May 2021 | Page 18 of 26 | My Crime Library

Samuel Derrick Florida Death Row

Samuel Derrick was sentenced to death by the State of Florida for the murder of Rama Sharma’. According to court documents Samuel Derrick would stab to death Rama Sharma during the course of a robbery. Samuel Derrick allegedly told a friend that he had murdered Shama. Samuel Derrick would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death

Florida Death Row Inmate List

Samuel Derrick 2021 Information

DC Number:	097494
Name:	DERRICK, SAMUEL J
Race:	WHITE
Sex:	MALE
Birth Date:	04/05/1967
Initial Receipt Date:	07/25/1988
Current Facility:	UNION C.I.
Current Custody:	MAXIMUM
Current Release Date:	DEATH SENTENCE

Samuel Derrick More News

On June 25, 1987, at 6:30 a.m., Harry Lee found the body of Rama Sharma in a path in the woods near Sharma’s Moon Lake General Store in Pasco County. Blood trailed from the body to a blood puddle twenty feet away. The police found a piece of a tee shirt near the body as well as two sets of tennis shoe prints, one set belonging to Harry Lee. The medical examiner found that Sharma had died from over thirty-one stab wounds and that he had died approximately ten to fifteen minutes after the last wound was inflicted.

Derrick was implicated in the murder by his friend, David Lowry. At trial Lowry testified that he and his wife visited Derrick on June 24 at Derrick’s mother’s house and that Derrick had knives out. Lowry drove Derrick to another friend’s house, at which time Lowry noticed that Derrick had a knife in the back of his pants. At the time, Derrick was wearing a tee shirt, jeans, and tennis shoes. The friend’s house was about two blocks from Sharma’s store. At approximately 1:30 a.m. on June 25, Derrick showed up at Lowry’s house in a sweaty condition and without a shirt. When Lowry drove Derrick home, Derrick told him that he had robbed the Moon Lake General Store. Derrick gave Lowry twenty dollars for gas. Later that day, after Lowry heard that Sharma had been killed, he asked Derrick whether he had killed him. Derrick admitted killing Sharma, stating that he had stabbed him thirteen times because Sharma kept screaming. Lowry testified that Derrick “kind of laughed and said it was easy.” Lowry also noted that on June 25 Derrick had a new car that was worth approximately $200-$300. On June 29, Lowry notified the sheriff’s department about Derrick’s involvement in the murder.

After being arrested and advised of his rights, Derrick denied any knowledge of the murder to Detective Vaughn. Vaughn then advised Derrick that they had a witness, David Lowry. After denying that Lowry had told them anything, Derrick demanded, “I’d like to have him in front of me. Let him tell me.” Vaughn then brought Lowry and Derrick into the same room and Derrick confessed to the murder. He stated that he went to Sharma’s store to rob it and jumped Sharma as he left the store. Sharma turned to run back to the store. When Derrick grabbed him, Sharma turned around and saw that it was Derrick. Sharma started screaming and Derrick stabbed him “to shut him up.” Derrick then took approximately $360 from Sharma’s pocket. Derrick also admitted that he tore off a piece of his tee shirt at the scene because it had blood on it. After the murder, Derrick threw the knife into the woods and ran to Lowry’s house. Derrick also stated that he lost the money and that he threw his shoes and some clothing into a pond. The police took Derrick to the Moon Lake General Store, and he showed them where he had attacked and murdered Sharma. The police never located the clothing, shoes, or knife.

Derrick v. State, 581 So.2d 31, 33 (Fla.1991). The jury found Derrick guilty of first-degree murder. During the penalty phase, Derrick presented witnesses who testified that he was a good husband, father, and human being and that he had suffered physical and sexual abuse as a child. The jury recommended death by an eight-to-four vote. In following the jury’s recommendation and sentencing Derrick to death, the judge found four aggravators ¹ but only one statutory mitigating circumstance-the defendant was twenty years old at the time of the murder. The judge did not find any nonstatutory mitigating circumstances. See id. at 34.

https://caselaw.findlaw.com/fl-supreme-court/1490040.html

Frank Walls Florida Death Row

Frank Walls was sentenced to death by the State of Florida for the murders of at least two women. Frank Walls who is a serial killer would be arrested for the murders of Edward K. Alger and Ann Louise Peterson and would later admit to the murders of Audrey Gygi, Tommie Lou Whiddon and Cynthia Sue Condra. Frank Walls would be convicted and sentenced to death

