Antoinette Frank: The NOPD Officer Who Became a Killer

The NOPD Officer Who Became a Killer

Antoinette Renee Frank was born on April 30, 1971, in Opelousas, Louisiana. She joined the New Orleans Police Department in February 1993, despite failing psychological evaluations that indicated a tendency to lie and exaggerate her abilities. The NOPD hired her anyway — a decision that would cost three people their lives.

Frank worked part-time security at the Kim Anh restaurant, a Vietnamese establishment in New Orleans East. On the night of March 3-4, 1995, Frank and her associate Rogers LaCaze entered the restaurant and murdered three people: Ha Vu, age twenty-four, and her brother Cuong Vu, age seventeen — both restaurant employees — and fellow NOPD officer Ronnie Williams, age twenty-five, who was also working security at the restaurant. Investigators believed the murders were motivated by a dispute over how security payments were being divided.

The Unraveling

After the killings, Frank fled the scene, then returned in uniform in a police cruiser — attempting to control the crime scene and eliminate witnesses. A survivor identified her. She was arrested and confessed. The trial lasted three days. The jury needed twenty-two minutes to convict her on three counts of first-degree murder — a record for speed in a New Orleans capital case at the time.

When police searched Frank's home, they discovered human remains beneath the house, believed to be those of her father. No charges were ever filed in that case.

Death Row

Antoinette Frank was sentenced to death and remains the only woman on Louisiana's death row. Her case is one of the darkest chapters in the history of the NOPD — a department that has weathered corruption scandals for decades but has never had another case quite like this one. She was a police officer who swore to protect people and then murdered three of them, including a fellow cop, in a restaurant robbery. New Orleans has always been honest about its darkness, and the Antoinette Frank case is as dark as it gets.