The Mad Chopper

by Fred Rosen

  Singleton seemed to acclimate himself quite well to the line’s cruise ships. He fraternized with female crew members who caught his fancy, which was how, one day in 1970, aboard the line’s President Wilson, he happened to meet Celia Johnson. At the time, Singleton was the ship’s navigator and Celia the ship’s nurse. Celia found the rugged seaman attractive. Singleton, who had been married and was divorced with a teenage daughter named Debbie, thought Celia was the one for him. They eventually married.

  Soon after that, Singleton left cruise ships and hired on to the Central Gulf Lines, once again out of New Orleans. This put a strain on his marriage, basing himself in New Orleans while his wife lived on the West Coast. But by that time, Celia had realized she was involved with a guy who not only drank too much, but was violent when he got drunk. That was much more than she had bargained for.

  While Celia tried to figure out what to do, Singleton found himself as chief mate, second in command, on the Green Wave. Under contract for the Military Sealift Command her cargo was ammunition bound for Vietnam.

  While Henry Kissinger had brokered a peace agreement to end the Vietnam War in December 1972, that didn’t stop the stockpiling of arms. Thus Singleton found himself transporting ammo into a war zone. The assignment brought back memories of another war from a long time ago that he had participated in.

  Singleton had served with distinction as an infantryman in Korea. Some of his friends said that he had participated in the most famous and bloody battle of the “police action”—Pork Chop Hill.

  Pork Chop Hill was a vicious frontal assault up and across rocky terrain by American soldiers. Gunning for them were Communist Chinese troops. Because it was a frontal assault, the American casualties totaled over fifty percent. As the Americans’ ammo ran out, they were forced into vicious hand-to-hand fighting with the enemy. It was an experience that Singleton rarely, if ever, spoke about. There was good reason to assume that his war experiences had left him with what is now known as post-traumatic stress disorder.

  Up until the Vietnam War, it was called shell shock, and treatment was little and intermittent because it was not acknowledged to be a long-standing problem. But as the veterans of the Vietnam War would show, post-traumatic stress disorder, an adverse reaction in civilian life to the stress soldiers face under fire, could completely destroy an individual’s life in peacetime. Had such knowledge, and advanced treatment, which included talking therapy and administering antidepressant medication, been available to Singleton, Mary Vincent might still have two whole arms.

  It was therefore not surprising that Singleton and his wife, Celia, had so many problems that they eventually divorced. But they still saw each other frequently.

  “What more is a divorce than a neon chapel wedding?” Celia would later tell a newspaperman.

  Meanwhile, aboard the Green Wave, Singleton touched anchor in Da Nang, Saigon, Guam, Midway Island, Korea, Okinawa, Taiwan, and Yokohama. In 1975, he sailed through the locks of the Panama Canal, gazed silently at Gaillard Cut, the vast expanse of the canal, where the air is haunted by the dead who fell there from Yellow Fever, and then up the eastern coast of Texas and back to New Orleans.

  Time to move again. He had these wandering sea legs. The Green Wave was left in his wake as he climbed aboard the S.S. Green Valley, another Central Gulf ship. The ship transported cargo to Northern Europe and Singleton soon found himself sailing through the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf.

  Singleton seemed to have a death wish. With his rating, he could have stayed above deck in a more administrative position, but he chose to become a tanker mate, one of the most dangerous jobs aboard any vessel. Much time was spent below decks, breathing poisonous fumes in the presence of gallons and gallons of flammable oil.

  Singleton’s job as chief mate was to supervise the loading and unloading of oil, a job that came with its inherent career dangers, for if any of that oil should spill and he was found responsible, he could face criminal as well as civil penalties. Ironically, given his propensity to consume alcohol, he was never found drunk on duty and had a spotless record. This was despite the fact that his duty required him to work seven days a week for months on end. Clearly, he stayed sober while working.

