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Jury finds Bolin guilty of murder in retrialBy SUE CARLTON © St. Petersburg Times, published February 19, 1999 TAMPA -- The three mothers, bonded by unimaginable grief, had been here before. Yet again, they spent days side by side in a courtroom, helping each other through heart-wrenching testimony about the final moments of a young woman's life, through graphic crime scene photos of a much-loved daughter, and at last to the verdict. Finally, on Thursday, they sat close together, waiting. And again, a jury said Oscar Ray Bolin was guilty in the 1986 murder of 25-year-old Natalie Blanche Holley, last seen after she worked the night shift at Church's Fried Chicken. A jogger found her stabbed body in an abandoned orange grove the next morning. "I was just holding my breath," an emotional Natalie Holley, the victim's mother, said after the verdict. "I was hoping, praying for the best, which I got." Today, prosecutors will ask that jury to recommend a death sentence for the former trucker. It isn't the first time he has faced that prospect, and prosecutors say it won't be the last. Bolin was convicted in 1991 of killing Holley and Stephanie Collins, a Carrollwood teen who was abducted from a shopping center parking lot. In both cases, he was sentenced to die, but his convictions were overturned. He is expected to be retried in the coming months in the Collins case. The Florida Supreme Court also overturned his conviction and death sentence in the murder of Land O'Lakes bank clerk Teri Lynn Matthews. He was retried and sentenced to death in that case in 1996. The mothers of all three victims have joined to support each other through the delays, appeals and retrials they have come to know well. "It's just one step closer," Collins' mother, Donna Witmer, said Thursday. In her closing argument, prosecutor Shirley Williams pointed to videotaped testimony of Bolin's then-wife, who has since died. Cheryl Jo Coby described how he came home to their trailer that night with bloodied shoes and a woman's purse, then took her to wipe down Holley's car for prints. She said Bolin told her how he stabbed Holley over and over to stop her screams. "With each thrust of that knife, he intended to kill her," Williams said. But Bolin's attorney Mark Ober called Coby's story "a complete and utter fabrication" and said she knew details because she was with the person who killed Holley -- and that wasn't Bolin. Though Bolin took the stand in the previous trial to blame a man he called Harold Jackson, he did not testify this week. The jury took two hours and fifteen minutes to convict him. In an unusual twist in 1996, Bolin married a woman who met him while she worked at the public defender's office and who divorced her well-known attorney husband for the death row inmate. After Thursday's verdict, Rosalie Bolin, dressed in black, sobbed in a courthouse restroom. Though in trials past attorneys have presented evidence of Bolin's abusive childhood and brain damage, his wife is expected to be today's only witness on his behalf. A woman who was the victim in an Ohio rape in which Bolin has been sentenced to 25 to 75 years in prison is expected to testify for the state. By law, Circuit Judge J. Rogers Padgett will give the jury's recommendation great weight when he later decides Bolin's sentence.
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