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On September 29th, 1978, Mary Vincent was hitchhiking and accepted a ride from Larry Singleton. She survived a violent attack where he cut her arms off and Larry served eight years of his fourteen-year sentence. He later murdered Roxanne Hayes on February 19th, 1997 and was sentenced to death, but he died in prison in 2001.
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RECAP: In September 1978, 15-year-old Mary Vincent was hitchhiking, and Larry Singleton picked her up. He was drinking and driving, and Mary got a feeling that she needed to get away from him. When she tried to escape, he hit in the head with a sledgehammer, raped her, and cut both of her arms off. He tossed her over a 30-foot cliff, then shoved her body into a drainage pipe. Mary regained consciousness and got herself to the highway where she could get some help. Larry Singleton denied attacking Mary. He agreed that he picked her up in his van, but he claimed he also picked up two other hitchhikers, Larry and Pedro, and they were the ones that attacked Mary. Larry had a total of 7 charges against him and since he admitted to drinking and driving, the police consulted alcohol abuse experts and they confirmed that an individual is responsible for their actions regardless of how drunk you are.
Detectives Breshears and Reese started digging into Larry’s past and they learned that he was an accomplished sailor. As far as the United States Coast Guard was concerned, he was qualified to command any US merchant marine ship on the high seas, anything from a two-hundred ton tanker filled with oil to the Queen Elizabeth II cruise ship. He was known as an “unlimited master”, the highest ranking the Coast Guard could bestow on a sailor. To earn that rating, a sailor must have many years of sailing experience and pass a series of detailed examinations and the exams last four full days.
Larry was ambitious and had taken his formal training at the Maritime Institute of Technology and Graduate Studies in Baltimore. He graduated with a captain’s certificate. It was through his line of work that he met his second wife. In 1970, he was aboard the President Wilson, and he met Celia Johnson. He was the ship’s navigator, and she was the ship’s nurse. Larry had already been married and divorced, with a teenage daughter named Debbie and he and Celia hit it off and got married.
He soon left cruise ships and got hired with Central Gulf Lines and this put a strain on his marriage because he was based out of New Orleans (Or-leans) and Celia was on the West Coast. It took her awhile to find out that her husband was an alcoholic, and he was violent. She was trying to figure out what to do when Larry became second in command on the Green Wave. Larry Singleton was transporting ammo into a war zone during the Vietnam War. Long before that, he had also been an infantryman (infantry-min) in Korea. His friends said he had participated in the brutal and bloody battle, Pork Chop Hill.
The battle of Pork Chop Hill was a crucial event that the soldiers went through during the Korean War. It’s strategic positioning provided a key advantage point for the United Nations forces and the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army. Both sides understood the significance of controlling this hill. It was elevated and provided a view of the surrounding area. The soldiers dealt with rugged terrain, limited supplies, and extreme heat, heavy rain, and freezing temperatures. The soldiers endured relentless enemy attacks and the intense fighting led to many casualties.
This is an experience Larry rarely ever discussed. He and his wife Celia soon got a divorce, and he accepted one of the most dangerous jobs aboard any vessel, he chose to become a tanker mate. He spent most of his time below decks, breathing in poisonous fumes from the gallons and gallons of flammable oil. His qualifications could have had him doing plenty of other things, but he was supervising the loading and unloading of oil. If the oil spilled, he would be responsible, and he could face criminal and civil penalties.
When news of Larry’s arrest was first released, his ex-wife, Celia, said “He couldn’t have done it. It was not his style.” She told the local papers that he was very devoted to his first wife, Shirley, who had died from cancer. She said he was faithful, and a loving father. But things weren’t so great between Larry and his daughter, Debbie. They had argued over the ownership of the Bay-Area home. It was in her mom, Shirley’s name, even though she had passed away. Debbie wanted it in her name and when they fought about it, Larry hit her, and she went to the police. She said he drank too much, and she was afraid of being beaten. She was sixteen and wanted to be removed from his custody so she could go live with some friends.
