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.