Tampa Bay Times from St. Petersburg, Florida • 22

6b ST. PETERSBURG TIMES FRIDAY, AUGUST 3, 1990 Sospsct has ddo ceinnios'SG, soume say 'I I Pasoo Gowers Cornet (S shown Ut 683 4lllsborou9r (11) Pinellas 1 1 Odessa PASCO CO. -fcK HILLSBOROUGH CO. I i nii 1 ft 3 BuiehBITx 580 Hillsborough Av. Tampaj r' Sharon Joan Hopper "Body found Nov.

12, 1985 Connie Louise Jones Body found Nov. 19, 1984 QUsa Elsman Body found April 2, 1985 Stephanie Collins Body found Dec. 5, 1986 HTerl Lynn Matthews Body found Dec, 5, 1986 either. Instead, Kennard holds out hope that the police simply have targeted Bolin and thinks the police missed the mark. "How unreasonable it seems, as nice a boy as he was," he said.

"I can't believe that he would do such a thing." Bolin was born Jan. 22, 1962, in Portland, a small town 45 miles south of Fort Wayne and just west of the Indiana-Ohio border. His parents, Oscar Ray Sr. and Mary Bolin, soon decided to return to Morgan County, in the hills of eastern Kentucky. It is an area where the Daniel Boone National Forest begins to give way to small plots of bottom land and families eke out an existence.

Bolin's father said he grew up a fairly normal child. He played with other children, attended school and helped his father and grandfather with farm chores. "He never give me no trouble," Bolin's father said. "He was a good son." But like his father, who left home as a teen-ager, and his grandfather before him, Bolin became restless. By 15, he had made up his mind to leave home.

Oscar Ray and Mary Bolin had divorced, and the younger Bolin originally planned to live with his mother back in Portland. But he decided to press southwest to Muncie, where he hoped to find work. "I don't really know what he wanted to do," the senior Bolin said. "He was just like all the other kids, ready to move on." In November 1978, Bolin made his first trip to Tampa, Hillsborough sheriff's Capt. Gary Terry said.

He traveled back and forth between Florida and Portland. While he worked at odd jobs in Muncie, Bolin found a wife back in Portland. The woman who would become Bolin's wife was Cheryl Jo Haffner. They first lived with Bolin's uncle, Jesse Bolin, in a small house on Valencia Drive in central Pasco. Eventually, Kennard's daughter allowed the couple to move into the Kennards' double-wide mobile home on the same street while the Kennards were in Ohio.

Bolin worked at the Crossroads Sawmill, just down the street from his Uncle Jesse's home, for a time, then took other work where and when he could Family and neighbors think the charges against the man suspected in several bay area murders are a mistake. By BRUCE VIELMETT1 AND CHUCK MURPHY Tlme Start Writer As if kidnapping and rape weren't enough, Oscar Ray Bolin Jr. put his victim through more horror. Inside a semitrailer truck rolling across Ohio, Bolin put a gun to a 20-year-old woman's head and pulled the trigger, but the gun didn't fire. Then he aimed the gun out the window and shot a live round before returning the barrel to the woman's head for another click.

Eventually, Bolin and his cousin, who alternated driving the truck and assaulting the woman, let her out along a Pennsylvania highway. "He was kind of a scary individual from what I remember," said Alan Mayberry, who prosecuted the 1988 case in Ohio. "Basically, he had no remorse whatsoever." Bolin is serving 23 to 75 years for the crime but Wednesday was indicted in connection with two murders in Tampa as well. Authorities suspect him in the deaths of several other bay area women dating back to 1984. "You're not going to see any remorse" for those crimes, either, said John Farmer, an Indiana police officer who has dealt with Bolin in the past.

"He just doesn't have it in him to say he's sorry." But Bolin's relatives and friends know a different Oscar Ray Bolin and he is not the type they would suspect of rape, much less murder. They describe Bolin as a good child who became a hard though unsteady worker with a well-groomed appearance and the ability to make people like him right away. "When you're a father, you can't believe that your son done something like this until they prove it to you," said Oscar Ray Bolin who now lives in Morgan County, Ky. "And they ain't proved a thing yet." Claude Kennard, who lives in Pasco County and has known the younger Bolin by his nickname "Needle" since he was a young man, doesn't believe it, find it. "He really would just work when he wanted," said Edra Kennard, Claude's wife.

