He chopped off teenager’s arms and got paroled
On Sept. 29, 1978 Lawrence Singleton picked up Mary Vincent as the teenager was hitchhiking from Berkeley to Los Angeles. She’d come from home in Las Vegas and was setting out on her own to see California. Singleton told her he had a daughter and offered to drive her to Interstate 5, the fastest route south.
Instead, he kept driving east, toward Modesto. When Vincent realized something was wrong, she would later testify, she became “scared and mad” and found a pointed surveyor’s stick beside the passenger seat. She picked it up and demanded he drive her back to the freeway. “I’m sorry,” Singleton said. “I’m just an honest man who made an honest mistake.” He turned his van around.
Stopping to relieve himself in desolate Del Puerto Canyon, he got out of the van - and so did Mary. As she bent over to tie her shoe, Singleton hit her. He tied her hands, tore open her white blouse and pulled her hair, forcing her mouth onto his penis. “You better suck hard, you bitch,” Vincent remembers he said. He raped her there, then threw her back into the van and drove deeper into the canyon.
It was almost dark when he pulled over again and repeatedly raped and sodomized her, then made her drink so much alcohol that she passed out.
When she woke up, he was cutting the ropes off of her hands and she thought he was letting her go. Then, she looked up and saw an ax coming down as he held out her left arm. “You want to be free?” he said. “You’ll be free.” He chopped off her left arm below the elbow in three strokes of the ax. Vincent was screaming, fighting to pull away, blood was spurting everywhere. He held her down, grabbed her right arm and chopped it off in two strokes. Then he threw the girl off a 30-foot cliff, saying, “OK, now you’re free.”
Despite being nude, in shock and near death she managed to pull herself back up the cliff and alert two passersby. She was holding up her arms “so the muscles and blood wouldn’t fall out,” she said. They wrapped her in towels and drove to an airport to call an ambulance. The first thing Vincent said was, “He raped me.”
While Vincent won a $2 million civil judgment against Singleton, she was unable to collect it when Singleton revealed that he was unemployed and had only $200 in savings. Along with the particularly gruesome aspects of the crime, the case became even more notorious after Singleton was paroled after serving only eight years in prison. He was paroled to Contra Costa County, California, but no town would accept his presence, so he had to live in a trailer on the grounds of San Quentin until his parole ended a year later.
Right before Singleton’s parole ended, Donald Stahl, the Stanislaus County prosecutor at Singleton’s trial, said, “I think, if anything, he’s worse now. He has not taken responsibility. He lives in a bizarre fantasy land and acquits himself each day. He doesn’t accept his guilt and won’t resolve never to do it again.“
In the spring of 1997, a neighbor called police to report Singleton assaulting a woman in his home. When police responded, they found the body of Roxanne Hayes; she had been stabbed multiple times. Hayes was a mother of three.
Mary Vincent traveled from California to Tampa to appear at Singleton’s sentencing. During her testimony, she described Singleton’s attack and the toll the ordeal had taken on her. The judge sentenced Singleton to death. He died in 2001 of cancer in a prison hospital in Florida.
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