  As for money, Singleton had not been lying when he said he had it. Singleton made approximately $3,000 per month, with room and board provided. By the time he mutilated Mary Vincent, he had enough money stowed away to buy another couple of homes if he wanted, and another couple of vans.

  He was ready to retire and enjoy the rest of his life. Then, in his opinion, he made the mistake of picking up that stupid bitch on the highway and everything went haywire.

  Among those who were upset over Singleton’s arrest was his ex-wife Celia Johnson. Turned out, she lived across town from Singleton in Sparks, in a large apartment complex. Singleton had moved to Sparks some ten years before on the advice of a merchant seaman friend who told him it was a nice place to live.

  “He couldn’t have done it,” Celia told a local paper. “It was not his style.” And then she went on to paint a picture of Lawrence Singleton directly at odds with his violent public persona.

  Celia told of his devotion to his first wife, Shirley, who had died from cancer two years before. Unlike most seagoing men, her Larry was faithful to her. He was also a father who took pride in his offspring, boasting frequently of Debbie, who would soon be sixteen.

  Sixteen being the legal age to drive in California, her loving father had just purchased her a brand-new Ford Thunderbird as an early birthday present. The girl also had two horses and everything a young girl could want. Yet for all that she had, there was much trouble between them.

  Debbie and Singleton had argued over the ownership of the Bay-Area home that was still in her mom, Shirley’s, name. Singleton had been drinking and his rage surfaced. After it did, Debbie was left with her father’s handprint across the side of her face where he had slapped her. Debbie then turned to the law for relief.

  She lodged a complaint against Singleton, claiming he drank too much, and when he did, she was afraid of being beaten. She wanted to be removed from his custody, free to move in with some friends in Sparks.

  “It all started about three months ago,” Celia continued. “He just didn’t seem to find any sense with life anymore.”

  Singleton suffered from depression, which apparently remained untreated. His health began to fail. A chest ailment ballooned in his mind to cancer. Celia thought it came from breathing in too many noxious fumes below decks. He did have skin cancer from his years of seagoing and remaining out on deck, exposed to the sun’s deadly rays. But what was most telling was what had happened to Singleton in the week after his assault on Mary Vincent.

  Apparently, his conscience got the better of him. Singleton combined scotch and barbiturates in a particularly lethal cocktail that he imbibed to commit suicide. Whatever demons were haunting him had overwhelmed him and he just wanted to check out. But he didn’t succeed—he wound up in the hospital instead, where he stayed for four days while he recovered. When he was released, he read a story in the Sunday newspaper about the ax-rapist search.

  Carefully, Celia recalled, he folded the newspaper, then quietly sat holding it for some time. Celia figured he was just suffering from stress and exhaustion. Yet back in her mind, she remembered numerous times he had picked up hitchhikers, including one time when she was frightened by some disreputable characters he had picked up. And there was another time when he showed his passion for “eye-for-an-eye” justice. On that occasion, they were driving toward Reno, when a male hitchhiker he happened to pick up pulled a knife and robbed him.

  “Take off your clothes and get out,” the knife-wielding hitchhiker ordered. Singleton’s hand flashed down under his seat. It came up with a loaded revolver and Singleton turned the tables.

  “Now you take off your clothes, get out, and walk,” he ordered the hitchhiker.

  Some time later, Singleton checked with the sheriff’s office. Th
e nude man had been picked up by the cops. Apparently, that incident had just been a prelude to what followed.

  Because of extensive pretrial publicity in Stanislaus County, Lawrence Singleton’s trial was moved south to San Diego. He finally went on trial in March 1979.

  During the trial, Mary, who was then sixteen, testified to the assault and mutilation that Singleton had inflicted on her. Detail by detail, she told the jury how Singleton had violated and mutilated her. By the time she finished, she was tired and limp from the memories that had returned to stalk her once again. Despite that it was in the name of justice and convicting her abuser, she still relived what had happened, and it was truly a trip into hell. Again. Would it ever end?

