In what could be Florida’s record 19th execution this year, Gov. Ron DeSantis on Tuesday signed a death warrant for an inmate convicted in the 1987 murders of two people in a home in Okaloosa County.
Convicted serial killer Frank Walls, 58, is scheduled to be executed Dec. 18 in the murders of Edward Alger and Ann Peterson. The warrant came as the state prepares to execute Richard Barry Randolph on Thursday and is slated to execute Mark Allen Geralds on Dec. 9.
A 1992 sentencing document posted Tuesday on the Florida Supreme Court website with the death warrant said Walls went to the home of Alger and Peterson in the early morning hours of July 22, 1987, and woke them.
The document said Walls forced Peterson to bind Alger’s wrists and ankles. After a struggle, the document said, Walls slashed Alger’s throat and shot him three times in the head and neck.
It said Walls then struggled with Peterson before fatally shooting her.
“Prior to the infliction of that (gunshot) wound, the defendant had informed her of the fate of her boyfriend, Edward,” the document said. “She was curled up crying as she was told of what had happened to Edward. By the defendant’s own admission, it was his intent to leave no witnesses. His first shot at her went awry and struck her cheek. Upon being shot the first time, she began crying and screaming, then the defendant fired a second fatal shot into her head.”
In addition to being convicted in 1988 for the prior year’s murders of Alger and Peterson, he has pleaded no contest to killing Audrey Gygi and admitted murdering Tommie Lou Whiddon and Cynthia Sue Condra.
“Out of all the cases I’ve worked, all the homicides … the death penalty is for someone like him,” said Dennis Haley, the 32-year veteran Florida Department of Law Enforcement officer who secured Walls’ confessions in a 2016 Northwest Florida Daily News article. “There are five different families that are still grieving because of the lives taken by Frank Walls.”
All five murders occurred between 1985 and 1987, most in the vicinity of Ocean City, close to where Walls lived.
“This town was terrorized back in that time,” said Don Vinson, who was the Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Office chief investigator when Walls was arrested.
DeSantis has shattered the execution record in Florida by double
Ordinarily, DeSantis signing a death warrant triggers a series of efforts by attorneys to halt the execution. That process starts in circuit court, goes to the Florida Supreme Court and typically ends at the U.S. Supreme Court. Challenges also can be filed in federal court.
The previous modern-era record for executions in a year in Florida was eight in 1984 and 2014. The modern era represents the period since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, after the U.S. Supreme Court had halted it in 1972.
Attorneys for Randolph, who would be the 17th inmate executed this year, went to the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday to try to halt his scheduled execution. They appealed after the Florida Supreme Court rejected their arguments last week. The appeal remained pending Tuesday evening, according to a court docket.
DeSantis on Oct. 21 signed a death warrant for Randolph, 63, who was convicted in the 1988 murder of Minnie Ruth McCollum at a convenience store she managed in Putnam County.
DeSantis on Nov. 7 signed a death warrant for Geralds, who was convicted in the 1989 murder of a woman in Bay County. Geralds has taken the relatively unusual step of not fighting the execution in court.
Recounting Frank Walls’ brutal murder spree
The Northwest Florida Daily News chronicled the Walls case extensively over the years.
Frank Athen Walls was 19 on July 24, 1987, when he was arrested by Okaloosa County deputies and charged with killing 21-year-old Alger and 20-year-old Peterson. Alger, an Eglin Air Force Base airman, had been slashed across the neck then shot during a robbery. Peterson, his girlfriend, was shot and killed execution-style, Walls would later say, because he didn’t want to leave a witness.
Walls was sentenced less than a year later to life in prison for Alger’s murder, and given the death penalty for the grisly slaying of Peterson. He was shipped off to state prison that August.
The Florida Supreme Court threw out Walls’ murder conviction in 1991, deciding Circuit Judge Robert Barron should not have allowed testimony from a corrections officer, Vickie Beck, who had befriended Walls and been told by him, among other things, that he was faking mental incompetence to help himself at trial.
Walls was brought back to Okaloosa County in February 1992 to be retried. Jury selection was aborted, though, when the court couldn’t find enough people who hadn’t heard about the murders to seat a jury. The trial was moved to Marianna, but Walls, after being convicted for the second time, was returned to Okaloosa County for sentencing.
Barron again ruled that he should die.
In 1993 a grand jury indicted Walls for the murder of 47-year-old Gygi, who was stabbed to death inside her Duval Street trailer sometime between late Tuesday, May 19, and early Wednesday, May 20, of 1987. Gygi’s trailer was a block away from the one Alger and Peterson would be killed in on Jackson Street later that summer.
Walls returned to Okaloosa County on Oct. 6, 1994, after agreeing to plead no contest to the Gygi murder. It was a deal that insured he would not receive a second death sentence.
At that time he also acknowledged killing Whiddon and Condra.
Whiddon’s throat had been slashed in the spring of 1985 when Walls happened upon her as she sunbathed on Okaloosa Island. He was on the beach doing community service for crimes that included cruelty to animals and peeking into people’s windows, Haley said.
Condra, a 24-year-old mother of three, was stabbed 21 times on Sept. 16, 1986. Walls left her body in a wooded area off Lewis Turner Boulevard.
All of Walls’ crimes were in some way sexually motivated, according to investigators Haley and Vinson.
Grisly facts about serial killer Frank Walls
• All five of the homicide victims to whom Walls is linked died on a Tuesday or before dawn the next day.
• Walls preferred using a knife to kill. Two of his five victims died from gunshot wounds, but one of those had first been injured with a knife.
• It took less than a year from the time Walls was arrested on July 22, 1987 to convict him. The jury came back with its verdict July 18, 1988.
• Walls, according to authorities, dated the stepdaughter of Mark Riebe, who is serving a life sentence for one murder and is suspected to have committed up to five more.
• A correctional officer reported before Walls’ first trial in 1988 that he confided to her about faking a mental illness to “buy time.” He continues to maintain he has brain deficiencies.
• The man who led authorities to Walls following the murder of Edward Alger and Ann Peterson, Thomas “Animal” Farnham, told them that he and Walls had been roommates and it disturbed him that Walls was “always talking about rape and killing people.”
This story combines reports from the News Service of Florida and the Northwest Florida Daily News.
This article originally appeared on Northwest Florida Daily News: DeSantis signs death warrant for Northwest Florida serial killer
Reporting by Jim Saunders and Tom McLaughlin, News Service of Florida and USA TODAY NETWORK / Northwest Florida Daily News
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