According to author Chuck Hustmyre, Frank was caught lying on several sections of her employment application and failed two standard psychiatric evaluations, with psychiatrist Philip Scurria advising against her hiring.

NOPD officials also thought having more African-Americans like Frank on the force would ease longstanding racial tensions in the majority-black city.

An investigator with the Department of Public Safety and Corrections (DOC) believed this was the first contact between the two, although in her statement, Frank claims that they met some eight months before the murders.

When asked why she would continue the relationship, knowing that Lacaze had been involved in dealing drugs and a shooting, she responded that she would not disassociate herself from him just because of his past.

Frank refused to discuss anything regarding the murders - every time the investigator asked her a question, she told him to "look it up in the record" or asserted her innocence.

[5] Two men who claimed they met Lacaze at a party on February 4, 1995, John Stevens and Anthony Wallace, testified in court.

Wallace was restrained until a backup unit arrived on the scene when he was subsequently arrested and charged with attempted murder and armed robbery.

[5] Irvin Bryant, a civil sheriff in 1995, testified that on the evening of February 4, he observed a stopped police vehicle with its lights flashing.

[5] On March 4, 1995, Frank and Lacaze visited Kim Anh, a Vietnamese restaurant run by the Vu family in New Orleans East.

Chau, Quoc, and the employee hid in the rear of a large walk-in cooler in the kitchen, turning out its light as they entered.

They did not know the whereabouts of their other sister and brother, Ha and Cuong Vu, who had been sweeping the dining room floors when Frank entered the restaurant.

After Frank and Lacaze left the premises, Chau tried frantically to call 911 on her cell phone, but the cooler prevented her from getting a usable signal.

Quoc emerged from the cooler and ran out the restaurant's back door to a nearby friend's home to call 911 to report the murders.

The robbers fled the restaurant, and Frank dropped Lacaze off at a nearby apartment complex, both knowing that witnesses were left behind.

Eddie Rantz, the homicide detective who worked the case, believed Frank and Lacaze planned the robbery to get revenge on Williams.

[8] On September 12, 1995, the jury needed only 22 minutes to return a guilty verdict on all counts—at the time, a record for a capital murder case in New Orleans.

His name was inscribed on the Memorial Wall at The National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial in Washington D.C.[11] Initially, the Vu family kept the restaurant open at the site of the tragedy in New Orleans East for a decade, until suffering flood damage from Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and post-storm looters stealing jewelry which Ha and Cuong had been wearing when they were killed.

After that, Quoc Vu and his mother Nguyet sold the location, re-opening the restaurant in Harahan, and moving their residence to Metairie, where they said they felt safer.

[12] In 1993, a year and a half before the murders at the Kim Anh, Frank's father had stayed at her home for a time before she then reported him missing.

In November 1995, a month after she received her first death sentence, a dog led police to find a human skull with a bullet hole buried under Frank's house.

In a 2005 retrospective, Chuck Hustmyre said, "As for those human bones unearthed beneath Frank's house, so far, authorities have made no serious effort to identify them.

Their decision, made public November 25, 2008 effectively voided the death warrant signed by Judge Marullo in September.

Louisiana state Judge Laurie White heard the motion in September 2009 and, on January 3, 2010, ruled that Marullo should not be taken off the case.

[18] However, yet another lower court state judge, ruled in October 2010 that Marullo had to be recused from the Frank and Lacaze cases because it was unclear if he had been open with the defense teams about his own surprising connection to the gun used in the restaurant murders.

[21] On July 23, 2015, retired district judge Michael Kirby threw out Rogers Lacaze's conviction and sentence and ordered a new trial.

Kirby said that Lacaze deserved a new trial because one of the jurors hid the fact that he was a Louisiana state trooper and previously worked as a railroad policeman.

4th Circuit appellate judges Edwin Lombard, Paul Bonin and Madeleine Landrieu ruled "After review of the state's writ application in light of the applicable law and arguments of the parties, we find that the trial court erred in finding that the seating of Mr. Settle on the defendant's jury was a structural error entitling him to a new trial".