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Interviews, official documents, statements to police and reporters, as well as newspaper articles, have all been used in the writing of this book. In the event that two participants offer differing, noncorroborating accounts of the same event, the author has used his journalistic prerogative to choose which version to present.

Dialogue has been extracted from the author’s interviews, court documents, Singleton’s murder trial, and newspaper articles. Some scenes have been dramatically recreated to portray episodes that occurred. A few scenes might be presented out of chronological order to simplify the narrative. Likewise, the Singleton investigation involved many police officers and for the sake of clarity, the story is presented principally through the eyes of the lead police officers.

The author has chosen to change the names of some individuals to afford them privacy. Any similarity between those fictitious names used and those of living persons or dead is purely coincidental.

I’d like to thank Captain Richard Breshears of the Stanislaus County Sheriff’s Office in California, and Vilma Bean of the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office in Florida for their invaluable assistance in writing this book, and Kensington Editor-in-chief Paul Dinas for his patience and guidance.

“He’s beating a woman, he’s beating a woman,” the caller said frantically.

“Listen, we just went up to the house and there was this guy inside and he was beating this woman.”

“What’s your name, sir?” asked the operator, speaking in the rational tone she had been trained to use when someone half crazy with fear called.

“What guy sir? Take your time, just calm down.” Her training included calming people down when they were excited.

“Okay, okay,” and Gene slowed down a little. “Okay, now I don’t know what the deal is, but the person that lives in that house is the same guy that cut that girl’s arms off, that fifteen-year-old in California.”

The operator didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, but she still didn’t have an address. After Reynolds gave it to her, she said the police would be there immediately. That was another thing 911 operators were trained to do. Say that the cops would be there immediately.

Hillsborough County, of which Tampa is a part, claims that the average response time to emergency calls is 9.1 minutes. It took thirty-four minutes for the first police car, with one Hillsborough County deputy, to arrive at the address. The cops would later explain the delay by saying it was “shift-change time and it was rush hour traffic.” Besides, no matter how fast they had arrived, the girl would have been dead anyway. Or so they would claim.

The murder had occurred in Orient Park, a neighborhood best described as the armpit of Tampa. Rundown, one-family houses lined the narrow streets, but the one Deputy Paul Robbins stopped at was nicer than the rest. It looked as though someone had put a lot of money into renovating it.

Robbins didn’t know it, but he was right. Ninety grand had been sunk into what had once been a rundown bungalow to make it what it was now, a jewel of a house, the nicest in the neighborhood, which literally shone in the blue light of dusk. But Robbins didn’t really care about its appearance. His eyes were trained on the vicious-looking Rottweiler that was guarding the door. It wasn’t on a leash and it was barking its head off.

Stu Simon, who lived across the street, heard the barking and came out on his porch. He saw the dog barking and the police car parked in front of the house and immediately knew it was big trouble. Stu quickly walked across the street.

“I’ll tie Kayla up, officer,” he said and approached the dog without any fear He tied her to the front fence and turned back to the cop.

The door was answered by a naked man covered with blood and wearing a condom. He was staggering as though he was drunk. Before he could say anything, the phone rang. He didn’t seem to hear it. Bill always responded quickly to phone calls, Stu thought “Bill, the phone’s ringing,” Stu said gently.

The naked man went back into the house to answer it. Hand on his weapon, Robbins hesitantly followed him.

On a sofa at the other side of the narrow room the deputy saw the body of a woman. He went over to look and saw that she was covered in blood. She was dead. He looked up. The naked man was standing over him. He had a mournful look on his face and he said nothing.

The man still said nothing. Robbins reached to the back of his belt, pulled off his cuffs, then spun the guy around.

The University of California at Berkeley is situated across the bay from San Francisco. A hotbed of radicalism in the 1960s, Berkeley, as the school was commonly known, clung to its radical reputation in the 1970s like a baby to its bottle.

The reputation fed the school’s popularity and as such, its radical past, and present, provided a haven for those free-thinking academics who would have found it difficult to teach at most other universities. Students knew this, and those who wanted to be taught in a different way, free from the rhetoric and mores of contemporary society, still flocked to Berkeley. Enrollment was also helped by the fact that it was a great party school.

There weren’t too many places more interesting than the San Francisco Bay area. The heavy gay population, and the strip clubs that dotted the landscape contributed to the feeling that San Francisco was a place where you could and would find anything and everything. At Berkeley itself, drug use was still de rigueur if you were a student, and sexy—well, all you had to do was look around at the sun-kissed bodies of men and women in tank tops and shorts, and if you didn’t get turned on, then you were surely asexual.

This casual attitude toward sex, and the free-form education structure, contributed to an attitude of permissiveness that blanketed the campus. The last thing on anyone’s mind was danger. How could it be, if you spent most of your time partying? But in Berkeley, there was a corner where crime, major crime, was just waiting to happen.

The students called it “Hitchhiker’s Corner” on University Avenue. It was the place you went to in order to hitch a ride anywhere in the state. Often it would be a student who’d pick you up. But there wasn’t anything to stop anyone else from driving there, someone who wanted to take advantage of, say, some young coed, or some runaway who happened to float into Berkeley. Luckily, nothing major had ever happened that anyone could remember.

Sure, maybe some kid had gotten picked up by some weirdo and been roughed up a bit, and maybe some poor girl had been picked up by some frustrated suburban husband who had forced himself on her. But for the most part, everyone who didn’t have a car just hitched and didn’t think twice about his or her safety.

In Rome, the Pope had just died. The College of Cardinals was meeting to anoint a new Pope. In Northern California, Mary Vincent was hitchhiking.

