On February 9, 1980, in a courtroom in Orlando, Florida, a man on trial for his life married the woman on the witness stand. The jury had already convicted him of murder. Ted Bundy was acting as one of his own lawyers, and Carole Ann Boone was the single witness he called at the penalty phase. Florida law recognized a declaration of marriage made in court with a notary present, and while she was testifying, Bundy used it. The same jury then recommended that he die.
It was not the first wedding of its kind and it was far from the last. Men convicted of killing several people, and in some cases dozens, have married from prison cells, visiting rooms and chapels in California, Washington, Georgia and Ukraine. A few of the brides worked inside the justice system. Several began as strangers who wrote a letter. The ceremonies were brief and the rules were strict, and in most of these marriages husband and wife never lived under one roof. What the prisons allowed, and what they refused, says a good deal about how the state treats a condemned man’s private life once it has taken everything else.
By the winter of 1980 Bundy had already been convicted once. In July 1979 a Miami jury convicted him of the murders of Margaret Bowman, 21, and Lisa Levy, 20, two Florida State University students in Tallahassee, and of three counts of attempted murder and two of burglary. Judge Edward Cowart sentenced him to death and told him he had gone "another way, partner."
The Orlando trial concerned Kimberly Leach, 12, of Lake City. The case had been moved from Suwannee County, and it opened on January 7, 1980. About a month in, the jury convicted Bundy of murder, with other charges. Then came the penalty phase, and Boone.
She was a mother of two whom Bundy had known and dated before his arrest. The marriage was valid because of the way Florida law treated a declaration of marriage, not because of anything a prison allowed: it was made in open court, before a notary. The jury recommended death and the judge imposed it.
Not everyone in the defense camp saw romance in it. At a later federal hearing on Bundy’s competence, a lawyer who had assisted at the Orlando trial called the courtroom wedding a "pitiful display." An investigator for the defense testified that Boone had smuggled juice spiked with alcohol to Bundy. The Eleventh Circuit, which reviewed that hearing in 1988, rejected his claims that he had been incompetent or poorly represented.
The Florida Supreme Court affirmed the Leach conviction on May 9, 1985. Bundy confessed to about 30 killings in seven states in the last week of his life, and he was executed in the electric chair at Florida State Prison in Starke on the morning of January 24, 1989. He was 42.
Richard Ramirez reached San Quentin State Prison in 1989 already famous. A Los Angeles County jury had convicted him on September 20, 1989, of 12 counts of first-degree murder, one of second-degree murder and 30 other felonies, including rape, sodomy and burglary, committed between June 1984 and August 1985. Judge Michael Tynan sentenced him to death in the gas chamber on November 7. "I am beyond good and evil," Ramirez told the court.
His trial had drawn a following of young women who sat in the gallery and wrote him love letters, the Associated Press reported, and some of them visited him once he was on death row. A prison spokesman, Lieutenant Sam Robinson, said in 2013 that Ramirez had arrived acting like a rock star and received more mail than any other prisoner at San Quentin.
In 1996 he married one of those correspondents, a 41-year-old freelance magazine editor from Richmond, California. The ceremony took place in a San Quentin visiting room. She declined to speak to reporters. CBS News reported in 2021 that she left him in 2009.
The marriage changed nothing in the legal case. The California Supreme Court unanimously affirmed his convictions and death sentence on August 7, 2006, and the United States Supreme Court declined review in 2007. When Ramirez died of complications of B-cell lymphoma at Marin General Hospital in Greenbrae on June 7, 2013, aged 53, prison officials did not list his wife as next of kin.
Kenneth Bianchi pleaded guilty in October 1979 to seven murders: two counts of first-degree murder in Whatcom County, Washington, for the deaths of Karen Mandic and Diane Wilder, two Western Washington University students, and five counts of murder in Los Angeles County, where he and his cousin Angelo Buono had been linked to the deaths of ten women and girls in 1977 and 1978. The plea spared him a death sentence. In return he agreed to testify against Buono, who was convicted of nine murders in 1983.
The letters started early. In 1980, while he was held in Los Angeles, a 24-year-old woman who called herself an actress and playwright began writing to him. That September she went to Bellingham, and in March 1981 a jury there convicted her of attempted first-degree murder. HistoryLink, the Washington history encyclopedia, says the two had planned to make it look as though the real killer was still free.
Bianchi was returned to Washington and held at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla. On September 21, 1989, he married a woman from outside the prison in a short ceremony in the prison chapel. According to HistoryLink, they had written to each other since 1986 and met in person for the first time the day before the wedding.
The penitentiary drew a firm line at the chapel door. Officials refused the couple conjugal visits, citing security and Bianchi’s record of violence toward women. He sued. In November 1990 Walla Walla County Superior Court Judge Donald W. Schacht ruled that the officials had acted within their authority. That ruling set the shape of the marriage: a legal bond, sealed in a chapel, with no private time to follow.
