Bernard Bolender was executed by the State of Florida for four murders
According to court documents Bernard Bolender and two accomplices would go to a drug deal involving the four victims. Soon the deal went south and Bolender would kidnap the four victims who would be tortured and murdered. The bodies of John Merino, Scott Bennett, Rudolfo Ayan, and Nicomedes Hernandez were found in a burnt out car
Bernard Bolender would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
Bernard Bolender would be executed via the electric chair on July 18 1995
Bernard Bolender Photos
Bernard Bolender Case
A Miami man convicted of four torture murders in a drug deal that went sour 15 years ago was executed Tuesday in Florida’s electric chair.
Bernard Bolender, 42, was one of three men convicted of the four murders, but the only one executed for the crime. The U.S. Supreme Court, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta and U.S. District Judge Federico Moreno in Miami all declined to block the execution in a flurry of appeals Monday and Tuesday morning. It was Bolender’s fourth death warrant.
He had a last meal of baby back ribs, a 16-ounce Delmonico steak and four peaches. He ate it all and complimented the chef. He also was given his last rites before the execution shortly after 10:05 a.m. He was pronounced dead at 10:19 a.m.
Before the execution he read from a prepared handwritten statement in which he said the courts and Florida Gov. Lawton Chiles had turned ‘a deaf ear’ to his pleas. The last round of appeals included an affidavit by prison inmate Clarence Muscynski who said that Joseph Macker, one of Bolender’s co- defendants, once told him he lied during Bolender’s trial to save his life and put Bolender on death row. Three other inmates have also said Macker told them he framed Bolender. Bolender and two co-defendants, including Macker, 58, and Paul Thompson, 49, kidnapped four drug dealers who went to Macker’s Miami apartment to make the deal, according to court records.
The three robbed, tortured and killed the dealers when they failed to produce the drugs they had promised. A jury ruled Bolender took the leading role. The bodies of the four victims were found in a partially burned car on Interstate 95.
Macker later confessed and implicated Bolender. Bolender denied being in Macker’s apartment at the time of the murders. His fingerprints were found on the trunk of the burned car, but Bolender explained one of the victims had tried to sell him drugs earlier on the first day of the two-day murder and torture spree. A jury recommended life in prison but the trial judge set the recommendation aside and sentenced him to death.
Macker served seven years and is a free man. Thompson’s prison sentence will be up in 1997.
Bolender’s application to the Supreme Court — and his separate request for a full review of his case — said his jury was never told Macker failed a polygraph test during his plea bargaining process to escape the death penalty, nor was it told that Macker was involved in previous homicides. Bolender was convicted in April 1980 for the murders three months earlier.
His case has been on appeal since. The Florida Supreme Court affirmed his conviction and sentence in 1983, but a state circuit judge threw out the death penalty in 1985, saying Bolender’s lawyer was ineffective because he did not present any evidence during the penalty phase of his trial. The Florida high court, however, reversed the judge’s ruling in 1987. Bolender began his federal appeals process in 1990 in U.S. District Court in Miami.
https://www.upi.com/Archives/1995/07/18/Miami-torture-murderer-executed/8652806040000/
