Antoinette Frank

Antoinette Renee Frank (born April 30, 1971) is an American murderer and former police officer who committed the 1995 Kim Anh murders, in which she and her probable lover, drug dealer Rogers LaCaze, shot and killed three people, two staff members and a fellow NOPD officer. After the murders, Frank fled, but returned to the scene of the crime shortly after the survivors called the police, arriving in a police patrol car. She then pretended to have had nothing to do with the crime, even asking a survivor, who had hidden in a freezer, what had happened.<blockquote>"You saw what happened. You killed my brother and sister."</blockquote>Frank was convicted of three counts of first degree murder and sentenced to death. She has been incarcerated since 1995 at the Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women in St. Gabriel, Louisiana, the only woman on the state's death row. Frank is also believed to have killed her father, Adam Frank, who had physically and possibly sexually abused her during childhood. A month after she was sentenced to death, police found a human skull with a bullet hole buried under Frank's house. He had stayed at his daughter's home shortly before she reported him missing in 1993. Adam Frank, a telephone company worker and Vietnam veteran, was often absent from home. Louisiana Department of Veterans Affairs records showed that Adam was physically and emotionally abusive towards his children and once strangled his then-two-year-old daughter Antoinette. While at the academy, Frank's father reported his daughter missing after he found a note in which Frank voiced self-hatred and described herself as "doomed since the day I was born". She returned shortly after and was hired by the NOPD in February 1993. She presented two letters of recommendation, one supposedly by then-mayor Sidney Barthelemy, who denied signing the letter. Frank's father disappeared in June On occasion, though, she did distinguish herself, winning "Officer of the Month" awards from the local Kiwanis Club for her work in the community. a known drug dealer, had been shot. An investigator with the Department of Public Safety and Corrections (DOC) believed this was the first contact between the two, although in her statement, Frank claims that they met some eight months before the murders. Frank had taken a statement from LaCaze after he was shot on the street, and initially got closer to him in hopes of turning his life around. However, she was smitten by LaCaze's "bad boy" persona, and their relationship soon turned sexual. She kept up her relationship even though she was well aware she was jeopardizing her career.

Two men who claimed they met LaCaze at a party on February 4, 1995, John Stevens and Anthony Wallace, testified in court. As the two were leaving the party, a verbal altercation between Stevens and LaCaze ensued, but Wallace suggested they leave. The two men got in a car and drove several blocks until a police vehicle pulled the car over. In police uniform, Frank exited the squad car and told Wallace and Stevens to get out and go to the back of the car. At that point, Wallace saw LaCaze and noticed he was holding a gun. According to Stevens, Wallace rushed LaCaze, and the two men began fighting. Then both Stevens and Frank also jumped into the fray, and the weapon discharged. Stevens began running, but a man named Irvin Bryant appeared and grabbed both LaCaze and Wallace. Frank then told the man that "LaCaze was the good guy" and that Wallace was the one causing the problems. Wallace was restrained until a backup unit arrived on the scene when he was subsequently arrested and charged with attempted murder and armed robbery.

Frank and LaCaze returned for a third at around 2 a.m. The staff had become wary of Frank and her new companion, so one of the employees, Chau Vu, hid the money meant for business expenses away in the kitchen. Frank opened the front door with the stolen key and corralled Chau and her brother Quoc into the staff-only area. LaCaze snuck up on the present security guard, 25-year-old Ronnie Williams, a fellow NOPD officer and colleague of Frank, and fatally wounded him with three gunshots. Frank was distracted by this and lost sight of the two siblings, who hid in a walk-in cooler with a third employee. Frank and LaCaze subsequently questioned the two remaining employees, Chau and Quoc's 24-year-old sister Ha and 17-year-old brother Cuong, for the location of the restaurant's money. After recovering the cash, Frank killed the siblings with multiple gunshots and left with LaCaze after failing to locate the survivors. In 2002, LaCaze's defense attempted to overturn the death sentence by claiming cruel and unusual punishment, stating that LaCaze was a "17-year-old mentally retarded child with an IQ of 71" at the time of the crime, but the Supreme Court of Louisiana denied the argument as LaCaze was 18 years old when he met Frank and participated in the robbery with her, also pointing out that mild intellectual disability is recognized at an IQ of 69 or below.

On September 12, 1995, the jury needed only 22 minutes to return a guilty verdict on all counts—at the time, a record for a capital murder case in New Orleans. The next day, they needed only 45 minutes to recommend the death penalty. She was formally sentenced to death on October 20, 1995, and sent to Death Row at the Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women (LCIW) in St. Gabriel, near Baton Rouge.

Aftermath and later developments

Frank's missing father

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."

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.

On April 22, 2008, District Judge Frank Marullo signed the death warrant for Antoinette Frank. According to the warrant, Frank was scheduled for execution by lethal injection on July 15, 2008. In May, however, the Louisiana Supreme Court issued a 90-day stay of execution effective June 10 pending ongoing appeals.

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. 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.

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. However, yet another lower court state judge, ruled in October 2010 that Marullo had to be recused from the Frank and LaCaze cases because it was unclear if he had been open with the defense teams about his own surprising connection to the gun used in the restaurant murders. Marullo's signature appeared on an order authorizing Frank to take the murder weapon from the evidence room; Marullo has long maintained the signature was forged. No female has been executed by the State of Louisiana since Toni Jo Henry died in the State's Electric chair in 1942.

Media depictions

Frank was profiled in an episode of Deadly Women in 2009,

Renewed effort to appeal Antoinette Frank's death sentence

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

In 2023, Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards, nearing the end of his term in 2024, publicly announced his opposition to the death penalty and advocated for its abolition in the state. However, on May 24, 2023, a majority of lawmakers voted against a bill aimed at abolishing capital punishment. A month later, in June 2023, 56 out of the 57 death row inmates in Louisiana, including Frank, petitioned the governor for clemency, citing his anti-death penalty stance. The pleas were to be processed by the Louisiana Board of Pardons and Committee on Parole.

In July 2023, the state's parole board rejected all 56 clemency petitions, ruling that the inmates were ineligible because such requests could not be filed within a year of a judge's ruling on an appeal. On October 13, 2023, Frank's appeal for clemency was rejected during a meeting of Louisiana's pardon board.

In February 2025, the Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill and Governor Jeff Landry announced plans to resume executions with the newly enacted method of nitrogen hypoxia, and convicted murderer Jessie Hoffman Jr. (who raped and killed a woman in 1996) was executed on March 18, 2025, therefore becoming the first inmate executed in the state since 2010. However, Frank was not one of the few inmates who had exhausted all appeals and became eligible for execution, because she is currently filing a post-conviction appeal against her death sentence, and the motion is pending.

On April 28, 2025, Frank's appeal to overturn her death sentence was heard, and state prosecutors were given a week to file a response to her case. On May 15, 2025, a state judge accepted Frank's appeal to overturn her death sentence and ordered a new hearing in December 2025. The judge also rejected an offer from Attorney General Murrill to take over the case when it goes to trial.

Antoinette Frank

Aftermath and later developments

Frank's missing father

Media depictions

Renewed effort to appeal Antoinette Frank's death sentence

See also

References

Citations

Sources

Further reading