The Mad Chopper

by Fred Rosen

  “Except for one thing.”

  “What?”

  Breshears pulled out a picture from under his pad and showed it to Singleton.

  “Is that the hand?”

  Singleton looked at it for a moment. It was a picture of a severed hand sitting on a rock in San Francisco Bay.

  “I cannot …”

  “That the hand there?” Breshears pointed to the pale object on the rock.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Is this the hand that you cut off with the ax?”

  “No, sir. If there’s some blood on that hatchet, I don’t know where it came from. I have no way in God’s world of knowing, but I couldn’t do it.”

  “Maybe you can explain how it happened. Maybe you don’t know how it happened. Maybe you don’t know why it happened. That I can understand. I can understand that. She can understand that, too.”

  Breshears tried sympathy again. Maybe Singleton would respond to sympathy this time and crack.

  “Sir, I am fifty years old.”

  “Mr. Singleton, you’ve got to help yourself now,” Breshears said, a newfound urgency in his words.

  “No …”

  “It’s time for you to help yourself.”

  “I’ll tell you the God’s truth, if I could help myself, I would. But I can’t say anything that I don’t know to be true.”

  “You can help yourself, though, right now.”

  “I can’t help myself by saying I did something that I know isn’t true.”

  “But you did do it.”

  Breshears started shuffling his papers, as though he was ready to leave.

  “Now there’s no way in God’s world that I can pull … use a gun … of course, now …” Singleton sputtered.

  “You didn’t use a gun,” Breshears corrected him. “You used an ax.”

  “Well, I …”

  “You took it out of your van. It was in your toolbox. You took it out. You were scared. You took the ax out and you cut her hands off so we could never find her fingerprints when she died. That would make identifying her body almost impossible.”

  “No …”

  “But you were so scared, you didn’t see if she …”

  “No!”

  “… was dead. You threw her down the gully. You kicked her, because you were scared.”

  “I …”

  “You kicked her into the pipe and kicked her with your foot. Shoved her right in where you figured she’d die.”

  “I did not kick anybody into a pipe.”

  “Really? Then how did she get in there? She didn’t crawl in there by herself.”

  “I don’t even know anything about a pipe.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “And I—”

  “That’s the pipe that comes down and goes underneath the road. Did you know that she heard you drive off?”

  Singleton’s face drained of color.

  “Sir …”

  “She didn’t even lose consciousness, and she heard you drive off. That’s amazing isn’t it? Can you imagine the pain that she was going through at the time, and was still eager to hear you drive off?”

  “The only thing I can say is that girl must—”

  “Must have a strong will to live,” Breshears cut him off.

  “No, she must … something else is wrong … I don’t know what …”

  “Did she lie about her hands and arms? Of course, she might lie about that.”

  “Sir?” Singleton didn’t get it.

  “But she told an awful good story, because I know. I looked at them and I didn’t see hands there. I didn’t see forearms there. I saw one elbow. I saw her when they brought her in from the ambulance with one bone sticking out alone there.”

  “Well, sir, I don’t know …”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I can’t tell you something else except that I’ve told you right now. I did not mutilate that girl in any way, shape, or form. She told me that she wanted to stay stoned all her life.”

  As if that explained her injuries. Or justified them.

  “Tell me, when she gave you that blow job, did you reach a climax?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “You don’t remember?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “You really don’t.”

  “She sat down on top of me, too,” Singleton added.

  “And you don’t remember a simple detail like if you reached a climax or not?” Breshears sounded incredulous.

  “And then Pedro was the one that was goosing her at the time.”

  “Ah, the mysterious Pedro. Now wait a minute. Somebody’s got to be behind the wheel if you and Pedro are going at her.”

  “I told you we were stopped at that time.”

  “Oh? You stopped there pretty close to where she got her arms cut off.”

  “No!”

  “You weren’t there? You went further down the canyon, laid down next to her …”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake!”

  “… told her she would be all right if she did what you said. We’re talking about in the canyon. You remember now. In the canyon where you and her were together.”

  “I never went in any canyon.”

  “This is the second time. This is the second time that you were going to have sexual intercourse with her. You kind of laid there next to her a little bit. You even got into the van after having sexual intercourse the first time and drove up there with no clothes because you were going to do it again.”

  “That’s an outright lie! She’s lying!”

  “That’s the truth, Mr. Singleton. The real truth. Why don’t you tell us the real truth?”

  “I never had all my clothes off.”

  “Sure you did.”

  “I never did.”

  “You took your shoes off.”

  “I did not!”

  “You even took your socks off.”

  As Breshears had enunciated every step of the rape, Singleton had gone paler and paler. But his mouth said, “No, sir, I did not.”

  “And you took these clothes, your good ones, all the way off.”

  “No, sir, I didn’t.”

  It was no use. It just wasn’t working and both cops knew it. Singleton wasn’t cracking.

  Breshears said, “Mr. Singleton, we’re going to stop and let you get another cup of coffee, because you’ve asked for one a couple of times and we didn’t get it for you. We’d like to talk to you one more time. Not tonight though.”

