Reginald Perkins

Reginald Perkins (April 29, 1955 – January 22, 2009) was an American serial killer and sex offender who was executed in Texas for the December 2000 murder of his stepmother. He was also linked with DNA to the murders of two women in Fort Worth in 1991, and he is suspected of killing a further three women in Ohio in the early 1980s.

Early life Perkins was born on April 29, 1955, in Woodruff County, Arkansas. He left Arkansas at a young age and grew up in Texas. In the 1970s, he moved to Cleveland, Ohio to be closer to his mother. He worked several jobs as a laborer, plumber, and truck driver.

Murders Ohio In 1979, Perkins began dating Ramola Nelson Washington, who moved out of her home to live with him in 1980. On April 4, 1980, Perkins raped a 12-year-old girl in an abandoned house located on the East Side of Cleveland. The girl was a friend of his younger sister. Months later, Washington asked Perkins to return a set of keys to her sister, 21-year-old Paula Nelson. Five days later, on October 23, 1980, Nelson was found strangled to death in her bedroom in Cleveland. According to Washington, a few days before Nelson's body was found, she had overheard Perkins talking to his brother about Nelson and that something had happened to her. Days before her murder, she had learned about the attempted rape of her daughter by Perkins. In 1993, Perkins returned to prison in Ohio for failing to attend classes for sex offenders. In 1999, an Ohio court classified him as a sexual predator. In 2000, Perkins was paroled and went back to Texas to work as a truck driver for his father and stepmother's company.

Ultimately, Perkins was found guilty of murder. On March 4, 2002, Perkins was convicted of the capital murder of Gertie Mae Perkins. On March 22, 2002, he was sentenced to death.

Execution On January 22, 2009, Perkins was executed via lethal injection at the Huntsville Unit in Huntsville, Texas. He was pronounced dead at 6:24 p.m. About an hour before his execution was due, he called a prison official to his cell and gave him a statement in which he proclaimed his innocence. Kevin Rousseau, the attorney who prosecuted Perkins, said he was nothing more than "a consummate liar and a con artist."