Mary Vincent: A Life of Survival
By Fiona Davis
CONTENT WARNING: This story contains graphic descriptions of sexual violence.
There is unspoken life buried in the pages of court documents. In the experiences of witnesses, law officers, victims, and defendants presented at a given trial, sensations are deemed irrelevant. Emotions and conjectures, too biased to be included, are omitted. Moments inherently tangled and visceral, where boundaries of law and morality are tested, must be stripped bare. The inordinate details that make up the vitality of a moment are extinguished in the need for objectivity and impartiality. The medium of Lady Justice has the intended effect.
Take one particular document, randomly archived, only to be found with just the right internet search, that details a trial – one that surrounded an incident on a February afternoon in 1997. Listed under the state’s case, an eyewitness account, given by a housepainter working in a Florida suburb, details what he saw through the window of a home he was hired to work on: a man, the home’s owner, strangling a naked woman. The account recalls the “bone crushing” sounds that came each time the man struck her, but it did not articulate just how it felt for the painter to kick at the front door as he heard the woman cry a muffled “help.” Whether he remained silent, or let out a breath or yell or sob of frustration when he realized the door would not budge. Whether his foot thrummed hours or days afterward.
In the same section, the notes of the officer called to the home mark his arrival at 6:23 p.m., but not what he felt when his knock at the door was answered by an elderly man, in boxers and an unbuttoned shirt, with blood smeared across his chest. It notes the smell of alcohol on the man’s breath, but not how the scent cut sharply through or merged into the waves of fresh paint that must have been present in the air. It documents the jittered excuses the old man gave—a disagreement with his girlfriend, an accident chopping vegetables—before the officer forced his way through the door, through the home, to find the body of a woman lying face-down. It doesn’t say whether the sight of her closed eyes gave him hope that she may only be unconscious. Whether her skin was still warm or had gone cold by the time he tried and failed to get her to respond. Here, across 109 pages of court summary, the impact of a moment as complex as this is distilled beyond itself, down to a clean, linear narrative that the whole truth can’t fully live within.
But the events that took place in this case found life beyond these law reports. Journalists across the country heard about this moment and saw an opportunity. Their interest wasn’t for the victim, Roxanne Hayes. Her boyfriend—who spent nearly a decade with her—when asked by news outlets would describe a generous woman with a wild kind of laugh, who climbed into dumpsters to save stray kittens and loved her three children immensely. But in the articles that followed her death, she was mostly mentioned in passing, her career as a sex worker largely replacing her name and obscuring her identity. The media’s interest wasn’t even really for the crime committed. What turned out to be a stabbing could be summarized in a few lines. The death of another woman was statistically unremarkable. A tragic violent end was an expected consequence of being a “prostitute.” Instead, the murderer himself, known to his neighbors as a kind, generous man, motivated the articles published in the days that followed. Each written piece used the murder of Roxanne as a springboard to retell what felt like a favorite horror story, with a coalescent tone of “Oh, of course, he’s done it again.” Across the country, when told what happened, Mary Vincent wasn’t surprised—with a small shudder and pain evident in her voice, she responded by saying, “he destroyed everything about me.”
Nearly twenty years earlier, in September of 1978, Mary had been standing on the side of the road, somewhere near Berkeley, California. Her dark feathered hair and fluffy bangs stood out so plainly as of the era, framing her long face and rounded cheeks in a way that somehow accentuated her youth. With a sign in her hand announcing she was heading south, she faced the direction of the oncoming traffic, determined to hitch a ride.
What is known of her life before this moment is sparsely scattered in the interviews she gave in the years that followed – a selectiveness that seems so clearly to be a choice made by someone. Perhaps this choice was based in Mary's desire for privacy or in the interviewers’ lack of interest, in the details that fell too far outside the narrative they itched to tell. Maybe the details were simply cut in the editing process. Even when gathered together, only a fragmented picture can be formed—one of a girl from Las Vegas. Of a middle child in a military family made up of seven children. Of a youth lead dancer for the Lido de Paris (a prestigious cabaret), who frequently skipped school and liked breaking her parents’ rules. Of a scared child, who ran away at fifteen “to save [her] life” when one of her sisters warned of their father coming home with a migraine and a rage directed towards Mary. It’s an image that leaves more implications than answers behind, evoking an impression of grace, fear, and rebellion.