  “I … uh …”

  “Now relax, take it easy. Get up in the morning and have breakfast or something and take a good shower.”

  “Okay.”

  “And we’d like to talk to you a little bit more tomorrow, but I think maybe we should end it right now. Okay?”

  “Yeah, fine.”

  And the interview was over.

  The cops had failed to get a confession. They knew that any further interrogation would probably get them nowhere, especially if Singleton had time to think about what he’d say. There really was no choice, unless they wanted to go all night and listen to Singleton’s repeated denials. One thing, though, was certain.

  Either he had had an alcoholic blackout when he cut the girl’s arms off or he was the most cold-hearted son of a bitch they had ever met.

  PART TWO

  No Man’s Land

  Chapter Seven

  The short film opened with a young girl being wheeled on a gurney into a hospital emergency room. A “Dr. Carter” runs to her aid and begins shouting orders to nearby nurses and orderlies.

  In the next scene, the same young girl is out on a deserted highway, hitchhiking. Shortly, she is picked up by a man driving a blue van. As the van drives off, the audience knows what is in her future. On comes the crawl, “Don’t be a pigeon,” intoned by an offscreen announcer.

  Ironically, the public service commercial advising young girls not to hitchhike had been filmed prior to Mary Vincent’s a
ssault, and had just begun airing. The use of an actress who looked a lot like Mary, plus her assailant driving a blue van, literally foreshadowed the real-life events.

  While the wheels of justice turned, the real Mary Vincent lay in a hospital bed, recovering from her ordeal. With her medical costs likely to exceed $10,000, attention began to focus on how to help her.

  California maintained a state program to help victims of violent crimes. The problem was, Mary was not a resident of California, but of Nevada. Regardless of the fact that she had lived in California with Diego, because she was a minor meant that her official place of residence was determined by where her parents resided, and that was Nevada. California residency was required to receive assistance from the program, which meant Mary’s bad luck might be holding.

  The horrific crime had focused nationwide attention on California and the state did not want to seem like an insensitive place. It was bad for business.

  “Let her family file for assistance. We’d rather lean over backwards and do everything possible for them,” said a spokesman for the State Board of Control, which oversaw the victim’s assistance program.

  Mary’s mother, Lucy Vincent, had arrived at the hospital to comfort her daughter. She told the press that the family did have some medical insurance, but she wasn’t certain of the exact coverage. There was no question that any assistance the state offered would help.

  Private contributions to help with Mary’s medical costs had not been generous. They only totaled $300. Additional contributions, however, were still coming in and it was hoped they would be substantial enough to make an impact on her medical bills.

  That left the eventual cost of her new arms, which would climb into the thousands, too. Perhaps some generous benefactor would come forward to help with that. Or maybe the state could find it in its heart to aid Mary, because without those arms, she would be left with two sawed-off stumps and helpless. But before any of this could happen, there was something Mary Vincent had to do first.

  Thursday, October 27, 1978

  For over an hour, during a three-hour-and-twenty minute closed session, Mary Vincent testified before the Stanislaus County grand jury. She remained calm about the details leading up to the crime, but showed emotion when talking about the attack. A few times she came close to breaking down, but she kept going until she got to the end of her story. As for the people hearing her story, the grand jurors, they struggled to listen to her words and look into her eyes, rather than gazing at her heavily bandaged lower arms.

  “I think she displayed a lot of courage” in testifying, District Attorney Donald Stahl said after her testimony. “I think she showed a lot of courage throughout this whole damn thing.”

  Stahl said that there was no credence to the charge Singleton had leveled against Mary—that she had accepted money from him for sex—nor was there any evidence to back up Singleton’s assertion that in addition to Mary, he had picked up the two mysterious hitchhikers, “Larry” and “Pedro.”

  Other witnesses who testified were Todd Meadows, the motorist who had picked Mary up bleeding by the side of the road outside Del Puerto Canyon, and Detective Reese, who read the statement Singleton had made at the time of his arrest. Singleton himself did not appear, since the defendant does not have to appear during grand jury proceedings.

  It does not take much for a prosecutor to get an indictment from a grand jury, since it is the state itself that calls the grand jury together. All the rules of evidence are set up in the state’s favor. While there are times when the grand jury refuses to indict, in the Singleton case, given the weight of the evidence, it would have been a major surprise if the grand jury had not come back with a positive result.

  Shortly after retiring to consider the evidence, the Stanislaus County grand jury reached its conclusion. Singleton was brought in for the formal reading of the indictment in front of Superior Court Judge Francis W. Halley. Concerned, lest someone with a grudge, or some nut might try to make a name for himself by killing Singleton, Sheriff Lynn Wood put on lots of extra security.

  Accompanying Singleton into court were more than a dozen sheriff’s deputies, who were posted around the defendant and throughout the courtroom. Deputies stood guard in the outside corridor. Court spectators had gone through metal detectors on the way into the courtroom, and no one was allowed within a distance of ten feet of Singleton as he was escorted through the corridor that connected the prisoners’ elevator and Judge Halley’s courtroom.

