The Mad Chopper

by Fred Rosen

  Blood was everywhere—on her face, chest, and stomach, spattered on the floor. She looked like a bloody animal that had been brought to the slaughter. Nearby was the knife that had allegedly inflicted the wounds and a length of rope. The camera then moved outside, where Singleton’s van, the doors open, took up part of the driveway.

  The jury watched intently, moving forward in their seats. The graphic images, accompanied by nothing but silence on the soundtrack, made for a spellbinding presentation. The expressions of anguish and sympathy on their faces were quite evident.

  After the tape was finished, a second one was loaded up, the start button was pressed, and on came Singleton himself. It was after his arrest. He was wearing handcuffs, being led from the sheriff’s homicide office shortly after he had been taken into custody. By that time, word had leaked out to the media of the sensational nature of the crime and the arrest. Local stations had sent camera crews, who shined their lights directly into his craggy, tired face. The St. Petersburg Times and Tampa Tribune dispatched their reporters to the scene, who peppered the former merchant seaman with question after question.

  “Did you do it?”

  “Did you kill Roxanne Hayes?”

  “Why’d you do it, Larry?”

  The questions kept coming. Looking directly into the camera, Singleton finally replied, “Yep, I done it.”

  “Why’d you do it, sir?” one reporter asked him.

  Singleton shook his head. “I don’t know” was his simple reply.

  What the jurors did not see was the rest of the tape, where reporters continued asking questions, looking for Singleton’s motivation.

  “How come?”

  “Why’d you do it?”

  “They framed me the last time,” Singleton replied, referring to his rape and mutilation of Mary Vincent. “This time, I did it.”

  The judge had made sure the comments were edited out, since the prosecutors were prohibited from disclosing Singleton’s record to the jurors. The ones picked, in fact, had sworn that they knew nothing about Singleton’s infamous California past. They would not have been seated had they admitted to that prior knowledge.

  All through the presentation of the tapes, Singleton remained expressionless. It didn’t seem to worry him that the prosecution was moving him closer and closer to the death chamber.

  As their final witness, the prosecution put on Sheriff’s Corporal Donald K. Bowling. Bowling had arrested Hayes numerous times. In fact, Hayes had an extensive arrest record stretching back ten years, ranging from prostitution to narcotics possession.

  When asked what Hayes’s demeanor was like, Bowling replied, “She was absolutely passive, nonviolent. Her business was being a professional prostitute. I’ve never known her to be a violent person.”

  The testimony was meant to head off any supposition on the part of the defense that Hayes was aggressive toward Singleton, which therefore would justify the homicide.

  The prosecution then rested. Their side of the case was singular for its brevity, yet no less damning in its graphic details. After the recess, it would be the defense’s turn.

  The courtroom was rife with speculation over whether Singleton would testify or not. It was a double-edged sword. If he testified, he could try to present an alternative interpretation of the facts. But that also entailed opening himself up to what would certainly be a scathing cross-examination by the prosecution.

  Regardless, public defenders Menadier and Skye had decided to pursue a strategy of showing the jury that Singleton was too depressed to form the requisite premeditation for first-degree murder.

  “Call Stu Simon to the stand.”

  Singleton’s neighbor, Stu Simon came forward, took the oath, and got into the witness box.

  “Did you have any interaction with the defendant the week prior to Ms. Hayes’s death?” Skye asked.

  “Yes, I did,” Simon answered.

  Simon related how, in that previous week, he had saved Singleton from committing suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning. Singleton had attempted to run a hose from his exhaust into his car, where he sat waiting to inhale the fumes. Simon had pulled him out before he could do any lasting damage.

  “Were you also on the scene the day of the murder?”

  “Yes, I was.”

  Simon happened to show up right after the murder was committed.

  “What kind of shape was the defendant in?” Skye wondered.

  “He wasn’t too steady on his feet. Bill looked like he was drunk.”