From there, as she traveled to California, and as she moved closer to that day of interest, the timeline of her life becomes more publicly accessible. In the summer of that year, she went from location to location, from person to person, as if constantly searching for a place or being to claim as her home. Some sweltering nights were spent in the car of a short-lived boyfriend near San Francisco, until he was arrested for the rape of another teenaged girl. Some in the home of an uncle just outside of Santa Cruz. Some behind trash cans and in the backseats of unlocked cars. Her escape from Vegas had chased her into a loneliness that led to homesickness, and on that September evening, she stood on the side of the road, tentatively heading towards home.
After a while, a man driving a blue van pulled over next to Mary, who stood beside two other hitchhikers hoping to head in the same direction. The driver was overweight, balding, and to Mary, looked like a “grandpa-type figure.” With no full name given, she only knew him as a man offering her a ride that would bring her south on the I-5 freeway. The van was noticeably empty, with space for all three travelers, yet he insisted on only taking Mary, saying he had just enough room for her. While the excluded two told Mary not to go with a man that eager to isolate her, she ignored their concerns, and got into the passenger seat. She ignored the two gallon milk-jugs he filled with alcohol before hitting the road, and the way he drank from them as he drove toward the I-58. She ignored the passes he made at her as he tried to pull her closer before she moved out of his reach. Tired, desperate to “not live another day out alone,” and in the innocence she still retained, she ignored the warning signs. Instead, she settled in and fell asleep.
When she woke up, it had gone dark outside. She looked up through the windshield, and started to panic.
“You’re going the wrong way and you know you’re going the wrong way.” Above their gaze, the road signs told her they were heading toward Nevada, the opposite direction than he promised. Angry and afraid, Mary felt around her seat until her hands fell upon a long-pointed object that turned out to be a random stick. She held it in front of him. “Turn around right now”.
He did as she asked, correcting his course, only to soon pull over, telling her he needed to relieve himself before getting out of the car. As he walked away, she looked down and realized one of her shoes were untied. She was almost sure she could outrun the old man if she had to. But her shoes would need to be tied. Stepping out of the car, she bent over and began to loop the laces together. Stooped down, her gaze lowered, she did not see him coming behind her. Or the sledgehammer he now held in his hand.
Mary came to in the back of the van, having been struck unconscious—tied up, completely naked, with the driver hovering over her.
There is no nice or good way to say he began raping her. Over and over, ignoring her cries, her pleas to be set free, her promises not to tell anyone if he did. Stopping to sleep for a short period of time, or to drive to a nearby canyon, each time returning to assault her once again. Mary was awake for it all, unable to escape her constraints even as he slept. She watched the sun begin to rise, the light of it inevitably seeping through the windows of the van.
As morning came, the man pulled Mary out from the backseat and removed the rope that bound her. He looked at her and said, “You want to be free? I’ll set you free.” Then, he pulled out a hatchet.
Pulling back, striking below her elbow, in a matter of three swings, he cut off her left arm. Mary felt the shock of the pain. Hot, slick blood ran out and down her body as she fell. He started to cut into her right arm, but it took much longer, as she began to kick and scream and grab at him. She hoped desperately that someone might hear her. But when he was finished, she grew still. Her blood spilled across the pavement. From where she lay, she could see him flicking his arm back and forth across the width of his body. She didn’t understand what he was doing until she saw her right arm, severed, in a death grip around his forearm.
There, still and in shock, perhaps she looked dead. Perhaps that is why he picked her up, and tossed her off the edge of the road, over a thirty-foot canyon cliff. Or why he climbed down after her, and stuffed her into a nearby drainage culvert, before climbing back up.
