I am a bit flummoxed as to how you get -1 as the result.

-1 is a legal return value for $sth->execute(). Quoting the DBI documentation:

For a non-SELECT statement, execute returns the number of rows affected, if known. If no rows were affected, then execute returns "0E0", which Perl will treat as 0 but will regard as true. Note that it is not an error for no rows to be affected by a statement. If the number of rows affected is not known, then execute returns -1.

Alexander