Saturday, March 4, 1995. 1:55 A.M. New Orleans
Louisiana map with New Orleans locator
Antoinette Frank stood in the cramped
kitchen of the Kim Anh restaurant, a 9mm pistol clutched in her hand.
Kneeling on the dirty floor at Frank’s feet were 17-year-old Cuong Vu
and his 24-year-old sister, Ha.
Cuong Vu, victim
Cuong was an altar boy at St. Brigid
Catholic Church. He played high school football and wanted to be a
priest. Ha was considering becoming a nun. Both worked long hours at
their parents’ restaurant.
Frank fired nine bullets into them.
Ha Vu died instantly. When detectives found her, she was still on her knees, her forehead resting on the floor.
Cuong took longer to die. Frank shot him
repeatedly in the chest and back, but his young athlete’s heart
continued to beat. Frank heard him trying to talk, so she shot him
again. This time firing two bullets into Cuong’s head.
Frank and her partner-in-crime, an
18-year-old thug named Rogers LaCaze, ransacked the Bullard Avenue
restaurant until they found what they were looking for — money.
Frank and LaCaze bolted through the
dining room. On their way to the front door they passed Ronnie
Williams. Williams was a 25-year-old New Orleans police officer assigned
to the 7th District. His shift had ended at 11 p.m. and he
had come straight to the restaurant to work a security detail. Williams
needed the extra money. Ten days earlier his wife had given birth to
the couple’s second son, Patrick.
Officer Ronald Williams
Still in his police uniform, Officer
Ronnie Williams was face down behind the bar in a pool of blood. He’d
been shot twice in the head and once in the back.
LaCaze had Ronnie Williams’s gun and his wallet.
Outside, Frank and LaCaze piled into a
battered 1977 Ford Torino. As the car screeched out of the parking lot,
a sun-yellowed cardboard sign fluttered on the dashboard in front of
the steering wheel. Printed on either end of the foot-wide rectangular
placard was the star and crescent symbol of the New Orleans Police
Department. In the center of the sign, between the symbols, were the
words NEW ORLEANS POLICE OFFICER ON DUTY.
The sign and the car belonged to Officer Antoinette Frank, a New Orleans cop who worked out of the 7th
District. She, too, had just gotten off at 11 p.m. Frank was on the
same platoon, and worked the same shift, as Williams. The two officers
had worked together every day for more than a year.
A Police Department in Despair
New OrleansPolice Dept. Badge
Few would deny that in 1995 the New
Orleans Police Department was in sad shape. The agency was losing about
100 officers per year — many of them fired or arrested — and hiring
only half that many.
In 1994, two officers were arrested for
murder. One for killing a man the officer suspected of breaking into
his apartment; the other for ordering the execution of a woman who had
filed a brutality complaint against him.
Then in December 1994, the FBI arrested 10 New Orleans cops on federal drug trafficking charges.
Mike Wallace
CBS’s Mike Wallace branded New Orleans
“The No. 1 city in the nation for police brutality and corruption.”
Mayor Marc Morial told Time magazine, “I inherited a police department
that was a shambles.”
Mayor Marc Morial
By the start of 1995, things were bad, but they were about to get a lot worse.
Officer Antoinette Frank — the woman who
would become the poster child for police misconduct and the living
symbol of a department gone bad — had just met Rogers LaCaze.
Rogers LaCaze
Just past his 18th birthday, LaCaze
already had a history of violence and drug peddling. His mother, Alice
Chaney, kicked him out of the house when he was 17. “Rogers had become a
dope dealer,” she says.
At the end of 1994, LaCaze got shot. He
told police that he and his friend, Nemiah Miller, were hanging out
when another friend, a 19-year-old who went by the name “Freaky D,”
whipped out a gun and opened fire on them.
Alice Chaney has her own opinion for the
reason behind the shooting. “It was behind a dope deal,” Ms. Chaney
says. “Rogers and Nemiah had just scored.”
Miller died. LaCaze went to the hospital. One of the investigating officers was Antoinette Frank.
Warning Signs
Antoinette Frank
Frank said she always wanted to be a
police officer. Born in Opelousas, she was a member of the Opelousas
Junior Police and the New Orleans Police Explorers. When she turned 20,
Frank applied to the New Orleans Police Department.
Almost immediately, Frank’s application
ran into problems. The applicant investigation unit discovered Frank
had been fired from Wal-Mart and had lied about it on her application.
She also scored poorly on two standardized psychological evaluations.
The psychologist who reviewed Frank’s tests recommended a psychiatric
interview.
Dr. Philip Scurria
Dr. Philip Scurria, a board-certified
psychiatrist, evaluated Frank on 14 characteristics relevant to the job
of a police officer. He rated Frank as unacceptable or below average
in most. In his report, Dr. Scurria wrote that Frank “seemed shallow
and superficial.” He concluded by saying, “I do not feel … that the
applicant is suitable for the job of police officer.”
