Tony Kilgore, a 15-year-old Black male from Atlanta, Georgia, died on December 30, 1987, in a killing that unfolded inside his grandmother’s home in DeKalb County, just outside Atlanta. Court records describe a grim morning in which Tony had spent the night at the house with his grandmother, Willie Myrt Lowe. Sometime after Eric Lynn Ferrell, Lowe’s grandson and Tony’s cousin, left the home early that morning, both victims were found dead in a bedroom.
Each had been shot twice in the head at very close range, a detail that gave the crime the cold, execution-style feel investigators would later emphasize in court.
In the first hours after the bodies were discovered, the case did not appear simple. Ferrell returned to the house while police were there, acting distraught and repeatedly asking what had happened. At that stage, investigators were not immediately focused on him and briefly considered whether the killings might be revenge connected to another recent family-related homicide. But as the day wore on, that early theory began to break apart. Detectives found more than $500 in Ferrell’s possession, along with spent. 22-caliber shell casings in his pocket. A search of his bedroom turned up a. 22-caliber revolver, and ballistics evidence linked that gun to the murders. Investigators also learned that a substantial amount of cash and rolled coins were missing from Lowe’s house, giving the state a robbery motive layered over the family betrayal.
Ferrell eventually offered an alternate story, one the jury refused to believe. According to court accounts, he claimed that two unknown armed men had forced their way into the house looking for his uncle, made him drop his own handgun, killed Tony and Willie Myrt Lowe with that weapon, stuffed money into his pocket, and left. But the prosecution built a much harsher and more direct narrative from the physical evidence. The state’s theory was that Tony was likely killed first, while still in bed asleep, and that Lowe was then confronted and shot as the violence spread through the house. What remained at the center of the case was not uncertainty over who had been charged, but the brutality of a teenage boy and his elderly grandmother being gunned down in what the Georgia Supreme Court later summarized as an execution-style double murder committed for a few hundred dollars.
There was an arrest, and there was a prosecution. Eric Lynn Ferrell was charged and in 1988 was found guilty of murdering Tony Kilgore and Willie Myrt Lowe, along with armed robbery and possession of a firearm by a convicted felon. He was sentenced to death for the murders. In 1991, the Georgia Supreme Court upheld those convictions and sentences on direct appeal, finding the evidence sufficient. That meant the case was not one in which suspicion lingered without a formal resolution; investigators identified a suspect, arrested him, and prosecutors secured convictions tied to both the killings and the robbery that surrounded them.
The legal fight did not end there. Years later, Ferrell challenged the outcome through habeas proceedings, and in 2001 the Georgia Supreme Court reviewed the case again after a lower habeas court had vacated his convictions and sentences. The state high court reversed that relief in part and affirmed in part, rejecting attacks on the murder convictions and much of the rest of the case. Later federal appellate records likewise described Ferrell as having been convicted of the fatal shootings of his grandmother and his 15-year-old cousin and noted that Georgia courts had rejected his challenges to the convictions and death sentence. So while the case carried the long shadow of appeals common to capital prosecutions, the central answer to who was suspected, arrested, and convicted in Tony Kilgore’s death remained the same: authorities identified Eric Lynn Ferrell as the killer, and the courts upheld responsibility for Tony’s murder through years of review.