  The thought being implanted in the jurors minds was “Could a drunk man form the requisite intent for premeditated murder?”

  Thursday, February 19

  It was just over a year ago that Roxanne Hayes had died. Her ghost seemed to hover around the hushed, packed courtroom as her killer prepared to testify. Despite the risk, the defense had decided to let Singleton testify.

  Lawrence Singleton had the face of a life-long drunk and rapist who had deteriorated to murder: bulbous, veined nose; a face etched with deep, craggy lines that on another man might have indicated character but on him, deterioration; and a mouth that looked like it could turn vile at a moment’s notice.

  Singleton was a rarity in today’s criminal justice system: a murderer who wasn’t young or middle-aged, but seventy years, old. He wasn’t weak, though. He still had the strong hands and physique of a merchant seaman.

  In the opinion of many, including the state of California and his first victim, Mary Vincent, he had never adequately paid for his crimes. The explanation for his crimes that he had offered then Sergeant Richard Breshears in 1978 was long behind him. Back then, he had just been trying to use his mouth to keep himself out of jail. Now, the stakes were higher, much higher, yet it was doubtful anyone in the courtroom, with the exception of his attorneys, felt any sympathy for him.

  As for the reason he was testifying, his attorneys, Skye and Menadier, knew they didn’t have much choice. They knew he wouldn’t be the best of witnesses. They knew he looked like what he was. That couldn’t be hidden, even under the sport jacket, slacks, shirt, and tie their client wore for the occasion.

  They were losing. So at all costs, the jury needed to know Singleton’s version of what had happened. Besides, they had nothing to lose. The prosecution had painted him as a vicious animal. The defense needed to show he was a human being, albeit flawed.

  “Mr. Singleton, did you deliberately kill Roxanne Hayes?” Menadier asked.

  “Ma’am, it was an accident,” Singleton said, looking imploringly at the jury. “I swear on the Bible it was.”

  “How did you come to meet the decedent?”

  “We met at a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant about two months ago. She joked around with me. I took her home and paid her twenty dollars for oral sex. I gave her my phone number.”

  “Did she call you?”

  “Three weeks later. She wanted to know if I’d like her services again.”

  He would and she came over.

  “How many more times did you meet afterwards?”

  “Just that night.”

  “What happened the night Roxanne Hayes died?”

  Quickly and efficiently, Singleton explained how ill he’d been feeling that day, how depressed he was. He had mixed fortified wine with a sleeping pill, an antidepressant, and an antihistamine. Clearly, he wasn’t himself and feeling godawful.

  Singleton went on to describe how he had picked Hayes up at her bus stop, as he had in the past. He hired her for sex and companionship. Then after they got to his house, things got out of hand.

  He had always found Roxanne to be “… a lovely person. Nice to talk to. But I never seen her in a mood like that.” Roxanne had gotten angry.

  “She complained that the price of cocaine had gone up,” Singleton said.

  Because of that, she wanted more money for her services. When she grabbed Singleton’s wallet to get it, and stuffed the cash in her mouth, “I got quite angry,” he continued. They foug
ht and she grabbed a large kitchen knife, one of two he had on the table for peeling potatoes in front of the TV.

  “I was afraid for my own life, and I was trying to control the knife,” Singleton said. “She threatened to cut my head off, and then took a swing at me. The knife was in her right hand.”

  Gesticulating wildly to show the jury how the fight had gone, Singleton described how they fought for possession of the weapon. Singleton managed to get a grip on the knife handle, which left only the blade for Hayes to grab.

  “That’s how she got those gashes on her hand,” he said, though he failed to note why, if all he was trying to do was get the knife out of her hands, she gripped it so tightly that the blade cut right down to the bone.

  “The knife went over my head and probably went right into her face,” was how he described the wound to her face. As the struggle continued, he said, “Probably each time that I pushed her, the knife would go in,” for a total of seven wounds. “I was just trying to get it down.”