Larry’s ex-wife Celia said that after this incident, Larry didn’t see the point in living any longer. He suffered from depression that wasn’t being treated and his health was failing. After he attacked Mary and cut her arms off, he combined Scotch and barbiturates, which are a class of depressant drugs that usually relax you or could make you drowsy. It can be used to stop or prevent seizures, but he mixed this cocktail as an attempt to end his life. It didn’t work and he ended up in the hospital for four days. When he was released from the hospital, he saw the story in the newspaper about the search for the ax-rapist. His ex-wife, Celia said he just folded up the paper and sat there quietly. She assumed he was just stressed or exhausted, but in the back of her mind, she did think about all the times he had picked up hitchhikers.
Since this case obviously had a lot of publicity surrounding it, Larry’s trial was moved to San Diego and trial started in March 1979. Mary Vincent testified about the assault and mutilation in great detail. On March 29th, 1979, a California Superior Court jury found Larry Singleton guilty of seven counts: one count each of rape, sodomy, kidnapping, mayhem, and attempted murder, and two counts of forcible oral copulation. The state had recently passed new sentencing laws so the most he could be sentenced to was 14 years in prison. The judge gave him the maximum allowed. As Mary was walking out of the courtroom, she was led past Larry and he whispered to her, “If it’s the last thing I do, I’ll finish the job.”
Larry never took any responsibility for what he had done and went on to claim that “mental torture” was inflicted on him in jail.
-He instead that Mary was a sex worker and denied having anything to do with the attack. He even called her “$10-a-night whore.”
He said he was held, “in the 3-G tank without any lights, and cockroaches running in my ear until I finally got moved. I wasn’t allowed a full night’s sleep either. I don’t see how I kept my sanity. They took my mind away from me.” He said that the investigators had framed him by putting a hatchet in his toolbox and as for the bloody pants they recovered, he said they never existed. He only washed the carpet in his van because his teenage daughter had been hauling hay for her horse, it was all a big coincidence.
He of course denied assaulting Mary. Then he began spouting claims that his daughter was suffering from this whole ordeal as well. He said, “Debbie couldn’t finish her law studies and had to finish business school. She had to change her name to get a job in a bank. I spent $27,000 on Laetrile (lay-a-trill) treatments for my first wife. I nursed her until she died from cancer in 1977.”
Here’s the real story. After everything Larry had done, he was running out of money. He had to pay his lawyers and he lost his seaman’s pension benefits. Prior to this, he actually had quite a bit of money put away and could have enjoyed a nice retirement, so he was acting as if he was the victim and he wanted to file a suit in federal court. Under a 1983 work incentive law that was passed while Larry was incarcerated, inmates in the program were granted one day off for every day in the program. So, this, plus his good behavior, meant that he only had to serve 8 years before he was paroled. As his parole date was approaching, there was another problem that arose.
Politicians in California knew that the citizens were not going to want him in their area. They tried to pull a fast one and contacted Larry Singleton’s relatives in Tampa, Florida to see if they could take him, but before the family could respond, the whole state of Florida rejected him, so he was California’s problem. Attorneys won a temporary restraining order to bar him from being placed anywhere in Contra Costa County. Corrections decided he would live in anonymity in San Franciso, but when Police Chief Frank Jordan found out, he had the city attorneys bar Larry from entering the city limits. The next day, on April 25th, Larry was released, but.....no one knew where to send him. His psychiatrist said, “Because he is so out of touch with his hostility and anger, he remains an elevated threat to others’ safety inside and outside of prison.”
Stanislaus County sent a letter to corrections officials stating they didn’t want Larry. The letter said his crime was, “too heinous for any rational human being to comprehend, should never have been granted parole in the first place.” They tried sending him to Nevada, but they said no. Larry’s ex-wife Celiea released a public statement saying she would take him in, he could live with her. She said, “I’m not afraid of him, and he has to live somewhere.”
