Florida execution Frank Walls serial killer in Okaloosa County

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Florida execution Frank Walls serial killer in Okaloosa County

Updated Dec. 18, 2025, 6:49 p.m. CT

Convicted murderer Frank Walls was executed at 6:11 p.m. ET on Dec. 18, 38 years after the brutal murders of Ann Peterson and Edward Alger in Okaloosa County.

Walls was originally sent to Florida’s death row on Aug. 24, 1988. He had been sentenced to death for the murder of Peterson and also received a life sentence for the murder on the same day of her boyfriend, Edward Alger.

Walls was ultimately tied to a total of five murders, however.

Joe Nelson, a former Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Office investigator, and Pat Hanratty, a retired Okaloosa Corrections Officer, were both in attendance. They said representatives of three of Walls’ victims’ family members were also present for the execution. Unlike more recent executions, there was a near full house, with the witness room filled to capacity and 23 or the 25 chairs provided for witnesses occupied.

For Nelson, who retired 18 years ago, Walls execution would at long last truly close out his law enforcement obligations, he said.

“This one will officially end my law enforcement career,” said Nelson prior to the execution. Nelson also attended the July 31 execution of Edward Zakrewski, a tech sergeant stationed at Eglin Air Force Base who killed his wife and children in their Mary Esther home in 1994. “This one and old Zak are something I’ve been waiting on.”

He said Walls had managed to outlive all but three of the investigators who investigated the cases he confessed to.

Hanritty managed a special response team at the Okaloosa County jail that handled high profile inmates like Walls. He said Walls felt he was somehow special because he was classified as a serial killer.

“In his early incarceration he didn’t think he had to follow the rules and was physically restrained by correctional staff on occasion,” he said. “I had to wrestle him down a few times when he got into fights with other inmates.”

When the time for his execution was imminent, Walls, himself, had little to say.

He thanked the executioners for the opportunity to speak, and in his only other legible statement said “I am sorry for all the pain and suffering I caused over the years.”

A priest was with Walls and held his hand during the execution, praying over him throughout the entire process.

The execution went smoothly other than about six minutes of labored breathing. A physician came into the room at 6:11 p.m., looked into Walls’ eyes and used a stethoscope to check for a heart rate before announcing the execution had been successfully carried out.

Frank Walls was 19th inmate executed in Florida in 2025

Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a death warrant for Walls on Nov. 18. His Dec. 18 execution was the 19th to have occurred in Florida this year.

With the execution slated for 6 p.m. Eastern time, the U.S. Supreme Court appeared to have debated his fate longer than is usual. It wasn’t until 2:10 p.m. Eastern time that it was announced the Court had denied his petition for a stay.

Walls’ attorneys had filed their petition Dec. 15 using an argument often presented over the years before various courts, that Walls should be protected from execution because he was intellectually disabled. The last minute appeal also argued that the Florida Supreme Court had not properly addressed the issue.

“Walls was denied due process (by Florida courts) by being unable to fully demonstrate and prove his intellectual disability,” the appeal said.

Walls was 58 on the day he was executed.

Who were Frank Walls’ victims?

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 explain her murder by telling authorities he didn’t want to leave a witness.

Walls was sentenced to death for the grisly slaying of Peterson less than a year after his arrest. He also received a life sentence for Alger’s murder.

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, where Walls was again convicted and sentenced by Judge Barron to die.

In 1993 a grand jury indicted Walls for the murder of 47-year-old Audrey Gygi, who was stabbed to death inside her trailer sometime between late Tuesday, May 19, and early Wednesday, May 20, of 1987. In 1994, Walls agreed to plead guilty to killing Gygi, whose trailer was a block away from the one in which Alger and Peterson were killed later that summer.

He took the plea deal after being assured he would not receive a second death sentence.

The majority of Walls’ murders were committed in the Ocean City community north of Fort Walton Beach. Because most of his victims were killed either on a Tuesday or before dawn on a Wednesday, investigators dubbed the case “the Tuesday murders.”

Along with pleading to the Gygi killing, Walls also admitted to killing Tommie Lou Whiddon and Cynthia Sue 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, investigators 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

Thomas “Animal” Farnham, the man who led authorities to Walls following the murder of Alger, told investigators that he and Walls had been roommates, and it disturbed him that Walls was “always talking about rape and killing people.”

In 2016, the Florida Supreme Court ruled that Walls was entitled to be heard on his claim that intellectual disability should prevent him from being executed. The decision was based on a 2015 U.S. Supreme Court determination that Florida acted unconstitutionally by using a single “bright line” IQ score of 70 to determine whether a killer could be put to death. Walls had been determined to have an IQ of 72.