  Singleton remembered that neither he nor Hayes said anything to the other during the struggle, which he estimated lasted just thirty seconds. The only sound was when he put his finger in her mouth to try to get the money she had secreted there.

  “I screamed when she bit me. I had no idea and I had no way of knowing the damage was being done,” he testified. Just like he couldn’t figure out who had cut Mary Vincent’s arms off. The question was: would the jury buy it?

  “Did you have any intention of killing Roxanne, hurting her or anything like that?” Jill Menadier asked.

  “No ma’am,” Singleton answered fervently. “It was probably both of us doing it.”

  “What happened then?”

  “I immediately thought of calling 911, but I didn’t have the ability,” Singleton said. “I picked up the television remote control, thinking it was the telephone. I told her we had to get to the hospital.”

  Gripping her around the shoulders, he helped her walk toward the door, but they only got as far as the dining room where she collapsed.

  “I fell down beside her and I was crying.”

  He managed to get her onto the couch.

  “And then?”

  “Well, Roxanne, she sat on the blue-plaid couch in my living room, really bleeding. She put both arms around me and asked me to hold her. We were embracing. I held her tight. I sat there and cried and rubbed her face and tried to talk to her,” he said. But it was no use because Hayes was dead.

  In all of his testimony, that scene stood out as the strangest and probably the truest. It would be easy to imagine Hayes, her life slipping away, aware she was dying, reaching out to the only human being present, ironically the man who was about to become her murderer.

  When Peden took over for cross, she wondered why the cut to Hayes’s stomach was so deep, it went straight through to her spine. After all, if all Singleton was trying to do was disarm her, why stab her so viciously?

  “That happened after she kneed me in the groin, ma’am,” Singleton explained. “God’s honest truth, I fell directly into her. She sat down on the couch and then I fell into her. That’s that seven-inch wound.”

  “So you’re saying that Roxanne Hayes stabbed herself?”

  “It was probably both of us doing it,” Singleton answered.

  “You and her are combining rather forcefully to put the knife into her,” Peden said in a mocking manner.

  “Yes, that’s what happened.”

  “You didn’t see the cuts on her?” Peden asked incredulously. “She didn’t start to bleed profusely?”

  “Not that I recall,” he said.

  “Do you recall telling Deputy Robbins, the first deputy on the scene, that everything was okay, that you and your girlfriend had just had an argument?”

  “I panicked,” Singleton explained, as rationally as he could. “That was the last thing I wanted to do was have to explain to a policeman having a dead woman on my floor.”

  “Oh, Mr. Singleton, have you ever been convicted of a felony?”

  Singleton paused and responded with a barely audible, “Yes.”

  “More than one?”

  Pause. “Yes.”

  “No further questions.”

  Understandably, he declined to offer any details of those crimes. Had he done that, the jury would have heard about his mutilation of Mary Vincent.

  There wasn’t much more the defense could do. Who were they supposed to, put on as a character witness? Lobster Boy?

  Joe Registrato, the chief public defender in Hillsborough County, had told this writer before the trial that had it been any other defendant, the state never would have asked for murder one and death. It was because of Singleton’s record in California and, Registrato might have added, Florida was trying to rectify its decision to accept Singleton in the first place.

  In his conversations with this writer, Registrato consistently talked about the penalty phase of the trial. It seemed a foregone conclusion that the jury would convict, and the real battleground would be pleading with the jury to keep Singleton out of the hot seat.

  There had been a lot of controversy the previous year when a murderer was executed in Florida’s electric chair and the black death mask that the condemned man wore caught fire. As witnesses continued to watch the man’s face was seared to a crisp. The odor of burned flesh permeated the death chamber. The state, meanwhile, would not stop the execution just because the murderer was literally burning his way toward hell.

  For Registrato, Menadier, Skye, and others who opposed the death penalty, that image of the death mask on fire, of the man’s flesh melting, was a harbinger of the fate that awaited Singleton should their pleadings not be successful.

