Frank Athen Walls was 19 when he broke into a mobile home in Okaloosa County, in the Florida Panhandle, early on July 22, 1987, and killed the two people who lived there: Edward Alger, an airman stationed at Eglin Air Force Base, and Ann Peterson, his girlfriend. Police arrested him the day after the bodies were found, when his roommate went to them with his suspicions, and he confessed on tape. He was convicted of both murders in 1988, won a new trial on appeal, and was convicted again in 1992, when a jury recommended death for Peterson's murder by a vote of 12 to 0.
The 1987 double murder was not the whole of the case against him. Later, DNA evidence linked him to the May 1987 killing of Audrey Gygi, and in 1994 he pleaded no contest to her murder and received a life sentence. As part of a deal with prosecutors he also admitted responsibility for two earlier killings: Tommie Lou Whiddon in March 1985 and Cynthia Sue Condra in September 1986. No conviction for those two deaths was reported.
Walls remained on Florida's death row for the rest of his life while his lawyers argued, through a long run of state and federal appeals, that he was intellectually disabled and could not lawfully be executed. The courts rejected the claim. Governor Ron DeSantis signed his death warrant on November 18, 2025, and he was executed by lethal injection at Florida State Prison near Starke on December 18, 2025. He was 58. His was the nineteenth execution in Florida that year, a record for the state.
Walls was born on October 12, 1967, according to the Florida Legislature's capital case record, which lists him under Florida Department of Corrections number 112850. What is known of his childhood comes mostly from court records, and much of it was put forward by his own lawyers. In their December 2025 petition to the United States Supreme Court, his lawyers summarized records reviewed by the psychologist Daniel Martell: that Walls may have been deprived of oxygen shortly after birth; that he was hospitalized with high fevers at about two and again at three or four; that he was referred at five for possible mental deficiency or minimal brain damage; and that he walked and talked late. His father, the petition said, reported that the boy was slow to talk and "spoke more than he understood." The petition said he had meningitis in 1979 and again in 1980. Some of the records it cites came from a United States Air Force clinic at Spangdahlem.
At school he was placed in special education. The petition described testing at eight that put him about a grade behind, and testing at twelve that put his spelling at a third-grade level, his arithmetic at a fourth-grade level and his reading at a fifth-grade level. A teacher who ran a class for emotionally handicapped students at his junior high school wrote that Walls struggled with tasks that had several steps and needed constant reminders. An eighth-grade teacher said in a 2019 affidavit that he was well behind his classmates in schoolwork, judgment, problem solving and caring for himself.
The State of Florida read the same childhood differently. Walls took three IQ tests as a minor, and the state's lawyers gave the scores as 88, 102 and 101, describing his intellectual functioning as a child as normal. The Florida Supreme Court, in a 2016 opinion, listed scores of 102 at about age 12 and 101 at about age 14.
Evidence given at his 1992 sentencing, as summarized by the Florida Supreme Court, described a troubled adolescence: violent and threatening behavior, emotional problems, placement in a class for emotionally handicapped students, and a stay at a residential youth camp when he was 15. A psychiatrist testified that he had prescribed lithium for bipolar disorder when Walls was 16, and that Walls later stopped taking it. A defense psychiatrist, Eugene Valentine, diagnosed bipolar disorder and conduct disorder, according to the federal court that later reviewed the case.
By the time he was 19, Walls had a short record of minor offenses. The scoresheet attached to his 1992 judgment lists earlier entries for disorderly conduct, grand theft, a false bomb threat and a vehicle tag offense. The trial judge nonetheless found, as a mitigating factor, that he had no significant history of prior criminal activity.
Two of the deaths later attributed to Walls happened before he turned 19, and he was never tried for either one.
Tommie Lou Whiddon was killed in March 1985.
Cynthia Sue Condra was killed in September 1986.
Little else was reported about either woman. Years later, Walls admitted responsibility for both deaths as part of a deal with prosecutors that resolved the Gygi case, according to the Associated Press. No charge or conviction for either killing was reported.
Audrey Gygi was killed in May 1987. The Florida Legislature's capital case record lists the offense date of Walls's later conviction in her case as May 19, 1987.