"But he was smart. One week he could be a welder, the next a carpenter. It seemed like he could do anything." By 1985, Bolin had taken his wife to Tampa. They lived in apartments and mobile homes in the Gibsonton area while Bolin worked for a variety of companies and drove his own wrecker for a time. Sometime in 1986 or 1987, Mrs.

Kennard said, Cheryl Jo became pregnant. Because she suffered from diabetes, the pregnancy was difficult and Cheryl Jo spent months in a hospital. The baby died of complications soon after birth. "I remember Needle bought a new suit and took the baby back to Indiana, where it was buried," Mrs. Kennard recalled.

The baby was a boy. Cheryl Jo soon became pregnant again. She again spent months in the hospital, but this time the birth went without complication. Another boy, although the child's name could not be determined on Thursday. Shortly after the child was born, Bolin and his wife moved back to Pasco County.

Bolin moved into a mobile home on Coon Hide Road, near his Uncle Jesse and the Kennards. It is shortly before or during this time that police suspect Bolin killed two young women in Tampa. Detectives think Bolin killed another young woman at this time and dumped her body near his mobile home. Bolin has not been charged with that murder. In 1987, Bolin told Claude Kennard that the hospital bills from Cheryl's pregnancies were too much for him to handle.

So he ran. "He said that he just couldn't pay the thousands of dollars they wanted from him," Kennard said. "So off he went." Bolin left Cheryl and his son behind. It is not known whether he saw them again before his arrest in 1987 for the Ohio rape. Bolin's father says Cheryl, who later divorced Bolin and since has remarried, still takes their son to the state prison in Lebanon, Ohio, so Bolin can see his family.

ElKIm Vaccaro Body found April 2, 1985 Meredith Hope Fish Body found Aug. 8, 1985 HNatalle Blanche Holleyj Times art Suspect from 1B Charles R. Holley was a GOP candidate for governor. urdered woman was forgotten victim She said Phillip Bolin called her Wednesday night from a hotel in Tampa to say that he was helping detectives piece together Oscar Bolin life in the area. "He said that he was just treating it like business," Mrs.

Ken-nard said Thursday. "He came in Monday or Tuesday, and he has to come back on Monday." At the time of Matthews' murder, Bolin and his wife, Cheryl Jo, lived in a mobile home on Coon Hide Road, less than 500 yards from where the body was found. Bolin has not been charged in that case, but investigators say he is their only suspect. In Hillsborough, sheriffs Capt. Gary Terry said investigators have turned up minute pieces of evidence that they think will link Bolin to six other killings.

Although some similarities exist in the way the women were killed, more subtle details may be more telling and more crucial to the prosecution's case, Terry said. "He's sophisticated enough to change his method of operation." 1 Ms. Collins and Ms. Matthews were stabbed and beaten repeat -A1 Her death, among eight under investigation, was overshadowed by the Challenger explosion three days later. Natalie Blanche Holley, 25, was found dead, but she had not been robbed.

By JEFF TESTERMAN Timet Start Writer fJ edly. Ms. Holley, Sharon Joan Hopper and Meredith Fish were stabbed to death. Connie Louise Jones was strangled, and Lisa Teri Lynn Matthews was found dead at age 26 on Dec. 5, 1986.

Eisman and Kim Vaccaro were beaten to death but not stabbed. "The difference in the way reward was offered. But no break in the case came until Dec. 5, 1986, when a county road crew discovered a clothed body, partly covered by a sheet, lying in a ditch off Morris Bridge Road. The body was identified as that of Ms.

Collins. She had been stabbed and beaten to death, authorities said. Lisa Eisman and Kim Vaccaro College students Lisa Eisman and Kim Vaccaro left New York for a Fort Lauderdale spring break vacation March 29, 1985. They mailed one post card from the trip. Four days later, their bodies were found floating in the Hillsborough River.

The women, both 20 and roommates at Buffalo (N.Y.) State College, were last seen alive hitchhiking along Interstate 95. The women's bodies were found 300 to 400 yards west of the Interstate 275 bypass bridge. Their faces were severely beaten, and each woman wore only a T-shirt. Police said it appeared the women were killed by blows to the head. Meredith Fish Meredith Fish was 16 when she was stabbed to death in August 1985.

