Florida Executes Oscar Ray Bolin Jr. for the 1986 Murder of Teri Lynn Matthews
The former carnival worker, convicted again and again of killing three Tampa Bay-area women, declined a last statement after the Supreme Court turned down his final appeal.
Published
The execution was set for six o'clock on Thursday evening, January 7, 2016, and it waited four hours for the United States Supreme Court. When the justices turned down Oscar Ray Bolin Jr.'s final appeal without comment, the State of Florida went ahead. Asked whether he wanted to make a final statement, Bolin said, "No, sir." The lethal injection took about twelve minutes, and his chest heaved through several minutes of deep breaths. He was pronounced dead at 10:16 p.m. at Florida State Prison in Starke, Governor Rick Scott's office said.
The death warrant Scott signed in October was for the 1986 murder of Teri Lynn Matthews, 26, abducted from a post office in Pasco County, just north of Tampa. Bolin, a former carnival worker, had also been sentenced to death for killing Stephanie Collins, 17. A jury sentenced him to die for the murder of Natalie Holley, 25, as well, but that verdict was thrown out for legal errors, and another jury later found him guilty of second-degree murder. All three women were stabbed. Every one of his convictions was reversed at least twice, and each time a new jury convicted him again.
The killings went unsolved until 1990, when someone called an anonymous tip line. Bolin was already in prison in Ohio by then, serving 22 to 75 years for kidnapping and raping a 20-year-old waitress outside Toledo in 1987. The caller turned out to be the new husband of Bolin's ex-wife, who said Bolin had told her about the killings in 1986. At trial his younger half brother testified that he had watched Bolin beat Matthews and try to drown her with a garden hose; he later recanted, then reversed himself again.
Bolin said to the end that he was innocent. "I didn't know 'em, never seen 'em, never met 'em," he told a Tampa television station the day before he died. "My conscience is clear. I'm at peace with myself. It's my release." During his trial he had fallen in love with Rosalie Martinez, a paralegal in the Hillsborough public defender's office who was married to a prominent Tampa lawyer. She divorced her husband and married Bolin on live television in 1996, and she became one of the state's most outspoken opponents of the death penalty.
Matthews' mother, Kathleen Reeves, and Collins' family were there to watch. It did not matter to Reeves that the warrant named only her daughter. "He only dies once," she said. "He dies for all of our girls." Outside, where several dozen of the victims' friends and relatives had gathered, she said it was not a celebration. "I feel relief that it finally occurred." Bolin's lawyer, Bjorn Brunvand, spoke to reporters with tears on his face. "I cannot imagine the pain they have suffered," he said of the families. "But this is not the solution."
What this story covers. Every fact here comes from the Associated Press report of January 8, 2016, as published by CBS News, which relayed the governor's office on the time of death and Bolin's interview with FOX 13 Tampa the day before. Texas authorities also linked Bolin to the 1987 strangling of a woman in Greenville, Texas, on a cousin's account, but prosecutors there declined to seek an indictment, and this story does not treat it as established. The Florida Department of Corrections execution list, which records the execution, could not be opened for this story.
Sources
- Convicted killer who married defense team member executed in Fla., CBS News (Associated Press)