| Notes |
- Classification: Murderer
Characteristics: Rape - Burning the body
Number of victims: 1
Date of murder: March 1, 1981
Date of birth: 1951
Victim profile: Jane Ellen Francioni, 21 (his secretary)
Method of murder: Shooting (.25-cal. pistol) - Stabbing with knife
Location: New Orleans, Louisiana, USA
Status: Executed by electrocution in Louisiana on August 24, 1987
Sterling J. Rault, Jr., was executed on August 24, 1987. Rault was convicted of raping, stabbing, shooting, and burning the body of Jane Ellen Francioni, a 21-year-old secretary who worked in the same gas company where he worked as an accountant, on March 1, 1981, in New Orleans. Rault had given several varying, bizarre confessions to the crime.
Rault's final statement was:
"I would like the public to know that they are killing an innocent man at this time. I pray that God will forgive all those involved in this matter. I, personally, do not hold any animosity towards anyone, though.
"This country professes to be 'One nation under God,' but the death penalty goes against the word of God. Jesus Christ died on the cross in order that all people would have mercy and we need to start giving that mercy to our fellow man.
"Into the arms of love of God I now go. I love you all. May God bless you all."
Embezzler Who Killed Secretary Dies in Louisiana's Electric
August 24, 1987
An accountant who raped and murdered his secretary because he feared she would expose his embezzlement of $84,000 was executed early today in Louisiana's electric chair.
Sterling Rault was pronounced dead at 12:16 A.M., according to C. Paul Phelps, secretary of the state Department of Corrections.
Mr. Rault, 36 years old, was the eighth person executed in Louisiana this summer and the 15th to be put to death in the state since it resumed executions in 1983.
In his final hours, Mr. Rault was visited by his mother, father, brother and sister-in-law, and his spiritual advisers, the Rev. Alan J. McLellan and Sister Mary Rault, his aunt.
After speaking with Mr. Rault late Sunday, Warden Hilton Butler said, ''He's taking it real well.''
High Court Denied a Stay
Mr. Rault was convicted of raping, shooting and stabbing Jane Ellen Francioni, 21, whose body was then doused with gasoline and set afire in March 1982 in a desolate section of eastern New Orleans.
Mr. Rault, a New Orleans accountant, was denied a seventh stay of execution Friday by the United States Supreme Court, leaving his last hope with Gov. Edwin Edwards. But Governor Edwards has refused to stop executions unless given proof of innocence.
At a State Pardon Board hearing, Mr. Rault said he was innocent of murder, that he recalled nothing of the events preceding his arrest and that someone must have drugged him.
The prosecution said Mr. Rault killed Miss Francioni in 1982 because she knew he had embezzled $84,000 from the Louisiana Energy and Development Company and was afraid she would expose him.
Told Contradictory Stories
Mr. Rault originally told arresting officers that he and Miss Francioni were kidnapped by two masked men who raped and killed her.
At one time, he said two long-dead cousins appeared while he was in a self-induced hypnotic trance and killed the woman while he tried to stop them. Later, under hypnosis, Mr. Rault said Miss Francioni was shot accidentally when his dead cousins appeared to rape the woman, slit her throat, drag her around with a belt and then set her body afire.
In yet another version, Mr. Rault told his defense attorney that Miss Francioni pulled a gun on him and was accidentally shot during a struggle.
Just another day in the electric chair
By Sarah Helm - The Independent
August 28, 1987
Sarah Helm reports from Louisiana, where executions have become so frequent as to pass almost unnoticed
THIS WEEK, the rate of executions in Louisiana reached its highest since 1941. The death of Sterling Rault in the electric chair was the eighth in the state in the space of 10 weeks.
Following a Supreme Court decision in April which removed major legal barriers, Louisiana courts had moved swiftly to throw out appeals and to clean out death row. "We still have the lynch mob down here," said Judie Menadue, of Louisiana Capital Defense Project. The pattern is expected to be reflected elsewhere, pushing the execution rate in 1987 in the US states which have the death penalty to its highest ever. "It's just becoming a routine - no one takes any notice any more," said one civil rights campaigner.
Inside Louisiana State Penitentiary on the night before the execution, the routine was running smoothly and the press attention was light.
All executions in the state must take place between midnight and 3am. The usual explanation is "it's written in the law that way". But as Sister Helen Prejean, who works with the death row inmates, commented: "It's a dirty deed and they do it at night in the bowels of the jail so no one will see."
At 10pm, the warden, R. Hilton Butler, gave his regular execution press conference. "For his last meal at 6.30pm, he chose a T-bone steak, 12 shrimps, French fries, Pepsi and strawberry shortcake. I have spoken to Rault and he is taking it real calm, real good," said Butler, with a guard chewing at his side.
