A SERIAL killer who murdered three young women and later married a member of his defence team in a televised ceremony on death row has been executed in Florida.
Former carnival worker and truck driver Oscar Ray Bolin, 53, became the first to be executed in the United States this year after receiving a lethal injection at Florida State Prison in Starke.
Family members of two of Bolin’s victims, all of whom were killed in the Tampa Bay area, were reportedly present during the execution and watched him die as his “chest heaved”.
Governor Rick Scott’s office said Bolin was pronounced dead at 10.16pm local time on Thursday (2.16am AEDT Friday).
The scheduled 6pm execution was delayed until the US Supreme Court rejected without comment Bolin’s final appeal.
The death warrant Mr Scott signed in October was for the 1986 slaying of 26-year-old Teri Lynn Matthews who was abducted from a post office in Pasco County, just north of Tampa.
Bolin was also sentenced to death for the killing of 17-year-old Stephanie Collins.
A jury also gave him the death penalty for killing 25-year-old Natalie Holley, but that verdict was thrown out because of legal errors. All three women were stabbed.
Another jury eventually found him guilty of second-degree murder in the Holley case.
Bolin was also convicted of kidnapping and rape in another case.
Ms Matthews’ mother, Kathleen Reeves, and Ms Collins’ family attended the execution.
Ms Reeves told The Associated Press it didn’t matter that Bolin was not executed for all three cases “because he only dies once”.
“He dies for all of our girls,” Ms Reeves said.
Bolin said “no sir” when asked if he wanted to make a final statement.
The execution procedure took about 12 minutes, during which Bolin’s chest heaved for several minutes as he took a number of deep breaths.
On Wednesday, Bolin told the Fox 13 television station that he was innocent and evidence used to convict him was both tampered with and planted.
“I didn’t know ‘em, never seen ‘em, never met ‘em,” he said of the three victims.
“My conscience is clear,” he told the TV station.
“I’m at peace with myself. It’s my release. My punishment’s over. After 28 years of this, being in this box for 28 years, it’s a release. My punishment’s over. They can’t hurt me no more.” While on trial, Bolin and a woman on his defence team fell in love.
Rosalie Martinez had been a paralegal at the Hillsborough Public Defender’s office who was married to a prominent Tampa lawyer.
Ms Martinez divorced him and married Bolin, on live TV, in 1996, 10 years after the slayings.
Rosalie maintained that her husband was innocent in Ms Matthews’ killing, and went on to become one of the state’s most outspoken death penalty opponents since her marriage.
She campaigned for two decades to save him.
The three Tampa-area killings 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.
Authorities later discovered it was the new husband of Bolin’s ex-wife who called in the tip; the ex-wife said Bolin had told her about the killings in 1986.
During the trial, Bolin’s younger half brother said he watched Bolin beat Ms Matthews and try to drown her with a garden hose, but later recanted his story, then reversed his position again.
Bolin was also officially linked to just one other murder: the strangulation of Deborah Diane Stowe, 30, in 1987 in Greenville, Texas.
His cousin told authorities that he and Bolin abducted Ms Stowe outside a convenience store and raped her in a truck before Bolin killed her.
Texas prosecutors declined to seek an indictment.
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.
Twenty-eight people were executed in the United States in 2015, the lowest figure since 1991, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
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