Apparently depressed over her faltering
job prospects, Frank disappeared. She left a half-baked suicide note
addressed to her father at a downtown office building. Her dad filed a
missing-persons report, but Frank turned up the next day.
Less than three weeks later the police department hired her anyway.
A Twisted Duo
After LaCaze got out of the hospital, he
started getting regular visits from Officer Frank. She took him
shopping for new clothes. She got him a pager and a cell phone. She
even rented him a Cadillac.
Frank became obsessed with him, LaCaze says.
She started driving him around in her
police car. She even answered calls with LaCaze and introduced him as
her trainee. Two officers from the 7th District once saw
LaCaze driving Frank’s patrol car. Then, the two of them started
hatching a plan to rob the Kim Anh restaurant.
Frank had been splitting the security
detail at the family-owned Vietnamese restaurant with Officer Ronnie
Williams for months. During that time, the Vu family, who owned the
restaurant, grew close to Frank and Williams. They treated Frank almost
like a member of the family.
“The Vus took a real liking to her,”
Frank’s ex-partner says. “I mean they were in love with this girl. They
bought her presents for this, presents for that. Anything she wanted,
anything she needed, they gave her.”
Frank knew the Vus distrusted banks. She also knew they kept all their money in cash.
During the weeks leading up to the
robbery, Frank acquired a 9mm pistol from the NOPD evidence room. Two
weeks before the murders, she reported the gun stolen.
LaCaze was with Frank when a police
officer arrived at her house to take the report about the stolen gun.
LaCaze later told detectives that the report was bogus. The pistol
hadn’t been stolen.
Just hours before they robbed the Kim
Anh and murdered three people, Frank and LaCaze stopped at Wal-Mart to
buy a box of 9mm bullets. Frank was on the clock, wearing her police
uniform and driving a patrol car.
Crime Scene Chaos
Chau Vu
As soon as they heard the explosion of
gunshots from the dining room, 23-year-old Chau Vu and her 18-year-old
brother Quoc ran and hid in the restaurant’s walk-in cooler. Chau
slammed the door shut as Quoc killed the lights. The two of them huddled
in the cold darkness.
Crime scene drawing, Cuong & Ha murders
Through the glass doors at the front of
the cooler and a window overlooking the kitchen, the pair caught
glimpses of Frank and LaCaze as they rummaged for cash. They heard
shouting, crying, more gunshots. Then silence.
Kim Anh kitchen crime scene
After she was sure Frank and LaCaze had
left, Chau crawled into the dining room. Her cell phone was in her
purse on a shelf beneath the bar. She saw Ronnie Williams’ body on the
floor.
Crime scene drawing, Williams murder
“I saw Ronnie was lying with all the
blood around him. That’s when all my confidence was gone because the
person that protects us was lying right there,” Chau later said.
Chau grabbed her cell phone and scrambled
back into the cooler. She dialed 911 but couldn’t get through. She
called a friend and begged him to call the police for her. The friend
asked what happened. The battery in Chau’s phone died.
Quoc slipped out the back door and ran to
a friend’s house to call police. On the way out, he passed the bloody
bodies of his brother and sister.
Several blocks away, Frank was fuming. “One of the bitches got away,” she told LaCaze.
Frank had seen Chau and Quoc inside the
restaurant when she and LaCaze went in, but she’d lost sight of them
and couldn’t find them again.
After dropping LaCaze off at his
apartment, Frank drove to the 7th District. There, she hopped into a
patrol car and raced back to the restaurant. She had a second gun a
.38 revolver tucked into the waistband of her jeans.
Sgt. Eddie Rantz
Sgt. Eddie Rantz, who supervised the
homicide investigation, says, “There’s no doubt in my mind she went back
there to kill the rest of them.”
Whether that was Frank’s intent, she never got the chance.
Chau hid in the cooler until she saw
police officers in the parking lot; then she bolted out the front door
and dove into the arms of Detective Yvonne Farve.
Frank stayed at the restaurant. She caught a break because Chau was so scared she would only speak Vietnamese at first.
In the initial confusion at the crime
scene, lead investigators Sgt. Eddie Rantz and Det. Marco Demma had no
idea that the young 7th District officer was one of the shooters. They
thought they had caught a break because one of their witnesses was a
trained police officer.
When the detectives questioned her,
Frank told them she had been in the kitchen getting something to drink
when she heard gunshots in the dining room. She said she tried to push
all the employees out through the back door.
Ha and Cuong wouldn’t leave, Frank said.
They stayed in the kitchen. Frank told Rantz she drove to the 7th
District station to report the shooting.
But Frank had a cell phone and a police
radio with her. Why didn’t she call, instead of wasting time driving to
the station? Rantz asked. Why did she leave everybody, including a
wounded police officer, behind?
