Chau Vu was still hiding in the walk-in cooler of the Kim Anh restaurant in New Orleans East when the police car pulled up outside. It was a little after two in the morning on March 4, 1995. Minutes earlier two people had come through the front door with a key and shot three people dead: Ronald Williams II, twenty-five, a New Orleans police officer working the restaurant's security detail, and Chau's sister Ha, twenty-four, and brother Cuong, seventeen. The officer who now got out of the patrol car in uniform was one of the two. Antoinette Frank had worked part-time security at the Kim Anh and everyone in the family knew her. She came back inside and asked what had happened. "You saw what happened," Chau told her. "You killed my brother and sister."
Frank and Rogers LaCaze, an eighteen-year-old drug dealer, had been in the restaurant twice that night already to order food and drinks, and on one of those visits Frank took a key to the front door. The staff had grown wary of her and her new companion, and Chau, seeing Frank approach yet again as the restaurant closed, hid the money meant for business expenses in the kitchen microwave. When the two came back around two o'clock, Frank let them in with the stolen key and herded Chau and her brother Quoc toward the staff-only area. LaCaze came up behind Williams and shot him three times. In the confusion Chau and Quoc slipped into the cooler with a third employee. From inside they could see part of the restaurant. Chau watched Frank looking for something until she moved out of sight, and then they heard more shots. Quoc, by the account of the trial evidence the Louisiana Supreme Court later gave, saw her searching where the family kept its money, then walking to the place where he would find his brother and sister, and heard more gunfire. Ha and Cuong were questioned about the money, and after it was found they were shot several times. The two killers left without finding the three in the cooler.
Quoc ran out to call for help while Chau stayed. The prosecution's account is that Frank came back in a cruiser from her own precinct to draw the survivors out and kill them before other officers arrived. Chau stayed hidden until they did, and then identified Frank. The two women were questioned at separate tables in the dining room, and Frank was arrested and charged with three counts of first degree murder. LaCaze was picked up later that night; he had used Williams's Chevron credit card at a station in Gretna minutes after the killings. At headquarters Frank confessed. She is believed to have been the first New Orleans officer ever charged with killing a fellow officer. The homicide detective on the case, Eddie Rantz, believed the robbery was partly revenge on Williams, who Frank thought was shortchanging her on hours and pay at the restaurant, and called her the most cold-hearted person he had met in three decades of police work.
She was born Antoinette Renee Frank on April 30, 1971, in Opelousas, Louisiana, one of four children of Adam and Mary Ann Frank. Veterans Affairs records described her father, a telephone company worker and Vietnam veteran, as physically and emotionally abusive; he once strangled her when she was two. After she was imprisoned she said he had begun raping her at puberty and forced her to have three abortions between sixteen and twenty. A psychologist who treated her in prison concluded she most likely had post-traumatic stress disorder and dependent personality disorder. As a teenager she was a junior police officer in Opelousas and briefly a New Orleans Police Explorer. She was fired from a Walmart in Opelousas in 1988 for giving false information on her application.
She applied to the New Orleans Police Department on her twentieth birthday, April 30, 1991, and failed the psychological examination, which found she tended to lie and to exaggerate her skills and background. A psychiatrist she hired herself gave a kinder evaluation, and she was admitted to the academy. The writer Chuck Hustmyre has reported that she was caught lying on several parts of her application, failed two standard psychiatric evaluations, and was hired over the objection of the psychiatrist Philip Scurria. One of her two letters of recommendation was supposedly from Mayor Sidney Barthelemy, who denied signing it. The department was chronically short of officers, badly paid, losing people faster than it could replace them, and hollowed out by arrests of its own for murder and drugs. She was hired on February 7, 1993. Her fellow officers found her shy and indecisive, and by August 1993 her superiors wanted to send her back to the academy.
She met LaCaze on November 25, 1994, when she took his statement after he was shot on the street. Other officers saw him driving her car and moving her police unit at an accident scene; she introduced him as a trainee and as her nephew. Witnesses later testified that the two had pulled motorists over in her squad car and robbed them. On February 4, 1995, after LaCaze argued with two men leaving a party, Frank pulled their car over in uniform, and in the fight that followed one of the men, Anthony Wallace, was arrested for attempted murder and armed robbery. A civil sheriff who stopped to help, Irvin Bryant, said Frank told him LaCaze was with her and had him released. The day before the Kim Anh killings she tried to buy nine-millimeter ammunition for LaCaze at a Walmart.
The two were indicted on April 28, 1995, and tried separately before Judge Frank Marullo. LaCaze went first, on July 17 to 21, and was sentenced to death. Frank's trial began on September 5. Her lawyers moved for a change of venue only after questioning of the first panel had begun, and the judge let jury selection go on; it was finished in a day, and he denied the motion the next morning. Of the 113 prospective jurors questioned, 110 had seen or heard coverage of the case, about forty admitted negative feelings about her, and seventy-seven were excused for cause. Her lawyers had subpoenaed thirty-nine witnesses and called none. The jury heard a recording of her admitting the crimes, and on September 12 it took twenty-two minutes to convict her on all three counts, then a record for a capital case in New Orleans. The next day it took forty-five minutes to recommend death, and on October 20, 1995, she was formally sentenced.
