Lawrence Singleton

Lawrence Bernard Singleton
Prison mug shot of Singleton
Born	(1927-07-28)July 28, 1927 Tampa, Florida, U.S.
Died	December 28, 2001(2001-12-28) (aged 74) Starke, Florida, U.S.
Occupation	Former Merchant seaman
Criminal penalty	14 years, 8 years served (Cal.) Death sentence (Fla.)
Criminal status	Deceased by cancer
Conviction(s)	Murder (Fla.), rape, kidnapping, mayhem, attempted murder, sex crimes, theft (Calif.)

Lawrence Bernard "Larry" Singleton (July 28, 1927 – December 28, 2001) was an American Serial Killer known for perpetrating an infamous rape and mutilation of an adolescent hitch-hiker, Mary Vincent, in California in 1978. Released from prison after serving only eight years of his fourteen-year sentence, he went on to murder a second woman, for which he was sentenced to death in 1997. He died in 2001 of natural causes before the sentence could be carried out. It is believed that he may have killed over a dozen women in his lifetime.

Singleton was born in Tampa, Florida. He worked as a merchant seaman.

On September 29, 1978, Singleton picked up 15-year-old Mary Vincent of Las Vegas while she was hitchhiking in Berkeley, California, raped her, and then severed both her forearms with a hatchet and threw her off a 30-foot cliff outside of Modesto, California, leaving her naked and near death. She managed to pull herself back up the cliff and alert a passerby, who took her to a hospital. By the time of Singleton's arrest, Vincent wore prosthetic arms.

Six months after the assault, Vincent faced Singleton at his trial, where her testimony helped to convict him. Singleton was sentenced to 14 years in prison, the maximum allowed by law in California at that time.

While Vincent won a $2.56 million civil judgment against Singleton, she was unable to collect it when Singleton revealed that he was unemployed, in poor health, and had only $200 in savings.

Along with the particularly gruesome and callous aspects of the crime, the case became even more notorious after Singleton was paroled after serving only eight years in prison. He was paroled to Contra Costa County, California, but no town would accept his presence, so he had to live in a trailer on the grounds of San Quentin until his parole ended a year later.

According to TIME magazine, "as authorities attempted to settle him in one Bay Area town after another, angry crowds and Tampa's Chapter of Guardian Angels led protests, screamed, picketed and eventually prevailed." In Rodeo, about 25 miles northeast of San Francisco, a crowd of approximately 500 local protestors were up in arms and forced officers to move him under armed guard from a hotel room. Authorities tried housing him across the street from Concord's City Hall, but that was met with protests and failed too. He was removed from one apartment in Contra Costa County in a bullet-proof vest after 400 residents surrounded the building to protest a decision to place him there permanently. Governor George Deukmejian ordered that Singleton be placed in a trailer on the grounds of San Quentin for the duration of his one-year parole.