  On March 29, 1979, a California Superior Court jury found Lawrence Singleton guilty of seven counts—one count each of rape, sodomy, kidnapping, mayhem, and attempted murder, and two counts of forcible oral copulation. The state had recently passed new sentencing laws under which the most Singleton could be sentenced to was fourteen years, four months in prison. The judge, seeing no mitigating circumstances, sentenced him to the maximum.

  Unfortunately, under those same laws he could be out in eight years with good behavior. As Singleton was being led out of the San Diego courtroom to serve his sentence, all his victim could hope for was that he was a very bad boy in prison.

  It was as if her life had stopped. Fifteen years old and bam, she was frozen in time. That was what life was like for Mary Vincent after the assault.

  There were the physical effects of the assault to get over, and the fitting of her new arms, of course, but the real damage was to her psyche. Nothing for her would ever be the same again. Life would never be so safe or precious or beautiful or full of hope. Lawrence Singleton had taken all that from her and more. He would always loom on the horizon to remind her of what her life was, and what it might have been had she never heard his name.

  Every morning she woke up, all she had to do was gaze down at her stumps and there was Singleton. There was no getting away from him except at night sometimes, when the artificial arms were taken off and sleep finally overtook her.

  When they were removed by her mother or father, or whoever helped her, she was helpless. She could not open a door if the wind blew it shut. If there was a fire, she couldn’t open a window to get out. She couldn’t answer a phone, or do something she used to take for granted, like wiping herself when she went to the bathroom.

  And what was she to do when she got older and applied for a job? Who would hire someone with hooks for hands? To them, she would just be a freak. She saw people’s stares when she went out. That was what Singleton had done to her.

  He had made her a target of people’s prejudices toward the handicapped. He had made her helpless, reduced to relying on others for her basic needs and safety. She had just been flowering into an independent woman, and now, that was gone.

  Her future. That’s what he had taken away. Her future. And there was no way to retrieve what might have been.

  “It isn’t fair,” she said. “When the sentence was announced, I felt like getting up and strangling him.”

  But she didn’t have hands so she couldn’t strangle him. Her hooks, though, could do even more damage, and if he ever came near her again …

  Chapter Eight

  1986

  San Luis Obispo is a charming seaside community in northern California. Off Highway 101, which ran along the coastline, the surf pounded the unusual rock formations in the harbor offering a picture-perfect view from the hills above the town.

  In those hills is the California Men’s Colony at San Luis Obispo. “Men’s Colony” was a euphemism for prison. It was there that the state chose to warehouse Lawrence Singleton while he was its guest.

  In many ways, jail suited Larry Singleton quite well. He was a perfect prisoner. Used to a chain of command in the merchant marines, he respected the prison guards and never gave them any trouble. He was neither young nor good looking, and therefore did not need to worry about attacks by the “sisters,” prison slang for homosexuals. As for the rest, if he got into an argument, he could give as good as he got, which therefore meant arguments were at a minimum.

  In short, Lawrence Singleton’s prison stay was downright boring. He passed his time like most prisoners, wandering aimlessly from day to day, filling any job that the prison ordered him to do—be it in the commissary or machine shop. His last job behind bars was as a student aide in an educational program. Under a 1983 work-incentive law, passed while he was incarcerated, inmates in the program were granted one day off for each day in the program. Of course, Singleton was eligible, and that further cut his sentence.

  It would have been smart for the state to require that he attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, but the law under which he was originally sentenced did not require that he seek counseling for his alcohol addiction. Never mind that it was the root cause of the violence he had perpetrated on Mary Vincent. Never mind that he might be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder from his war days.

  The law was more concerned with retribution than rehabilitation. Sheltered away from the public, his addiction to alcohol, and violence, smoldered.

  Still, no matter what kind of problems Singleton suffered from, they were no excuse for his violence. He was a man who refused to take responsibility for his actions, and others had continually covered up for him over the years. Otherwise, he could never have reached fifty with a record that had remained spotless until the Vincent tragedy. By 1986, he was a fifty-nine-year-old rapist about to be paroled.

