In Love with a Death Row Dandy Level 1 Julie Bindel Julie Bindel is an American writer, feminist, and journalist. She is the co-founder of the group Justice For Women, which opposes violence against women. This article was originally published in the New Statesman in 2012. The small town of Starke in Bradford County, Florida, is best known for the three prisons 1 that surround it. One of those, Florida State, houses 400 death row inmates. It is where the serial killer Ted Bundy died in the electric chair, and Aileen Wuornos by lethal injection. In the visiting area outside, one hot and humid morning, a few women stand waiting to spend 2 time in a visiting room with their loved ones. “Death row” is an ugly corridor with cells facing each other down a concrete walkway. There is no air-conditioning in this section of the prison and the temperature can reach 40° in summer. The inmates are alone in their cells for up to 23 hours every day, eating a diet of tinned vegetables and soya. Cases of scurvy have been reported. Rosalie Bolin, a legal advocate on behalf of death row inmates, is here to visit a rapist and 3 serial killer of women. But this man is not her client. Oscar Bolin is her husband. They married in 1996 and said their vows over the phone. She wore a wedding dress and sat 4 in her apartment and he wore his prison-issue orange boiler suit in his death row cell. What drives women to become romantically involved with men who commit heinous 5 crimes? I had travelled to Florida to Rosalie Bolin’s picturesque lakeside home, six miles south of the prison, to find out. Bright, articulate and immediately likeable, Rosalie is a passionate campaigner against state 6 execution. It was in this role that she first met Bolin. He had been a drifter, a carnival worker and a long-distance trucker, had dealt in drugs and had pleaded guilty to a vicious gunpoint rape in 1988. While Bolin was in prison for that crime, he was arrested for the murder of a 26-year-old 7 bank cashier, Teri Lynn Matthews, who had been beaten, raped, strangled and dumped by the roadside in 1986. Soon, investigators discovered compelling evidence linking him to at least two other, similar murders the same year, of 25-year-old Natalie Holley and 17-year- old Stephanie Collins, who had been stabbed and beaten over the head. Police suspect he may be responsible for many more killings. Yet Rosalie tells me: “Oscar no more committed those crimes than I did.” She accepts that he is a rapist, but avoids speaking of it. In 1994, Rosalie was employed as a mitigation specialist for the Hillsborough County Public 8 Defender’s Office, a job that involved examining death row cases for any evidence that would convince a jury to spare a prisoner’s life. In this role, she met Oscar Ray Bolin at the county jail, where he was awaiting retrial for one of the murders of young women. Rosalie, who was married with four young daughters, felt that her role in life was to do 9 everything she could to save prisoners from state execution. “The first time I was exposed to the death penalty was in tenth grade, when I was asked to write a paper on capital punishment,” she says. “I was appalled. They tell us ’don’t kill’ but the state does just that. I walked into Oscar’s cell and he asked me, ’Who are you?’ and I told him, ’I was sent here to help. I am your guardian angel.’ He had real attitude and I was intrigued.” The prison guard told her that Bolin was a convicted serial killer, but she decided he was 10 innocent. “I have looked in the eyes of thousands of killers and there is a look, a toxicity, something behind those eyes. It is a sort of dark - ness. Oscar did not have that demeanour.” Two Weddings Having been appointed officially as Bolin’s mitigation specialist, Rosalie left the jail with 11 her head full of the man she was determined to help. “I didn’t quite admit it to myself at the time, but it was an immediate attraction. I can’t describe it. I sat on his bed and stayed there for eight hours. I left breathless. “I was very fascinated by him. I ordered his file and they delivered dozens of boxes. I started 12 going every day to see him.” For some time, Rosalie had not been happy in her marriage to the lawyer Victor Martinez. 13 The couple lived the life of socialites in their Tampa Bay home, often entertaining politicians and celebrities. “I wore Jimmy Choo [shoes] and always looked like I stepped out of a magazine,” Rosalie says. Her first wedding could not have been more different from her second. When she married 14 Martinez in 1979 in Tampa, more than 1,000 guests drank champagne and ate seafood at a luxurious hotel. She was 19, her groom 21. After their marriage, Martinez trained as a criminal defence lawyer and Rosalie as a court 15 reporter. After becoming pregnant she decided she could not stand doing that work any longer, “because the poor get no justice and the rich get all the justice”. She became an advocate for death row prisoners in the early 1990s. But her outwardly perfect marriage quickly crumbled as she spent more and more time with 16 Bolin, ostensibly helping him with his case. “People picked up on what was going on with Oscar and I because his face would change when I walked in the room,” she tells me. During one court hearing, Bolin looked over at her and mouthed, “I love you.” A court 17 reporter noticed. Then came the rumours that she had been caught having sex with Bolin in his cell, which she has denied. “The Christmas before I married Oscar I was hosting a party for the governor of Florida and 500 others, and someone asked me why I was sitting alone,” she tells me. “I said, ’Because I am invisible.’ They were eating my food and drinking wine, and causing a mess that I would have to clean up the next day. “I was a great mother and wife. I did everything I was supposed to do. But if I had stayed in 18 that life I would be dead by now. I would have killed myself.” What caused the breakdown of her marriage? “Victor had stopped telling me he loved me 19 years before. One morning he said to me, ’If you go to Oscar’s trial this morning, I will divorce you.’ I was like, ’Do what you want to do.’” When Rosalie arrived at court, one of the reporters present handed her a yellow sticky note. 20 It read: “Victor Martinez has filed for divorce.” “I have to tell you that I snapped,” she says. “I went to the defence table and I threw the note at Oscar and said, ’Are you going to marry me now, you fucker?’ He said: ’Where’s the preacher?’” They married 30 days later. Rosalie keeps several photos of the two of them in her home. In them, she looks vibrant. 21 Bolin, who is now 50, wears his prison-issue jumpsuit, its bright orange glow contrasting with his pallid complexion. By the French windows in the living room I notice a wooden box. It is inscribed with the 22 name, birth and death dates of a man Rosalie affectionately refers to as “Mr Winkles”, who was executed on death row. He had raped, tortured and murdered several prostituted women he picked up on the streets. The prison asked her to take Winkles’s ashes home after he was executed, because nobody had claimed them. She tells me that he protects her home, as “no one would dare try to get past him”. She thinks it is a cute story. I find it repulsive. There are also many photographs of her four grown-up daughters and her grandchildren 23 dotted around her home. Rosalie’s marriage to Bolin came at a heavy cost: she gave up custody of her children. “The press crucified me for that, but I did it to protect them.” I ask her what the children think of her marrying a serial killer. “Oscar has been the safest 24 stepfather they could have had,” she replies. “I have never had other men in my house, or exposed them to sexual perversions. He would never harm those girls.” She shows me a short film that her daughter Katherine made for her graduation in response 25 to that same question - how Rosalie’s marriage to a serial killer had affected her children. Katherine was granted permission to interview Bolin in prison, and it is clear that, despite her obvious love for her mother, she has been adversely affected by Rosalie’s choices. In the film, Katherine asks Rosalie whether she realises how hard it was for her and her sisters, coping with both a broken home and their mother’s notoriety. They both cry. Sexless Unions There are an estimated 100 women in the UK involved with men on death row in various 26 states in the US, according to research conducted for Death Row Dates, a TV documentary screened in the UK in 2010 on the Crime and Investigation Network. The US Federal Bureau of Prisons does not keep statistics on how many marriages take place in its jails, but in 1987 the US Supreme Court ruled that prisoners had a constitutional right to marry.