers that are involved in criminal activity.” Mayor Marc Morial appeared alongside Pennington, stating he was left somewhat speechless by the events which were reported to me. The Kim Anh murders came at a moment when the city was reeling from violent crime and corruption within its own police force.

The fact that a uniformed officer had executed colleagues and innocent civilians struck at the heart of public trust. Frank’s case would become a symbol of NOPD dysfunction alongside other corrupt officers like Len Davis, known as the Desire terrorist, who sat on federal death row for ordering the murder of a woman who filed a complaint against him.

For the Vu family, the arrest brought no solace. No Myet Vuong had lost two of her children to violence perpetrated by someone she had trusted and treated as family. The surviving children, Chau and Quoc, were traumatized by what they had witnessed. The family’s restaurant, the symbol of their American dream, had become a murder scene.

The community mourned alongside them and vigils were held for the victims. Officer Williams’s widow, Mary, was left to raise two young sons alone, including a newborn who would never know his father. Williams’s father, Ron, would spend decades attending court hearings seeking justice for his murdered son. The pain inflicted by Antoinette Frank’s betrayal rippled outward, destroying lives and shattering families.

 As Frank sat in a jail cell awaiting trial, the full weight of her actions was only beginning to be understood. The state of Louisiana swiftly prosecuted both defendants following their April 28th, 1995 indictment on three counts of first-degree murder. Prosecutors chose to try them separately with Rogers Lacaze facing trial first in mid-July 1995.

Just over 4 months after the murders, the trial lasted only 5 days, reflecting the overwhelming strength of the evidence against him. The prosecution built its case on compelling eyewitness testimony from Chau and Quoc Vu, who described what they witnessed from their hiding place in the walk-in cooler. Forensic evidence showed execution-style killings with 9-mm weapons fired at close range.

 The most damaging evidence against Lacaze was surveillance footage and transaction records proving he used Officer Williams’s stolen Chevron credit card at a gas station in Gretna within minutes of the murders. His defense team argued he had been coerced by Frank, portraying him as a young man manipulated by a police officer with authority over him.

 But prosecutors successfully demonstrated he was an experienced criminal who actively participated in planning and executing the robbery and murders. The jury returned guilty verdicts on all counts and sentenced the 18-year-old to death. Antoinette Frank’s trial began on September 5th, 1995 before the same judge, Frank Marullo.

Despite subpoenaing 39 potential witnesses, Frank’s defense team made the stunning decision to call not a single witness and present no evidence whatsoever. The prosecution methodically presented overwhelming evidence of Frank’s guilt, including Chau Vu’s emotional testimony about watching Frank and Lacaze execute her siblings and her devastating confrontation with Frank at the crime scene.

 Frank’s own recorded confession admitted to shooting Ha and Quang Vu, though she claimed coercion. Prosecutors systematically dismantled this defense by demonstrating Frank had planned the robbery, stolen the restaurant tea, obtained a weapon from the police evidence room, and purchased ammunition beforehand. Her claim of being forced at gunpoint could not explain why she never called for help on her police radio or used her training to protect the victims.

On September 7th, the jury toured the Kim Anh restaurant, walking through the dining area where Williams died, the kitchen where the Vu siblings were executed, and the walk-in cooler where survivors hid. After the prosecution rested and the defense presented nothing, the jury deliberated for only 22 minutes on September 12th before returning guilty verdicts on all three counts, setting a record for the fastest verdict in a New Orleans capital murder case.

The sentencing phase followed immediately with prosecutors emphasizing Frank’s betrayal of her oath as a police officer and the cold-blooded nature of the executions. On September 13th, the jury needed just 45 minutes to recommend death. Judge Marullo formally sentenced Frank to death on October 20th, 1995, and she was transported to the Louisiana Correctional Institute for women in St.

Gabriel, becoming the only woman on Louisiana’s death row. One month after Antoinette Frank received her death sentence, a disturbing discovery was made that suggested she might be responsible for even more violence than the Kim on murders. In November 1995, a dog unearthed human remains beneath Frank’s house in New Orleans.