She died of 13 knife wounds to the throat. Her body was found at the Floriland Mall in Tampa. For a while, family members suspected her murder might be related to the death of Billy Rosebud, also 16, who was killed four months earlier. But that theory led nowhere. Connie Fish, Meredith's father, said he has few details on the Bolin lead.

"I pray this is it," he said. Officials are also investigating links between Bolin and the 1984 death of Connie Louise Jones and the 1985 death of Sharon Joan Hopper. Bodies of both women were found in Hillsborough County. Staff writers Sally Hicks, Heddy Murphey and Marlene Sokol contributed to this report, in which information from Times files was used. Tampa.

Mrs. Holley said she feels some relief now that detectives have arrested the man they think killed her daughter. But she still feels tormented by the question, "Why?" "The money wasn't missing," she said. "My daughter was fully clothed when found, and her jewelry wasn't taken. I can't understand what the motive might have been." Teri Lynn Matthews Teri Lynn Matthews called her mother about midnight from her job at the NCNB National Bank regional center in Tampa.

She was leaving work but planned to stop by her boyfriend's house before heading home to Pasco County. Her mother, Kay Reeves, was concerned about her daughter's 35-mile drive to work, but knew her daughter, 26, was cautious. That was the last time Mrs. Reeves spoke to her daughter, who apparently stopped at the Land O'Lakes post office about 2:40 a.m. but never made it home.

That same day, Dec. 5, 1986, a motorist found her body near Coonhide Road and Greenfield Road in north-central Pasco. She had been stabbed and beaten to death. Stephanie Anne Collins Stephanie Anne Collins, 17, stopped by the Eckerd drugstore on Dale Mabry Highway on Nov. 5, 1986.

She wanted to talk her manager into letting her work more hours at her part-time job to earn money for Christmas presents. But she couldn't accept the manager's offer to work that night. She was on her way to rehearsal for a concert at Chamberlain High School. She never made it. Her mother, Donna Witmer, found her daughter's 1977 Plymouth Volare the next morning, parked outside the Eckerd in the Market Place North shopping center.

The keys were on the floor of the car. Family and friends blanketed the area with fliers. Classmates held a candlelight vigil, and a $10,000 they were killed doesn't bother When Natalie Blanche Holley was a toddler in 1964, her daddy was a step away from the Governor's Mansion. But she never made it to the state Capitol, and when she grew up, she never had a chance to marry or have children. On Jan.

25, 1986, a few hours after locking up the Church's Fried Chicken restaurant she managed in Tampa, the young woman, whom family and friends called Blanche, was stabbed to death and dumped in the backwoods of Lutz in northern Hillsborough County. Ms. Holley is one of two young women Oscar Ray Bolin Jr. is accused of murdering. He is a suspect in at least six other killings.

The 25-year-old victim was almost forgotten. While detectives were still searching for clues to her murder, the media and all of America were distracted by another event Jan. 28. "It was the Challenger explosion," explained Blanche's mother, Natalie. "That made everybody forget." Mrs.

Holley cannot forget. Now 65 and recently retired from her job as an operations analyst for the Social Security Administration, she thinks of her daughter every time she glances at the jewelry box decorated with flowers or the photos taken when the two took a five-week jaunt to Europe shortly before Blanche was murdered. Blanche's parents divorced before she finished school. Her father, Charles R. Holley, was a lawyer, circuit judge and state legislator from Pinellas County and was the GOP candidate for governor against Haydon Burns.

He died in Naples in 1981. Blanche was "a reader, on the quiet side" and a girl "who always liked to be around children," her mother said. She attended Keswick Christian School in St. Petersburg and King High and Plant High in us," Terry said. It was "trace evidence" fabric fibers, hair and body fluids that investigators gathered in the Collins and Holley cases that led to the indictments Wednesday, he said.

Until Bolin's black 1984 Grand Prix was tracked down in Pennsylvania last week, the evidence gathered more than four years ago meant little to investigators, Terry said. The car, even two owners later, was still rife with significant evidence, Terry said. He wouldn't say what the evidence was, but he said it is as important now as the anonymous tip that broke open the investigation three weeks ago. Stephanie Anne Collins, 17, was killed before she made it to a rehearsal. New chief brings sterling reputation chief from 1B Los Angeles police officials speak highly of the man who will take over St.