After Walls had been convicted of the Alger and Peterson murders, DNA evidence linked him to her killing. In 1994 he pleaded no contest to her murder. The plea spared him another trial and the risk of a second death sentence, the Associated Press reported, and he was sentenced to life in prison on October 5, 1994. The Legislature's record lists the conviction as first-degree murder together with a burglary offense.
WEAR-TV in Pensacola reported in 2016 that three of the killings linked to Walls took place in the Ocean City area near Fort Walton Beach, and that another took place in daylight on the beaches of Okaloosa Island. The report did not say which killing happened where.
Edward Alger was an airman at Eglin Air Force Base. Ann Peterson was his girlfriend, and the two lived together in a mobile home in Okaloosa County, in the Fort Walton Beach area. Neither the court records nor the news reports give much more about who they were.
In the early hours of July 22, 1987, Walls entered their home. By his own account to police, he went in to burglarize it and woke the couple. The jury later convicted him of kidnapping each of them, and he killed them both.
A neighbor heard loud noises in the night, according to the federal court's summary of the trial record. When Alger did not report for duty at Eglin that day, his supervisor, a sergeant, went to the home, found Peterson's body, left and called police. Officers found both victims inside.
Walls took Alger's wallet, money and a fan, according to the Attorney General's 2025 summary of the case, and spent the money at a topless bar.
The break in the case came from a man who knew Walls well. A former roommate of his, who lived next door to the victims, gave police the information they used to obtain a warrant to search the mobile home Walls shared with another roommate, according to the Florida Supreme Court and the federal district court. The Associated Press reported that his roommate tipped off police about his behavior. Police seized items linked to the crime scene, and Walls was arrested the day after the bodies were found.
After his arrest he gave a recorded statement. He said he had gone in to steal and that things fell apart after the couple woke. He described the night as chaotic, said he had been scared, and said he could not remember many details, according to the federal court.
A 2016 WEAR-TV report quoted a statement attributed to Walls in which he told the investigator Don Vinson: "I don't know why I did it, I just hear voices sometimes."
He was indicted on August 10, 1987. The indictment carried ten counts, some of which were later dismissed or reduced, according to the federal court.
Before the first trial, the question was whether Walls was fit to be tried at all. Five experts testified. Three said he was incompetent and two said he was competent. The trial judge sided with the two and found him competent to stand trial, according to the Florida Supreme Court's 2016 summary of the case.
The trial, before Circuit Judge G. Robert Barron, ended in guilty verdicts on all charges on July 18, 1988. The jury convicted him of felony murder for Alger's death and of both premeditated and felony murder for Peterson's death. It recommended life imprisonment for Alger's murder and, by a vote of 7 to 5, death for Peterson's. On August 24, 1988, Barron sentenced him to death for Peterson's murder and to life for Alger's.
His lawyers at trial were Earl D. Loveless, an assistant public defender, and later James C. Sewell. Their approach, as described in later appeals, was to present the crime as a burglary that had gone wrong rather than a planned killing.
On April 11, 1991, the Florida Supreme Court threw out the convictions and the death sentence. The problem lay in how the state had gathered evidence about his mental state while he was in jail before trial. A correctional officer had obtained statements from Walls through subterfuge, and those statements were later used by experts who evaluated his competency. The court held that this violated due process and ordered a new trial on all issues.
Because of publicity in Okaloosa County, the retrial was moved to Jackson County. During jury selection the prosecutor used a peremptory strike against a 24-year-old Black prospective juror who had expressed discomfort with the death penalty. Walls challenged the strike as racially motivated, but the trial court allowed it, and the federal appeals court later found that the state's reason was supported by the record.
At the guilt phase the state relied on the physical evidence, testimony from investigators and the pathologist, and the taped confession, which was played to the jury in full. The defense presented no evidence. On June 18, 1992, the jury found Walls guilty as charged: two counts of first-degree murder, burglary of a structure, armed burglary of a dwelling, two counts of kidnapping and petit theft.
At the penalty phase the defense put on the history of his childhood and mental health: his emotional problems, his special education placement, the youth camp, the lithium prescription, and a psychologist's testimony that his IQ had declined and that he was impaired at the time of the killings. The jury recommended death for Peterson's murder by a vote of 12 to 0. Because the first jury had recommended life for Alger's murder, double jeopardy barred a death sentence on that count.
