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Yahoo
2 days ago
- Yahoo
He Cut Off a Teen's Arms and Threw Her Down a Ravine — But She Climbed to Safety and Helped Catch Her Attacker
NEED TO KNOW In 1978, 15-year-old Mary Vincent was attacked by a man who severed both her arms and left her in a ravine She packed her wounds with dirt, then crawled up a 30-foot embankment to reach the road Bleeding and barely alive, she flagged down a passing car — and later helped identify her attacker in court In the fall of 1978, 15-year-old Mary Vincent was hitchhiking near Modesto, Calif., hoping to get to her grandfather's house after running away from home. When a seemingly kind older man in a blue van pulled over and offered her a ride, she hesitated — but accepted. The man was 51-year-old Lawrence Singleton, a former merchant seaman. After stopping briefly to pick up other passengers and being refused, Singleton continued alone with Mary, eventually turning off onto a deserted road. That's when her instinct turned to fear. Singleton knocked Vincent unconscious, stripped her of her clothing and bound her tightly. He sexually assaulted her repeatedly, ignoring for hours her cries and pleas to be set free, per court records. "You want to be set free? I'll set you free," Singleton said the next morning. He pulled out a hatchet, severed both Vincent's arms, threw her down a ravine and left her for dead. But Mary Vincent did not die. Instead, she heard a loud, persistent message in her head. "I can't go to sleep," she recalled thinking, per an interview with Open Ceilings Magazine. "He's going to do this to somebody else. I can't let that happen." She packed the raw ends of her arms with dirt to slow the bleeding and crawled her way out of the ravine — a 30-foot climb — naked, injured, and barely conscious. Once she reached the road, she managed to flag down a passing car. 'The next morning, two individuals found Mary Vincent wandering nude," reads a court document obtained by UPI. "She was holding up her arms so that the muscles and blood would not fall out.' Two good Samaritans picked her up and rushed her to a nearby hospital. A forensic sketch artist worked with Mary as she recovered from her injuries, and her description helped police identify and arrest Singleton, who was later found guilty of attempted murder, mayhem, kidnapping and multiple sexual assault charges. When asked to identify Singleton in court, she pointed at him with her silver prosthetic hook hand. "I was attacked," she said, per the Tampa Bay Times. "I was raped and my hands were cut off. He used a hatchet... He left me to die." Singleton was sentenced to 14 years in prison, the maximum allowed under California law at the time — but he served just eight. He was released in 1987 and faced public outrage. Towns across California protested his release, and he had to be housed in a trailer on San Quentin prison grounds until his parole ended because no Northern California community would accept him, per the Los Angeles Times. In 1997 — nearly two decades after his attack on Mary — Singleton murdered 31-year-old Roxanne Hayes in Tampa, Fla. He was sentenced to death but died of cancer in prison in 2001. Vincent told UPI at the time that she was devastated "because it had to happen again before anyone realized he shouldn't have been released in the first place." Want to keep up with the latest crime coverage? Sign up for PEOPLE's free True Crime newsletter for breaking crime news, ongoing trial coverage and details of intriguing unsolved cases. "It was only recently I stopped having my nightmares," she told the Los Angeles Times at the time. "Now they're back again. It starts off with my attack, and then I end up seeing all these other people and worse things happening to them." So Vincent took action — she shared her story with victims of trauma and testified before legislative bodies, advocating for sentencing reform. California later passed a law increasing the maximum penalty for crimes like Singleton's, informally dubbed the 'Singleton bill.' Now a mother to two adult children, Vincent lives with her husband in Washington State. A self-taught artist, she has created thousands of pastel drawings — many of them empowering female figures — and even designs her own prosthetic tools for different activities like bowling, using spare parts from old stereo systems and refrigerators, per a 2022 interview with The Netline.
