The Art of Survival: How Mary Vincent Turned Private Horror into a Public Shield

BERKELEY, Calif. — On September 29, 1978, a 15-year-old girl stood on the roadside, trying to hitchhike south to visit her grandfather in Los Angeles. She was a half-Filipino teenager full of life, who just two years earlier had danced a solo routine at the Miss Universe pageant in Las Vegas.

When a blue utility van pulled up, the 50-year-old driver, Lawrence Singleton, offered her a ride. Despite warnings from nearby bystanders, an exhausted Mary Vincent got in.

What followed became one of the most notoriously brutal crimes in American history—but the true legacy of the story lies in what Mary Vincent did after the world left her for ᴅᴇᴀᴅ.

The Attack and the 3.9-Mile Walk

Once in the desert, Singleton stopped the van. He knocked Mary unconscious with a sledgehammer, raped her throughout the night, and used a hatchet to sever both of her forearms—four inches below the right elbow and six inches below the left. He then dragged her naked body down a 30-foot ravine, dumping her in a concrete drainage culvert to bleed to death in the desert cold.

Believing he had left behind an unidentifiable body with no fingerprints, Singleton drove away.

But Mary was conscious. Drawing on a survival instinct she had learned years earlier while living in the Philippines, she packed her bleeding stumps into the dirt until the blood congealed. She then climbed back up the 30-foot ravine and, completely unᴀssisted, walked 3.9 miles along Interstate 5 until a pᴀssing couple found her.

At the hospital, her memory proved flawless. She provided a description of Singleton so precise that a neighbor recognized the police sketch within a week. Singleton was swiftly arrested.

A Flawed Sentence and Private Struggles

Six months later, wearing two new prosthetic arms, 15-year-old Mary Vincent walked into a California courtroom. Refusing to speak his name, she pointed at “my attacker” and testified. Singleton was convicted of rape, attempted murder, and mayhem. However, under California law at the time, the judge could only sentence him to a maximum of 14 years.

Singleton served just eight years and four months before being paroled in 1987. The public outrage was mᴀssive; no town in California would house him, forcing him to live in a trailer on the grounds of San Quentin State Prison until his parole concluded. A civil judgment of $2.56 million awarded to Mary went completely uncollected, as Singleton had virtually no ᴀssets.

For Mary, the years following his release were defined by a grueling battle to rebuild. She struggled with depression, nightmares, and severe eating disorders. She raised two sons, Luke and Alan, navigating periods of extreme poverty and homelessness, at one point living out of an abandoned gas station while scraping by on disability payments.

Yet, amidst the trauma, something shifted. Mary discovered a completely latent talent for art. Holding chalk pastels with her prosthetic tools, she began creating vibrant, powerfully upbeat portraits of women, whom she proudly termed her “female action figures.”

The Second Courtroom: Facing the Monster Again

In February 1997, the phone rang. Lawrence Singleton had been arrested in Florida, covered in blood, standing over the body of Roxanne Hayes, a 31-year-old mother of three whom he had stabbed to death.

Mary Vincent was under no legal obligation to participate in the Florida trial. Nobody required her presence. She chose to go anyway.

In 1998, Mary walked into a courtroom for the second time in her life. Standing before a Florida jury, she raised her prosthetic hook, pointed directly at Singleton, and recounted the horror he had inflicted upon her twenty years prior.

On February 20, 1998, the jury found Singleton guilty of first-degree murder. He was sentenced to death on April 14, 1998. Singleton ultimately died of cancer in prison on December 28, 2001, before the execution could be carried out.

From Victim to Advocate: The Singleton Bill

Mary Vincent survived the desert, but her ultimate victory was systemic. Her case led directly to the pᴀssage of California’s “Singleton Bill” (ᴀssembly Bill 720), which drastically overhauled sentencing laws, mandating a minimum of 25 years to life for crimes involving torture and mayhem.

In 1999, she founded the Mary Vincent Foundation to provide direct support, resources, and advocacy for survivors of violent crime. She became a sought-after motivational speaker, a sculptor, and an active victims’ advocate. She even learned to modify her own prosthetics by hand, including a custom piece designed specifically for bowling.

When asked as a child what she wanted to be when she grew up, a four-year-old Mary had answered that she wanted to be “a mother to the world.” Through decades of unimaginable resilience, she fulfilled that promise to herself and to countless survivors.

“I will never get over being attacked,” Mary once reflected on her journey. “I wake up every morning with a constant reminder. But I can move past it.”