Convicted killer of 3 women scheduled for Florida execution

A former carnival worker who was convicted of killing three Tampa Bay-area women and then married a member of his defense team has been executed in Florida.

Convicted serial killer Oscar Ray Bolin got a last-minute reprieve from execution Thursday evening. The Florida Supreme Court rejected a request for a stay of execution and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit also on Monday declined to grant a stay.

Gov. Rick Scott signed Bolin’s death warrant in October for the 1986 death of Matthews.

The 26-year-old was abducted from a post office in Pasco County, north of Tampa. When the authorities first confronted Bolin about the killings, he was already serving a 22- to 75-year prison sentence in an OH prison for a 1987 rape of a 20-year-old woman outside of Toledo. Bolin has also been convicted in two other murders. The jury found 50-year-old Bolin Jr. guilty of second-degree murder.

All of Bolin’s convictions were reversed at least twice due to legal errors, but new juries found him guilty again in all three cases.

Hours earlier, Bolin ate a final meal that included steak, baked potato, salad and lemon meringue pie, Corrections Department spokesman McKinley Lewis said.

Rosalie Martinez, wife of a prominent local lawyer and mother of four children, married Bolin in 1996 when he was inside on live television, triggering renewed media scrutiny. Matthews’ mother Kathleen Reeves thanked a key witness against Bolin – his half-brother Phillip Bolin, who testified in 1986 that he had witnessed his brother beating a woman who was wrapped in a sheet, according to the Tampa Bay Times.

“He dies for all of our girls”, she said. Bolin claimed that he neither knew, had he ever seen, or met any one of the three victims.

“They’re executing someone that absolutely did not commit that murder”, Bolin said, regarding the death of Teri Lynn Matthews, the case he’ll be executed for Thursday evening. Holley’s mother died in 2012.

Bolin was also sentenced to death for the killing of 17-year-old Stephanie Collins.

Bolin is in a cell waiting to be moved to the death chamber.

In his final interview from death row, Bolin told FOX 13’s Gloria Gomez he planned to look at the families as he is executed. “I’m at peace with myself”. “Now they’re just releasing me”. Rosalie Bolin says her husband is innocent in Matthews’ killing, and she has become one of the state’s most outspoken death penalty opponents.