The problem wasn’t who he could live with though, it was where. There had been many anonymous threats to Larry’s life and armed parole guards were brought in to shuttle him to a secret location in northern California while things were sorted out. He was staying at nice motels, guarded and getting plenty of food. County official Claire Thomas released his location because she said it was inappropriate to withhold the information from the public, so he was sent to another motel. When he got there, the guy checking him in recognized him and called his friend who just happened to be a reporter for the local paper, the Times Tribune. The next morning, Larry opened the door, thinking it was his bodyguards knocking, but he was greeted by reporters. Every time they moved him, his location continued to get leaked.
The state eventually rented him a furnished studio apartment and Larry finally felt settled. He was able to go out shopping, to the movies, and to get food, it felt normal. The next morning, the local reporter interrupted regular programming with a special bulletin. Larry Singleton was residing in Rodeo township. Larry knew nothing of this, and his guards were also unaware of the situation unfolding. Townspeople began to gather around the apartment to protest. The guards locked down the streets. Parole agents and county officials showed up to discuss their options. One of them said Larry should consider serving his remaining eleven months of parole at a minimum-security prison, but he said he refused because he was an innocent man.
Things clearly had to change and fast. They couldn’t keep moving Larry around and it was costing the Department of Corrections $4,000 a day to keep him guarded. Officials removed him from the apartment and continued to come up with ways to hide him until they could find a solution. Since no community would accept him, there was no choice left. The Governor decided that Larry was going to serve his parole time at San Quentin, but he wouldn’t necessarily be locked up inside. He arrived there on Mary 30th and he was taken to a trailer that was set up on the prison grounds. No one could visit him, except his ex-wife and it couldn’t be often. He had to be home from 10 PM to 6 AM, but he could leave prison grounds when he was with a parole agent.
He would be a free man on April 25th, 1988, and the game of finding a place for him to go would start all over again. As the date was approaching, a farmer in Oregon offered to let him move in with his family to work on his farm. The state refused this request, so a church group in Oregon offered to take Larry in. When asked how he was feeling about things, he said as soon as he got out, he was going to file a complaint against Mary Vincent for lying about him and kidnapping him. He also wanted the California Department of Corrections off his back.
For years, he claimed he was actually a victim of this whole thing too because he got locked up when he was innocent. After his release, he suddenly “remembered” that Mary threatened to accuse him of rape, and she was pointing a stick at him. He filed a complaint, suing Mary Vincent for “forcible kidnap for the purposes of robbery.” He alleged he felt sorry for her and claimed that he almost vomited three times and couldn’t sleep for several nights after filing the claim. The court dismissed it.
The Bride of Christ Church was a fundamentalist Christian sect in Azalea, Oregon. They personally invited Larry to their town to live with the 65 church members. They would grow their own food and raise livestock. Unfortunately, the public wasn’t happy about this, and someone took a shotgun to the church and shot at two of their vehicles. There was no one in the vehicles, but calls started rolling into the governor of Oregon’s office and everyone in the community wanted to make sure Larry didn’t get sent there. Larry heard about the mess this was causing, so he called the church and declined their offer.
When Larry was released, he had a tough time finding a place to go and it wasn’t going to be easy. In late June, he wrote to a Southern California court to say that he was living in northern California, in the town of Richmond. Everyone in the town was surprised, no one had seen him, and the Police officers said he wasn’t there. The address he had used in the letter was the state parole office, where his former parole supervisor worked. The former parole officer hadn’t seen or heard from him since his last day of parole, and he hadn’t registered in Richmond as a sex offender.
While he was missing, or hiding, Mary Vincent went to court and got a $2.4 million dollar judgment against him. In June, Larry called his former parole supervisor and said he was actually in Florida, living with his brother in the Forest Hills neighborhood of Tampa. He had seven brothers and sisters and all of them had been hiding from the media, but they were a close family. Since he had served his time, he could live anywhere, but he did have to register as a sex offender, and he hadn’t done that. He bounced around between all of his siblings’ homes, but people kept finding him, so the family rented him an apartment in the Tampa area. The town they chose was 20 miles outside the city limits.
