Kay Reeves, Diane Witmer and Natalie Holley, three women united in grief and fury, were calm enough to make one rule.
As long as Oscar Ray Bolin's murder retrial was under way, they weren't going to talk about her.
Her. Rosalie Martinez.
Her. The woman with the movie deal in the works. The networks and the tabloids calling. The reporters spilling so much ink in her honor, from Tampa to L.A.
Rosalie Martinez, the rich man's wife who gave up virtually all she had for this accused serial killer who terrorized Tampa a decade ago. And who gives new meaning to the complaint that crime victims are often forgotten.
Kathleen Reeves, Donna Witmer and Natalie Holley, victims in their own way, are the mothers of the three young women Bolin is accused of killing in 1986 in Hillsborough and Pasco counties. They made their rule during Bolin's August retrial in the murder of Reeves' daughter, Teri Lynn Matthews, and they stuck to it.
They stuck to it when Rosalie Martinez gave Bolin one of her husband's Armani suits and some Brooks Brothers underpants to wear in court. When she bragged that her notoriety would make her enough money to give Bolin rich man's justice. When her husband filed for divorce.
The three women stuck to their rule because violating it would only add to what Rosalie Martinez, with the help of the media, was already doing. Namely, diverting attention from what counted.
What counted was what Bolin did to 26-year-old Teri Lynn early on the morning of Dec. 5, 1986.
He kidnapped her as she stopped at the Land O'Lakes post office to pick up her mother's mail on her way home from a night job at a bank.
He stabbed her. Even cut her jugular.
He stuffed a garden hose down her throat to drown her.
He beat her head in with a lead-tipped club.
Last week, Bolin and his jail house groupie proclaimed they were going to get married. Teri Lynn's mother learned about it on the TV news. By then the jury had said again he was guilty, had again recommended somebody at Starke pull the big switch on Bolin. Kay Reeves could let her anger spill then when I called. So could the other two women.
As if with one voice, they used the same adjective to describe Rosalie Martinez.
"Pathetic."
Again, they responded as if with one voice when asked if they wanted to say anything to her.
"No." She wouldn't understand.
She wouldn't understand what it means to wake up every day with the palpable sense of their daughters' absence, like a perfume scent that never leaves the air. Every day for a decade. Through trials, verdicts, death sentences, appeals. For 10 years, they have asked themselves what the sickness in Bolin's heart must be.
And now they are forced to ask what moves the heart of Rosalie Martinez.
And what moves the minds of the reporters and editors who think her story is more important than theirs.
The days of Bolin's retrial, the spotlight trained on Martinez, have been like "bringing up the breakfast you have in the morning," Kay Reeves said. "Three girls are murdered, and the most interesting thing is the killer and this woman?"
She was so angry she called 20/20, the ABC news magazine that Mrs. Reeves said is doing a story about Rosalie Martinez. A producer there got on the phone and told her, she said, that they were struck by all Martinez was giving up by leaving her family for Bolin.
"It isn't what she's giving up," Reeves said. "It's what she's taking away."
Taking away from her children, that is. Whatever will happen, Kay Reeves wondered, to Rosalie Martinez's four children?
Children, children. That's all Reeves thinks about.