In November 1995, a month later, a dog led police to a human skull with a bullet hole buried under her house. Her father had stayed there in 1993 and she had reported him missing that year. Police and prosecutors believe the skull was his and that she killed him, but the remains have never been formally identified and she has never been charged.
The appeal turned on money. A week before trial Marullo had refused to declare her indigent. She testified that her mother had hired her lawyer, that she owned a nineteen-year-old Ford Elite bought for $600, and that her furniture had been sold for about $6,000 to pay her debts and the attorney's fee; the judge ordered her roughly $3,800 in police pension paid to the court reporters and said there would be no free transcripts. Eight months after the trial he declared her indigent for the appeal, though nothing in her finances had changed. In January 2001 the Louisiana Supreme Court affirmed her convictions but held that he had abused his discretion, and sent the case back for a hearing on whether she should have had state-funded psychiatric and mitigation experts for the penalty phase. On remand the trial court found that her own lawyer had given her access to a mental health expert and she had refused his help. The Louisiana Supreme Court upheld her sentence 5 to 2 on May 22, 2007, holding that because she had refused that expert she could not show the denial of state funds had made her sentencing unfair; Chief Justice Calogero and Justice Johnson dissented. Marullo signed death warrants in April 2008 for July 15 and in September 2008 for December 8, and the state supreme court set both aside. In October 2010 a state judge removed Marullo from both cases, because it was unclear whether he had disclosed his own link to the murder weapon: his signature appeared on an order releasing the gun from the evidence room to Frank before the killings, a signature he has always said was forged. LaCaze's death sentence was later converted to life after a partially successful challenge concerning a juror at his trial. The Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide, which advocates for Frank, says a state witness in LaCaze's 2013 post-conviction proceedings testified that he had coerced her.
In June 2023, Frank was one of fifty-six of Louisiana's fifty-seven death row prisoners to petition the outgoing governor, John Bel Edwards, for clemency; the parole board ruled them ineligible, and her own petition was rejected in October 2023. Louisiana resumed executions on March 18, 2025, with the nitrogen gas execution of Jessie Hoffman Jr., the first in the state since 2010, but Frank's post-conviction appeal was still pending. Her most recent pleadings, filed in July 2024, say that LaCaze shot Williams and then put a gun to her head and forced her to shoot the Vu siblings, and that jurors never heard about her father's abuse. In March 2026 the Louisiana Supreme Court unanimously overturned Orleans Parish Criminal Court Judge Kimya Holmes's refusal to hold a hearing on whether the claims came too late, and Holmes heard evidence on that question on June 3, 2026. No woman has been executed in Louisiana since Toni Jo Henry in 1942. Frank remains at the Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women in St. Gabriel.
At the June 3, 2026, hearing the question was narrow. The Supreme Court's per curiam order had held that Holmes abused her discretion in refusing the state a hearing confined to timing, and directed that if the state made the showing the law requires, that the delay had prejudiced it, the late claims must be dismissed. Attorney General Liz Murrill's office argued that after decades in which Frank had failed to seek relief, witnesses had died, evidence had been lost and records had been destroyed. Frank's lawyers answered that years after her trial the state had disclosed evidence about LaCaze that its own prosecutors acknowledged was exculpatory, evidence that in their words confirmed she had not been a willing participant. Holmes was expected to rule on the prejudice question on October 9, 2026. Frank was fifty-four.
April 30, 1971: Antoinette Renee Frank is born in Opelousas, Louisiana.
1988: fired from a Walmart in Opelousas for giving false information on her application.
April 30, 1991: she applies to the New Orleans Police Department and fails the psychological examination.
February 7, 1993: hired by the New Orleans Police Department.
1993: she reports her father, who had stayed at her house, missing.
November 25, 1994: she meets Rogers LaCaze while taking his statement after he is shot.
March 4, 1995: the police officer Ronald Williams II and Ha Vu and Cuong Vu are shot dead in a robbery at the Kim Anh restaurant; Chau Vu identifies Frank, who is arrested and charged with three counts of first degree murder.
April 28, 1995: Frank and LaCaze are indicted.
July 17 to 21, 1995: LaCaze is tried and sentenced to death.
September 5, 1995: Frank's trial begins before Judge Frank Marullo.
September 12, 1995: the jury convicts her on all three counts in twenty-two minutes; the next day it recommends death.
October 20, 1995: she is formally sentenced to death.
November 1995: a human skull with a bullet hole is found buried under her house; police believe it is her father's, but it has never been formally identified and she has never been charged.
January 2001: the Louisiana Supreme Court affirms her convictions but sends the case back on the question of state-funded experts.
May 22, 2007: the Louisiana Supreme Court upholds her death sentence 5 to 2.
2008: Marullo signs death warrants for July 15 and December 8; the state supreme court sets both aside.
October 2010: a state judge removes Marullo from both cases.
June 2023: she joins a clemency petition to the outgoing governor, John Bel Edwards; her petition is rejected in October 2023.
July 2024: new pleadings say LaCaze forced her to shoot the Vu siblings.
March 2026: the Louisiana Supreme Court overturns Judge Kimya Holmes's refusal to hold a hearing on whether the claims came too late.
June 3, 2026: Holmes hears evidence on the timing question.