by Fred Rosen
Immediately, he was taken to an area psychiatric hospital. Examined by psychiatrists, they concluded that Singleton should be locked up before he hurt himself or anyone else.
“He is incapable of surviving alone or with the help of willing and responsible family or friends,” the doctors wrote,” (and) all available restrictive alternatives … have been judged to be inappropriate.… There is substantial likelihood that in the near future, he will inflict serious harm on himself or another person.”
Their opinion was prepared as part of a report intended to help commit Singleton for long-term psychiatric care. His family pleaded with the doctors to keep him in custody. But after being put on medication, he was inexplicably released three days before a scheduled commitment hearing.
Singleton went back to spending time at the Brandon Crossroads bowling alley, about five miles from his home. A decent bowler, he had trouble getting matches because of his notoriety. Players in the Thursday and Monday afternoon leagues had already refused to play on his four-man team. The Tuesday night bowling league protested his very presence on the alleys.
Singleton felt alone, ashamed, and despised. But he wasn’t the only one.
Chapter Twelve
February 9, 1997
East Hillsborough Boulevard runs through Orient Park. It is a desolate, sunburned landscape where the air reeks of stale French fries from the fast food chains and gasoline from filling stations that dot the washed-out street.
The ten blocks between Fortieth and Fiftieth Streets on Hillsborough are pockmarked with by-the-hour motels and down-at-the-heels businesses that crowd for space with passing trucks that spew their dirty exhaust. Even the occasional palm tree set off to the side on a neat median of indestructible grass cannot offer the scene anything less than unrelenting gloom.
This was one of the many strips in the city frequented by whores, who liked to approach the men in the cars that floated by on their way to wherever, and propose simple business transactions that involved sex for money. Sometimes, the street would get so crowded, there’d be fifteen cars backed up on Fiftieth Street, with the prostitutes sticking their heads in the johns’ cars, and other places, hustling for business.
Roxanne “Roxie” Hayes was one of the most popular women who worked the streets. Maybe it was her size. At six feet and 170 pounds, Roxie really stood out. Well-built and friendly, she was one of the johns’ favorites.
While the buses had long since stopped running on the boulevard, the benches were still there, and one of them belonged to Roxie. Well, it didn’t really belong to her exactly, but Roxie had been there for so long that everybody thought of it as hers, even the cops.
Deidre Lawrence, who worked in the county sheriff’s office, used to see her on the same bench on her way to and from work.
“I saw Roxie today on her bench,” Deidre would tell the vice guys when she got to work. Deidre worked at the county jail, Roxanne’s sometime residence.
Roxie had shown up there for booking one-hundred times from 1992 to 1997. Because Deidre took East Hillsborough to work, she saw Roxie every day. A few times, she was tempted to stop and speak with her—the girl looked as though she could do better for herself, but Deidre wasn’t a social worker and, besides, she couldn’t be late for work. So she’d pass Roxie and wonder what she was doing there.
What Roxie was doing there was business, pure and simple, capitalism with a capital “C.” It was her bench and Roxie was as polite as could be about it. The woman spent a lot of time on that bench, waiting for clients, which gave her time to think.
Roxie, thirty-two, thought a lot about her kids. There was Xena, a shy, polite girl, an honor student with plans to earn a scholarship to private school. Xena was hers by a previous relationship.
For the last few years, she had lived with Fred Ricker, and though their relationship had never been legally formalized, she thought of him as her husband, so much so that she bore him two boys, aged seven and three.
Sitting out on that bench under the hot Florida sun, inhaling the noxious exhaust fumes of East Hills-borough Boulevard, Roxie thought how her life had changed after she met Ricker on this very street.
“Can you give me a ride?” Roxie had asked him, poking her head through the open front window to where Ricker sat behind the wheel.
So he gave her a lift. Roxie slept in his car, they talked about her daughter, and then, he drove her to his sister’s house. She slept there for a couple of days and from that point onward, the relationship blossomed.
Roxie remembered having their first son in 1989. She had been serving a jail sentence on a prostitution charge when her water broke and she went into labor. After she gave birth, a Hillsborough County sheriff’s deputy shackled her to her bed in the hospital maternity ward.
Things were just slightly better when her second son was born four years later, in 1993. She was under house arrest at the time on some sort of drug beef, and her first call was to her probation officer, because she couldn’t go anywhere, including the hospital, without his permission.
Looking out at the traffic on East Hillsborough, waiting for her next trick to show up so she could pay her rent, Roxie thought of what had happened afterward.
From bad to worse, bad to worse, that was how her life had gone. Ricker had been working as a trucker but he injured himself in a car accident in July 1996. He needed surgery on his left knee and was forced to use a wooden cane to get around. He had not worked in the intervening time, which just put that much more pressure on Roxie to be the family’s principal breadwinner.
Like any dutiful husband taking his wife to work, Ricker would frequently drive his wife, leaving her at the bus stop to do her business, while going home to take care of the kids. She wanted what all parents want, what was best for her children, and she was determined to give it to them. At least that was how she rationalized it. To her, prostitution was just a business. She only fucked men for money to meet expenses.
