Editor’s note: The following story contains material about disturbing crimes against a young girl.
A little girl nicknamed “Coppertop,” killed in Oklahoma over 18 years ago, was loved by all who knew her.
Jamie Rose Bolin, like other 10-year-old girls her age, liked to “sing, sew, ride four-wheelers, watch movies, loved spaghetti” and was a member of a local Girl Scouts chapter in Purcell, a small community about 40 miles south of Oklahoma City, according to court documents obtained by USA TODAY.
She also had a knack for beating her father Curtis Bolin at checkers, was known to rehearse her “cheerleader dance” often and could make light of almost any situation, according to an April 2007 report by The Oklahoman, part of the USA TODAY Network.
“She was a good reader, and she got awards for her reading,” Curtis Bolin shared in a statement recorded in clemency documents. Her “willingness to give” and “help others” is what he was “most proud” of. He was “proud of everything she did.”
Jamie was just “starting to come into her own” when she was beaten with a wooden cutting board, suffocated to death, molested and nearly decapitated by neighbor Kevin Ray Underwood in his apartment on April 12, 2006.
“I know she’d want me to go on,” Bolin previously shared in an interview with The Oklahoman. “She was just starting to come into her own. She was becoming her own person.”
Underwood is scheduled to be executed on Thursday, nearly two decades after he took Jamie’s life to fulfill a recent sexually violent and cannibalistic “desire,” court documents show.
As the execution approaches, USA TODAY is looking back at the tragic crime and who Jamie was before her life was tragically cut short.
Girl left school and was ‘never seen alive again,’ court records show
Jamie was typically left to her own devices after school because of her father’s work schedule. She was alone for a “period time” every day after school ended, court records show.
Underwood let Jamie use his phone to order a pizza for dinner the night before she disappeared, The Oklahoman reported in April 2006. The two were “acquainted” as Jamie had sometimes gone over to his apartment to play with Underwood’s white pet rat, Freyja, which he would place on his shoulder for her to pet.
Jamie played with a classmate in the school library for a short time before she headed home on April 12 and was “never seen alive again,” court documents show. She asked Underwood if she could visit with Freyja that afternoon and was beaten with a wooden cutting board while she watched “SpongeBob SquarePants” on his television before he suffocated her to death.
Archive photos:Jamie Bolin mourned
Jamie fought and pled for her life, begging Underwood to let her go, apologizing and promising not to tell on him, according to The Oklahoman. Underwood later attempted to decapitate the little girl with a decorative dagger before he sexually molested her.
The “frantic” search for Jamie ended on April 14, 2006, two days after her father realized she was gone and 24 hours after local authorities issued an Amber Alert for the 10-year-old girl.
Jamie’s remains were located inside a storage container stashed in Underwood’s bedroom closet after he was questioned by police regarding the little girl’s whereabouts. He was taken into custody, where he confessed to Jamie’s murder on tape.
Jamie’s mother Jennifer Fox was dazed by news of her daughter’s death, crashed the tractor-trailer rig she was driving when she learned what happened, The Oklahoman reported.
“It felt like I stepped outside myself,” Fox said of finding out about her daughter’s death in an April 2007 interview with The Oklahoman. “I freaked out, I think.”
‘She really did exist,’ relative says in April 2007 interview
Jamie and her mother had made plans to go Easter egg hunting that weekend after months of not seeing each other, The Oklahoman reported.
“I was just going to spend time with her,” Fox shared with The Oklahoman at the time. “I think about her all the time to be honest. There’s not a day that doesn’t go by that I don’t think about her.”
Fox remembered her daughter as a fighter, someone who always “did her best in everything.”
“She never gave up. She had to adjust to a lot of different situations in life, but she’s stubborn,” Fox said in a statement recorded in clemency documents.
The family struggled to navigate life after her passing but turned to one another for support, growing closer with every phone call.
Curtis Bolin is sure one day he will reunite with his daughter in heaven, telling The Oklahoman at the time that he’ll “probably just give her a big ol’ hug and tell her I miss her.”
Tennia Lieb, Jamie’s aunt, has sat down for countless interviews about Jamie and collected newspaper clippings in a scrapbook over the years in an effort to keep the memory of her niece from “fading away.”
Jamie’s mother and father, too, have hung onto other mementos like pictures, dolls and the checkerboard used to play games with her father.
“She is part of history, and I want people to know that she really did exist,” Lieb told The Oklahoman.
Kevin Underwood faces execution
Underwood was convicted of murder in 2008 and later sentenced to death. He is set to be executed by lethal injection in Oklahoma on Thursday. If the execution proceeds as scheduled, Underwood will be the fourth person executed in the state this year and the 25th in the nation, pending Joseph Corcoran’s execution in Indiana.
Jamie’s family will receive the closure they “deserve” after Underwood’s death sentence is carried out, with relatives writing in various victim statements that she never got the chance to experience life or make new memories with family or friends.
Instead, she’s buried in a cemetery with her mother, her grandmothers, her great grandmothers and so many others who have passed.
“She didn’t get to have those firsts, make those memories, go to those celebrations, try new food, go on vacations, make mistakes and learn lessons, have laughs and tears and all that is in between,” Jamie’s aunt Jessica Stegner wrote. “Those were taken from her and her family and her friends.”
The only just punishment, in the eyes of Jamie’s family, is death for Underwood.
“I feel justice would be served by his serving his sentence including execution. He did not consider the impact this has had for all the families involved, the local people, and even his own family,” Don Fox, Jamie’s grandfather, wrote in his victim impact statement. “Many have been forever changed by this murder and how many are still affected today.
Contributing: Chad Previch, Bryan Dean and Nolan Clay; The Oklahoman
