Word: rault
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...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...
...Orleans was outraged by the brutality of the murder, and at a trial in October 1982 a New Orleans jury needed less than three hours to recommend a death sentence against Rault. "Crimes don't come any more hideous," said the prosecutor, David Paddison. "The death penalty was eminently justified...
Over the next five years, however, Rault managed to stave off five dates with Louisiana's electric chair. On death row he re-emerged as an exemplary citizen, teaching fellow inmates to read and write. With an old typewriter perched on his bunk, he batted out articles for prison ministries and corresponded with dozens of other prisoners who had heard his writings on Christian radio broadcasts...
...executions last week set a record for a single week. The pace has increased since April, when the court struck down the so-called McClesky defense, which argued that killers of whites stand a disproportionate chance of being put to death. Indeed, the McClesky defense had been used by Rault as well as the seven men who had been executed earlier this summer in Louisiana's electric chair...