 Police excavated the site and found a human skull with a bullet hole along with other bones including an arm, a leg, and sections of spine. The remains were those of a male approximately the same age as Frank’s father, Adam Frank, who had been reported missing by Antoinette in September 1993. Adam Frank had been living with his daughter before she reported him missing.

He had not been seen or heard from since that time. The discovery immediately raised questions about whether Antoinette Frank had killed her father. Police and prosecutors believed the skull belonged to Adam Frank and that Antoinette had murdered him, possibly shooting him and burying his body under the house where they had lived together.

However, authorities made a pragmatic decision. They would not pursue charges against Frank for her father’s death. She was already on death row for the Kim on murders facing execution. Additional charges would serve no practical purpose and would require resources to investigate and prosecute a crime that might be difficult to prove without a positive identification of the remains.

The case of the bones beneath Frank’s house remained officially open but uninvestigated. The question of whether Frank killed her father would become significant in later appeals when her defense team argued that the jury should have heard about the extensive abuse she suffered at his hands. If Frank did kill Adam Frank, that act might be understood in the context of a desperate victim finally striking back against her abuser.

Experts who later reviewed Frank’s case noted that the years of physical, sexual, and psychological abuse she endured from her father would have left profound psychological scars. Some victims of severe childhood abuse do eventually kill their abusers, and in some jurisdictions such cases are treated with more leniency than typical homicides.

However, Frank never confessed to killing her father, and without a formal investigation, the circumstances of Adam Frank’s death remain unclear. Rogers Lacaze, Frank’s co-defendant, later wrote in a letter from prison, “Antoinette is crazy. Hell, she killed her own dad and buried him under her house.” This statement suggested that Frank had discussed her father’s death with Lacaze, though Lacaze himself was hardly a credible source given his own involvement in the Kim on murders and his attempts to shift blame onto Frank.

In the aftermath of the murders, the victims’ family struggled to find meaning in their losses. Officer Ronald Williams was buried at Lake Lawn Metairie Cemetery on March 7th, 1995, just 3 days after his murder, with his name later inscribed on the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial in Washington. His widow, Mary, was left to raise their two sons alone, 6-year-old Christopher and newborn Patrick, who would never know his father.

She had lost her high school sweetheart to violence perpetrated by someone her husband had considered a colleague. In the years that followed, Mary grew close to the Vu family, bonded by their shared trauma and supporting each other through the legal proceedings and the difficult work of rebuilding their lives.

 The Vu family held traditional Vietnamese funeral ceremonies for Ha and Quang, setting up an altar in their home displaying portraits of both siblings alongside Officer Williams, whom they considered part of their extended family. Nuec Nguyen, having lost two children, struggled with survivor’s guilt and haunting questions about whether her presence that night might have changed the outcome.

Chau and Quoc Vu, the survivors who had hidden in the walk-in cooler, carried the burden of having witnessed their siblings’ murders through the small window, powerless to help them. The sounds of those gunshots would echo in their memories forever. Both testified at the trials, reliving their trauma in graphic detail for the sake of justice.

 Initially, the family kept the Kim on restaurant open at the original location as a testament to their resilience, but the space held too many painful memories. After Hurricane Katrina devastated the area in 2005 and looters stole jewelry Ha and Quang had been wearing when they were killed, the Vus sold the Bullard Avenue location and relocated the restaurant to Harahan, moving their residence to Metairie to seek a fresh start.

Antoinette Frank’s legal battle continued immediately upon her arrival on death row in October 1995. Her attorneys challenged various aspects of her conviction and sentence, arguing she had not received adequate legal representation at trial. The defense team’s stunning decision not to call any of the 39 subpoenaed witnesses or present any mitigating evidence during the sentencing phase became a central theme of her appeals.

On October 18th, 2006, Frank’s lawyers appeared before the Louisiana Supreme Court arguing her death sentence should be overturned because she had been denied state-funded experts to help prepare for the sentencing phase. They contended the defense needed to investigate Frank’s background for possible mitigating evidence, and without proper resources, her trial attorneys could not effectively represent her during the critical penalty phase.

