Lawrence Singleton

• 1. Introduction

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  Lawrence Singleton, born in Tampa, Florida, in 1927, once told a judge that he was "a confused, muddleheaded old man." His record said otherwise. Singleton committed one crime so brutal that California rewrote its sentencing law because of it. Then, years after walking free, he committed another. The story of how a hitchhiking teenager named Mary Vincent met him on a California road raises hard questions. How did she survive what he did to her? Why did a maximum sentence keep him in prison for only eight years? And what happened to the people who lived near him once he was released?

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• 2. The Road to Berkeley

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  On the 29th of September 1978, a 15-year-old named Mary Vincent was hitchhiking outside Modesto, California. She had run away from her abusive stepfather in Las Vegas, Nevada. Her destination was her grandfather's house in Berkeley.

  A former merchant seaman named Lawrence Singleton picked her up. According to the source, he knocked her unconscious with a sledgehammer and spent the night raping her. He then used a hatchet to cut off both of her forearms.

  Singleton believed she was dead or close to it. He threw her from a 30-foot cliff beside Interstate 5, near Del Puerto Canyon, leaving her naked and bleeding. At the bottom of that drop, Mary Vincent was still alive.

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• 3. Mud and Miles

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  Mud was the only help within reach at the bottom of the cliff. Vincent pushed what remained of her arms into it, and the mud slowed the bleeding enough for her to keep moving. With no arms to climb with, she still pulled herself back up to the road.

  Then she walked. She covered 3.9 miles, naked, bloodied and without hands, before she found a passing couple. They took her to a hospital.

  By the time police arrested Singleton, Vincent was wearing prosthetic arms. Her survival had turned a case with no witness into one with a very credible one.

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• 4. Facing the Defendant

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  Six months after the attack, Mary Vincent walked into court and faced Singleton. Her testimony helped convict him. He received fourteen years in prison, which was the longest term California law allowed at that time.

  The presiding judge made his frustration plain. He said, "If I had the power, I would send him to prison for the rest of his natural life."

  Vincent also won a civil judgment against Singleton worth $2.56 million. She never collected it. Singleton was unemployed, in poor health, and had only $200 in savings.

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• 5. A Town Nobody Wanted

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  Singleton served eight of his fourteen years. He shortened the term through good behavior, including work as a teaching assistant in a prison classroom. California then paroled him to Contra Costa County, and the real fight began.

  Time magazine described what followed. As officials tried to settle him in one Bay Area town after another, angry crowds and the Tampa chapter of the Guardian Angels "led protests, screamed, picketed and eventually prevailed."

  In Rodeo, about 25 miles northeast of San Francisco, roughly 500 protestors forced officers to move him from a hotel room under armed guard. A plan to house him across from Concord's City Hall also collapsed under protest.

  At one apartment in Contra Costa County, 400 residents surrounded the building. Officers took him out wearing a bullet-proof vest.

  Governor George Deukmejian finally ordered that Singleton spend his one-year parole in a trailer on the grounds of San Quentin prison.

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• 6. The Singleton Bill

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  In 1987, public anger over his release produced a new California law known as the Singleton bill. It carries a sentence of 25 years to life for offenders whose crimes involve torture, and it blocks their early release. Mary Vincent supported it.

  One journalist who interviewed Singleton noticed something other than the sentence. In the journalist's words, Singleton had "worked his crimes around in his mind so completely that they did not warrant punishment at all."

  Donald Stahl, the Stanislaus County prosecutor from the trial, agreed. Just before the parole ended, he said, "I think, if anything, he's worse now. He has not taken responsibility." He added that Singleton "lives in a bizarre fantasy land and acquits himself each day."

  Stahl's last warning was that Singleton would not resolve never to do it again.

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• 7. Return to Florida

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  A $10 disposable camera put Singleton back in a Florida courtroom in the spring of 1990. He served a 60-day sentence for stealing it. That winter, he was convicted of stealing a $3 hat and received a two-year prison term. He pleaded for sympathy before that sentencing, and it did not change the outcome.

  In 1997, a neighbor in Sulphur Springs, Florida, called police to report that Singleton was assaulting a woman inside his home. Officers found Roxanne Hayes dead. She had been stabbed several times in the upper body. Hayes was the mother of three children.

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• 8. The Tampa Verdict

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  Mary Vincent crossed the country from California to Tampa to appear at Singleton's sentencing. On the stand, she described his attack on her and the toll it had taken on her life.

  On the 20th of February 1998, the jury found Singleton guilty. On the 14th of April 1998, the judge sentenced him to death.

  Singleton never faced execution. He died of cancer on the 28th of December 2001, in the prison hospital at the North Florida Reception Center near Starke, Florida.

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