Against the cool concrete that encased her body, Mary was alive, but only just. Having broken four ribs from her fall, she continued to bleed out from her arms, not knowing if the man had left her to die or was still waiting for her. She grew tired and cold. She wanted to close her eyes and sleep. To let go. But, alone and in that desire for rest, she heard a voice.
“I can’t go to sleep. He’s going to do this to somebody else. I can’t let that happen.”
Moving her way out of the culvert, she stuck what remained of her arms into the earth of the canyon, the mixture of blood and dirt creating mudpacks that she somehow knew would slow the bleeding. Then, she began to climb.
By the time she reached the cliff’s edge again, it was night. Her attacker was gone, and the road was empty. A memory came to her of cutting her finger as a child, and of her mother, who told her to hold it above her heart. Standing on the roadside, she lifted what was left of her arms over her head. She walked. For nearly three miles, she followed the sound of the nearby highway. The expanse of empty road was illuminated only by the night sky. In the distance, she saw headlights—a convertible with two young men. She could see and hear them getting closer, knew they must see her, too, as she stood in the road, waiting. Instead of slowing down, their speed increased. They intentionally passed her. Naked, caked in dirt and blood, with her severed arms held high, she was afraid she was going to die. Not from her injuries alone, but because she was too horrifying to approach. Then again, she saw headlights, this time of an old truck. It came, slowed, and stopped.
The front doors opened. A couple on their honeymoon, who had gotten lost, stepped out and led her back to their car. Across the backseat, Mary could hear the tires of the truck peel as they sped across the road. A phone call later, Mary was airlifted to the hospital. She was told she had lost over half the blood in her body, while the blood that remained became toxic. In her attack, her body and mind had been torn, drained, poisoned, yet she somehow held onto both. Ten days later, with a description Mary had given as she recovered in the hospital, police identified and arrested her attacker where he lived.
Lawrence Singleton, and the atrocities he committed toward Mary Vincent, quickly became the worst kind of infamous. No one gave his version of events credence, as he described Mary as a drugged-out call-girl, who threatened to “hurt, hurt, hurt [him] and say that [he] raped her” if he didn’t do as she asked. He would insist that, in reality, two other hitchhikers he picked up were Mary’s true attackers, that he was entirely framed for the crimes he was charged with, that he was the real victim. This insufferable defense, along with the inarguably shocking and gruesome nature of the attack, left him easily depicted and dismissed as a one-dimensional monster—a bogeyman who served to frighten and entertain, selling newspapers that told little of the who or how or why behind Lawrence Singleton. A man who began working as a merchant marine in his young adulthood, where he served and was discharged honorably. A man who became a sea merchant, likely bringing him to the west coast of California. A man who married, had a daughter, and seemed so capable of leading an ordinary life.
Once more, scattered hints and implications only form a splintered image. A drinking habit that began when he was stationed in Korea would follow him throughout his life, ending his first marriage in 1971, and continuing into his second in 1976. A propensity for rage and violence would only worsen with the drinks he regularly consumed, and would be aimed at the women around him, ultimately ending his relationship with his daughter. Notably, his second marriage “fell apart” after two years in his refusal to accept or change his addiction or anger . . . meaning his attack on Mary would have occurred in the same year his wife, a primary outlet for abuse, presumably left him. Years later, psychological evaluations conducted on Singleton would find evidence of atypical psychosis, traits of personality disorder, and damage in all measurable regions of his brain. This included the frontal lobe, an area that impacts cognitive, emotional, and behavioral function, that can be impaired with prolonged excessive consumption of alcohol. Yet answers drawn in light of any of this information would be speculative at best, even as the desire for closure might compel false conclusions. This, in itself, becomes another type of forced narrative, as loosely formed portraits satisfy a seemingly innate desire for reason.
Six months after her attacker’s arrest, wearing the prosthetics she had already been fitted for, Mary stepped into a San Diego courthouse and faced Singleton for the first time since he tried to kill her. On the witness stand, she was afraid. Her attacker sat only a few feet away as she reopened her wounds. When she finished testifying, her only exit forced her to move directly past Singleton. Now, he was just inches away. And as she walked past, he whispered to her, “If it’s the last thing I do, I will finish the job” .
