Oscar Ray Bolin: Serial killer convicted of three murders executed after Supreme Court declines to intervene

A long and twisting death row saga has come to an end after Florida executed 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.

Bolin was killed by lethal injection on Thursday evening, minutes after the US Supreme Court rejected his final appeal. He had been scheduled to be put to death at 6pm but because of the appeal to the country’s highest court, it was past 10pm when it was carried out.

According to the Tampa Bay Times, Bolin was injected with a lethal combination of chemicals beginning at 10.05pm and was pronounced dead at 10.16pm.

The newspaper said there were 36 witnesses, including family members of Bolin's three victims: Teri Lynn Matthews, 26, Natalie Blanche Holley, 25, and 17-year-old Stephanie Collins.

Moments before his execution, a warden asked Bolin if he had any last words. “No, sir,” he replied.

Bolin was technically executed for the killing of Ms Matthews.

“It will be in a sense, a closure,” Ms Matthews mother, Kathleen Reeves, told the Associated Press before the execution. “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 Ms 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 Ms Collins disappeared from a shopping center parking lot in Tampa. Two months later, Ms 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 being executed for 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.

“I think that he should get a new trial because another individual has confessed to that murder,” Mr Brunvand told the AP.