Oscar Ray Bolin's attorney declares his intent to begin a new round of appeals.
By SUE CARLTON
© St. Petersburg Times, published June 5, 1999
TAMPA -- A grim sense of deja vu filled a Tampa courtroom Friday as convicted killer Oscar Ray Bolin again was sentenced to death in the murders of two Hillsborough County women.
Chained hand and foot, Bolin faced the judge and showed no emotion. He had heard it before. Friday's pronouncements marked the fifth and sixth time the former carnival worker has been sentenced to die.
Thirteen years have passed since Stephanie Collins, a 17-year-old Chamberlain High student, was plucked from a suburban parking lot and stabbed and beaten to death. That same year, Natalie Blanche Holley, who worked at a Church's Fried Chicken restaurant, was also kidnapped and murdered.
Bolin, who had also worked as a trucker, was convicted in both those cases, as well as in the 1986 Pasco County slaying of bank clerk Teri Lynn Matthews.
But Bolin, 37, won new trials in all three.
At his retrials, the mothers of the victims sat in a shoulder-to-shoulder vigil in the courtroom. The women took turns comforting each other, passing tissues, giving each other hugs.
Bolin was convicted again in the Matthews murder in Pasco County and again sentenced to death in 1996. Similar trials, and similar results, followed this year in the Hillsborough murders of Holley and Collins.
Jurors took less than an hour to recommend that Bolin should die for killing Holley, and only seven minutes to make a similar decision on the Collins case. In a brief hearing Friday, Circuit Judge J. Rogers Padgett followed the jury's decisions in both cases and gave Bolin two more death sentences.
Those cases will be appealed. "There may be trials seven, eight and nine," defense lawyer Brian Donerly said.
Also in the courtroom Friday was the defendant's wife, Rosalie Bolin, who got to know him when she worked for the Public Defender's Office, divorced a prominent Tampa lawyer and married the death row inmate in 1996.
Mrs. Bolin covered her mouth with her hand and shook her head after the death sentences were read.
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