On July 29, 1992, Barron sentenced Walls to death for Peterson's murder. For Alger's murder he imposed life with a 25-year minimum. For the other counts he imposed five years for burglary of a structure, 20 years for armed burglary, 20 years for each kidnapping and 60 days for petit theft. The judgment originally specified death by electrocution.
The judge found six aggravating circumstances: a prior violent felony, meaning the contemporaneous murder of Alger; that the murder was committed during a burglary or kidnapping; that it was committed to avoid arrest; that it was committed for financial gain; that it was especially atrocious or cruel under the statute; and that it was cold, calculated and premeditated. He rejected the statutory mental health mitigators but found nine others: no significant criminal history; Walls's age of 19; his classification as emotionally handicapped; brain dysfunction and damage; low intellectual functioning, put at about the level of a 12-year-old; his confession and cooperation; a loving relationship with his parents and a disabled sibling; a good work record when employed; and kindness to helpless people and animals. He found that the mitigation did not outweigh the aggravation.
The Florida Supreme Court affirmed the convictions and the death sentence on July 7, 1994, and the United States Supreme Court declined to hear the case on January 23, 1995. From that point the judgments were final.
Walls's postconviction litigation ran for three decades. A first motion for postconviction relief, filed in 1997, raised nine claims; the circuit court denied it in 2003 after an evidentiary hearing, and the Florida Supreme Court affirmed in 2006, at the same time rejecting a state habeas petition. The court sent back one issue, his claim of intellectual disability, for a hearing under Florida's rule 3.203.
At that hearing in 2007, the defense expert Jethro Toomer and the state's expert Harry McClaren testified. The circuit court denied relief because the lowest IQ score Walls had recorded, 72, was above the cutoff of 70 that Florida then applied. The Florida Supreme Court affirmed on October 31, 2008. In its 2016 opinion the court listed his scores as 102 at about age 12, 101 at about age 14, 72 at about age 23 and 74 at about age 40.
A federal habeas petition, filed in 2006, was denied by the federal district court in Pensacola on September 30, 2009, in an order of 134 pages. The court rejected, among other claims, the argument that his trial lawyers should have had parts of the taped confession cut; it found that keeping the whole tape had been a tactical decision that supported the defense theory of a burglary gone wrong. The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed on September 28, 2011, and the Supreme Court declined review in 2012.
In 2014 the United States Supreme Court, in Hall v. Florida, struck down Florida's rigid IQ cutoff of 70. Walls filed a new motion, and on October 20, 2016, the Florida Supreme Court held that the Hall decision applied retroactively and ordered a new hearing on his disability claim. His lawyers argued that he functioned at the level of a 12-year-old; prosecutors pointed to his childhood score of 102.
The ruling did not last. In 2020, in a different case, Phillips v. State, the Florida Supreme Court reversed course and held that Hall did not apply retroactively, expressly receding from its 2016 decision in Walls's case. A circuit judge rejected Walls's disability claim in 2021, and the Florida Supreme Court affirmed in 2023, relying on Phillips. A separate claim based on Hurst v. Florida, a 2016 United States Supreme Court decision, had already been turned down in 2018 because the court held Hurst was not retroactive to his case.
Governor DeSantis signed the death warrant on November 18, 2025, setting the execution for 6 p.m. on December 18 at Florida State Prison. The warrant stated that executive clemency had been considered and denied, according to the local news site Get The Coast. Walls was the nineteenth person scheduled for execution in Florida that year, far beyond the state's previous record of eight in a single year.
His lawyers, from the office of the Capital Collateral Regional Counsel, filed a new round of motions. They argued again that he was intellectually disabled, citing adult IQ scores of 72 and 74 and deficits in everyday functioning. They argued that the bar on executing people who were under 18 at the time of their crimes should extend to young adults, since Walls had been 19. And they argued that 37 years on death row was itself cruel and unusual punishment. The Attorney General's office answered that Walls had averaged 97 on three tests as a minor and 73 as an adult, and said he "is not now intellectually disabled and never was."