Florida Death Row Inmate List

Frank Walls 2021 Information

DC Number:	112850
Name:	WALLS, FRANK A
Race:	WHITE
Sex:	MALE
Birth Date:	10/12/1967
Initial Receipt Date:	08/24/1988
Current Facility:	UNION C.I.
Current Custody:	MAXIMUM
Current Release Date:	DEATH SENTENCE

Frank Walls More News

It has been nearly 30 years since Frank Walls was sentenced to die for the murders of Edward K. Alger and Ann Louise Peterson, and to this day in Okaloosa County the mere mention of his name evokes emotion, be it a shiver or a snarl.

“His name kind of creeps me out. It gives me the heebie jeebies. If you could see my expression, my lip went up and everything,” Fort Walton Beach resident Ann White said over the phone. “He is just a bad person.”

Walls is a serial killer. 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. “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.

White’s generation lived through the horror Walls inflicted upon the community, and she was closer than even she knew to the grisly story.

White resided in the mid-to-late 1980s near Ocean City. Walls worked for a while as a dishwasher at Quincy’s, where White was employed as a server.

She was attending Okaloosa-Walton Community College at that time, as was her friend, Tommie Lou Whiddon. On March 26, 1985, when she was just 19, Whiddon became Walls’ first murder victim.

“It makes me so mad. I can still picture her,” White said. “You just get mad and you think about it and it gets you even madder.”

Walls has been on death row at Union Correctional Institution in Raiford since 1988, but his appeals continue. And, as things stand now, next year he’ll make what is believed to be his fifth trip back to Okaloosa County for a court appearance.

Each time he returns, those who remember him are confronted again by Walls’ bloody two-year reign of terror.

“When I hear his name and see his picture, the word that describes what I feel is disgust,” said Brett Hinely, a Niceville resident who attended middle school and high school with Whiddon and considered her a friend. “I feel disgust about someone who could do this and still be alive after all these years.”

“The name sure resonates, though,” Hinely said. “Anyone that’s still around from my time knows the name Frank Walls. We don’t want to know the name, but the name Frank Walls sticks in your brain and will probably never go away, unfortunately.”

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.

Walls’ last appearance at the Shalimar courthouse annex came in January 2003 when a hearing was held on a motion claiming defense attorneys had failed to properly represent him at trial. Walls alleged that his attorneys were ineffective and had failed to present evidence of brain damage he claimed to suffer from.

The motion to overturn his murder convictions and death sentence was denied.

If Walls does return to Okaloosa County in 2017, his appearance will be due to another Florida Supreme Court ruling. In October, a divided court ruled that Walls was entitled to be heard on his claim that an intellectual disability should prevent him from being executed.

The state high court’s decision came two years after a 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. That opened the door for death row inmates with IQ’s hovering around 70 — Walls has been determined to have an IQ of 72 — to present their case for intellectual disability.

The Attorney General’s Office has requested that the state Supreme Court reconsider its ruling on Walls. If the court reverses itself, Walls won’t make the trip to Okaloosa County, said Bill Bishop, the county’s chief assistant state attorney for the First Judicial Circuit.

Circuit Court Judge William Stone has set aside time Feb. 13 for a status update on the Walls case, Bishop said.

“Obviously, we’ve got to wait and see what the Supreme Court decides. Hopefully it will have ruled by then,” he said.

A hearing on the motion itself wouldn’t be heard until later in the year.

If Walls does make it back to Okaloosa County, it could be for the last time, said Bill Eddins, the elected state attorney for the First Judicial Circuit. Thirty years after committing five heinous crimes, his appeals are running out.