Frank’s attorneys introduced testimony from psychiatrists who evaluated her after trial. These experts testified that traumatic events in Frank’s childhood could have affected her behavior at the time of the murders and that she might have been suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder when she committed the crimes.

The psychiatrists detailed the abuse Frank suffered at her father’s hands including the documented choking incident when she was two, the sexual abuse beginning at age nine, and the rapes continuing into her 20s. They explained how the sustained trauma could have resulted in PTSD and dependent personality disorder, making her vulnerable to manipulation by violent men like Rogers Lacaze.

A state-retained psychiatrist disagreed with the PTSD diagnosis, concurring instead with an earlier diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder with antisocial tendencies, painting Frank as someone with a fundamental lack of empathy and sense of entitlement consistent with her ability to murder people who had treated her with kindness.

 On May 22nd, 2007, the Louisiana Supreme Court ruled 5-2 against Frank’s appeal, upholding her death sentence. The majority found that while Frank’s childhood had been difficult, the evidence of her guilt was overwhelming and the nature of her crimes justified the death penalty. The court determined that the failure to present mitigating evidence at trial, while potentially a mistake, did not rise to the level of constitutional violation warranting reversal.

This ruling cleared the way for the state to move forward with setting an execution date, though it was not the end of the legal battle. Meanwhile, Rogers Lacaze pursued his own appeals, raising different arguments including claims of coerced confession and questions about judicial impartiality. These parallel appeals would wind through the courts for years, sometimes intersecting with Frank’s case and sometimes following separate tracks.

More than 12 years after Frank’s conviction, Judge Marullo signed the first death warrant on April 22nd, 2008, scheduling her execution for July 15th, 2008 at Angola. He took the unusual step of signing on his own initiative, believing the case had been thoroughly litigated and the time had come to carry out the sentence.

Frank’s attorneys immediately filed new appeals arguing they needed more time to review the complete case record, and in May 2008, the Louisiana Supreme Court issued a 90-day stay of execution, beginning a pattern that would repeat itself multiple times. On September 11th, 2008, Marullo signed a second death warrant scheduling Frank’s execution for December 8th, 2008, but once again, her attorneys challenged the warrant.

The Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office finally provided Frank’s defense team with their complete case file in September 2009, consisting of more than 18,400 pages of police reports and documents. On November 25th, 2008, the Louisiana Supreme Court effectively voided the December 8th execution date, placing a hold on Frank’s case pending completion of her post-conviction appeal.

In September 2009, Frank’s attorneys filed a motion to have Judge Marullo recused, arguing he should remove himself on grounds of bias and raising questions about his connection to the murder weapon. It was revealed that Marullo’s signature appeared on an order authorizing Frank to remove a firearm from the NOPD evidence room before the murders, the same gun used in the crimes.

Though Marullo maintained his signature had been forged, in October 2010, another judge ruled Marullo had to be recused from both the Frank and Lacaze cases, determining his continued involvement created an appearance of bias that undermined confidence in the proceedings. While Frank remained on death row, Rogers Lacaze’s legal proceedings took a different turn.

 In 2013, a witness testified during Lacaze’s post-conviction proceedings that he had coerced Frank into participating, holding a gun to her head and forcing her to shoot the Vu siblings, supporting Frank’s long-standing claim of duress. On July 23rd, 2015, retired Judge Michael Kirby threw out Lacaze’s conviction and death sentence, determining his trial had been fundamentally flawed because one juror had been a law enforcement officer who concealed this fact during jury selection.

Higher state courts later overturned Kirby’s order for a complete new trial, reinstating Lacaze’s conviction, but not his death sentence. The news devastated the victims’ families, forcing them to confront the possibility of reliving their trauma through new proceedings. In December 2019, rather than face another death penalty trial, Orleans Parish District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro agreed to a plea deal, and Lacaze was resentenced to life imprisonment without parole.

