Episode 8: Survival Against All Odds: Mary Vincent
1978 was a year for firsts. Louise Brown, the first test-tube baby was born in July of that year. On the 12th of September, Janet Parker, an English medical photographer was the last person to contract and die from smallpox. The global eradication programme had all but wiped-out natural infections of the disease. Later that month, in the United States, a 15-year-old girl was hitchhiking through California when she was abducted by a violent and sadistic offender. Taken to a desolate canyon, she was attacked, maimed and discarded in a concrete culvert, left to slowly bleed out and die. But she was far from dead. This is the harrowing survival story of Mary Vincent.
The Canyon
Mary Vincent was drifting in and out of consciousness. She was in excruciating pain. She didn’t know it yet, but along with her other injuries, she had four broken ribs from when her attacker had flung her down a 30 foot or 9-metre-deep embankment. She was losing a lot of blood, and her body was in shock. She was cold and wanted nothing more than to sleep. She looked down at where her forearms had once been. A sludge or dirt, blood and muscle congealed on the ground below her. She heard a voice within her telling her that she couldn’t sleep. That she had to survive. She packed her forearms with dirt to help stem the bleeding, and forced herself to stand, despite her agonising injuries.
It would be nightfall before she made her way out of Del Puerto Canyon, naked, bleeding and broken. Mary walked until the sun began to rise. Finally, she saw a red convertible car driving towards her with a male driver and passenger. She called out to them to help her, but they drove right past her.
Soon after this, the headlights of an old truck came into view. At this stage, Mary was walking along the middle of the highway. The truck stopped and a couple on their honeymoon got out, horrified by what they saw. They had taken a wrong turn and were not even supposed to be on that road at that time. The couple wrapped her in a blanket and drove as fast as they could to a nearby airport, where they called paramedics. Mary was airlifted to hospital by rescue helicopter. By the time she reached the hospital, she had lost over half of the blood in her body. She was lucky to be alive.
Mary’s Background
Mary Vincent was born in Las Vegas, Nevada in 1963. Her parents, Lucy, a casino dealer who served in the military, and Herb, a gambling machine repairman, had seven children together. Between 1977 and 1978, Mary’s home life became tense. Lucy and Herb were going through marital difficulties, and this, coupled with strict rules that Mary and her siblings were expected to adhere to, made Mary seek freedom outside of the confines of her family home.
In early summer 1978, Mary left home with her boyfriend and ran away to Sausalito, a small city in Marin County, just across the Golden Gate Strait from San Francisco. The two lived in her boyfriend’s car until he was arrested for allegedly sexually assaulting a teenage girl.
After her boyfriend’s arrest, Mary found herself alone. She spent some time sleeping in unlocked cars and abandoned buildings, not quite ready to return to her volatile home life. She made her way to Soquel, a small village in Santa Cruz County, California, where she stayed with an uncle for a brief period.
Day of Abduction
On the 29th of September 1978 15-year-old Mary Vincent bid farewell to her uncle and began hitchhiking south. It was Friday afternoon, and Mary, tired from being on her feet all day and flagging down vehicle after vehicle was desperate to get home to her family. Mary, along with the two male hitchhikers she had met were all heading south and were happy to travel at least some of the way together. A blue van pulled up beside the trio, and they asked for a ride. The middle-aged driver was balding, overweight and wore a blue jumpsuit. He said that only had space for one passenger and indicated that it had to be Mary.
Mary said that the inside of the van was empty, and that there was plenty of room for the other hitchhikers. The two young men pulled her to the side and said to her, ‘you shouldn’t go in there’. They told her that if this driver was only willing to take a solo female hitchhiker, then there was something creepy and unsafe about the situation.
Mary ignored their concerns and climbed into the front seat of the blue van. The driver introduced himself as Larry, and said that he had been heading to Reno, Nevada, but would take a detour and drive her to Los Angeles. The two drove for several hours. Eventually, the fatigue was overwhelming for Mary, and she closed her eyes and drifted off to sleep.
When she awoke, it was almost dark. She was alone in a moving vehicle with a strange man. There were no other cars on the road. She immediately sensed a shift in the atmosphere. Her intuition told her that something had changed. It was dark outside, and Mary noticed that the road signs and markers indicated that they were travelling in the opposite direction from where they were supposed to be headed.
Mary began to panic a little. She reached around her and found a sharpened stick in the passenger footwell and demanded that the driver turn around, which he did. The sun had set, and Larry pulled off the freeway and began driving along an isolated road near a canyon. He told his passenger that he had to relieve himself. Mary’s instincts told her that she was in trouble. She was in an isolated place with an erratic stranger, and no other signs of life around her. She decided that she would run. Looking down, she realised that the laces on the tennis shoes she was wearing had opened, and she stepped outside of the van to tie them.
The Attack
Without warning, Mary felt a blinding pain at the back of her skull. The man who had called himself Larry had hit her in the back of the head with a sledgehammer. She felt several more blows, this time with his fists. She temporarily lost consciousness When she awoke, her abductor had removed her clothes, tied her up and raped her repeatedly throughout the night.
Mary begged him to let her go. She asked him to ‘set her free’. She told him, ‘Let me go. Set me free. … Just set me free. I won’t tell anyone’. Soon after this, she blacked out again. When she woke up, it was daylight, and he was dragging her by the arm out of the van and along the dirt.
He said, ‘You want to be set free? I’ll set you free’ and removed a hatchet from the toolbox in the back of his van. He swung the hatchet at Mary and hacked off both of her hands and forearms below the elbow.
