“I’m about to experience something wonderful”. “I feel relief that it finally occurred”.
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Still, she knows there could be a delay, a ruling on a last minute appeal that robs her of what she calls the only kind of closure she can ever have.
“It was not a celebratory event”, Reeves said. “The circus we’ve had to go through over the years is over”.
“I see her all the time and she’s there and I’m with her”, said Reeves.
“It’s just a circus, and we’re waiting for the finale”, she said. “I’ll have a good time sitting there and watching it all turn to ashes”.
The scheduled 6 p.m. execution time was delayed until the U.S. Supreme Court rejected without comment Bolin’s final appeal. I would have hoped it would have been answered by now. Brunvand said if all appeals fail, he will file a motion for a stay with the U.S. Supreme Court.
“With all the turns and twists and trials over the years, I’m not counting on anything until it happens”, Reeves, 78, said in a phone interview from her home near daughter Teri Lynn Matthews’ grave in Spring Hill, Florida.
Over the years, Bolin had several trials, retrials and courtroom drama – even marrying one of his defense attorneys. “At this moment, it’s not looking very promising”. Matthews vanished on December 4, 1986 after planning to have dinner in Tampa with her boyfriend.
Matthews had a job, was learning how to scuba dive and had begun a serious romantic relationship with a young man, she said.
She was talking about Rosalie Bolin, who was a married mother of four daughters working in the public defender’s office when she fell for the death-row inmate.
With fewer than 24 hours before his execution, Bolin told FOX 13, “My conscience is clear”. Police later found her body on the side of the road, wrapped in a sheet imprinted with a hospital’s logo.
The morning after her disappearance, the boyfriend, Gary McClelland, found Matthews’ vehicle abandoned and still running in the parking lot of the Land O’ Lakes Post Office. The women were stabbed and bludgeoned to death just months apart.
When he was charged in 1990, Bolin was serving a 22- to 75-year prison sentence in OH for kidnapping and raping a 20-year-old waitress near Toledo. Rosalie Bolin says her husband is innocent in Matthews’ killing, and she has become one of the state’s most outspoken death penalty opponents. The third conviction withstood appellate challenges, and his death sentence was upheld.
Reeves and Collins’ family planned to attend the execution.
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The mother of Natalie Holley is now deceased, but Reeves reportedly will be joined in the death chamber witness room at the Florida State Prison by Anita Holley, the sister of Natalie, and Donna Witmer, the mother of Stephanie Collins.
