Love is a mystery to just about everyone. Nobody knows where it comes from, why it appears, or what it means.
People like to shrug off the oddities involved by saying that “love is blind” as a pat explanation for the strange ways that it affects people. The truth is, love crops up in the most unlikely of environments every single day.
One of the strangest staging grounds for romance? The American prison system, which is full of romantic young women (and, occasionally, adorable puppies) throwing their lot in with convicted criminals.
It’s a phenomenon known as hybristophilia, a romantic attraction to partners who have committed violent crimes. While the visiting room at the country prison might not sound like fun to you, for women like Rosalie Bolin, it’s practically Paris.
She’s a former Miami socialite who famously threw her lot in with a truck driver convicted of killing three women. Rosalie abandoned her husband and four young daughters almost twenty years ago, soon after she met Oscar Bolin while working in the public defender’s office.
Rosalie Martinez became Rosalie Bolin when she and Oscar married in 1996. Now, after two decades of marriage, she still stands by her husband, who has been convicted for the murder of three young women many times over the course of 11 trials since 1986.
Until the mid-90's, Rosalie lived a lavish life as the wife of a prominent attorney.
She lived in a beautiful Italianate mansion, wore fancy baubles, and was a frequent guest on the social circuit with her defense attorney husband Victor Martinez. In a 1996 interview with 20/20, she told reporters, "I had very expensive jewelry. 3-carat diamond earrings on each ear. 6-carat diamond ring, $500,000 house, Mercedes."
Together, the couple also had four young daughters.
Now grown, Jennifer, Elizabeth, Kristina, and Katherine have children of their own, and seem to have a reasonably solid relationship with their mother. When Bolin left the family in 1996, courts called her judgment into question and gave full custody of the girls, then aged 6-14, to their father.
She gave up her daughters and her luxurious lifestyle for a man who was already sentenced to a lifetime in prison.
This is a picture of an early encounter between Rosalie Bolin and her future husband. She met him while working as an assistant to the public defender. She went to talk to him in his cell and felt a spark. "I felt his isolation, his confinement, his loneliness… It affected me because I felt the same way. And it left me breathless," she told the LA Times.
Oscar was equally smitten with the attractive young legal assistant.
While the pair initially met in 1994, they grew closer over the next two years as Rosalie became more and more convinced of Oscar's innocence. Eventually, she became a licensed private investigator to better pursue her hunches on his case.
Oscar, a former carnival worker and one-time long-distance trucker, has been convicted of the murders of three women.
He has faced 11 trials for the murders of Natalie Holley, Stephanie Collins, and Terri Matthews and has been convicted on at least seven occasions. Though he pleaded guilty to rape at gunpoint, he has never admitted to murder, and his wife maintains his innocence.
Rosalie and Oscar were married on live television in 1996, which was aired to 20 million people.
Bolin, already sentenced to life in prison, received a death sentence around the same time as the nuptials. He was not able to attend his wedding physically. Instead, he and his bride exchanged vows over speaker-phone with a minister looking on.
Today, they have been married for a total of 18 years.
Oscar sends Rosalie hand-made cards inscribed with love notes almost every day, and the couple see each other twice a week. Due to the nature of Oscar's confinement, this is the extent of their relationship, but Rosalie insists the marriage remains strong.
At the moment, the pair is working together on another appeal to prove Oscar's innocence. Says Rosalie, "I just want people to listen…there are innocent people that are wrongfully convicted. It happens."
For more on this story, watch 20/20's follow-up with Rosalie Bolin below.
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