Petersburg's forces Aug. 27. By KAREN DATKO TknM Staff Writer and liked what he heard. "He's interested in the problems of the police officers and he wants to make St. Petersburg a good place to stay and work," Giardina said.

"L.A. has always been known as a leader in law enforcement. He spent 26 years there so he should have a hell of a lot of ideas." Curtsinger said his first job will be to learn about the city and its neighborhoods and determine the best way to provide them with police service. He pledged to bring a change in philosophy that would put the department "in tune with the community" in trying to prevent problems. "I think the kind of philosophical changes I'm talking about take place over a period of years, not a period of weeks," Curtsinger said.

"It takes a lot of time." The new chief instituted some of those changes in Los Angeles. There, Curtsinger wrote in his application, he freed a large number of officers from responding to routine calls so they could concentrate on preventing problems. Curtsinger will have some quick decisions to make. Five or six lieutenant positions need to be filled. The department is also about to embark on a new program of neighborhood police teams, who will target problem areas in the city.

Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) pension but give up a tree service he ran from his home. He supervised 1,570 people in Los Angeles. The St. Petersburg department employs about 700 people. Runyon, who was praised by Obering on Thursday, will continue as acting chief until Curtsinger takes over Aug.

27, then return to the position of assistant chief. He would not comment on the selection Thursday. Obering's announcement ended weeks of expectation and speculation in the department. Obering originally said a new chief would be selected by June 1. "I'm glad the search is over and we have a chief so we can move forward," police Maj.

Marc Harden said. "All of the officers are very happy. They're thrilled," said patrol Sgt. Dennis Simmons, a 21-year department veteran. "We needed a change.

We feel this man is the man who can turn this department around." The Police Benevolent Association (PBA), which has complained about low morale and high turnover at the department, did not endorse a particular candidate. PBA president Sam Giardina, a St. Petersburg police officer, said he met earlier with Curtsinger at the LAPD commander's request tions that involved millions of dollars and hundreds of positions," he wrote. Curtsinger already has read all 217 responses to a PBA survey last year that documented poor morale in the St. Petersburg department, and he has a list of 100 items to address.

He has made a reputation as a problem-solver. For instance, he decided to help increase minority representation in his department by conducting promotion classes for interested officers. Almost half of the first class, including many women and minorities, were promoted. Now his former students conduct the classes. He has already picked out a house to buy.

He lives with his wife, Barbara, and four children, ages 1 through 13. A fifth child will stay with his former wife in Los Angeles. "The first time I came to St. Petersburg, I stopped looking (for another job). I saw what I wanted," he said at a news conference Thursday.

Staff writers Patty Curtin and Rachel Swarns contributed to this report. those he has worked with during his rise through the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). He started as a police officer in 1964 in downtown Los Angeles and ended his career there as the second in command of a quarter of the city. In between, he was an original member of his division's SWAT team, became an explosives and weapons expert, and marched quickly up the ranks. "He has a lot of confidence and he approaches problems head-on," LAPD Commander Bill Booth said.

Police Capt. Sandy Wasson, who worked for Curtsinger, said: "He's honest and straightforward and lets you know where you stand on things. He's very, very approachable, and he has a good sense of humor." Sam Giardina, president of the Police Benevolent Association (PBA), said police union officials in Los Angeles told him Curtsinger is "a fair guy to work with. He'll listen to both sides, and you can take him at his word." Curtsinger appears to be a master of detail, successfully coordinating traffic for the 1984 Olympics. "Often I found myself mediating or negotiating situa ST.

PETERSBURG Ernest "Curt" Curtsinger's reputation has preceded him. Words such as "fair," "thorough," "honest" and "accessible" already have attached themselves to the 48-year-old Los Angeles police commander who will become St. Petersburg's police chief Aug. 27. It is a reputation that Curtsinger cultivated as he groomed himself to become a chief of police.

"It takes time to build credibility, and I have spent 26 years doing just that," Curtsinger wrote in a self-review for City Manager Robert Obering. "You can't make every employee happy, but you can gain their trust." Curtsinger gets rave reviews from.