Okaloosa County Circuit Judge William Stone denied the motions in early December 2025. On December 11, 2025, the Florida Supreme Court affirmed. The majority held that the disability claim was procedurally barred because it had already been raised and rejected, that the age-based claim was filed too late and failed on the merits in any case, and that the delay claim failed under the court's earlier decisions. Justice Jorge Labarga dissented, repeating his disagreement with the Phillips decision; Justice Charles Canady was recused.
In federal court his lawyers raised a different issue: that his health problems, including obstructive sleep apnea, high blood pressure, low blood oxygen and obesity, put him at risk of pulmonary edema during a lethal injection. A medical examination in July 2025 recorded his weight at 354 pounds. United States District Judge Mark Walker denied a stay, and a three-judge panel of the Eleventh Circuit upheld that ruling, finding that Walls had long known of his conditions and had waited too long to raise them. On the afternoon of December 18 the United States Supreme Court denied his final requests for a stay, without explanation.
On his last day Walls woke at about 5:10 a.m., corrections officials said. He met with one visitor and a spiritual adviser, and his last meal was steak, chicken and cheesecake.
The three-drug injection began at about 6 p.m. Before it started, Walls made a short statement. He said he appreciated the chance to say what was on his heart and apologized to any family members present. "I am sorry for all of the things I did, the pain I caused," he said, according to the Associated Press. A spokesman for the governor said no complications were reported. He was pronounced dead at 6:11 p.m. The news reports do not say whether relatives of his victims attended.
He was the 47th person executed in the United States in 2025 and the nineteenth in Florida, the most in a single year since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, according to Fox News and the Associated Press.
How many killings. Walls was convicted of three murders: Edward Alger and Ann Peterson after a jury trial, and Audrey Gygi on a plea of no contest. The deaths of Tommie Lou Whiddon and Cynthia Sue Condra rest on his own admissions, made as part of a deal with prosecutors; neither was tried. A 2016 WEAR-TV report described him as having confessed to three killings beyond the two for which he was first convicted.
Intellectual disability. Whether Walls was intellectually disabled was contested from 2006 until his execution. His childhood scores were in the normal range and his adult scores, taken after the killings, were low. His lawyers said his early records showed signs of disability that predated the tests; the state said he had never been disabled. No court ever found him intellectually disabled, and the Florida Supreme Court's last word on the subject rested largely on procedural grounds.
His age. Walls was 19 at the time of the Alger and Peterson killings, and his lawyers argued in 2025 that people of that age should be treated like juveniles for purposes of the death penalty. The Florida Supreme Court held that it had no power to extend the juvenile bar beyond age 18.
October 12, 1967: Frank Athen Walls is born.
March 1985: Tommie Lou Whiddon is killed (admitted by Walls years later).
September 1986: Cynthia Sue Condra is killed (admitted by Walls years later).
May 1987: Audrey Gygi is killed (offense date in the conviction record: May 19, 1987).
July 22, 1987: Edward Alger and Ann Peterson are killed in their Okaloosa County home.
July 1987: Walls is arrested the day after the bodies are found.
August 10, 1987: He is indicted.
July 18, 1988: A jury convicts him on all charges.
August 24, 1988: He is sentenced to death for Peterson's murder and life for Alger's.
April 11, 1991: The Florida Supreme Court reverses and orders a new trial.
June 18, 1992: A Jackson County jury convicts him again.
July 29, 1992: Judge G. Robert Barron again sentences him to death for Peterson's murder.
July 7, 1994: The Florida Supreme Court affirms.
October 5, 1994: He is sentenced to life for the Gygi murder after a no contest plea.
January 23, 1995: The United States Supreme Court declines review.
February 9, 2006: The Florida Supreme Court affirms denial of postconviction relief and orders a disability hearing.
October 31, 2008: The Florida Supreme Court affirms the denial of the disability claim.
September 30, 2009: A federal district court denies habeas relief.
September 28, 2011: The Eleventh Circuit affirms.
October 20, 2016: The Florida Supreme Court orders a new disability hearing under Hall v. Florida.
2020: Phillips v. State reverses the retroactivity ruling.
2023: The Florida Supreme Court affirms the denial of the disability claim.
November 18, 2025: Governor DeSantis signs the death warrant.
December 11, 2025: The Florida Supreme Court denies a stay.
December 18, 2025: Walls is executed at Florida State Prison and pronounced dead at 6:11 p.m.