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Convicted Killer Bolin Will Be Tried For 4th Time In 1986 Death

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TBO.com

Published: March 20, 2009

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Oscar Bolin (2006 photo)

TAMPA - Death row inmate Oscar Ray Bolin Jr., who is awaiting execution for the murder of two Bay area women in 1986, has won a new trial – his fourth – in the slaying of a third woman that same year.

The state's 2nd District Court of Appeal today ordered a retrial in the killing of Natalie Blanche Holley, ruling that the trial judge did not properly instruct jurors.

The decision shocked the victim's mother.

"I'm too stunned to have any comment," said Natalie Holley. "This will be his fourth trial. What words can I use? I can't get my breath about it."

Bolin, a former carnival worker and truck driver, first was convicted and sentenced to death in 1991 for the murder of Holley, 25. The Tampa woman was abducted early one morning after leaving her job as assistant manager of a Church's Chicken in north Tampa. Her body was found a few hours later; she had been stabbed repeatedly.

But the Florida Supreme Court overturned Bolin's conviction and ordered a new trial.

In 1999, Bolin again was sentenced to death in Holley's slaying. Two years later, the high court overturned that conviction, too.

At his third trial in 2005, a Hillsborough County jury found Bolin guilty of second-degree murder. He was sentenced to life in prison.

The appellate court today, however, said then-Circuit Judge Barbara Fleischer did not properly instruct jurors on the lesser offense of manslaughter.

Bolin, now 47, was charged in 1990 in the slayings four years earlier of three women: Holley; Stephanie Collins, a 17-year-old Tampa high school student; and Teri Lynn Matthews, 26, of Pasco County.

At the time of his arrest, Bolin was serving a 75-year prison sentence in Ohio for the 1987 kidnapping and rape of a truck-stop clerk, and for attempted escape.

Twice, Bolin's convictions and death sentences in the slayings of Collins and Matthews were overturned.

In 2001, he was sentenced to death a third time for Matthews' murder. The state high court has upheld that sentence.

In 2007, he was sentenced to death a third time for Collins' murder.

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