Frank was born in 1971 and joined the New Orleans Police Department in 1993, at twenty-two. Her recruitment became a scandal in itself: she had failed a psychological evaluation, had a documented history of dishonesty on her application, and was hired anyway during a period of aggressive expansion of the force.
She worked a private security detail at the Kim Anh restaurant in New Orleans East, run by the Vu family. On the night of March 4, 1995 she and Rogers Lacaze, an eighteen-year-old with whom she was involved, entered the restaurant to rob it. They shot dead Ronald Williams, twenty-five, an off-duty officer working security there, and two of the owner's children, Ha Vu, twenty-four, and Cuong Vu, seventeen. Two other family members survived by hiding in a walk-in cooler and identified her. She was, to them, a familiar police officer.
She then returned to the scene in uniform as a responding officer.
She was convicted and sentenced to death on October 20, 1995, and remains on Louisiana's death row, one of very few women there. Lacaze was also sentenced to death; his conviction has been the subject of extended litigation. Human remains were later found under her house, and were never conclusively identified or charged.
The case is remembered in New Orleans as the low point of the department's 1990s corruption and hiring crisis, and the entry records that her hiring was itself part of the story.