“This is the only issue remaining between him and the imposition of the death penalty,” Eddins said.

https://www.nwfdailynews.com/news/20161203/serial-killer-remains-reviled-after-30-years

Anthony Ponticelli Florida Death Row

Anthony Ponticelli was sentenced to death by the State of Florida for the murders of Nicholas and Ralph Grandinetti. According to court documents Anthony Ponticelli would shoot and kill Nicholas and Ralph Grandinetti over a drug debt. Anthony Ponticelli would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death

Florida Death Row Inmate List

Anthony Ponticelli 2021 Information

DC Number:	112967
Name:	PONTICELLI, ANTHONY J
Race:	WHITE
Sex:	MALE
Birth Date:	04/19/1967
Initial Receipt Date:	09/06/1988
Current Facility:	UNION C.I.
Current Custody:	MAXIMUM
Current Release Date:	DEATH SENTENCE

Anthony Ponticelli More News

Anthony Ponticelli owed Nick and Ralph Grandinetti money for cocaine so he hatched a plan to lure the brothers into a car to drive to a back road, away from their home, where he murdered them with a gun he had borrowed from a friend. Ponticelli shot Ralph once in the head and Nick twice in the head and later abandoned them to die in the car. Ralph died from the gunshot wound within one or two minutes of being shot. Nick was found a day later, curled up on the floorboard in the front of the car, covered in blood, gasping for air, and kicking his foot. Nick felt pain until he became comatose, and later died from cardiac arrest secondary to the gunshot wounds. In addition to his gunshot wounds, Nick suffered bruises to the back and side of his head, which were consistent with blunt force trauma, and a burn of his right ear.

https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-11th-circuit/1609409.html

Richard Randolph Florida Death Row

Richard Randolph was arrested, convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of Minnie Ruth McCollum. According to court documents Richard Randolph would murder Minnie Ruth McCollum during the course of a robbery. Richard Randolph was arrested, convicted and sentenced to death

Florida Death Row Inmate List

Richard Randolph 2021 Information

DC Number:	115769
Name:	RANDOLPH, RICHARD B
Race:	BLACK
Sex:	MALE
Birth Date:	01/03/1962
Initial Receipt Date:	04/05/1989
Current Facility:	UNION C.I.
Current Custody:	MAXIMUM
Current Release Date:	DEATH SENTENCE

Richard Randolph More News

Minnie Ruth McCollum managed a Handy-Way store in Palatka, and Randolph was a former employee of the same store. Shortly after 7 a.m. on August 15, 1988, Terry Sorrell, a regular customer, and Dorothy and Deborah Patilla, custodians of the store, observed Randolph, wearing a Handy-Way smock, locking the front door. When the Patillas inquired about Mrs. McCollum’s whereabouts and why the store was locked, Randolph told them that Mrs. McCollum’s car had broken down and that she had taken his car. He indicated that he had repaired her car and was leaving to pick her up. Randolph then drove away in Mrs. McCollum’s car.

The women tried the door and, finding it locked, peered in through the window. They saw that the security camera in the ceiling was pulled down; wires were coming out of the trash can, which had been tipped over; the area behind the counter was in disarray; and the door to the back room, normally kept open, was almost completely closed. Thinking that something was awry, they called the sheriff’s office.

After breaking into the store, a deputy found Mrs. McCollum lying on her back, naked from the waist down, with blood coming out of the back of her head and neck. She was breathing and moaning slightly. The deputy also observed a knife beside her head. Paramedics transported Mrs. McCollum to the hospital.

Dr. Kirby Bland, a general surgeon, testified that Mrs. McCollum arrived at the *333 emergency room comatose, and with her head massively beaten and contused. She had multiple skin breaks and skin lacerations about the scalp, face, and neck and her left jawbone was fractured. Dr. Bland indicated that Mrs. McCollum had knife lacerations to the left side of her neck that caused a hematoma around the heart. There was also a stab wound in the area of the left eye. Dr. Albert Rhoten, Jr., a neurologist, testified that in twenty years of neurosurgical practice he had not seen brain swelling so diffuse, and he likened it to someone who had been ejected out of a car or thrown from a motorcycle and received multiple hits on the head. Mrs. McCollum died at the hospital six days after the assault.

After leaving the Handy-Way, Randolph drove Mrs. McCollum’s car to the home of Norma Janene Betts, Randolph’s girlfriend and mother of their daughter. She testified that he admitted robbing the Handy-Way store and attacking Mrs. McCollum. He told her that he was going to Jacksonville to borrow money from the manager of a Sav-A-Lot grocery store and cash in lottery tickets. He promised to return to take Betts and their daughter to North Carolina.

Betts also testified that while they lived in North Carolina Randolph was a “nice young man” and was employed. After they moved to Palatka, he began socializing with the wrong crowd, became addicted to crack cocaine, and changed altogether. On the morning of the incident, she testified, Randolph did not appear to be under the influence of crack cocaine, but she did not know whether he had taken any cocaine between 11 p.m. the night before and 6 a.m. the morning of the incident.