This hushed deadly threat had Mary turning pale and running out of the courtroom, and her fears would only be further realized during Singleton’s sentencing. Despite being convicted of attempted murder, kidnapping, rape, sodomy, forced oral copulation, and aggravated mayhem, he was sentenced to only fourteen years in prison, the maximum sentence California had to offer at the time. Across the state, from the public to those actively working on the case, people were outraged, and the judge himself expressed his desire to “send [Singleton] to prison for the rest of his natural life.”
Outrage surrounding his sentencing would rise again when Singleton was paroled after serving merely eight years and three months, due to good behavior and a prison program that allowed inmates to work time off their sentence. While the state’s parole board and its laws had deemed the convicted rapist and attempted murderer ready to reenter society, the entirety of California objected to the idea of Singleton living in their state. In what might be described as a strange game of parolee hot potato, each city, where Singleton was placed, rejected him. Entire counties placed temporary restraining orders on him. One city’s petition to have him banned received over ten thousand signatures. On several occasions, Singleton had to be escorted by police out of what was to be his quiet permanent residence, pushing past hundreds of protestors screaming and waving signs denouncing his presence. The state’s stubbornness only won a short-lived victory. After months of the parolee being constantly moved and removed across city-lines, a trailer was placed on the grounds of San Quentin, where he lived until his parole expired in 1988. Less than ten years from the day he saw a young girl on the side of the road and decided to offer her a ride, Lawrence Singleton left the grounds of San Quentin. While many wanted him to go to Florida, where he was known to have family, his destination was entirely in his control. He was free.
The same thing could not be said for Mary Vincent. While she survived, the trauma left behind cascaded. Early on, beyond the constant reminders that hung at her sides, surgeons had to take part of her leg in order to save her right arm, ending her career as a dancer. In her return to Las Vegas, She began to understand her new reality as “a public spectacle.” She enrolled in a school for the handicapped. Her old friends drew away from her. Even after the trial, media outlets became a bombarding presence in her life. Her already strained relationship with her parents worsened, as she’d say later in her life, “They were more interested in what they felt about what happened to me than what I felt”. Her family fractured in the aftermath of the attack as her father started collecting guns and plotting ways to kill Singleton, and loud fights became a regular facet of the home Mary was originally so desperate to return to.
She left again, traveling until she found a small town in Washington to settle down. There, she got married, became a mother, something she had dreamed of doing since she was four years old. For a moment, she was allowed to have the home she’d been trying to reach. Then, Singleton was released from prison, then from parole. Mary hadn’t forgotten the promise he made, to finish what he had started the day he decided to end her life. Her fear was only made more tangible when Singleton said he planned to spend his first days of freedom visiting the state Mary was known to be living in.
She began to move frequently, too afraid of staying in one place long enough for anyone to find out where she or her two sons were. Within the looming threat of another attack, and the imposing, hounding force of the media, her marriage fell apart. Her income became limited to disability checks, insufficient or never paid court settlements, and that of her boyfriends. When one home was repossessed within months of her overborrowing on a down payment, she and the boys she referred to as her “little men” lived in an unheated, abandoned Arco Station in the icy months of winter. With her children, Mary felt the push to keep fighting and keep going, even in moments she didn’t want to. In the fear and anticipation of her attacker’s return, with the knowledge of what he was capable of, Mary couldn’t be free.
And so, in the early months of 1997, when she learned of Singleton’s arrest for the murder of Roxanne Hayes, she couldn’t help but feel relieved. The man she had spent so much time fearing would come after her was locked up once again. But to say that this was all she felt wouldn’t be right. As multiple news outlets came crashing into her life, pushing her to rehash and revamp her trauma, she mourned the life of Roxanne. She couldn’t stop thinking about her, or reliving her own encounter with Roxanne’s murderer. In those thoughts and recollections, did she recall the voice that had told her to stay awake all those years ago, that told her she couldn’t let him hurt anyone else? Could she not help but imagine herself in the last moments of Roxanne’s life? At night, in the trailer park that was her home, the nightmares she’d recently gotten over, that often made her scream and dislocate her joints from falling out of bed, returned in the wake of the murder.
