He Cut Off a Teen's Arms and Threw Her Down a Ravine — But She Climbed to Safety and Helped Catch Her Attacker By Christina Coulter

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.”

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“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.

If you or someone you know has been sexually assaulted, please contact the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673) or go to rainn.org.