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Death-row inmate on trial again

Oscar Ray Bolin Jr. is accused of killing a woman in north Tampa.

By CANDACE RONDEAUX
Published October 3, 2005

TAMPA - Jury selection began Monday in the eighth murder trial of death row inmate Oscar Ray Bolin Jr.

Bolin, 43, is facing the death penalty for the third time in the two-decade-old murder of Natalie Blanche Holley.

Holley, 25, was kidnapped in January 1986 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 same day found the body of Teri Lynn Matthews, 26; she had been beaten, raped and stabbed.

In 1991, Bolin was convicted of murdering Holley and Collins after two separate trials. A year later he was convicted of killing Matthews.

But, those convictions were overturned in 1994. In 2001, he was sentenced to death for a third time for the murder of Matthews, and the Florida Supreme Court upheld that conviction last year.

Bolin is scheduled to be tried again on charges he murdered Collins after the current trial ends this week.

[Last modified October 3, 2005, 16:49:50]