 This created a striking disparity with Lacaze, the trigger man who shot Officer Williams three times at close range, serving life in prison while Frank remained on death row awaiting execution. In 2023, Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards publicly announced his opposition to the death penalty, though lawmakers voted against a bill that would have ended capital punishment.

 Despite this rejection, Edwards’ stance created an opening for death row prisoners to seek clemency. In June 2023, 56 of Louisiana’s 57 death row inmates, including Frank, petitioned for clemency. The Louisiana Board of Pardons scheduled hearings for 20 applications, with Frank’s case heard on October 13th, 2023. Her attorneys presented evidence unavailable to the jury that sentenced her to death, detailing the horrific abuse she suffered at her father’s hands.

Clinical psychiatrist Leslie Lebowitz testified that Frank was literally tortured and exposed to almost every form of serious trauma that can befall a child, explaining how the sustained abuse resulted in PTSD and dependent personality disorder that made her vulnerable to manipulation. Frank’s legal team presented affidavits from two jurors stating they would not have voted for death if they had known about her abuse history and mental illness, and highlighted the disparity with Lacaze’s life sentence.

50 prominent anti-gender violence organizations called for commutation of Frank’s sentence. However, the Attorney General Jeff Landry orchestrated efforts to block clemency applications, and board member Alvin Roche Jr. cited disciplinary reports in Frank’s prison record and concerns about eventual parole release in voting against clemency.

 On October 13th, 2023, the Louisiana Board of Pardons voted two to two on whether to grant Frank a full clemency hearing. Under board rules, a tie vote means the application fails. Antoinette Frank was denied clemency, meaning she would remain on death row, and the state could continue pursuing her execution. Since arriving on death row in October 1995, Antoinette Frank has spent more than 29 years at the Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women in St. Gabriel.

She remains the only woman on Louisiana’s death row, a distinction that has made her case particularly prominent in debates about capital punishment and gender-based violence. In 2016, flooding damaged the LCIW facility, and Frank was temporarily moved to other prisons along with other inmates. However, she has spent most of her incarceration at LCIW, living in the restrictive conditions that define death row existence.

Life on death row is fundamentally different from the general prison population. Death row inmates are typically housed in individual cells with limited contact with other prisoners. They spend the vast majority of their time in their cells with restricted opportunities for recreation, programming, or social interaction.

The isolation and uncertainty of awaiting execution can be psychologically devastating, even for the most hardened criminals. However, those who have worked with Frank in prison describe a person very different from the cold-blooded killer portrayed at trial. Johnny Jones, a former head warden at LCIW, has described Frank as the best person in our institution.

Jones noted that while inmates frequently complain about conditions and treatment, she never complains. Other prison officials and staff have similarly characterized Frank as a model prisoner who causes no problems and treats others with respect. Frank has used her time in prison to continue her education, taking advantage of programs available to death row inmates.

She has also developed a reputation as a peacemaker among the prison population, helping to resolve conflicts between other inmates and maintaining a calm, non-confrontational demeanor. This behavior stands in stark contrast to the violence she perpetrated in 1995 and raises questions about how a person capable of execution-style murders could present as gentle and peaceful.

Frank’s spiritual advisor, Deacon Angelo Zeeknola, has worked with her for many years and attests to what he describes as the authenticity of her conversion and redemption. Nola states that Frank has entered a life of true repentance and shows genuine remorse for the murders she committed.

 In communications with her legal team, Frank has consistently expressed that she feels responsible for the deaths at the Kim on restaurant, even while maintaining that she participated under duress from Lacaze. She acknowledges that the victims would not have been put in harm’s way if she had possessed the mental capacity to stand up to Lacaze, or if she had not been involved with him at all.

This expression of remorse and acceptance of responsibility represents a significant evolution from her behavior immediately after the murders, when she attempted to deceive investigators and minimize her role. The portrait of Frank in prison suggests a person who has changed over nearly three decades of incarceration.

Whether this change represents genuine transformation or simply adaptation to prison life is a matter of interpretation. Mental health professionals who have evaluated Frank note that the structured environment of prison, combined with medication and counseling, may have stabilized conditions that were untreated during her time as a police officer.

