Man gets 3rd death verdict

That is just for one slaying. He also has been convicted of killing two others.

By COLLEEN JENKINS, Times Staff Writer
Published December 1, 2007

Oscar Ray Bolin is brought into court at the start of his penalty phase after being found guilty of killing 17-year-old Stephanie Collins back in 1986. Bolin received a death sentence Friday, after already having previous sentences overturned on appeals.
	[Ken Helle | Times]

TAMPA - For the third time, Oscar Ray Bolin received a death sentence Friday for the 1986 murder of Stephanie Collins.

It was just the punishment he wanted.

Bolin, 45, has been convicted three times each for killing three young women. A death sentence allows him to appeal directly to the Florida Supreme Court, where he has gotten six murder convictions overturned before.

Does Assistant State Attorney Michael Halkitis worry that this latest conviction will meet the same fate?

"No," Halkitis said as he left the courtroom. "I've had enough of them."

The handing down of the death penalty felt perfunctory. Hillsborough Circuit Judge Barbara Fleischer was emotionless as she rattled off the aggravating and mitigating factors. Bolin smiled and chatted with the bailiff who fingerprinted him.

And the three dead girls' mothers, who sat united against Bolin during every trial, were absent from the courtroom.

It was unclear why they didn't attend. Donna Witmer, Collins' mother, could not be reached Friday.

As Bolin's third trial for Collins' killing got under way in November 2006, Witmer said the women hoped it would be the last.

Already, they were breathing easier. In 2004, after three trials, the state Supreme Court upheld Bolin's death sentence for murdering Teri Lynn Matthews in Pasco County. In 2005, after three trials, a judge sentenced Bolin to life in prison for his second-degree murder conviction in Natalie Blanche Holley's case.

Collins, 17, disappeared Nov. 5, 1986, from a Carrollwood shopping center after leaving her drugstore job to head to choir practice. A month later, a county worker found her decomposed body in a ditch. She had been stabbed and badly beaten.

Juries twice found Bolin guilty of first-degree murder. But in 1994 and 2001, he won new trials on appeal.

His trial last year featured a new twist. During closing arguments, Halkitis pulled out a piece of paper that had gone undetected for two decades by detectives, FBI lab analysts and lawyers and had never before been shared with a jury.

An investigator for the prosecution had found the note in Collins' purse. Scrawled on the back was "724-BYL. Ray" - the name Bolin was known by and the license plate of his Ford truck.

It was the same truck witnesses said he used to dump Collins' body. Halkitis said Collins probably wrote down the information after getting into a fender-bender with Bolin days before he killed her.

Whether the defense pins its hopes for an appeal on the manner in which the note was revealed remains to be seen. Defense attorney David Parry would not comment Friday.

Neither would Rosalie Bolin, who has worked to free Oscar and married the death row inmate in 1996.

Fleischer considered Oscar Bolin's troubled history: born to an alcoholic mother, abused by his father, suffered a brain injury.

She cited just one aggravating factor: his previous capital felony convictions. In addition to the three Florida killings, Bolin pleaded guilty to abducting and raping a woman in Ohio in 1987.

The judge said his criminal history far outweighed his personal history.

For that, she said, he should die.

Colleen Jenkins can be reached at cjenkins@sptimes.com or 813 226-3337.

[Last modified November 30, 2007, 21:19:56]