As you cross the bridge and enter Gibsonton, there was a sign that said GIANT’S CAMP. It was a combination of a trailer park and a restaurant that was started by people who had quit the carnival. Gibsonton was the place where carnival people would go during the winter or off-season and they would retire there when their performing days were over. The Singleton family was putting Larry in the town where everyone was different. He was still an alcoholic because somehow, he was never required to attend AA meetings as part of his parole or during his time behind bars and he was now going by the name Bill Johnson.
On April 8th, 1991, Larry entered a drugstore and stole a $10 disposable camera and he got caught. Local members of the New York vigilante group, the Guardian Angels picketed the courthouse when he was charged. He served 60 days of a six-month sentence for the theft. Six weeks after his release, on November 23rd, he stole a $3 hat from Wal-Mart. He was caught and told the judge that he was caring for a 75-year-old man, and he had gone to Wal-Mart to buy adult diapers. He said he picked up the hat to buy for a friend and he paid for the diapers, but forgot to pay for the hat.
When security had picked him up outside the store, he gave them the name Bill Johnson, so now he was charged with petty theft and giving a false identity. He was sentenced to 2 years in jail and when he got out, he headed back to Gibsonton to be with the one friend he had made, but he found out that his friend had cancer. His only friend in the world did pass away and Larry began drinking more.
His brother Herb stepped in and decided Larry should move to his own home. In July 1996, he used the name Bill Singleton to put down a $10k down payment on a converted ex-Army barrack in the Orient Park neighborhood of Tampa and he would pay another $15k over the next few months to cover the full purchase price. This was money his brother Herb had given him and now Larry was a property owner. His brothers Herb, Walter, and Jimmy helped him fix the place up. His neighbors said he was great, and they would do barbecues, he came from a tight knit family, and he got a dog named Kayla.
On February 1st, 1997, Larry stole an $87 power drill. He was charged with shoplifting and sent home. When he got there, he wrote a letter thanking everyone who helped him find peace, especially his brother, Herb. He placed the note on the dining room table and his neighbor, Stu Simon, watched as Larry took a hose from the garage and attached it to the tail pipe of his van and stuck the other end through the top of the driver’s side window. He opened the door, got in, and started the vehicle and sat there in the driveway, waiting. Stu realized his neighbor whom he knew as Bill, was trying to end his life, so he ran over and pulled him out. He told him he should go to the hospital, but Larry declined and went back in the house, but an hour later, Stu saw him trying the same thing again, so he ran over and pulled him out.
On the third time it happened, Stu ran over, but this time, Larry was unconscious in the van, so he called the police, and he was taken to the psychiatric hospital. I want to highlight this next part. The doctors wrote, “He is incapable of surviving alone or with the help of willing and responsible family or friends, all available restrictive alternatives have been judged to be inappropriate. There is substantial likelihood that in the near future, he will inflict serious harm on himself or another person.”
Larry’s family pleaded with doctors to keep him in custody, but they put him on medication and released him three days later.
While this all happening, Mary Vincent met Mark McCain and they fell in love. He was the boss of a landscaping crew, and he was good at making her laugh. They kept the location of their wedding secret, three journalists had been invited, but they had to sign an agreement not to disclose the location. Since Larry Singleton had threatened to finish the job when he got out, Mary had to be extremely careful. The Department of Motor Vehicles wouldn’t reveal if there was a driver’s license in Mary Vincent’s name, so marriage certificates had to be arranged in advance so her marriage to Mark wouldn’t be state record. There couldn’t be a paper trail left for Larry.
Mary had settled into a town where she finally felt safe and the residents knew her story, but they protected her and refused to talk to outsiders about her.