Mary says that she believes that her attacker thought that she was dead. He dragged her to the end of a cliff and threw her over the side. He then climbed down and stuffed her body into a concrete culvert in the ravine below. Mary says that she just ‘lay there, bleeding to death’. Mary lay there in the concrete tunnel for what must have seemed like an eternity. She didn’t know if her attacker had left, or was waiting at the top of the embankment, watching her. Her body wanted to sleep, but she heard a loud voice telling her that she couldn’t sleep. She said that the voice told her that he was going to do this to someone else, and she couldn’t let that happen. So, she stood up and ‘crawled back up the cliff, without any hands’.
Mary spent several hours in surgery, as medical staff battled to save her life. When she woke up from surgery, she gave detailed statements to the police and worked with a sketch artist to create a composite likeness of her attacker. Mary’s description was so accurate that within ten days of Mary’s attack, a suspect was arrested.
Lawrence Singleton’s Background
Lawrence ‘Larry’ Singleton was born in July 1927 in Tampa, Florida. Not much is known about his early life, but as a young man, he found work as a merchant seaman. We don’t know what his profession was at the time of Mary’s attack. He married twice. First, to a woman named Shirley with whom he had a daughter, Debra, and then to a nurse, Mary Collins in 1976. Singleton was a heavy drinker and had a previous conviction for contributing to the delinquency of a minor. By the end of summer 1978, Singleton was estranged from his daughter. At the time of his attack on Mary, he was 50 years old.
Trial
Singleton’s trial took place in early 1979. The prosecution played Singleton’s recorded statement to the court. Mary was a key witness for the prosecution, and bravely testified against the man who had attacked, mutilated and tried to murder her. She told the court the following. 'I was attacked, I was raped, and my hands were cut off. He left me to die’. On the stand, Mary referred to Singleton as ‘her attacker’. This is how she has referred to him ever since. During her testimony, Mary gestured with her prosthetic arms, and stated to the court that he ‘did this’, referring to Singleton.
In March 1979, Singleton was sentenced to 14 years in prison, which was the longest sentence available under California law at the time. He was also ordered to pay his victim USD$2.56 million in compensation in a civil judgement, but Mary did not see any of these funds, as Singleton had no source of income. The judge in the case said the following during sentencing. ‘If I had the power, I would send him to prison for the rest of his natural life’.
Life After the Attack
Mary struggled to come to terms with what had happened to her in the aftermath of her attack. She had little choice but to return to the family home and the circumstances that had caused her to run away to begin with. Her parents argued frequently and did not seem able to deal with or process what their daughter had been through.
Mary’s parents enrolled her in a school for disabled students, but most of her friends had abandoned her. Either too afraid to bring up the attack, or else worried that they would be tarnished by association. After her high school graduation, Mary sought a new start in Washington state. She struggled with stress, depression and an eating disorder. By the mid-1980s, Mary had a son, Luke from a past relationship. She eventually married and had a second son, Alan, but her life was fraught with difficulties, including divorce, having her home foreclosed on and homelessness. Eventually, Mary met and married Bob Clayton, and the two have been together for several decades.
Mary thought that she was free of Singleton. He couldn’t find her or get to her while he was in prison. Unfortunately, lenient sentencing laws in place at the time meant that Singleton was eligible for parole after serving a few short years of his sentence. Mary’s attacker was paroled after serving just eight years and four months of his 14-year sentence.
Parole
The public backlash against Singleton’s release was deafening. Many towns in California refused to allow him to live in their community. Singleton was forced to spend the entirety of his parole living in a trailer on the grounds of San Quentin prison. During this period, he was allowed to leave the grounds two to three times per week to shop and for other short excursions. He also joined Alcoholics Anonymous.
Singleton blamed Mary for the crime, and upon reflection, decided that he, rather than Mary, had been the true victim. We have seen this play out again and again with certain offenders. They either want to further terrorise their victim or are so entrenched in their own delusions and sense of victimhood, that they actually start to believe their own fabricated version of reality.
In Singleton’s case, he alleged that Mary had threatened him with false accusations of rape if he didn’t drive her to Los Angeles. He said that she also threatened him with a weapon – the weapon in question being the sharpened stick she had found on the floor of the van. According to an article by Laura Allan of Ranker, Singleton decided that ‘this was the reason he had become violent’. He unsuccessfully sued Mary Vincent for ‘forcible kidnap for the purposes of robbery’. His frivolous suit was dismissed by a Placer County Superior Court. A journalist who had interviewed Singleton remarked that for him, the most surprising aspect of this case was that ‘Larry Singleton had worked his crimes around in his mind so completely that they did not warrant punishment at all’.
Further Crimes
On the 19th of February 1997, Roxanne Hayes, a 31-year-old sex worker and mother of three was lured to Singleton’s home in Sulphur Springs, Tampa. A house painter was working on a neighbouring property, and watched in horror through the window, as a naked man repeatedly stabbed a woman lying unconscious on the bloodstained couch.) When police arrived, they found Singleton covered in blood, and Roxanne’s body covered in multiple stab wounds. Roxanne’s 11-year-old daughter had to identify her body.
Mary Vincent flew to Florida to testify for the prosecution against Singleton. Mary argued for the death penalty. Singleton was sentenced to death and spent the remaining years of his life on death row. He died of cancer in a prison hospital in Florida on the 28th of December 2001, before his death sentence could be carried out by the state.
Today, Mary is an accomplished artist, victims' advocate, and motivational speaker. In an interview, she said that she remembers that someone asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up. She was 4 years old at the time and responded that she wanted to ‘be a mother to the world’. I think it is safe to say that she has achieved that ambition. Mary credits her belief in God and the love she has for her sons as keeping her going. She says that she is ‘just glad that I’ve been given another chance at life’.
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