Thread 17934841

Reginald Perkins was the 429th person executed by Texas since 1976. He murdered his stepmother in Fort Worth in 2000 and would ultimately be linked to two 1991 murders and a possible three additional victims in Ohio a decade earlier, which would make him a serial killer. Perkins, an African-American, was born in Augusta, Arkansas on April 29, 1955 but mostly grew up in Texas. He moved to Cleveland, Ohio in his early 20s to be closer to his mother, who was living there, and worked several blue collar jobs.

His girlfriend Ramola Washington began living with him in 1980 after they'd dated for about a year. That April 4, Perkins raped a 12 year old in an abandoned house in east Cleveland. The girl was a friend of his sister. On October 18, a little more than six months after that incident, Ramola asked him to return a set of house keys to her 21 year old sister Paula Nelson. A few days later, Nelson was found strangled in her bedroom, her infant daughter sound asleep next to her, and Ramola would claim that two days before the body's discovery, she heard Perkins and his brother remarking that something bad happened to Nelson. On December 13, Perkins tried to rape his neighbor's 12 year old daughter Lashelle Thomas by dragging her into an abandoned house. The girl fought him and yelled for help; eventually a neighbor heard her and intervened to stop the attack. Perkins let Lashelle go but threatened to kill anyone who told on him.

On January 4, 1981, Jennie Morman, 43, was found strangled in her apartment with a scarf and smothered with two pillows; money and some prescription drugs (Morman was a diabetic and had impaired kidney function) were missing. Perkins was dating her daughter and they later had a son together. On January 23, Jerry Thomas, Perkins's neighbor and the mother of the girl he tried to rape in December, was found dead in her basement; the neighbor who stopped the attack on Lashelle had told her a few days earlier. Lashelle and her friend Karen arrived at the house during their school lunch hour trying to sneak her mother's cigarettes while she wasn't home. They found the front door of the East 79th Street house jammed shut, so they entered through a basement window and went upstairs only to find something bad had clearly happened in here--furniture was overturned and a pair of scissors was stuck in the jammed door.

Lashelle run upstairs and found her mother's purse in a dresser drawer. Their dog, Queenie, was sitting in front of a door looking obviously distressed. The girls couldn't get the dog to move from the door. They peered inside and saw Jerry propped upright in a chair, her mouth wide open, her eyes bulging. A hair dryer cord was wrapped around her neck.

Cleveland police questioned him in the two murders and a spree of child rapes along St. Clair and Superior Avenues; ultimately he was convicted of lewd and lascivious acts on a child younger than 13 and sentenced to six to life, but there was not enough evidence to charge him with the murders. The prosecution assumed that the rape convictions were sufficient to put him away for a long time, but didn't count on the "six to life" part. And indeed it was. He served the mandatory minimum six years and was paroled in 1987 for reasons unknown, however the Ohio Parole Board tended to be quite soft in that era and usually didn't keep inmates locked up longer than absolutely necessary.

After Perkins's release he left Ohio and went back to Texas. On May 6, 1991, Hattie Wilson, 79, and her 44 year old niece Shirley Douglas were found strangled in the former's Fort Worth apartment and Douglas was raped. Perkins was then dating Wilson's granddaughter. In 1993, he was ordered to be sent back to prison in Ohio for violating the terms of his parole, as they required him to attend sex offender rehabilitation classes which he had failed to do. Perkins spent almost seven years behind bars until being paroled again in 2000 and returning to Texas to work for his father and stepmother's trucking business as a dump truck driver. Neither of them ever knew he was suspected in three murders, but his half-sister Shirley Brooks claimed her mother would never have given him a second chance if she'd been aware of that.

On December 4, Gertie Perkins, his 64 year old stepmother, was supposed to pick up her grandson from school but never showed up and was reported missing. When police searched her home, they found the phone was unplugged, carpeting ripped out, blood stains, and several missing bedsheets. Perkins hocked her wedding ring at a pawnshop for $150 the same day and he was arrested the following day for having failed to register as a sex offender. He also paid a known crack user $200 to cash two checks valued at a total of $1,300 which had been written from the Perkins’ trucking business account. He was extensively grilled by police due to his prior history and ultimately confessed to killing Gertie; he showed them to her Cadillac Sedan de Ville where her body was stuffed in the trunk. Gertie's head and mouth were bruised and she had strangulation marks on her neck that appeared to have been caused by a phone cord.

Tarrant County prosecutors sought the death penalty and witnesses were brought in to testify about the unsolved murders in Ohio and that Perkins was the likely culprit--retired Cleveland homicide detective Gary Garisek believed he'd gotten away with murdering three people and deserved the death penalty. Ramola Washington claimed Perkins talked to her on the phone from jail and admitted to having strangled her sister 20 years earlier and he hoped she could forgive him. He also told a cellmate that he beat Gertie to death and robbed her.

Perkins was found guilty of murdering Gertie Perkins in March 2002 and sentenced to death. In 2008 he was linked via DNA testing to the two 1991 murders in Fort Worth, however since he was already awaiting execution no attempt was made to charge him in those incidents. Perkins was executed by lethal injection at Texas's Huntsville Unit on January 22, 2009, still proclaiming his innocence to the end--in an official statement, he said "They didn't link me to nothing. I did not kill my stepmom. I loved her. Texas is going to kill an innocent man." He argued that Fort Worth police were out to get him and had faked the DNA evidence in the Wilson/Douglas murders. Tarrant County DA Kevin Rousseau called him "nothing more than a consummate liar and con artist. I wouldn’t believe anything he said. He’s a serial killer. People look for more complicated rationale. But the bottom line is he’s a killer. He goes through quite a bit of trouble to kill folks."

>>17934848
>attorney is a fat disgusting dyke
Figures.

>>17934844
the justice system was so lolcow in boomer days

>rape a bunch of children
>get out in six years

oh well, at least no white people died here

>>17934848
>as they required him to attend sex offender rehabilitation classes which he had failed to do
i'm sure those classes actually ever rehabilitated anyone

>>17934844
>>17934903
the victims were black so nobody even cared about them. if he raped a white 12 yo girl he'd end up in the electric chair in six months.

>>17934978
fuck off LBJfag. and this wasn't the 1920s so that wouldn't have happened.

>>17934978
capital punishment for rape was long gone by this time

>>17934850
>He argued that Fort Worth police were out to get him and had faked the DNA evidence
hey no reason to think corrupt Chief Wiggum cops wouldn't do that

there's loads of black serial killers you barely hear of because they didn't kill outside their own race

>>17935297
They'll make the hundredth Dahmer doc but you'll never hear about Stuart Little

>>17935297
Alton Coleman would almost be as forgotten except one of his victims was white.

>>17935301
Dahmer was white, blonde, and good looking so he's more marketable. White serial killers who were ugly fuckers don't get docus made about them either.

>>17935308
In his case it was the sheer extremity of what he did with his victims, there's nothing overly compelling about mundane stuff like strangled hookers.

>>17935301
>>17935308
Samuel Little. I meant Samuel Little.

>>17934841 (OP)
>>17934844
living in Cleveland in the wintertime would drive just about anyone to murder and rape

>>17935316
While most of his victims were black, there were some white and Hispanic ones as well.

>>17934841 (OP)
>murder 1
watch the videos yikes
snapped & forensic files