Daily Record
14-07-2025
- Daily Record
'I hitched ride from stranger but day later he'd cut my arms off and thrown me down cliff'
WARNING: DISTRESSING CONTENT Teenager hitchhiker Mary Vincent was picked up by Lawrence Singleton, who brutally raped her and then cut off both her arms before throwing her off a cliff Mary Vincent was just 14 years old when she decided to hitchhike across the country to visit her grandfather, in an attempt to escape her abusive stepfather. Unbeknownst to the innocent teenager, she was venturing into what true crime podcaster Julian Morgans describes as a "hunting ground for dozens of serial killers". Serial murders are relatively uncommon today, but between the early Seventies and the 1990s, particularly along the US West Coast from Los Angeles to Seattle, there was a disturbing epidemic of motiveless murder. It was towards this deadly environment – and an attack that nearly claimed her life – that Mary was headed. On the What It Was Like podcast, she revealed: "I never hitchhiked until the last abuse that I took from my mother's husband. And my sister heard it, and she came and told me that I had to get a ride as far away from the house as possible." In September 1979, Mary joined a couple of other teenagers who were heading in the same direction. However, when a van driven by 51 year old former merchant seaman Lawrence Singleton pulled over for them, he insisted that Mary get in his van alone. "We all started going to the van, and he said, 'No, I only have room for her'," Mary recalled. "Both the guys said, 'I wouldn't go in there if I were you,' but I was desperate. I was a child. I was scared. I wanted to get to my grandpa. And I thought I was one step closer to getting to my grandpa. That's all I could think of." Mary was tired after a long day, and as the van drove along she drifted off to sleep. However, upon awakening, she realised with horror that they were not heading towards her grandfather's Berkeley home but in the opposite direction. In a moment of peril, the quick-thinking teenager searched for something to defend herself with. She recounted: "I looked all over to see what I could find to protect myself. And I saw a wooden stake, the kind that you have on the ground to build a little cheap fence. I picked it up and pointed it to him, and said, 'You're taking me in the wrong direction. Turn around now.' But he made an excuse that he had to go and relieve himself." But Singleton then struck Mary with a sledgehammer, fracturing her skull—a wound so severe that she says part of her brain still occasionally protrudes through the gap left by the hammer, even 47 years later. As she lay semi-conscious, the evil attacker attempted to incapacitate her further by forcing milk spiked with alcohol into her mouth She continued: "He was cutting my clothes off, and then trying to rape me, but he couldn't because I was just this little kid, and he was a big slob. And that's when he took the butcher knife and ground it up inside me three times." She revealed that a physician later informed her that the assault with Singleton's knife had left her internal organs as "ripped her insides until they were like shredded wheat." After binding and repeatedly assaulting her, Singleton then started to drag Mary to a nearby cliff with the intent to kill her. Mary recalled: "When he did that, he grabbed a hold of my one arm, and I tried kicking him, and he sliced my left arm off, swinging two times, which made me fall. And I knew I was going to go into shock." As a child, Mary had learned meditation, a practice that now became her lifeline, helping her concentrate on survival despite the dire circumstances. She remembered observing her surroundings with acute clarity, even noting a scar on her assailant's abdomen from an appendectomy. Singleton then turned his axe on her remaining arm, delivering three brutal strikes to remove it. While gravely injured, Mary continued her meditation, feigning death in hopes of deceiving him, leading him to throw her from a 30-foot cliff. Singleton followed a mile-long trail to the base of the cliff and pushed her into a drainage pipe, leaving her for dead. Severely wounded, all Mary wanted to do was give in to unconsciousness and end her suffering. "But God told me that I had to get up and stop him, that he was going to do it to another person," she explained. According to Mary, the voice of God was persistent, compelling her to climb back up the cliff despite her horrific injuries, and as she struggled out of the culvert, her wounds bled profusely. "I had to stop the bleeding from my arms because I'm moving now and my blood is leaking," she explained. Mary recalled the ordeal: "So I stuck my arms in the dirt, and it packed it to where it acted like mud because it got gelled with the blood, but it stopped me from bleeding. And then, then God helped me up the cliff, and then we walked for three miles." She added that the first people to encounter her were terrified: "I'm all naked, covered in blood, but I have no hands. I look like something out of one of those horror movies. And those two guys freaked out and peeled out. You could see the tyre marks, because they peeled out so fast." A second motorist collected Mary and drove her to the hospital. Upon arrival, she requested to give a statement to a police officer immediately due to uncertainty about her chances of survival. Miraculously, despite being mistakenly administered the wrong blood type during a transfusion, Mary's body adapted and utilised the new blood. She could recollect every detail of Singleton's van, including a note he had pinned to the dashboard showing where he was headed next. This critical information allowed the police to locate him swiftly. Six months later, Singleton was convicted of kidnapping, rape, and attempted murder, and received a fourteen-year prison sentence, despite his lawyer's attempts to intimidate Mary into contradicting her testimony during the trial. After serving only eight years in prison, Singleton was granted early release and went on to commit further crimes, including the murder of a woman in 1997 for which he received the death sentence. However, Singleton managed to evade execution, succumbing to cancer in a Florida prison hospital in 2001.
