Inset: Charlotte Lester (Warwick Police Department); Background: Mark Perkins, center, appears in court (WJAR/YouTube).
More than two years after a Rhode Island woman went missing, her remains were found and the man suspected of her murder was finally arrested.
Mark Perkins, 64, was taken into custody on Wednesday after his vehicle’s GPS data was connected to the location of 44-year-old Charlotte Lester’s skeletal remains, which were found on Nov. 17 and identified through dental records. According to the Warwick Police Department, Perkins had been on their radar from the beginning but they lacked the evidence needed to make an arrest.
Court documents obtained by Providence NBC affiliate WJAR detailed police evidence of Perkins’ activity in the days following Lester’s disappearance around May 16, 2022, when her landlord reported her missing. The documents reportedly described a witness from a convenience store who saw that Perkins allegedly had “blood on his hands and scratches and bite marks on his arm.”
Perkins allegedly told the witness that he and Lester, with whom he had a relationship, “had the blowout of the century” and described his house as “a blood bath.” He also told the witness, “I think I killed her,” the witness reported back to police.
Perkins was interviewed by police days later, on May 20. They reportedly noted that his hands were swollen but that he seemed to be “calm and unaffected” by Lester’s disappearance. He allegedly told the police that “she had stopped texting him and he did not know where she was,” CBS affiliate WPRI reported.
Warwick police then reportedly searched Perkins’ house and wrote in their report that they witnessed blood splatters on walls, the ceiling, door, and bedframe, and an apparently bloodstained shirt hanging on a clothesline in the basement over a bottle of bleach. Testing later reportedly showed the blood matched Perkins and likely Lester based on it matching the DNA profile of Lester’s mother.
The court documents also stated that Perkins followed Lester as she drove to another man’s house on May 16, 2022, the last day anyone saw her alive. Text messages from that night reportedly show Perkins writing Lester, asking her to return home from the other man’s house. On May 18, the day after he was allegedly seen bloodied and scratched up at the convenience store, Perkins was reportedly seen on video leaving his home in his truck with an object in the back and when he returned three hours later it was no longer there.
It was not until the discovery of Lester’s skull that investigators made the connection they needed. When police began looking at the GPS tracking data on Perkins’ truck, it allegedly showed he went to the area where the skull was found four times in four months — twice in July 2022 and twice in October 2022. In one of those trips, Lester’s remains were allegedly within 1,000 feet of the area where Perkins stopped his truck, according to GPS data.
Perkins was arrested in August 2022 for a completely unrelated case when he allegedly threatened a local radio personality with his lawn mower after being confronted about Lester’s disappearance.
Perkins was arraigned at Kent County District Court where he was formally charged with first-degree murder. He did not enter a plea and is being held without bail.
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