WARNING, DISTRESSING CONTENT: After a horrifying sustained assault, which left her with a fractured skull and two missing arms, Mary Vincent says God told her to bring her attacker to justice
Mary Vincent was just 14 years old when, desperate to escape her abusive stepfather, she decided to hitchhike cross-country to visit her grandfather. But the innocent teenager was unwittingly heading into a “hunting ground for dozens of serial killers,” says true crime podcaster Julian Morgans.
While serial murders are comparatively rare today, in a 20-year period between the early Seventies and the 1990s, particularly along the US West Coast between Los Angeles and Seattle, there was a grim catalogue of slaughter. And it was towards that deadly environment – and an attack that nearly cost her life – that Mary was headed.
She explained on the What It Was Like podcast: “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 met up with a couple of other teenagers that were headed in the same direction. But when a van driven by 51-year-old former merchant seaman Lawrence Singleton stopped for them, he was insistent that Mary travelled alone.
“We all started going to the van, and he said, ‘No, I only have room for her’,” Mary said. “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.”
The steady motion of the van soon lulled Mary into sleep. But when she woke up, she realised that they were heading in the wrong direction, away from the area where her grandfather lived in Berkeley, California.
Realising that she was in trouble, the resourceful teen tried to defend herself. She recalled: “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.”
Moments later, Singleton smashed Mary over the head with a sledgehammer. The blow cracked her skull, and she says that even today, 47 years later, part of her brain will still sometimes bulge through the hole Singleton’s hammer left.
As Mary lay dazed on the ground, the monster poured milk laced with some sort of alcohol into her mouth, hoping to subdue her enough to rape her.
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.”
Mary said that a doctor later told her Singleton’s knife had “ripped her insides until they were like shredded wheat.”
After tying her up and repeatedly raping her, Singleton decided to drag Mary to a nearby cliff in order to kill her.
“When he did that,” Mary continued, “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.”
Mary had learned to meditate as a child, and that skill enabled her to focus on staying alive against all the odds. She recalled seeing the world around her in incredible detail, noticing a scar on her attacker’s abdomen where he had had his appendix removed.
Singleton then used his axe on her other arm, taking three savage blows to sever it completely. Then, as the gravely-wounded teenager continued to meditate in order to convince him that she was already dead, he threw her off a 30-foot cliff.
Singleton had taken a mile-long path that brought him to the bottom of the cliff and he shoved her into a drainage culvert to die.
Horribly injured, Mary wanted nothing but to lapse into unconsciousness and die. “But God told me that I had to get up and stop him, that he was going to do it to another person,” she said.
Mary says that God’s voice was insistent, urging her to get back up the cliff despite her awful injuries, and as she began to struggle out of the culvert her wounds began to bleed even more. “I had to stop the bleeding from my arms because I’m moving now and my blood is leaking,” she said.
“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.”
The first people Mary encountered were terrified of her: “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 driver picked Mary up and drove her to hospital, where she insisted on giving a statement to a police officer right away because she wasn’t sure how much longer she would survive.
In another apparent miracle, doctors mistakenly gave her the wrong blood type in a transfusion, but her body somehow adapted and started using the new blood.
She had remembered every detail she had seen in Singletons’ van, including a note indicating where he was planning to go next, and police were able to track him down fairly rapidly.
Six months later, despite Singleton’s lawyer trying to intimidate Mary into contradicting herself, Lawrence Singleton was found guilty of kidnapping, rape and attempted murder and sentenced to fourteen years in prison.
Granted early release after having served only eight years in prison, Singleton went on to commit more crimes, murdering a woman in 1997, and receiving the death sentence. However, Singleton cheated the executioner, dying of cancer in a Florida prison hospital in 2001.