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Jury hears ex-wife's testimony
By SUE CARLTON © St. Petersburg Times, published February 18, 1999 TAMPA -- The words of suspected killer's dead ex-wife came back to haunt him in a Hillsborough courtroom Tuesday. On a videotape from the 1991 trial of Oscar Ray Bolin, Cheryl Jo Coby described the horrifying last moments of a young woman who had just finished the late shift at a fried chicken restaurant. That night in January 1986, Bolin said, he had followed assistant manager Natalie Blanche Holley as she drove home, flashing his lights to get her to pull over, planning to rob her of the night's receipts, Coby testified on a wide screen in the courtroom. "He said that he stabbed her in the throat so she would stop screaming," Coby said,"... and that she wouldn't die, so he had to keep stabbing her." A sickly Coby uttered those words before a different jury eight years ago, when Bolin was first tried, convicted and sentenced to death in the murder of Holley, 25. He was also given a death sentence for the 1986 murder of a Carrollwood teenager, but the Florida Supreme Court ordered new trials in both cases. Tuesday, prosecutor Melanie Bossie told the jury that evidence, including tracks from the brand of the tennis shoes Bolin favored and his own words to his then-wife, would tie him to Holley, whose body was found in an orange grove. Defense attorneys Brian Donerly and Mark Ober objected to Coby's videotaped testimony, calling the recorded cross-examination "ineffective" in the first trial. Coby, who suffered from acute diabetes, has since died. Jurors were told that the testimony was a deposition recorded because Coby was dying. They were not told of the previous trial. Coby said she sat across the street with Bolin earlier in the day at a Fowler Avenue Burger King so he could scope out the Church's restaurant where Holley worked. Later, when Bolin came home and woke her up, he had a woman's purse and blood on his sneakers. Hillsborough sheriff's deputy Ronald Valenti testified that he happened upon two cars parked on the side of the road that night and pulled up to see Bolin and a woman in one of them. When he asked if she was okay, Bolin said something to her and she told the deputy, "I'm fine." Defense attorneys pointed out that the deputy originally said there were three cars on the scene, not two. "No fingerprint, no hair, no piece of evidence" will link Bolin to Holley's abandoned car or the orange grove, Donerly said. Prosecutors are expected to rest their case today. Bolin also faces a retrial in the murder of Stephanie Collins, 17. In 1996, Bolin was retried and convicted in Pasco County in the 1986 slaying of Teri Lynn Matthews. Again, he was sentenced to death. Bolin, who wore an olive suit Tuesday, smiled occasionally at his wife, Rosalie Bolin. A former employee of the public defender's office, she divorced a Tampa lawyer and married the death row inmate. The mothers of the three murder victims sat close together on the other side of the courtroom.
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