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."