She entered psychotherapy which she continued for many years. After the attack, her parents got a divorce, her dad went to Alaska where he joined the Alaskan Air National Guard and her mother remained in Vegas where she was a blackjack dealer. Mary couldn’t return to school after the attack, and she couldn’t really work either. She received $13k from the California Victim of Crimes Act and $6k from donations that came from a public fund set up in her name and she had some public assistance. This was her total income for the first ten years after the attack.
She hated hearing anything about the vile shit bag that attacked her. She says, “Whenever I hear his name, I go into a panic. So, to anyone who is ever around me, I say: ‘Don’t say that name.’ I don’t watch this on Televison, because if I ever see a picture of him, I just start shaking.”
After the attack, Mary joined a school for the handicapped and started seeing a therapist. She also had to find new friends and she felt incredibly isolated. She explained that her old friends either hated her or they were so uncomfortable that they just couldn’t deal with it. She said she felt like a public spectacle and the therapy didn’t work. Her family broke apart and her parents got a divorce.
Mary joined a victim's group, hoping to find a way to heal, but it didn’t work because she wasn’t able to talk about her emotions and she didn’t feel that she could turn to her family because they seemed to be even more traumatized by the tragedy than she was. Mary said, “They couldn’t handle it. They took it harder than me. I’m telling them, ‘I need you’, but they couldn’t do it. They were more interested in what they felt about what happened to me than what I felt.” After she graduated, she became very secretive about her life, but dealt with depression, an eating disorder, and thoughts of suicide.
She found male partners who understood her, but they couldn’t deal with the pain she was experiencing, so she just stopped going out. She did end up divorcing her husband, but said she eventually found peace in her children and her ex-husband's mother. She said, “I needed a mom, and I found one. It’s my mother-in-law, Pat Platt, who lives nearby. When anyone asks me if I’m close to my mom, I say yes, because Pat’s my mom now.”
Her mental health has improved over the years, but she still has trouble sleeping. She said, “I’ve broken bones thanks to my nightmares. I’ve jumped up and dislocated my shoulder, just trying to get out of bed. I’ve cracked ribs and smashed my nose. Every day I pray to God to make a space I can breathe in, and every day God gives it to me.”
After the attack, she did try public speaking, but she didn’t find comfort in reliving that experience. She was going to schools, telling her story and explaining to kids why they shouldn’t hitchhike, but they were making rude comments to her, cussing at her, and saying things like, that could never happen to me. It made her feel bad, and it wasn’t a good environment for her. In 2009, she made an appearance at the Ventura County Government Center where she said, “I would never have been able to turn from victim to survivor without advocates and attorneys. I will never get over being attacked. I wake up every morning with a constant reminder. But I can move past it.”
Mary Vincent says she no longer sees herself as a victim. “Most people, if they ever put their mind in the position where something like this happened to them, they would probably still be in the hospital now, being a big vegetable. But I’ve accomplished so much in my life. I need to share that, letting them (the public) know that this isn’t going to get me down and nothing will.”
She concentrates on the skills she’s learned and has faith in prayer. She says, “I’m a Hobbit at home. Always wanting to serve, looking after everybody, cooking things, that’s my therapy. As well as knowing everything has a way of working itself out.” She likes to disappear for hours, reading science-fiction books, especially by author Piers Anthony. She says, “They’re uplifting books. They make me feel like I’m one of the characters and not some mutant outcast.” She admits that when she’s lost in that alternative universe, she still has arms.
She was interviewed for the show American Journal where she said, “He took away my pride, my esteem, my childhood. I mean, this isn’t living, this is existing.” She said she lived in hiding, in fear of her attacker and she said she considered suicide. She explained that, “I’m haunted when I wake up. I’m haunted when I’m sleeping. It won’t leave, it’s always there. As I get older, its getting harder to use my arms, and I have to keep myself in shape just to deal with the everyday chores, the everyday life. I have to work ten times harder than the average person with hands to do anything, fold clothes, do dishes.”
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