 The question of whether someone who has changed in prison should still face execution for crimes committed decades earlier lies at the heart of many death penalty debates. Frank’s defense team argues that executing someone who has shown remorse and positive change serves no purpose beyond retribution. The state maintains that the severity of Frank’s crimes and the betrayal they represented justifies carrying out the death sentence regardless of her subsequent behavior.

As of November 2025, Antoinette Frank remains on death row at the Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women, 30 years after her conviction. Her case continues to wind through the legal system with ongoing post-conviction appeals that have prevented the state from setting a final execution date.

 In January 2024, Republican Jeff Landry took office as Louisiana’s governor, replacing term-limited John Bel Edwards. Landry, along with newly elected Attorney General Liz Murrill, made clear their intention to resume executions in Louisiana after a 15-year hiatus. The last execution in Louisiana had been in 2010, when Gerald Bordelon waived his appeals and was put to death by lethal injection.

The drought in executions was due to both legal challenges and difficulty obtaining the drugs necessary for lethal injection. In February 2024, the Louisiana legislature approved the use of nitrogen gas as an alternative execution method, addressing the drug shortage issue. Nitrogen hypoxia, which causes death by replacing oxygen with nitrogen in the breathing air, had been pioneered in Alabama and offered states a new option for carrying out executions.

Governor Landry announced that Louisiana had established protocols for implementing nitrogen executions. On March 17th, 2025, Louisiana executed Christopher Sepulvado, convicted of killing his 6-year-old stepson, marking the state’s return to capital punishment. The following day, March 18th, 2025, Jesse Hoffman became the first person executed by nitrogen hypoxia in Louisiana.

 He had been convicted of the 1996 kidnapping, rape, and murder of Molly Elliott in New Orleans. These executions signaled that Louisiana was serious about carrying out death sentences after years of de facto moratorium. Attorney General Murrill publicly stated in February 2025 that she believed Antoinette Frank was among a handful of death row prisoners who had exhausted their post-conviction release options and could have execution dates set.

Murrell said she had asked Orleans Parish District Attorney Jason Williams to move forward with setting an execution date for Frank and indicated that if Williams declined to do so, she would seek authority to intervene and sign the death warrant herself. However, Williams’ office pushed back on this characterization, releasing a statement that Frank’s post-conviction appeal, filed in 2009 and supplemented in 2024, had not yet been fully heard by the courts.

 Williams stated, “There can be no effort to proceed with an execution of Ms. Frank during post-conviction review by the court.” A hearing was scheduled for March 31st, 2025 on Frank’s post-conviction application before Criminal District Court Judge Kimya Holmes. In May 2025, Judge Holmes issued rulings that dealt a significant blow to Attorney General Murrell’s efforts.

Holmes denied the state’s motion to dismiss Frank’s post-conviction claims and refused to allow Murrell’s office to take over the case from the Orleans Parish District Attorney. Holmes found that no provision in Louisiana law or the state constitution permitted the Attorney General to intervene in the case without the local prosecutor’s consent.

The judge scheduled a December 2025 hearing for Frank to present arguments challenging her conviction and death sentence. Murrell immediately announced her intention to appeal Holmes’ rulings, stating, “We obviously strongly disagree with the rulings of the court today in the Antoinette Frank case. We intend to file an expedited appeal and resolve these issues to get justice for the victims.

” In October 2025, the Louisiana Supreme Court overturned Judge Holmes’ ruling in a 5-2 decision, finding that Attorney General Murrell could intervene in Frank’s case with the District Attorney’s cooperation. However, the court allowed Frank’s post-conviction appeal to continue, meaning she remained protected from execution while her legal claims were being reviewed.

As of November 2025, Frank is one of 53 people on Louisiana’s death row, down from 56 at the start of the Landry administration. No execution date has been set for Frank, and her attorneys continue to pursue multiple legal avenues to overturn her death sentence or have it commuted to life imprisonment.

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