The truth was, there was another reason that Roxanne Hayes worked as a prostitute: she was a cocaine addict and needed the money to support her habit. She had been an addict for years. Her two youngest had been lucky they had not been born addicted to the drug.
Her musings were interrupted when a white van pulled over from the traffic and stopped at the curb. Roxie went over and stuck her head in to talk to the driver.
She knew this guy. His name was Bill. They had been together twice before. Boy, was he an ugly cuss, she thought. His face had more lines than a map of China. His bulbous nose stood out like a great big wart. It was the nose of a drunk, what with the broken blood vessels, an assumption borne out by his ruddy complexion and the smell of booze on him.
Roxie negotiated. He was a john, after all, and it wasn’t important how a john looked, but how much he’d pay.
“Why don’t you come over to my house?” Bill asked. “I live right around here.”
The two previous times they’d been together, he’d been okay. The guy didn’t look particularly dangerous and besides, it’d be better inside than out; no chance of a cop catching them in a parking lot somewhere. Roxie agreed, got in, and the john took off. She looked back at the bench as she drove away.
A few hours later, Gene Reynolds, a painter who had recently painted Singleton’s house, came by to do some touch-up work. He knocked on the door, and when no one answered, peered through the living room window to see if anyone was home.
He saw Singleton. It looked like he was punching a girl repeatedly in the chest. She looked in bad shape. He ran to call 911.
Singleton had just put on his condom when the disagreement started. Mindful of the increased street price of cocaine, and therefore of the increased price of her habit, Roxie asked for more money. Singleton refused, and they argued. He’d been drinking.
Anger and booze. It was as deadly a combination as any drug imaginable. Singleton’s rage boiled to the surface and when it got there, it spouted out like lava from a volcano.
Singleton went into the kitchen and came back with a knife. Roxie screamed, but no one heard her. Singleton grabbed her and the murder started.
What Reynolds thought was punching was actually stabbing. Over and over, Lawrence Singleton plunged a knife into Roxanne Hayes’s body. When he did, he saw everyone who had ever hated him, everyone from that girl back in Modesto to those idiots down at the bowling alley who wouldn’t let him bowl with them.
When he had finished, both he and the girl were covered with blood. She managed to crawl away from him and onto his couch.
“Hold me,” she implored, as her life’s blood seeped out of her body. “Hold me,” she whispered.
The rage had dissipated. Singleton dropped the knife and went over and took the woman he had murdered in his arms and slowly, he rocked her like a father would his child.
PART THREE
Retribution
Chapter Thirteen
A police search of Singleton’s house turned up a bloody knife that police surmised was the murder weapon. That would be confirmed after forensic testing. By that time, Singleton was already downtown and talking to reporters who had followed him after his booking.
“I did it, I did it,” Singleton shouted at reporters. “The first time was a frame, but this time, I did it.”
He delivered those comments to a waiting and willing camera crew from a local TV station, that promptly broadcast them, over and over and over. Singleton was determined to end his suffering one way or another, and if it took a confession on TV to get his ass into the electric chair, so be it.
The news of Singleton’s arrest for the murder of Roxanne Hayes immediately went out over the wires. Reaction was instantaneous.
“Between his past and his trying to commit suicide, I thought it was just a matter of time before something like this happened,” said a neighbor.
“Gee, what a surprise,” said Richard Breshears, now a captain of police.
“I’m not surprised by it,” said retired Stanislaus County District Attorney Donald Stahl. “He’s been disintegrating all his life.”
“I have the utmost compassion for the victim and the victim’s family,” said former Contra Costa County executive Sarah Fisher. “I’m proud that our community rallied together to keep him out.”
“It’s a sad commentary on our criminal justice system that a person of this notoriety who has committed a crime this heinous is out on the streets,” said a spokesman for the Hillsborough County Florida Sheriff’s office, clearly shifting the blame to California for letting Singleton out of prison in the first place. But in California, Governor Pete Wilson, a conservative Republican, was not going to pass the buck. “This man deserved to be locked away forever. The law should never, ever have allowed his release from prison. He was clearly dangerous. I think he is an animal.”
Wilson was tough enough to admit that California bore some responsibility for Singleton’s crimes, while reiterating the problem with the state sentencing laws at the time of the mutilation.
“The law was inexcusably lenient, absurdly lenient, and now some poor woman in Florida has paid for it. It made no sense to allow someone who is as dangerous as Singleton to be released because he’d done a good job folding shirts in the prison laundry.”
Under present California law, Wilson noted, Singleton would have gotten at least twenty-five years in prison for his crimes. He would have been prosecuted under the “one strike” law, which the California Legislature passed in 1994. But that was all twenty-twenty hindsight. With it, Roxanne Hayes was alive. Without it, she was on the slab in the coroner’s office.
The next day, Singleton was led into the courtroom for his formal arraignment. He was wearing an orange jail jumpsuit, similar to the one he had worn nineteen years before during his first arraignment in Modesto. It looked as though there were the same chains around his wrists and ankles.
“Mr. Singleton, I need to ask you a few questions,” said State Supreme Court Judge Bob Mitcham.
