LAWRENCE SINGLETON
HATCHET IN HAND, SICK LAWRENCE SINGLETON HACKED AT THE LIMBS OF HIS YOUNG VICTIM AND TOSSED HER INTO THE CANYON. MIRACULOUSLY SHE SURVIVED – BUT THE MAN WHO TRIED TO KILL HER WASN’T FINISHED JUST YET
The year 1978 was a frightening time for the USA. The nation was gripped by the first murder to be attributed to an unknown assailant dubbed the ‘Golden State Killer’ in California. Serial killer Ted Bundy was hiding out in Florida, and the tenth and final victim of ‘Hillside Stranglers’ Angelo Buono and his cousin Kenneth Bianchi was killed in Los Angeles. Texas-born serial killer Carl Eugene Watts, the ‘Sunday Morning Slasher’, was still roaming free, as was ‘BTK Killer’ Dennis Rader. But it is not any of these men that 15-year-old Mary Vincent encountered on her journey to Los Angeles on 29 September: the Golden State Killer hadn’t struck in weeks, Bundy was behind bars awaiting trial, Watts was settling into married life and Rader was lying low, revelling in the media’s perplexed panic as they tried to decipher when he would strike again using the taunting letters he had sent them. The man who attacked Mary was not a high-profile serial killer, but his crimes were just as devastating.
It was a sunny September afternoon when the grandfatherly van driver named Lawrence ‘Larry’ Singleton first encountered Mary. His attack on the 15-year-old in a deserted canyon left her dismembered and damaged. The public were outraged when, having been sentenced for rape and attempted murder, the maximum inprisonment the state could enforce on the monster was a little more than 14 years. Singleton’s ‘good behaviour’ saw him released after eight.
Unlike Singleton’s next victim, Mary managed to escape and lived to testify against him for a second time in court. Her testimony was so moving, and the evidence that Singleton had reformed so lacklustre, that judges would avoid making the same mistake twice, handing down a punishment that ensured he could never attack another woman again.
HITCHHIKING ON HELL’S HIGHWAY
On the morning of 29 September 1978, Mary, a Las Vegas teenage runaway, decided she needed to move on from California, where she had briefly settled. Homesick and with little money in her pocket, she made plans to head to her grandfather’s house in Los Angeles. As she stood at a roadside in San Rafael, California, Mary hitched a ride with a lone man in a car, who took her to Vallejo in Solano County. Here, she then received a ride from a woman travelling with two men and a dog for 24 kilometres to Berkeley.
With only a few hundred kilometres of her journey left, Mary stood at the foot of University Avenue, a place known as ‘Hitchhikers’s Corner’, leading onto the 280 freeway. She stood with two other hitchhikers, all three of them thumbing for a ride closer to thei