A year after Roxanne’s death, her children sat quietly in the second row of a Florida courtroom, all dressed in black. Akiena, eleven-years-old, who had gone to identify her mother’s body, stared off into the distance as she spoke quietly about how she wanted to remember her mother "Loving everybody like she did. Helping people in need. Caring, always." Eight-year-old Clifton, remembered his mother telling him, “You can be whatever you put your mind to.” The youngest, Malachi, recounted a game Roxanne would play with him as he sat on her lap. They would take turns, back and forth, pointing to the other’s chest and declaring, “No, I love you,” before dissolving into fits of laughter. He was four years old. Next to them, Roxanne’s boyfriend, Clifford Tyson, breathed heavily as he and the children observed the trial and awaited its sentencing. In his testimony, Singleton spun another tale of victimhood and misunderstanding. Of a sad old man, who asked Roxanne to come over more for company than for sex. That she was the one who tried to stab him and, in his struggle for the knife, had somehow stabbed herself seven times in the face, body, and stomach. That she had asked him to hold her in his arms as she died. Again, people saw through his story, as he was found guilty after less than four hours of deliberation.
The following week, despite the last time she had been in the same room as Singleton, after traveling across the country, Mary raised her right prosthetic hand before the courtroom, and gave her testimony at his sentencing. For ten minutes, while Singleton sat emotionless, she retold her story, looking him in the eye, physically pointing to him and identifying him as the man who had attacked her. This time, when she walked out of the courtroom, he said nothing.
Singleton died of cancer three years after receiving a death sentence. In what often marks the end of true crime narratives, writers and audiences are left the rare presence of a survivor. Some fixate on the toll of her attack, as her daydreams of having her arms again becomes the conclusion to one version of her story. Others turn her into a symbol of survival and hope. They hyper-focus on her triumphs, her moments of joy and laughter. Her attack and disability become objects of inspiration for others, and swallow her identity in an entirely different way.
But Mary Vincent cannot be fully encompassed in any conclusion. In the latest accounts of her life, she was still reliant on disability checks and couldn’t afford to replace the arms she had outgrown, but she reveled in her ability to use bits and pieces from broken radios and refrigerators to make them function the way she needed. She felt safe to share her new location in Gig Harbor Washington, but wouldn’t give motivational speeches to high-school students after being mocked on too many occasions. She’d become an aspiring artist, who loved to draw family portraits and feminine warriors, but still woke often to nightmares that will likely never go away. Her shoulders ached every day as she held her prosthetics up to walk her dogs, play pool, or embrace her sons. A pattern is etched in the narratives that fail to adequately portray the truth. A paradigm that maybe exemplifies an inherent human instinct: to pick and choose elements of fact, or a particular life, as a story is woven around a desired tone, effect, or moral. To be a victor or a victim. To be a tragic or happy ending. There is comfort in the simplistic, the essential, the linear. But if any conclusion can be drawn from Mary’s story, it isn’t that life is comfortable, or clear, or chosen. It’s complicated. It’s felt. Before anything else, it’s lived.
Fiona Davis
5/9/21
Fiona Davis, in the broadest of terms, considers herself to be a storyteller as she weaves and untangles narratives of fiction and nonfiction using prose, verse, and illustrations, all in an effort to unearth her voice and that of others. She feels honored to have had her work published and exhibited, to have been asked to present her writing at student literary events, and to have been awarded for her submission in the 2018 James O’Keefe Comic Contest. Beyond studying English at UC Davis, she might be spotted watching true crime documentaries or animated shows with her family, pampering her cats and dogs, or making a mess of paint or thread or words while in the process of creating something new.
