By CANDACE RONDEAUX, Times Staff WriterOscar Ray Bolin is on death row, but Rosalie Bolin says his life is worth saving.
Published October 4, 2005
TAMPA - Rosalie Bolin can't put her finger on it. There's no way to explain what made her give it all up for him. All she knows is she saw something in Oscar Ray Bolin Jr. before she married him that no one else did and she needs to save him from being executed.
"Some people have whales. I have Oscar," she said. "I'm sure my mother would rather see me save the whales than a death row inmate but it's Oscar I'm trying to save."
On Monday, she came to court ready to try again as jury selection began in her husband's eighth murder trial. In the decade since Bolin, 43, said "I do" to her over a death row telephone, she's sat through a lot of legal proceedings, but this one is different. This time prosecutors are doubly determined to convict Bolin for the 1986 murder of Natalie Blanche Holley.
Holley, 25, was kidnapped as she left the north Tampa Church's Chicken where she worked. Her body, stabbed and bloody, was found the next day in an orange grove in north Hillsborough County.
Holley was the first but not the last woman Bolin would be accused of killing. On Dec. 5, 1986, authorities found the body of Stephanie Anne Collins, 17, after she disappeared from a parking lot in Carrollwood. Investigators later that day found the body of bank clerk Teri Lynn Matthews, 26, in Pasco County after she had been beaten, raped and stabbed.
During the trial for Matthews' murder, Bolin's half brother, Phillip, said Bolin woke him the night before the young woman's body was found and asked him to go outside. There, Phillip Bolin said he heard moaning coming from a body wrapped in a sheet. He said Oscar Bolin hit the woman with a piece of wood, sprayed her with a hose and asked for help loading her body into the back of a truck.
In 1991, Bolin, a former carnival worker, was convicted after two separate trials of murdering Holley and Collins. A year later he was convicted of killing Matthews.
But those convictions were overturned in 1994. He was convicted again but won reversals on appeal.
In 2001, he was sentenced to death a third time for the murder of Matthews. The Florida Supreme Court upheld that conviction last year.
Rosalie Bolin, 47, was there for all the court proceedings.
Monday, she sat on the same bench as Holley's mother, Natalie Holley, who chatted quietly with Matthews' mother, Kathleen Reeves, and Collins' mother, Donna Witmer, shortly before bailiffs brought in the 80-member pool of potential jurors.
While the three women whispered their hopes that the trial would go fast and that Bolin would be convicted again, the death row inmate's wife hoped jurors would see what she saw in Bolin a decade ago.
"His life is worth saving because he's a human being," she said.
She came to know him when she was a death penalty mitigation expert for the Hillsborough County Public Defender's Office. Removed from Bolin's case for spending too much time on it, she fell in love with the man who eventually cost her a job.
Bolin is scheduled to be retried in the Collins murder immediately after the trial in the Holley case.