Bianchi has spent the decades since in Walla Walla, denying his guilt and claiming that hypnosis planted false memories of the crimes. The Ninth Circuit rejected the argument in 1994, noting it was "not clear that he was ever hypnotized." In July 2025 the Washington parole board declined to release him and added ten years to his minimum term, and a California board denied him parole for ten years. As of October 22, 2026, the Washington Department of Corrections listed him, under the name Anthony D’Amato, at the penitentiary.
No marriage in this group grew so directly out of the case file as that of Oscar Ray Bolin Jr.
Bolin, a former carnival worker, was convicted of killing three young women around Tampa in 1986: Natalie Blanche Holley, 25, a restaurant manager; Stephanie Collins, 17, a high school student; and Teri Lynn Matthews, 26, a bank worker. The cases went cold until July 1990, when the new husband of Bolin’s former wife called Crime Stoppers in Fort Wayne, Indiana, with what she had told him.
That first marriage became the legal problem at the center of the prosecution. Bolin’s former wife had heard things from him during their marriage, and Florida law protects private communications between spouses. In April 1994 the Florida Supreme Court threw out the Holley convictions, holding that the trial judge had been wrong to rule that Bolin waived the marital privilege when his lawyers took her deposition. She had died in 1992, terminally ill, and later juries watched her testimony on videotape. Reversal followed reversal. Each new jury convicted him again, ten verdicts in all, the Associated Press counted.
During the retrials Rosalie Martinez, a paralegal at the Hillsborough County Public Defender’s office, worked on his defense team. She was married to a prominent Tampa lawyer. She told ABC News in 2015 that she had brought Bolin depositions and asked him to mark the inconsistencies, and that long study of the record had convinced her he was innocent. She divorced her husband, and in 1996 she married Bolin.
Because he was on death row, the bride and groom were not in the same room. ABC’s 20/20 covered the wedding: she wore a wedding dress, a photograph of Bolin stood in for the groom, and the vows were exchanged over a speakerphone. In place of a honeymoon, she told ABC, the couple sat in a courtroom while he was sentenced to death in one of the cases.
Teri Lynn Matthews’s mother said the wedding "made kind of a mockery of the whole thing," BuzzFeed News reported.
The marriage lasted 20 years and was lived almost entirely on paper and across a visiting table. Florida’s death row allowed no conjugal visits, ABC reported. Bolin spent 23 hours a day alone in a six-by-nine-foot cell at Florida State Prison. Rosalie Bolin visited twice a week, and he sent her letters and hand-drawn cards nearly every day. She became a licensed private investigator and mitigation specialist and one of the most outspoken opponents of the death penalty in Florida.
She also kept working his case. In 2014 an inmate in Ohio contacted her about another Ohio prisoner, identified in court as S.K., who was said to have confessed to the Matthews killing. The courts ordered DNA testing; the results excluded S.K. and did not exclude Bolin, the Florida Supreme Court recorded in December 2015, and it affirmed the denial of relief.
On January 7, 2016, Bolin spent his last day visiting with his wife and his spiritual adviser. The United States Supreme Court denied a stay shortly before 10 p.m., and he was pronounced dead by lethal injection at 10:16 p.m. at Florida State Prison in Starke. He was 53. In a statement, Rosalie Bolin accused the state of executing an innocent man and called the execution "barbaric in a civilized society." Teri Lynn’s mother, outside the prison, said it did not matter that he died for only one of the three killings. "He only dies once," she said. "He dies for all of our girls."
Carlton Gary was convicted in August 1986 of three counts each of malice murder, rape and burglary for the deaths of Florence Scheible, 89, Martha Thurmond, 69, and Kathleen Woodruff, 74, in Columbus, Georgia, in the autumn and winter of 1977. Prosecutors told the jury that one man had targeted older women in Columbus from September 1977 to April 1978, and that he was Gary. He was sentenced to death on August 27, 1986, and was never charged with the other deaths in the series.
He denied the killings for more than 30 years. His lawyers fought over blood-group tests, DNA results and a dental impression kept from the defense. In 2009 the Supreme Court of Georgia halted his execution and ordered DNA testing, which the state said matched him to one of the women killed. A Muscogee County judge denied his motion for a new trial in September 2017.
Gary’s wife came into his life by mail, five years after the trial. They began corresponding in 1991, and they married in prison in 1996, she told the Atlanta station 11Alive. In the last weeks before his execution, with his appeals nearly spent, she told 11Alive she believed he was innocent.
Gary gave his own last interview to 11Alive the day before he died. "I’m an innocent person," he said. He thanked his supporters for their prayers. The State Board of Pardons and Paroles denied clemency on March 14, 2018. The next night the execution, set for 7 p.m., was carried out at 10:33 p.m. at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Jackson. Gary declined a final prayer and made no final statement. He was 67.
The marriages in the United States took place under rules that newspapers could print. The last marriage of Serhiy Tkach took place far from that kind of scrutiny, in a Ukrainian penal colony for men serving life.
