A long and twisting death row saga is set to come to a conclusion as Florida prepares to execute Oscar Ray Bolin, a man convicted of murdering three women 30 years ago, who saw each conviction overturned before he was then found guilty again.
Unless there is a last minute intervention by a an appeals court or else the US Supreme Court, Bolin is scheduled to be executed at 6pm at the Florida State Prison for the 1986 killing of Teri Lynn Matthews.
“It will be in a sense, a closure,” Ms Matthews mother, Kathleen Reeves, told the Associated Press. “It’s been so long. The pain doesn't change. It's just time for it. It’s due. It’s past due.”
Police said Bolin's first Florida victim was 25-year-old Natalie Holley, who was abducted after she left work at a Tampa fast food restaurant in January of 1986. In October of that same year, 17-year-old Stephanie Collins disappeared from a shopping center parking lot in Tampa. Two months later, Matthews was abducted from a post office in Pasco County, just north of Tampa. All three were fatally stabbed.
The cases went unsolved until someone called an anonymous tip line in 1990, when Bolin was already serving a 22- to 75-year prison sentence in Ohio for kidnapping and raping a 20-year-old waitress outside Toledo in 1987.
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.
He once again received the death penalty in the Matthews' and Collins' killings, but a new jury in the Holley slaying found Bolin guilty of second-degree murder, converting his previous death sentence to a sentence of life in prison.
Ms Reeves said it did not matter that Bolin was not awaiting execution in all three cases “because he only dies once.”
She added: “He dies for all of our girls.”
Bolin’s lawyer, Bjorn Brunvand, said he filed another motion to stay with the district court and with the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. The appeals court denied the motion on Monday. If all appeals are denied, Mr Brunvand said he will file a motion to stay with the US Supreme Court.
“I think that he should get a new trial because another individual has confessed to that murder,” Mr Brunvand told the AP.
