Best American Crime Writing 2006 - Mark Bowden [127]
Rogers LaCaze has a simpler diagnosis. In a letter from prison, he wrote, “Antoinette is crazy. Hell, she killed her own dad and buried him under her house.”
After twenty-seven years on the job, Eddie Rantz retired. He went to law school. Sometimes he still thinks about the case and about Antoinette Frank. “She is, without a doubt, the most coldhearted 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,” she says. In his office, Glen 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.
Mary Williams, wife of Officer Ronnie Williams, is busy raising their two sons, Christopher and Patrick. She has grown very close to the Vu family. They see each other often.
The Vus still own the Kim Anh restaurant.
Antoinette Frank and Rogers LaCaze are on death row, still 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 ten-year-old case, they say, remains under investigation.
CHUCK HUSTMYRE is a freelance journalist in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Before embarking upon a career as a writer, he spent twenty-two years in law enforcement and retired as a special agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF). This story is based on his book Killer with a Badge (Penguin, 2004). His articles have appeared in a variety of publications, including the Washington Post, the Baton Rouge Advocate, Law & Order magazine, Homeland Security Today, and Court TV’s CrimeLibrary.com. He is at work on another true crime book for Penguin.
Coda
Despite being jaded by more than twenty years in law enforcement, I’m still shocked by this crime. Cops are human. I know it all too well. They sometimes do stupid things. They sometimes get in trouble. They sometimes end up in jail. But a police officer planning the execution-style murder of a fellow officer is something I never would have thought possible. In the two years I researched this story, I think I uncovered everything that could be uncovered about how Antoinette Frank became a police officer and about how she and Rogers LaCaze committed a crime so brutal, so senseless, and so shocking. But what I did not uncover, at least not to my own satisfaction, was why Antoinette Frank did what she did. I can—and do in the article and in the book—speculate about her motivation. Greed and anger, I suspect, played a major role. Greed is certainly why Rogers LaCaze got involved. But nothing in Antoinette Frank’s past indicated excessive amounts of either. So why did she plan and participate in the murder of a fellow police officer, an officer she worked with every day, an officer she knew she could rely on to risk his life to save hers? Looking back, I think maybe I was searching too hard for an answer. Maybe it was right in front of me the whole time. Maybe Sgt. Eddie Rantz and Rogers LaCaze are right about the one thing they agree on. Maybe Antoinette Frank is just crazy as hell. Just ask her dad.
Devin Friedman
OPERATION STEALING SADDAM’S MONEY
FROM GQ
BY AUGUST, EVERYONE AT Fort Stewart knew we were headed to war. It’s one thing to go to the UN and pretend that it’s all up to the weapons inspectors. But you can’t play semantics with the people who order the bombs. Because preparing for war means buying stuff. And not just Javelin missiles, Bradley Fighting Vehicles, and the rest of the photogenic,