Tkach had once been trained as a police forensic expert in the Soviet Union. He was arrested in Polohy, in Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region, on August 5, 2005, and within weeks he was confessing to killings of girls and young women that he said went back to 1980. His count rose from about 80 to more than 100. The Dnipropetrovsk Regional Court of Appeal tried him in closed session from December 2007, and on December 23, 2008, a panel presided over by Judge Serhiy Voloshko sentenced him to life imprisonment for murder, with other charges. Reports of how many killings the court held proven differ: UNIAN, on the day of the verdict, reported 36 murders and attempted murders between 1984 and 2005; Interfax-Ukraine later gave 29 murders and eight further crimes against victims who survived. While he was free, at least ten other men had been arrested or jailed for crimes he later admitted, the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group reported, and police officers were later convicted over the way some of those confessions were obtained.
He served his sentence in penal colony No. 8 in Zhytomyr, sharing a cell with one other prisoner. The head of the colony later described him as calm, a prisoner who caused no incidents and had no disciplinary violations, UNIAN reported. In 2015, Interfax-Ukraine reported, a woman from Russia married him in prison. It was his fourth marriage; he had been married three times before his arrest and had four children.
The marriage left little trace in the official record. When Tkach fell ill in the colony on November 4, 2018, staff called an ambulance at about 3 p.m., and he was declared dead at about 7 p.m. He had complained of heart trouble and shortness of breath. Interfax-Ukraine said he died in his 67th year. No relatives came for the body. Staff tried to reach his wife and could not; her whereabouts were unknown. On November 7, 2018, the colony buried him itself.
Set side by side, these six marriages follow the shape of the institutions that held the men. In Florida in 1980 the wedding happened because a statute allowed a declaration in court, and a defendant acting as his own lawyer knew how to use it. In California the ceremony was fitted into a death row visiting room. Washington let Bianchi marry in the chapel and then refused the marriage any private life, and a county judge agreed that the prison had that power. Florida in 1996 would not put a condemned man and his bride in the same room, so the vows went over a speakerphone, with a photograph standing at the altar. Georgia let Carlton Gary marry a woman he had known only through the mail. A Ukrainian colony recorded a fourth marriage for a man serving life, then could not find the wife when he died.
The women came from different directions. Boone had known Bundy before his arrest. Rosalie Martinez met Bolin through his own defense. Ramirez, Bianchi, Gary and Tkach married women who had first written to them. Some marriages ended quietly, as Ramirez’s did in 2009. Others lasted to the execution chamber, where Rosalie Bolin spent her husband’s last day with him.
None of the six marriages altered a verdict. The courts that heard these cases dealt with privilege, hypnosis, DNA and competence, and in only one of them did a marriage reach the law books: Bolin’s first marriage, the one that ended before his arrest, which forced the Florida Supreme Court to decide what a wife may repeat. The weddings that followed in custody were private acts in public places, held under the eye of a guard, and in the end they were bound by the same walls as everything else in the men’s lives.
• July 24, 1979: A Miami jury convicts Ted Bundy of two counts of first-degree murder, three of attempted murder and two of burglary.
• October 1979: Kenneth Bianchi pleads guilty to two murders in Washington and five in Los Angeles County.
• February 9, 1980: Bundy marries Carole Ann Boone by declaration in an Orlando courtroom during his penalty phase.
• March 1981: A Bellingham jury convicts a woman who had written to Bianchi of attempted first-degree murder.
• August 26 and 27, 1986: Carlton Gary is convicted in Columbus, Georgia, and sentenced to death.
• January 24, 1989: Bundy is executed at Florida State Prison, Starke.
• September 21, 1989: Bianchi marries in the chapel of the Washington State Penitentiary, Walla Walla.
• September 20 and November 7, 1989: Richard Ramirez is convicted in Los Angeles and sentenced to death.
• November 1990: A Walla Walla County judge rules that prison officials acted within their authority in refusing Bianchi conjugal visits.
• 1991: Gary begins corresponding with the woman he later marries.
• April 21, 1994: The Florida Supreme Court reverses the Holley convictions against Oscar Ray Bolin Jr. over the marital privilege.
• 1996: Ramirez marries at San Quentin; Bolin marries Rosalie Martinez by speakerphone from death row; Gary marries in prison.
• August 7, 2006: The California Supreme Court affirms Ramirez’s convictions and death sentence.
• December 23, 2008: Serhiy Tkach is sentenced to life imprisonment in Dnipropetrovsk.
• 2009: Ramirez’s wife leaves him, according to CBS News.
• June 7, 2013: Ramirez dies on death row at a hospital in Greenbrae, California.
• 2015: Tkach marries in prison, according to Interfax-Ukraine.
• January 7, 2016: Bolin is executed at Florida State Prison, Starke.
• March 15, 2018: Gary is executed at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison, Jackson.
• November 4, 2018: Tkach dies in penal colony No. 8, Zhytomyr; the colony buries him on November 7.
• July 2025: Washington and California parole boards decline to release Bianchi.
• October 22, 2026: The Washington Department of Corrections lists Bianchi, as Anthony D’Amato, at the Washington State Penitentiary.