Oscar Ray Bolin Jr. was tried and convicted ten separate times for three murders committed in the Tampa Bay area in 1986, and was executed in Florida on January 7, 2016. He maintained to the end that he was innocent.
He was born in Portland, Indiana on January 22, 1962, worked for a carnival and a towing company, and described an abused childhood and his own substance abuse. Natalie "Blanche" Holley, twenty-five, was killed on January 25, 1986; Stephanie Anne Collins, seventeen, on November 5; Teri Lynn Matthews, twenty-six, on December 5. All three were abducted from car parks, raped, and stabbed or beaten to death. He was later connected to a fourth killing, that of Deborah Diane Stowe in Texas in 1987.
The Matthews case broke in the summer of 1990, when his former wife Cheryl Coby told police he had confessed to it and had used his thirteen-year-old half-brother Phillip to help dispose of the body. Phillip confirmed her account. Bolin was in prison in Ohio at the time, serving twenty-five to seventy-five years for the kidnap and rape of a waitress, and was arrested there in July 1990.
He was first sentenced to death in July 1991. What followed was one of the longest appellate histories in Florida: convictions and sentences repeatedly reversed and retried, ten trials in all, ending with a second-degree murder verdict in Tampa in April 2012. He was convicted of first-degree murder in two of the cases and second-degree in the third. Governor Rick Scott's death warrant, signed in October 2015, was for the murder of Teri Lynn Matthews alone.
While on trial he and a paralegal on his defence team, Rosalie Martinez, fell in love; she married him in 1996 when he was already on death row and remained on his legal team. In his final appeals he argued for time to show that an Ohio inmate who had confessed to the Matthews murder and then killed himself was the real killer; prosecutors noted that the inmate had falsely confessed to other crimes. The Supreme Court refused a stay shortly before ten at night, four hours after the scheduled time, and he was pronounced dead at 10.16 p.m. at Florida State Prison. Asked if he wished to make a final statement, he said no. He was the first person executed in the United States in 2016.