Word: francioni
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Dates: during 1987-1987
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They seemed unlikely protagonists for a tragedy. Sterling Rault, an outgoing and likable accountant for a New Orleans gas pipeline company, was married to his high school sweetheart and was the father of two children. Jane (Janie) Francioni, a slight, happy-go-lucky girl who delighted in lunching on Saturdays with her grandparents and aunts, was a 21-year-old clerk in the same office...
Both had joined the Louisiana Energy & Development Corp. in 1981. Francioni arrived in April; she got the job on a tip from a friend after dropping out of Louisiana State University. She took to the work. "I think I've found something I really enjoy doing," she told her mother. She talked of returning to college, perhaps to study accounting...
...pipeline company, things quickly went awry again. Within a few months, Rault was forging the company president's name on checks and depositing them in a bogus bank account he set up. He was one of Jane Francioni's supervisors, and he apparently duped her into withdrawing cash from the account on his behalf...
...Francioni's discovery of the embezzlement and her threat to turn him in, prosecutors believe, that prompted Rault to kill her. On the afternoon of March 1, 1982, he asked the young woman for a ride to his C.P.A. night class at L.S.U.'s local campus. Once in Francioni's white Mustang, Rault produced a .25-cal. pistol and shot her in the abdomen. He raped her, beat her and slit her throat with a knife. The two hours of viciousness ended when he dumped her body on the city's east side and set the body afire to cover...
...execution, Jane Francioni's family gathered at their trim lakeside home in Slidell, 30 miles northeast of the city, to console themselves and pray. "We are totally spent," sighed Jane's anguished mother Mary Catherine. "It was we who got the life sentence." Her son Norman expressed the grief of all who were connected to the two deaths: "We're victims, they're victims, everyone's a victim in this...