Singleton stood at the defense table. At his side was public defender John Skye. Across from them at the prosecution table sat Assistant State’s Attorney Lyann Goudie.
The judge looked down at his file.
“Mr. Singleton, do you receive four hundred dollars a month in social security?” the judge asked.
“Yes, sir,” Singleton responded.
“And all you have is five hundred dollars in assets?”
“Yes, Your Honor.”
Which meant the defendant was indigent and qualified for a public defender.
After the court clerk read the charges, the judge asked, “Mr. Singleton, how do you plead?”
“The defendant pleads not guilty to all charges,” public defender John Skye answered for him.
“Upon conviction, the prosecution intends to seek the death penalty,” stated Assistant State’s Attorney Goudie.
In light of the seriousness of the charges and the defendant’s previous record, the prosecution then asked that Singleton be held without bail. That left Skye with few options.
He could oppose the motion, but what was the point? Bail was rarely, if ever, given in a capital case. Even if it had been, Singleton had no money to meet it.
The judge banged down his gavel. “So ordered,” he said, and Singleton was held without bail, and taken back into a holding cell while the lawyers and judge conferred at the bench. March 18 was the date set to argue a motion for the release of records from St. Joseph’s Hospital Psychiatric Care Center, where Singleton had been taken after his suicide attempt weeks before the murder.
The wheels of justice turn slowly and it was anticipated by all parties concerned that it would take a full year of pretrial motions, psychiatric evaluations, and the like before the case came to trial. In the meanwhile, Singleton had three squares a day, proper medical attention, and a clean, dry place to sleep at night, with color TV—that admittedly, he did have to share with his fellow inmates.
Singleton’s incarceration made headlines, first in south Florida, and then across the country. Much attention was focused on why he had been allowed out on bail to begin with. Pundits in California and Florida, on CNN and local stations, questioned how Singleton had slipped through the cracks in the system.
The country’s mood seemed to be one of retribution and the media reflected that. No one talked about the man’s psychomedical problems, which had been untreated for most of his lifetime, or his combat in Korea, which might have started, and/or exacerbated what already existed.
One angle reporters did take was the most obvious one: seek out his other victim. Get some sound bites and great shots. Which was how Mary Vincent came to be back in the news.
Reporters found Mary living in Tacoma, Washington. It was to Tacoma that she had moved after the assault, and right before her marriage. Long divorced from Mark McCain, she was raising her two children alone. She reflected on what had happened to her.
“When I start thinking about things, like how raw my arms are, I start thinking I’m not useful anymore. That’s why I think about my kids and how beautiful they are.”
The prosthetic arms she wore were old and broken, the cables holding them in place snapped and frayed. Because of their poor condition, they rubbed her skin red and raw, and their weight alone gave her backaches. But she was poor, almost destitute, and couldn’t afford new ones, which cost $18,000 to $20,000 a pair. She had been devastated to hear of Singleton’s murder of Roxanne Hayes. “I’m distraught. For the last three days”—since she had heard about the crime—”I’ve lost all sense of time. I haven’t been able to eat, I haven’t been able to sleep.”
The memories of the 1978 assault had returned, stronger and more powerful than ever. She recalled Singleton’s warning after the assault.
“I’m going to finish the job someday.”
“My kids are the reason why I’m still alive,” she continued. “I’m struggling, I’m really struggling, but you can’t stop being a mother.”
There mig
ht, however, have been a ray of sunshine, with Singleton again in the spotlight and the news media seeking her out. Mary had decided to try to sell her story and had contacted an agent. The idea was that any money brought in could be used to help set up a trust fund for her and her two sons.
Actually, had Singleton been a wealthy man, she would have been a wealthy woman. The civil court jury years before had awarded her a judgment of over two million dollars against him. Unfortunately, his law bills had left him practically broke and she collected almost nothing. When the judgment failed to generate any appreciable assets, Mary was forced to file for bankruptcy. She was subsequently thrown off welfare and lost her home.
“I was just starting to get happy again,” she recalled. “It’s been a really slow process. But I was starting to feel those little glimpses of happiness again.”
Of her assailant, she characterized him as “nothing but pure evil.” She couldn’t understand why Singleton hadn’t been locked up forever. “I’ve already seen what he can do with me,” Vincent said.
Amazingly, she claimed not to have felt any anger over the attack on her. “Right now, I’m still stunned, and very disappointed and horrified.”
December 1997
In Florida, cameras are allowed into the courtroom. Those in support of the first amendment say that cameras promote free speech. Those against cameras, say they trample on the rights of the accused. In the Singleton case, the camera initially worked against the system.
The jury pool had been narrowed to forty-eight prospective jurors when Francine Leiter, who was part of that forty-eight, arrived home from court. She turned on the TV and was surprised to see herself. The courtroom camera had inadvertently captured her sitting in the jury box. This violated the anonymity of juries that is so important to the system’s functioning effectively.
The next day, Francine complained to Judge Mitcham that her anonymity had been compromised. Judge Mitcham immediately declared a mistrial. He said that the jury process was tainted because the media had violated his order not to broadcast closeups of prospective jurors. Mitcham reprimanded the media and then dismissed the jury. Retrial was set for February.