  When he arrived in court, Singleton took his place by the defense table. Only a few reporters and photographers were present, because Stahl had carried on the grand jury proceedings behind closed doors to avoid a media circus. Encased in security leg chains and handcuffs, attired in orange jail coveralls, Singleton, head bowed, silently read a copy of the charges as the clerk read them out loud.

  “Lawrence Singleton, you are charged with one count of forcible rape, two counts of forcible copulation, one count of sodomy, one count of kidnapping, one count of mayhem, and one count of attempted murder.” That made a total of seven charges in all.

  Bail was set at $200,000. A Florida attorney, Henry Gonzalez, informed District Attorney Donald Stahl that he would represent Singleton, along with a California lawyer yet to be retained. It was rumored that Singleton had family in Florida that was paying for his legal representation.

  In the wake of the attack, alcohol abuse experts were consulted by the police and prosecutors. Their overriding question was this: could a person in an alcoholic blackout commit the kind of crime Singleton had and have no memory of it afterward?

  If the answer came back “yes,” it would give Singleton a diminished capacity defense at trial. If the answer was “no,” Singleton would have to convince a jury of twelve men and women that “Larry” and Pedro” existed and they were the ones who had committed the crime.

  Thankfully, for the prosecution, the answer came back an unqualified “no.”

  In the opinion of the alcohol abuse experts, a person could not have hacked off a girl’s arms while in the throes of an alcoholic blackout and not have any memory of it later. Instead, the alcohol would act as a triggering mechanism, releasing the pent-up rage and sadistic impulses that dwelled just below the surface of a person’s consciousness. Released from his ego, his id would be free to act up. Or out. Or cut.

  Interestingly, while heavy drinkers or just occasional drinkers could suffer blackouts where they were not aware of their actions in general, alcohol could not erase an individual’s moral code. In other words, if Singleton thought it wrong while sober to cut someone’s arms off, he would feel the same way during the blackout. Likewise, if violence suited him sober, it would suit him drunk. In either case, the individual was still responsible for his actions. Which suited the cops and D.A. just fine.

  They had Singleton where they wanted him. Let him make his case for “Pedro” and “Larry” and they’d see if the jury would buy his story.

  It had been Sondra Ruben’s tip that had led the cops to capture Singleton and, as usual, the reporters wanted to hear from the hero of the hour, ignoring the detective work of Breshears and Reese.

  “I suffered over this decision,” she told the media. “I wasn’t sure I’d done the right thing after I called.”

  The housewife and mother of five did not know until after she’d called in her tip that an anonymous person had offered a $5,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the suspect.

  “That’s good, I’m glad, because I was worried that the money had come from the family,” Sondra said.

  What Breshears and Reese did not know was they had a rather accomplished sailor on their hands. As far as the United States Coast Guard was concerned, Lawrence Singleton was qualified to command any United States merchant marine ship on the high seas, anything from a two-hundred-ton tanker filled with oil to the Queen Elizabeth II cruise ship, which transported thousands of passengers every month. In fact, the cops had a real p
rodigy on their hands, a man who was known as an “unlimited master,” the highest ranking the Coast Guard could bestow on a sailor. In order to get that rating, a sailor must have many years of sailing experience and pass a series of detailed examinations. The exams lasted four full days.

  Singleton had been a most ambitious man. Even those with a master’s rating needed to study hard at a maritime college before they could move up to unlimited master. Singleton had, taking his formal training in 1974 at the Maritime Institute of Technology and Graduate Studies in Baltimore. Ever the overachiever, he graduated with a captain’s certificate.

  “Even with schooling, not all pass,” said Jace Beemer, a spokesman for the Coast Guard’s Maritime Safety Office in San Francisco. “Some applicants just give up. But if they are motivated, they go after it. On the section of the exam called ‘Rules of the Sea,’ it takes a grade of ninety percent to pass, and on other parts of the exam, seventy percent is required.”

  Singleton was proficient in the rules of the sea, navigation, techniques of ship operation, and radar equipment, and even in such arcane details as how to balance the oil in a tanker so the ship wouldn’t list.

  As Lawrence Singleton’s arrest flashed across the news wires, in no place was it received more sadly than in New Orleans. New Orleans had been Singleton’s home base for years. Like his fellow mates, he would wait in the seamen’s union hall for word from shippers that they needed mates. When he found one that required his services, he signed on immediately and shipped out to ports world-wide.

  Authorities suspected that Singleton’s attack on Mary Vincent was not an isolated incident. He had been accused of assaulting his daughter, too, and speculation arose that if police had the time and resources to check his activities in faraway ports, they would find that he had assaulted women in those places, too. Unfortunately, if a record of violence existed somewhere else, no one knew where it was, nor did they have the resources to obtain it.

  In his home port of New Orleans, though, no one knew of any charges against him. By 1968, he was ready for a change and he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, where he took a position with the American President Lines out of Oakland.