Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies
In Oscar Ray Bolin's trial in the murder of Teri Lynn Matthews, his stepbrother testifies about a chilling scene.
By CARY DAVIS
© St. Petersburg Times, published October 19, 2001
NEW PORT RICHEY -- In the early morning hours of Dec. 5, 1986, 13-year-old Phillip Bolin was asleep in a camper on his parents' Land O'Lakes property when he heard a knock at the door.
It was his older stepbrother, Oscar Ray.
"He tells me to get my clothes on and come outside," Phillip Bolin, now 28, told a jury Thursday.
Phillip obeyed, and what he said he saw next transformed him from an adoring little stepbrother to the key witness in the murder of 26-year-old Teri Lynn Matthews.
It began as he stepped out of the camper and heard what he described as a "muffled sound."
"I thought my dog was hit," Phillip Bolin testified, speaking in a slow drawl and never looking at his 39-year-old stepbrother.
Then he realized the low moans were coming from a woman wrapped in a bloody white bedsheet. In horror, he said, he watched as the stepbrother he worshiped and knew as "Needles" straddled the body. When Oscar Ray raised a wooden club over his head, Phillip said he turned away, unable to watch.
"I was scared to death," he said. "I knew what was going on."
The thumping he heard next sounded "like taking something and hitting a pillow." The moaning turned to gurgling. Oscar Ray told him to get a water hose, Phillip Bolin said. He refused.
The older Bolin fetched the hose and "it appeared he was spraying the body," Phillip Bolin testified. Prosecutors, however, say Oscar Ray Bolin put the hose in Matthews' mouth and drowned her.
Then, Phillip said, Oscar Ray told him to help load the lifeless body onto the bed of a tow truck. Phillip "just stood there," he testified.
"You will help me," Oscar Ray Bolin demanded, according to Phillip's testimony. Phillip said he grabbed the woman's ankles and helped his stepbrother raise the body onto the wrecker.
When Oscar Ray asked him for help dumping the body, Phillip said he drew the line. He watched his brother drive away, then Phillip returned to the camper. He had been staying alone in the travel trailer while his parents, both carnival workers, were out of town.
Phillip said he didn't sleep the rest of the night and felt sick at school the next day. After school, he took his best friend, Danny Ferns, to the Bolin compound on Valencia Drive and showed him the blood. For the next four years, Phillip and Danny shared their terrible secret with no one. Ferns testified Thursday that he was afraid Oscar Ray Bolin would kill him if he went to authorities.
No arrests were made in the case until 1991, after detectives got a tip. They approached Phillip Bolin, and he told them everything.
This is the third time Oscar Ray Bolin has stood trial for Matthews' killing. Twice Bolin has been convicted and sentenced to death, but each time the Florida Supreme Court ordered new trials. Bolin also is awaiting retrials for the 1986 murders of two Hillsborough County women.
At times in the past, Phillip has been a reluctant witness against his stepbrother. On Thursday, as a rapt courtroom hung on his every word, Phillip never wavered, not even when he was asked about an affidavit he signed in 1996 recanting his prior testimony.
He only signed the affidavit, he said, because he was pressured by his parents and Rosalie Martinez, who at the time was an investigator working on Bolin's case. She is now Bolin's wife, having divorced her former husband, a prominent Tampa attorney.
"She had wrote everything on a sheet of paper and I pretty much copied it," Phillip Bolin said of the affidavit. Some of the phrases in the sworn document, such as "the integrity of the recantation," he didn't even understand, he said.
"I was just doing it to stay in the good graces of everybody," he testified.
The trial resumes this morning and is expected to last through next week.
-- Cary Davis covers courts in west Pasco County. He can be reached in west Pasco at 869-6236, or toll-free at 1-800-333-7505, ext. 6236. His e-mail address is