Tampabay: Suspect's seventh murder trial to open

Years ago, Bolin was convicted of the murders of three women in Hillsborough and Pasco counties and sentenced to death. There were appeals, of course. Then orders for new trials. But usually, during the retrials, there was at least one conviction still standing.

So the focus of public attention sometimes shifted outside the courtroom -- most notably to a well-dressed woman named Rosalie Martinez who left her husband, a successful Tampa attorney, and their four children to marry Bolin and fight for his innocence.

But then the legal math changed: All of the convictions (two for each murder) have now been sent back for another retrial. Today, the quest for justice begins again: for Bolin, facing his seventh murder trial, and for the victims, Teri Lynn Matthews, Natalie Holley and Stephanie Collins.

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The passage of time and rulings from the state Supreme Court have weakened the government's cases against Bolin. Important evidence has been thrown out. Witnesses may have difficulty remembering everything they saw and heard 15 years ago.

Of Bolin's three retrials, the first, starting today in Circuit Court in New Port Richey, may be the most important. This trial, for the December 1986 murder of Matthews, represents prosecutors' best hope for conviction, according to lawyers who have previously worked on the cases.

"I've always thought this case was the strongest," said Bob Attridge, who prosecuted Bolin the last time he stood trial in Pasco County for the Matthews murder. "In this case, you have an eyewitness."

But that eyewitness -- Bolin's stepbrother -- is unpredictable.

In 1992, Phillip Bolin told a spellbound jury how, as a 13-year-old boy, he watched his older brother beat a sheet-wrapped figure with a club outside a Land O'Lakes mobile home. The low moans from the woman, he said in a gentle Kentucky drawl, sounded "like my dog got run over or something."

His testimony helped secure a death sentence for Bolin. Then the case got overturned. The Supreme Court ruled that jurors should not have been allowed to hear testimony about Bolin's alleged role in the murders of two young Hillsborough County women, Holley and Collins.

Just before the Matthews case went to trial a second time, Phillip Bolin changed his story. In a sworn affidavit, he wrote: "I was told to and was coerced into making false statements reference my brother. . . . The events I testified to under oath both in my deposition and trial testimony are not true."

But on the witness stand at trial, Phillip Bolin flip-flopped again. He had lied in the affidavit, he said, "to make everybody happy."

As he retold how he watched his brother kill Matthews, his family, who had driven him down from West Liberty, Ky., walked out of the courtroom.

"They left him here," said Attridge, who is now a criminal defense attorney in New Port Richey. "We got him back to Kentucky somehow."

Now the question is: What will Phillip Bolin say this time?

A call to his house in Kentucky produced no answers.

"He ain't got no comment," said a woman who answered the phone.

Once again, Phillip Bolin's testimony will be the key to the trial, said Doug Loeffler, who represented Bolin in 1992 in the Matthews case.

"Phillip is the most damaging witness for Oscar Ray," said Loeffler, who is now retired. "He's the key to the whole thing. . . . Without Phillip, there is no way they could convict him."

Attridge doesn't totally agree. He said prosecutors will have a tough time without Phillip Bolin's cooperation, but there is still plenty of circumstantial evidence for a jury to consider.

Matthews, a 26-year-old bank clerk, was abducted from the Land O'Lakes Post Office, where Bolin rented a box. Her body was found wrapped in linens from St. Joseph's Hospital in Tampa, where Bolin's then-wife, Cheryl Jo Coby, was being treated. At the time, Bolin was working for a tow truck company in Tampa. Tire tracks matching the pattern on Bolin's company-issued wrecker were found near Matthews' body.

In addition, there was a partial match between semen found on Matthews' pants and Bolin. Experts have testified that there is a 1-in-2,000 chance the DNA pattern belonged to someone other than Bolin.

"There was no question he raped her, or tried to," Attridge said.

And even Loeffler said Bolin has another problem: west Pasco jurors.

"They tend to be prosecution-oriented retirees," he said. "If they think he looks guilty, they're going to convict him."

Prosecutors and Bolin's defense attorneys, Sam Williams and John Swisher, declined to comment for this story, citing concerns about pretrial publicity. In fact, the 1996 conviction in the Matthews case was overturned because Circuit Judge William Webb did not allow defense attorneys to question jurors individually about exposure to news reports.

Loeffler said Bolin "never disclosed to me guilt or innocence."

"He never told me he did it. He never told me he didn't do it," Loeffler said. "But if he is acquitted, so what? You've still got the two Hillsborough cases."

The Hillsborough cases, however, lack eyewitnesses.

Natalie Holley, a 25-year-old restaurant manager, was stabbed to death in January 1986. Her body was found in a Tampa orange grove.

Stephanie Collins, a 17-year-old Chamberlain High School student, was abducted in November 1986 from a Carrollwood shopping plaza. Her body, beaten and stabbed, was discovered in a ditch a month later.

In overturning Bolin's latest convictions in theHolley and Collins murder cases, the state's high court said this summer that a judge should not have allowed Hillsborough prosecutors to use Coby's testimony. Coby died in 1992, but not before telling prosecutors that she helped Bolin cleanse the scene after one murder and disposed of a victim's body after another. She also said she overhead Bolin talking about a third victim.

The Supreme Court ruled that Coby's videotaped testimony, which was played for the jury, was inadmissible because Bolin never waived his spousal privilege. That privilege protects defendants' spouses from testifying about their conversations.

New trial dates have not been set in the Hillsborough cases.

Even should Bolin be acquitted of all three bay area murders, he will not walk free. A 1987 rape conviction in Ohio led to a 15- to 75-year prison sentence, which he is still serving.

There is also a charge in Texas, where Bolin and a cousin are accused of murdering a 30-year-old woman. There has been little progress on that case, however, because prosecutors there did not pursue an indictment, choosing to let Florida authorities take the lead with Bolin.

Bolin was a suspect in at least three other killings, though no additional murder charges were ever filed.

Matthews' mother, Kathleen Reeves, has attended all six of Bolin's trials in Florida, and she'll be in the courtroom again this morning. The mothers of Stephanie Collins and Natalie Holley will be there, too. The three met during the first round of trials, and they have been friends ever since.

"We have to stay together because everything seems to be falling away," said Reeves, 63, who lives in north-central Pasco, not far from where her daughter's body was found.

"We don't know what to think anymore. It's like a child who keeps sticking his hand out, looking for love. If it keeps getting slapped away, he eventually learns not to expect it anymore.

"That's what's happened to us."

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