At 11.30pm, a line of seven witnesses was driven off the five miles across the grounds to the death chamber. In the prison lobby, a telephone was lying off the hook, keeping the line open for an agency reporter. "You guys got deadlines, so you'll want to know right away?" asked one official. Another commented: "This used to be fine when we got paid overtime, but that's all stopped now."
At 12.15am, a reporter looked at his watch. "It should be happening just about now." The door reopened and the official walked in. "12.16. It's over." At 12.45am, the witnesses were back. "When he was strapped in the chair, he gave a thumbs-up sign with both hands and then looked over at his aunt, Sister Mary Rault, a Roman Catholic nun, and said, `I love you.' The first jolt passed through him at 12.10 and he arched sharply and clenched his fists. After the first jolt he appeared to remain with his fists clenched during subsequent jolts," said the spokesman for the witnesses.
Sterling Rault, a father of two, was convicted in 1982 of murdering his secretary, Janie Francioni. He raped her, shot her twice and set her body alight with gasoline.
Speaking two days before his execution, Rault said he had accepted death. "I will just be transferring from death row to life row. I will be going to join God."
Louisiana State Penitentiary is known as "the prison plantation". Covering 18,000 acres, it houses 4,760 prisoners, 80 per cent black and one third serving life. Death row is in Camp G. Its single-storey green buildings, housing 39 inmates, sweat in the heat, surrounded by neat flowerbeds and triangular exercise pens. Two miles away is "death house" where the prisoner goes the day before his execution - and next door to that, the execution chamber itself.
The prison's executioner is known as Sam Jones. "Nobody really knows who he is. He just rings up when he knows there is an execution and we go and pick him up. He gets paid $400 a time - but I'm sure we could find a load of people to do it for free," said the warden.
Richard Peabody, an assistant warden, explained the procedure. "We administer 2,400 volts for 10 seconds, 500 for 20 seconds, 2,400 for 10 seconds and then again 500 for 20 seconds. The idea is not to have any overkill - excessive scarring, for example. It is our belief that the man is dead from the moment of the first jolt." Peabody said none of the guards look forward to executions. "We treat them as well as we can or as bad as we have to - it's just part of the job." His feet on his desk and puffing a pipe, the warden agreed. "It's just part of the job."
"Everyone's A Victim in This"
By Richard Woodbury - Time.com
Monday, Sep. 07, 1987
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.
Rault came to LEDCO in August as a $28,000-a-year assistant comptroller. He was returning to his native New Orleans after eight years with the Masonite Corp. in Laurel, Miss. Friends there remember him as an exemplary family man and something of a civic figure: he had served as vice president of the / Jaycees and ran the club's Christmas parade.
But something had gone wrong with Rault. In 1981 he was caught embezzling money from Masonite. With the $166,000 he stole, Rault bought a larger house, built a swimming pool and took his parents on vacations to Disney World and San Francisco. "He flipped out," remembers a former associate. "He wanted the image of success, especially to impress his family."
Rault repaid the entire sum and was never prosecuted -- even though he was also suspected of trying to kill a co-worker who he thought had turned him in. The brakes on the man's car were cut while he and his family were attending church. Nevertheless, Rault managed to keep news of the embezzlement from his family when he returned to New Orleans and was hired at LEDCO.
At the gas 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.
It was 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 his crime. But an off-duty state trooper spotted the blaze, and minutes later Rault, reeking of gasoline, was arrested running from beneath a highway overpass.
New 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.
But appeals have been fast running out for many of the nation's 1,919 death row inmates. The 22 death sentences carried out this year are the most since the Supreme Court reinstated them in 1976; four 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.
Last week it was Rault's turn. Just past midnight last Monday, the former accountant, now 36, took the short walk from his cell to the small green death room in the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. He moved onto a podium and read a onepage statement proclaiming his innocence and his love for all. As guards fastened him to the chair with eight leather straps and draped his head with a green canvas hood, Rault managed a final thumbs-up sign.
At 12:10 a.m. Warden Hilton Butler nodded slightly to a man known only as "Sam Jones," who stood hidden behind a cinder-block partition. The executioner proceeded to throw a lever and press two black buttons, and the first 2,400-volt surge of current tore through Rault's 6-ft., 228-lb. frame. Two minutes later the power stopped, and at 12:16 Prison Doctor Alfred Gould stepped forward to pronounce Rault dead.
Yet the execution seemed to provide no immediate finality to a gruesome crime. In New Orleans, Rault's aging, infirm parents attended a small wake and funeral for their son, then retreated in grief behind the doors of their modest bungalow. Observed his aunt, Sister Mary Ruth Rault, a Roman Catholic nun who had been one of the official witnesses at Rault's execution: "This has been five long years of living death for us."
On the eve of the 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."
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1950 - 1987 (36 years)