  The job of prosecutors Peden and Pruner was directly at odd with the defense attorneys’. They wanted to get Singleton into that chair, and if his nose melted in the process, tough.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Friday, February 20

  As with all criminal cases in Florida, the prosecution began the closing arguments. Assistant State Attorney Jay Pruner delivered the close and he gave an impassioned one.

  Pruner reviewed the known facts of the case and Singleton’s culpability in Hayes’s murder. He said that Singleton’s claims that Hayes inflicted the death wounds on herself were preposterous.

  “If you are to believe Lawrence Singleton, this lunatic, Roxanne Hayes became enraged and threatened to decapitate him.” It was an utterly ridiculous argument. “If you’re to believe Lawrence Singleton’s testimony, the only crime he committed was assisting suicide.” As for Singleton’s account of tenderly holding the dying Hayes in his arms, Pruner said, “I’m sure it was a very touching moment for all of you, if you are able to believe Mr. Singleton,” which he clearly believed they could not. Not unless they were lunatics.

  “What the evidence shows you is that Mr. Singleton plunged that knife in seven times intentionally,” Pruner continued.

  Clearly, Singleton was a wanton criminal, a murderer who snuffed out Roxanne Hayes’s life in a calculated act, Pruner told them. In reminding the jury of the bloody murder scene, including the angle of the stab wounds on her hands that were consistent with her attacker standing over her and thrusting the knife downward, Pruner characterized the murder as the most heinous brutality imaginable.

  “Your only choice, your only choice is to come back with a verdict of murder in the first degree.” Pruner sat down and gave the stage to the defense.

  “We have never attempted for even one moment to say that Larry Singleton was not responsible for what happened to Roxanne Hayes and I’m not going to insult your intelligence by doing that now,” defense attorney Jill Menadier told the jury. “Lawrence Singleton never, never at any time made a decision to kill Roxanne Hayes. Larry Singleton did not have an ounce of ill will, hatred, or spite toward Roxanne Hayes.”

  Instead, her death was the result of a deadly combination of antidepressants, alcohol, and an antihistamine Singleton took the day
of the murder. He was not in his right mind or in control of his actions. The murder Lawrence Singleton committed was “a spontaneous eruption of emotion.” Therefore, the jury had no choice but to find that it was not a calculated, premeditated act, and had to come in with a verdict of not guilty on murder one. Murder two, yes, even murder three if they were so generous, but murder one—no way. The prosecution hadn’t proved their case.

  After Menadier sat down, the judge charged the jury. He explained the necessary legal components to convict on murder one, and gave the jury the option to convict on the lesser charges. By then, it was midday, and he excused the jury to have lunch and begin their deliberations.

  A jury could be out a few hours, a few days, or longer. To everyone involved in the case, it was a time of great tension.

  While Singleton cooled his heels in a holding cell below the courtroom, the lawyers roamed the corridors, sometimes going back to their offices, which were on the upper floors of the courthouse.

  In the media room, reporters hung around, reading papers and paperbacks. The TV correspondents put on their makeup for live updates downlinking via the satellite antennas attached to their trucks parked outside the courthouse. The print reporters waited, too, hoping the verdict would come in time to meet their evening deadlines for the next day’s paper.

  Just two hours and forty minutes later, the phone rang in the state’s attorney’s office.

  “There’s a verdict,” said the court clerk.

  He hung up the phone and dialed the public defender’s line.

  “There’s a verdict,” he repeated.

  All the lawyers hustled back into the courtroom. Singleton was brought in from the holding cell, the reporters sat with pencils poised over paper. In the back of the courtroom, photographers and a video crew shooting for all the local stations focused their cameras, getting ready for the singular shot of the defendant reacting to the verdict.

  “Mr. Foreman, I understand you’ve reached a verdict?”

  “Yes, we have Your Honor,” said the foreman.

  The verdict was written on a single sheet of folded, white paper that the foreman handed to the court clerk. The court clerk read the verdict.