During 2025, the State of Florida carried out nineteen executions at Florida State Prison near Starke, accounting for over forty percent of all capital sentences carried out in the United States that year. Among those put to death were two men whose cases drew widespread attention: Glen Edward Rogers, an itinerant killer dubbed the “Casanova Killer” by the popular press, and Frank Athen Walls, whose execution in December concluded Florida’s record-breaking execution year.
Glen Edward Rogers
Post-Furman US execution #1623
Florida execution #109 since reinstatement
The Crimes
Glen Edward Rogers was born on the 15th of July, 1962, in Hamilton, Ohio. A transient and carnival worker with an extensive criminal history, Rogers embarked on an interstate cross-country murder spree during the autumn of 1995 that left at least four women dead across several jurisdictions.
His Florida conviction stemmed from the murder of 34-year-old Tina Marie Cribbs, a waitress and mother of two. On the evening of the 5th of November, 1995, Mrs Cribbs was seen in Rogers’s company at the Showtown Bar in Gibsonton, Hillsborough County, having offered to give him a lift. Two days later, cleaning staff at the Tampa 8 Inn discovered her body in the bathtub of Room 119, which Rogers had rented under an alias. She had been stabbed multiple times in the chest and neck and left covered with blankets. Her wallet, cash, and motor car had been taken.
Rogers fled north and west, leaving a trail of homicide. Within days, he killed 37-year-old Sandra Gallagher in Van Nuys, California, whose body was found burned inside her pickup truck. Further murders in Mississippi and Louisiana were also linked to him. Following a high-speed vehicle pursuit, Rogers was captured by the Kentucky State Police on the 13th of November, 1995, whilst still in possession of Mrs Cribbs’s stolen car.
Trial and Sentence
Rogers was first tried in Tampa in May 1997 for the first-degree murder, armed robbery, and grand theft of Tina Marie Cribbs. Physical evidence against him was conclusive, including his fingerprints in the hotel room and personal effects recovered from the car. On the 7th of May, 1997, the jury found him guilty on all counts and subsequently voted 9–3 to recommend death, a sentence formally imposed by the circuit judge.
He was subsequently extradited to California to face trial for the murder of Sandra Gallagher, where in 1999 he was convicted and received a second sentence of death, before being returned to Florida’s death row at Union Correctional Institution in Raiford.
The Execution
Rogers spent nearly twenty-eight years on death row, exhausting state and federal habeas corpus appeals. His legal representatives made repeated claims regarding severe childhood physical abuse, chronic alcoholism, and mental impairment, but these were consistently rejected by the appellate courts.
Governor Ron DeSantis signed his death warrant in April 2025. When the United States Supreme Court declined to intervene, the execution was scheduled for Thursday, the 15th of May, 2025.
For his final meal, Rogers requested pizza, chocolate cake, and soda. He was escorted into the execution chamber at Florida State Prison shortly before 6:00 p.m., secured to the gurney, and intravenous catheters were inserted into both arms. Behind the viewing glass sat official witnesses and surviving members of the Cribbs family.
When offered the opportunity to speak, Rogers offered brief, cryptic remarks before concluding: “President Trump, keep making America great. I’m ready to go.”
The lethal three-drug cocktail—consisting of etomidate, rocuronium bromide, and potassium acetate—was administered at 6:03 p.m. Rogers closed his eyes and drifted into unconsciousness within two minutes. Respiration ceased shortly thereafter, and an examining physician formally pronounced life extinct at 6:16 p.m. He was 62 years of age.
Frank Athen Walls
Post-Furman US execution #1654
Florida execution #123 since reinstatement
The Crime
Frank Athen Walls was born on the 12th of October, 1967. In July 1987, at the age of nineteen, Walls committed a violent home invasion in Ocean City, Okaloosa County, in the Florida Panhandle.
In the early morning hours of the 22nd of July, 1987, Walls forced entry into a residence shared by 19-year-old Edward Alger, an airman stationed at Eglin Air Force Base, and his 20-year-old girlfriend, Ann Clark. Alger was bound by the wrists, severely beaten, and had his throat cut before being shot in the head. Miss Clark was forcibly taken to a bedroom, where she was sexually assaulted and fatally shot. Walls ransacked the premises, stealing several firearms, photographic equipment, and personal belongings.
A palm print left on a doorframe matched Walls, leading to his arrest two days later. Following his apprehension, Walls confessed to the Alger and Clark homicides, and subsequently admitted responsibility for three other unsolved murders committed in Okaloosa County between 1985 and 1987, including the 1985 bludgeoning murder of 75-year-old Tommie Lou Whiddon.
Trial and Sentence
Walls was brought to trial in Shalimar in July 1988 for two counts of first-degree murder, two counts of kidnapping, armed burglary, and petty theft. His defence presented testimony concerning extensive neurological abnormalities, brain damage from head injuries in youth, and low intellectual functioning, seeking to have him declared incompetent or ineligible for the death sentence.
The jury rejected the defence and found him guilty on all counts. Following the penalty hearing, the jury recommended death by a unanimous 12–0 vote for the murder of Ann Clark, and recommended life imprisonment for the killing of Edward Alger. The circuit judge followed the recommendations, sentencing Walls to death for Clark’s murder alongside a consecutive life term. Although the Supreme Court of Florida vacated the sentence in 1991 due to procedural errors during the penalty phase, a resentencing jury in 1992 again voted unanimously for the death penalty.
The Execution
Walls spent thirty-seven years on death row, making him one of the longest-serving condemned inmates in Florida history. His later appeals repeatedly raised questions regarding intellectual disability and the constitutional validity of Florida’s lethal injection protocol, but all were denied by the state courts and the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals.
On the 19th of November, 2025, Governor DeSantis signed Walls’s death warrant, setting the date for the 18th of December. A final application for a stay of execution was rejected by the United States Supreme Court without published dissent on the morning of the scheduled date.
Walls was taken into the death chamber at Florida State Prison on the evening of Thursday, the 18th of December, 2025. He lay strapped to the gurney as the viewing curtains were retracted. He declined to deliver a formal last statement.
The injection of the three-drug protocol was initiated shortly after 6:00 p.m. Walls showed no outward signs of physical struggling, his breathing gradually slowed, and he became unresponsive. He was officially pronounced dead at 6:11 p.m. Eastern Time. He was 58 years of age.
Walls’s death was the forty-seventh and final execution carried out in the United States in 2025, and established a modern single-year record of nineteen executions for the State of Florida.
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