  With time off for good behavior and the points he accumulated as a student aide, Singleton was now scheduled to be paroled in April 1987. He would have served eight years of his fourteen-year sentence. But the singular nature of Singleton’s crime made him much more a part of the public’s consciousness than any single malefactor in California state prison history.

  All the while he was in jail, public sentiment had been building against him. Politicians in particular were outraged that his parole was coming up, and none more so than the man who had prosecuted him, Stanislaus County District Attorney Donald Stahl. Said Stahl: “He got the maximum sentence [yet] even the judge said he wished he could’ve give him life. The work-incentive law is a terrible one, but that’s the law, unfortunately.”

  How heinous the assault was didn’t matter. As far as the law was concerned, assault was assault, until the law was changed. As for where Singleton would go after his parole, Stahl wanted him to stay out of Stanislaus County.

  “It doesn’t make a whit of sense to send him here. There’s nothing he wants in Stanislaus County; he’s a merchant seaman,” the D.A., said trying to convince himself, and perhaps reassure his constituents that the last place where the master seaman would ever want to settle was in landlocked Modesto.

  The chief of the state parole office in Modesto, Leonard Olives, told the San Jose Mercury News, that he would recommend that Singleton be paroled elsewhere, “Because he had such a high notoriety.”

  Singleton was not exactly the most popular visitor Modesto had ever had. In other words, there were people who wouldn’t mind seeing him dead if he came back to the same town that he elevated from simple anonymity to the site of what was now viewed as the worst assault in California state history.

  In between his work-release assignment and other prison duties, Lawrence Singleton learned the one immutable rule of prison life: there are no guilty men in prison.

  Caught killing your wife?

  “She killed herself. I was just there watching.”

  Embezzled money from your employer?

  “It was just a loan that I meant to pay back.”

  Raped a girl and cut off her arms?

  “I was framed!”

  Singleton had said that at the time of his arrest and he decided to stick to his story. In his cell, crowded with appeal letters, trial transcripts, and other documents pertinent to his case, Singleton decided to give an
interview to a reporter from the San Jose Mercury News, in which he vociferously proclaimed his innocence.

  “Why doesn’t the media look at what happened?” an angry and frustrated Singleton demanded. He produced typewritten documents from his case, stabbing his finger at specific sections.

  “It was an inquisition,” he continued, “an inquisition! There was only the word of the accuser and nothing else.” As for his trial in San Diego, he characterized it as “a farce and a scam.”

  Singleton went on to claim that “mental torture” was inflicted on him while being held in jail at San Diego. He was held “in the 3-G tank without any lights, and cockroaches running in my ear until I finally got moved. I wasn’t allowed a full night’s sleep either. I don’t see how I kept my sanity. They took my mind away from me.”

  Despite the fact that he had no hard evidence to support his charges, Singleton continued to go on the attack.

  What was his version of the night that Mary Vincent lost her arms? Once again, he claimed that he picked up two male hitchhikers and that they had been responsible for cutting Mary Vincent’s arms off, not him. He insisted that after they had passed Sacramento, Mary got so angry at him for missing the cutoff to Los Angeles that he tried to kick her out of the van when they reached Auburn.

  “She [Vincent] was smoking PCP and she got foul mouthed.” He failed to say how a sailor could be offended by anyone’s cursing. “I can’t stand that kind of talk from a woman. Anyway, I gave her five dollars and told her to get going. But she sees my twenties and changed her mind, and that’s when she put a stick to my neck and tells me she wants to go to Los Angeles and she won’t cry rape.”

  Singleton failed to show how anyone in history ever had their life truly threatened by a stick to the neck. But he, a veteran, was afraid of the deadly stick to the neck and the little girl wielding it. The former serviceman and merchant marine turned tail and headed south as the girl demanded. Then Singleton told a wild tale that he hadn’t even made up for Breshears or Reese.