Best American Crime Writing 2006 - Mark Bowden [126]
Detectives found LaCaze at his brother’s apartment in Gretna just a few hours after the murders. It turned out that about forty-five minutes after LaCaze left Kim Anh, he used Williams’s credit card to buy fifteen dollars worth of gas at a station three blocks from his brother’s apartment. 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
Rogers LaCaze went on trial in July 1995. He decided to take the stand 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 seventies, pitted himself against lead prosecutor Glen Woods. Woods is a soft-spoken, contemplative man, but he has a mind like a scalpel, a tool he has used to slice people apart on the witness stand. In the battle of wits with Glen Woods, Rogers LaCaze was unarmed.
In the end, LaCaze was reduced to blubbering on the stand and begged 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.”
Seeking justice for “them people” was one of the defining moments of Woods’s 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 Glen Woods and Elizabeth Teel rested the state’s case against Frank, her lawyers essentially gave up. Although they’d subpoenaed nearly forty witnesses, they didn’t call a single one.
The jury took forty minutes to convict Frank on three counts of first-degree murder. They too recommended the death penalty. 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 received the same sentence.
A month later, a dog found the remains of a human skeleton buried under Frank’s house. It was the same house she shared for a while with her father. Frank had reported her father missing a year and a half before the murders at the Kim Anh restaurant. There was a bullet hole in the unearthed skull.
LOOKING BACK
A decade after the case that rocked the New Orleans Police Department to its foundation and outraged the city and the nation, much has changed.
Under Pennington, the police department completely revamped its hiring practices. It weeded out bad officers and hired good ones. Under Supt. Eddie Compass, the healing process continues.
Still, as bad as the old hiring system was, in the case of Antoinette Frank, it worked—at least initially. The police department had at least four obvious indicators of Frank’s unsuitability for the job before they hired her: lying on her application and during her pre-employment interview, two failed psychological evaluations, her disastrous interview with the department psychiatrist, her strange disappearance and suicide note—all were well-known to the NOPD before they offered Frank a job. So why did they hire her?
In the early 1990s, the department was severely shorthanded. 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 department to hiring only those applicants who lived within Orleans Parish. (That policy still prevents NOPD from hiring well-qualified officers who live in surrounding parishes.)
And in a city that often simmers with racial tensions, Antoinette Frank, a black woman, fit the profile they were looking for. Hiring her allowed the police department to chalk up one more hash mark for its nonexistent, never-talked-about quota system.
As to why she committed the crime, Frank now says it’s her father’s fault. She claims to have suffered through years of emotional, physical, and sexual abuse