Randolph was arrested in Jacksonville at a Sav-A-Lot store, while waiting for the manager to advance him some money. After waiving his rights under Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436, 86 S. Ct. 1602, 16 L. Ed. 2d 694 (1966), Randolph gave a statement to two Putnam County detectives. Detective William Hord testified that Randolph had said he had ridden his bicycle to the Handy-Way store with a toy gun, which he hid behind the store. He said he knew the routine at the store, having worked there, and knew there should be approximately $1,000 in the safe. He planned to enter the store unseen, open the safe, remove the money, and leave while the manager was outside checking the gas pumps. However, the manager returned and saw him. He rushed her, she panicked, and a struggle ensued. Randolph indicated that she was “a lot tougher than he had expected,” but that finally he forced her into the back room where he hit her with his hands and fists until she “quieted down.”

Randolph tried unsuccessfully to open the store safe. When Mrs. McCollum started moving again, he approached her. He said that she pulled the draw string out of his hooded sweat shirt, which he then wrapped around her neck until she stopped struggling. Randolph then found a slip of paper with the combination of the safe. Unsuccessful in opening it, he took the store’s lottery tickets.

At this point, the victim started screaming. Randolph again struck her until “she hushed.” Because she continued to make noises, Randolph grabbed a small knife and stabbed her. He again grabbed the string and “tried to cut her wind.” To make it appear as if “a maniac” had committed the crime, Randolph said he then raped her. He put on a Handy-Way uniform, grabbed the store video camera out of its mount and put it into the garbage. He took Mrs. McCollum’s keys and locked the store before leaving in her car.

On the way to Jacksonville, Randolph stopped at several convenience stores where he cashed in winning lottery tickets and discarded the losing tickets, and at a McDonald’s where he disposed of his bloodstained clothing and shoes. The sheriff’s detectives recovered the lottery tickets and articles of clothing when they returned to Putnam County with Randolph.

During the penalty phase, the state called the medical examiner, who testified that Mrs. McCollum died as the result of severe brain injury. He also described the *334 extensive bruises to Mrs. McCollum depicted by a series of photographs.

https://law.justia.com/cases/florida/supreme-court/1990/74083-0.html

Perry Taylor Florida Death Row

Perry Taylor was sentenced to death by the State of Florida for the murder of Geraldine Birch. According to court documents Perry Taylor and the victim were having sex when Taylor beat the woman to death. Taylor claimed that the woman attacked him and it was self defense however Taylor had no visible injuries. Perry Taylor was arrested, convicted and sentenced to death

Florida Death Row Inmate List

Perry Taylor 2021 Information

DC Number:	086160
Name:	TAYLOR, PERRY A
Race:	BLACK
Sex:	MALE
Birth Date:	06/19/1966
Initial Receipt Date:	05/15/1989
Current Facility:	UNION C.I.
Current Custody:	MAXIMUM
Current Release Date:	DEATH SENTENCE

Perry Taylor More News

Taylor was charged with the murder and sexual battery of Geraldine Birch whose severely beaten body was found in a dugout at a little league baseball field.[1] Shoe prints matching Taylor’s shoes were found at the scene. Taylor confessed to killing Birch but claimed that the sexual contact was consensual and that the beating from which she died was done in a rage without premeditation. Taylor testified that on the night of the killing, he was standing with a small group of people when Birch walked up. She talked briefly with others in the group and then all but Taylor and a friend walked off. Taylor testified that as he began to walk away, Birch called to him and told him she was trying to get to Sulphur Springs. He told her he did not have a car. She then offered sex in exchange for cocaine and money. Taylor agreed to give her ten dollars in exchange for sex, and the two of them went to the dugout.

Taylor testified that when he and Birch reached the dugout they attempted to have vaginal intercourse for less than a minute. She ended the attempt at intercourse and began performing oral sex on him. According to Taylor, he complained that her teeth were irritating him and attempted to pull away. She bit down on his penis. He choked her in an attempt to get her to release him. After he succeeded in getting her to release her bite, he struck and kicked her several times in anger.

https://caselaw.findlaw.com/fl-supreme-court/1895112.html