Defense team a seasoned lot

By Pat Moore, Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 22, 2003

STUART -- An Arkansas attorney and a Florida private investigator -- both no strangers to high-profile murder cases -- have joined the defense team representing a Tequesta man charged with killing the wife of his wealthy father-in-law last year.

Stuart attorney Ed Galante asked his cousin, Arkansas attorney Paul N. Ford, to join the team because of his experience in death-penalty cases, including his representation of one of the infamous "West Memphis Three" nearly a decade ago.

Together, they asked private investigator Rosalie Bolin to assist with the defense of Edward Eugene "Gene" King, 54, who is charged with murdering his wife's stepmother Dec. 3 while she was decorating a Christmas tree.

But the men had no idea Bolin was married to a serial killer on Florida's Death Row.

"I am surprised by that," Ford said Friday. "But I know she is a zealous advocate for people and I could see how she gets emotionally involved in the representation of her clients."

Ford and Galante met Bolin this year an educational seminar required for Florida attorneys handling death-penalty cases.

They said they asked Bolin to assist with the King case because she came highly recommended by defense attorneys in Florida. The two insist her marriage to a Death Row inmate will not affect her work on the Martin County case.

Bolin, 44, a licensed private investigator, previously lived a life of luxury as the wife of a prominent Tampa defense attorney. That marriage ended in 1996, a month before she married Oscar Ray Bolin Jr., who has been sentenced to death seven times for the 1986 murders of three women in Hillsborough and Pasco counties.

The Florida Supreme Court has overturned the convictions twice. He was sentenced to death again in one case last year and is awaiting retrials in the two other cases.

The Bolins exchanged wedding vows over the telephone -- her in a Gainesville apartment and him on Death Row -- in a ceremony televised nationally on ABC's news magazine 20/20.

They met a year earlier, after she went to work for the Hillsborough County public defender assisting lawyers in death penalty cases. Bolin was her first case.

Ford, meanwhile, represented one of three Arkansas men accused of the 1993 cult-ritual killings of three 8-year-old boys that spawned several television documentaries, a book, and an off-Broadway play.

"I didn't think my client was guilty," Ford said of his most famous client, Charles Jason Baldwin, 16, who was sentenced to life in prison.

National interest began after the 1994 convictions of Baldwin and co-defendants, Jessie Lloyd Misskelley Jr., who also received a life sentence, and Damien Wayne Echols, 19, who was sentenced to death.

Televised documentaries, including HBO's Paradise Lost, question the fairness of the three men's trials for killing three second-graders. The films suggest the men were wrongly convicted on little evidence of a ritual slaughter and their alleged association to the occult.

A movie about the case is in production and popular groups, including Pearl Jam, have performed concerts to raise money for the men's defense fund.

While those cases continue to draw national attention, Ford and Bolin have turned their efforts toward King's defense in Martin County.

Galante told a judge he was intending to rely on an insanity defense for King, who had visited a psychiatrist and was taking prescribed psychotropic medications on the day he shot Brooke Berndt, 52, at her waterfront home at 17369 S.E. Conch Bar Ave.

Her husband, Edward Berndt, 81, who made his fortune in real estate, told investigators he was helping his wife trim the tree when King burst into the room and shot her.

Berndt said King also pushed him to the floor, put the gun to his head and asked, "Do you wanna go with her?" Then he put the gun to Brooke Berndt's chest and fired again into her heart.

Assistant State Attorney Nita Denton said her office has not decided whether to seek the death penalty, but she is concerned about the defense investigator's efforts to take her elderly, wealthy victim to dinner.

Berndt testified in a deposition last month that Bolin visited him and invited him out to dinner. He said he did not think she was being unprofessional, but he rejected the invitation after talking to the prosecutor. He said he was afraid he would say something that could be used against him at King's trial.

But Denton said she had a problem with the invitation.

"In my 17 years as a prosecutor, I've never had a defense investigator take one of my victims out to dinner," Denton said. "I was very concerned... so I did some research and I learned who she is."

Ford said he disagreed with Denton, saying Bolin did not invite Berndt to dinner. Even if she had, nothing was improper about it, he said.

"That's what investigators do. They get people to tell them things," he said. "I don't care if they agree to meet at a coffee shop, around a conference table in a law office or over dinner. If they are going to discuss information that could help, I want to get that information."

Bolin has made no secret of her Death Row spouse, whose case has been featured on Court TV, or of her efforts to exonerate him. She could not be reached for comment for this story.

Berndt told attorneys last month that Bolin also asked him to agree to a reduced manslaughter plea for King -- a suggestion he adamantly rejected -- saying he "would probably like to see (King) rot in jail."

He said he later changed his mind.

"I think I'd like to see him die, yes," Berndt testified. "If I were in his shoes, I would want the needle."

pat_moore@pbpost.com

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