“That’s when she started talking about
Rogers LaCaze,” Rantz says. Frank wasn’t a witness, the veteran
detective realized. She was a suspect. “I wanted to vomit,” Rantz
recalls.
Soon enough, Chau calmed down and told
her story in English. Quoc returned to the restaurant and also told the
detectives what happened.
Chief Richard Pennington
Rantz and Demma had heard enough. Rantz
approached Chief Richard Pennington in the parking lot. Pennington, a
veteran detective, had been on the scene for a while but was letting
the detectives run the show. “I told the chief, ‘We’re about to book
this motherf—er with three counts of first-degree murder,’” Rantz says.
Later, at police headquarters, with a
tape recorder in front of her, Antoinette Frank confessed to shooting
Ha and Cuong Vu in the kitchen of the Kim Anh restaurant. Her
justification was simple: Rogers LaCaze made her do it.
Antoinette Frank in custody
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 murder all three victims, Frank
refused to admit to shooting Officer Ronald 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 45 minutes after LaCaze left the Kim Anh restaurant, he used
Officer Williams’s credit card to buy $15 worth of gas at a station
three blocks from his brother’s apartment.
Cop & Rogers LaCaze at Kim Anh restaurant
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.
Aftermath
Orleans Parish Criminal District Court
Rogers LaCaze went on trial in July 1995. He testified 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 70s, pitted
himself against lead prosecutor Glen Woods. Woods is a soft-spoken
contemplative man, but he has a mind like a scalpel, which he had used
to slice people apart on the witness stand. In the battle of wits with
Glen Woods, Rogers LaCaze was severely outmatched.
In the end, LaCaze was reduced to
blubbering on the stand and begging 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.”
Them people. They had names, and Glen
Woods knew them well: Ha Vu, Cuong Vu, Ronnie Williams. Seeking justice
for them was one of the defining moments of Woods’ 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 Woods and Elizabeth Teel rested the state’s
case, Frank’s attorneys threw in the towel. Although they’d subpoenaed
nearly 40 witnesses, they didn’t call a single one.
The jury took just 40 minutes to convict Frank of three counts of first-degree murder. They recommended the death penalty.
After hearing the recommendation from
the jury, Woods said, “It would have been a mockery of justice 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 got the same.
A month later, a dog found the remains of
a human skeleton buried beneath Frank’s house. It was the same house
she once shared with her father. Frank reported her father missing a
year-and-a-half before the murders at the Kim Anh restaurant.
There was a bullet hole in the skull.
Looking Back
A decade after the case that rocked the New Orleans Police Department and outraged the city and the nation, much has changed.
Under Chief Richard Pennington, the
police department completely revamped its hiring practices. It weeded
out bad officers and hired good ones. Under Chief Eddie Compass, the
healing process continues.
Chief Eddie Compass
Still, as bad as the old hiring system
was, in the case of Antoinette Frank, it worked — at least initially.
The police department had a minimum of four glaring indicators of
Frank’s unsuitability for the job before they hired her.
Lying on her application and
pre-employment interview, two failed psychological evaluations, her
disastrous interview with the department psychiatrist, her strange
disappearance and half-hearted suicide note — all were well known to
NOPD before they offered Frank a job.
So, why did they hire her?
In the early 1990s, the department was
severely short handed. 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 police department to
hiring only those applicants who lived within Orleans Parish. To this
day, that policy still prevents NOPD from hiring well-qualified
officers who live in surrounding parishes.
Louisiana map with Orleans Parish
And in a city that often simmers with
racial tensions, Antoinette Frank, as a black female, fit the profile
they were looking for. Hiring her allowed the police department to
chalk up one more hash mark for their nonexistent, never-talked-about
quota system.
Antoinette Frank, younger
As to why she did what she did, Frank now
says it’s her father’s fault. She claims to have suffered 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 again in 1999 said she showed symptoms of “Narcissistic
Personality Disorder with anti-social features.” According to the
psychiatrist, Frank exhibits a lack of empathy toward others, a feeling
of entitlement, flies into rages, and is manipulative in
relationships.
Rogers LaCaze has a simpler diagnosis.
In a letter from prison, he said, “Antoinette is crazy. Hell, she
killed her own dad and buried him under her house.”
After 27 years on the job, Eddie Rantz
retired. He went to law school and has a spacious office on Poydras
overlooking the Superdome. 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.”
Vu family remembers
In his office, 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.
Vu family victims memorial
Mary Williams, wife of Officer Ronnie
Williams, is busy raising their two boys, Christopher and Patrick. She
has grown very close to the Vu family. They see each other often.
Ronald Williams memorial
The Vus still own the Kim Anh restaurant.
Antoinette Frank prison ID
Antoinette Frank and Rogers LaCaze are on
death row, waiting to die and 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 10-year-old case, they say, remains under
investigation.
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