Vincent was a fifteen-year-old teenager with a troubled present. She had a “companion,” twenty-six-year-old Diego Montoya, who had been arrested the previous month on a charge of raping another fifteen-year-old girl in Sausalito. Mary relied on Diego, and with him behind bars, she just didn’t know what to do. Her solution was to try to help her friend. Maybe she could help find a way to get him out. Toward that end, Mary traveled to see his lawyer at the Marin County Civic Center.

There, Mary spoke with Diego’s attorney. It didn’t do any good. Unsuccessful at resolving her friend’s legal problems, and therefore her personal ones, Mary needed to find a way to live. She applied for emergency public housing. That didn’t work either. Finally, with her options for survival dwindling, with no place to go and no way to support herself, she placed a long-distance phone call to her grandfather, Ricker Vincent, in Los Angeles.

She said that she was coming down to visit him, and asked him to get some money. Mary had little or no money in her pockets, which was why she had to hitchhike to Los Angeles.

Beginning her trek in San Rafael that morning, she was first picked up by a man who was alone in his car. He drove her north across San Pablo Bay on Highway 37. He dropped her off someplace around Vallejo, but not before giving her written directions on how to get to Los Angeles.

Next, she was picked up by a woman who had two men and a dog with her. Traveling south and west on Interstate 80 for approximately fifteen miles, the woman left her off at Hitchhiker’s Corner in downtown Berkeley.

Wearing a light pink top, blue jeans, and white tennis shoes, carrying a green backpack and reddish-purple knit purse, Mary looked like the archetypal Northern California—Berkeley hippie. She waited at Hitchhiker’s Corner with her thumb out for someone to stop and pick her up. Someone did. A burly-looking guy, with a bulbous nose, driving a blue 1974 Ford Econoline van.

“I’ll give you a ride where you’re going, if you’ll help me load my van at my house,” the guy said.

He was vague about where that was, but said it was somewhere “nearby.” Mary agreed and off they went.

They drove for a while, up toward the north bay area, until they got to his house, a neat little clapboard number. Mary helped him load up the van with his stuff and once again, they were off.

“You know, I have a daughter,” Larry said wistfully. He did not say that he had been accused of beating her, and that his daughter had little or no contact with him, a fact that hurt him deeply.

Mary listened to the man talk about his second home in Nevada, and other facets of his life. After a while, the man’s conversation turned boring and ran out of steam. Just as they hit the freeway, Mary dozed off.

It was hard for her to measure how long she had been asleep, but Mary reckoned later it was just a catnap. Yet when she awakened, it was to a tremendous shock.

Instead of being greeted by the lights of the San Francisco Bay area, Mary awoke to see that they had passed Sacramento and were on their way east to Nevada, not south to Los Angeles.

Whatever he was up to, he tried to stall, to make Mary believe that they were on the right route. Mary, though, was too bright for him and repeated her protest: “Los Angeles is in the other direction!”

Larry stopped the van and forced Mary into the back. Mary was a feisty girl. She picked up a stick from the floor of the van and whacked the man with it. Suddenly ashamed of his conduct, Larry backed off.

“I apologize for my behavior,” Larry said sheepishly. “I’ll take you where you want to go.”

Driving south on Interstate 99, he pulled in at a greasy spoon, in the Sacramento area, where they both got out to get something to eat. Considering the guy’s strange behavior, Mary would have been smart to escape from the stranger at that point, but she was clearly not experienced enough and decided to travel on with him.

After the meal, the guy headed out onto Interstate 5 and turned south, toward Modesto. It was a round-about way to get back to San Francisco, but Mary was still not suspicious.

At the greasy spoon, the guy had bought a soft drink. As he drove, he drained some of it and then pulled a bottle of whiskey out from under his seat. While driving, he uncorked it, filled the soft-drink container to the brim with the booze, and continued to drink.

A short time later, outside Modesto, he had found the way into Del Puerto Canyon, a barren, deserted landscape, so isolated it might have been on the far side of the moon. The night was pitch black, and the only sounds were cicadas clicking in the darkness. The sky was like black velvet with diamondlike stars set upon its surface.

They both got out of the car to heed nature’s call. Mary was just about to take down her pants when Larry came up behind her. He knocked her senseless and then dragged her into the back of the van.

Screaming, trying to resist, but powerless against the man’s massive strength, Mary was forced to the floor of the van. Larry loomed over her like some monster, powerful shoulders and chest flexing, rough, callused hands holding her down. He seemed to get off on the power he had over her. He brutally raped her.

Afterward, to show he wasn’t all bad, he gave her a drink of whiskey. More likely, he was trying to calm her down just in case she screamed and someone nearby happened to hear her.

Drained, Mary expected that the worst was over when the guy started up the van and drove farther into the canyon. She figured he was looking for the way out. But he wasn’t and she knew that when he pulled to the side again.

Her worst fears were realized when he pulled her out of the van and raped her again, only this time, he wasn’t content to merely force himself on her sexually. Larry put his hands around her throat and began to squeeze, harder and harder and harder, squeezing the life out of the poor, defenseless fifteen-year-old, who happened to be hitching at the wrong place at the wrong time.

Suddenly, Larry stopped and looked down at her. The girl seemed dead, and his hands were around her throat. He had killed her. He had to think fast.

Larry carried her back into the van. He drove farther into the canyon and then stopped beside a drainage pipe. The pipe ran under the two-lane road. It was a good place to stash a body. Chances were, the girl was one of those troubled runaways whom no one ever missed.

But wait a minute, Larry thought, what if someone did discover her? Yeah, you always had to think about the “what ifs” if you were a smart dude. Larry thought of himself that way.

He was smart all right. Hadn’t he chosen to rape the girl in an isolated, out-of-the-way canyon where no one else was around? Hadn’t he figured out how to get rid of her after he killed her? But he came back to that question of discovery. And fingerprints. If the cops did find the girl, her fingerprints would identify her and then maybe they could figure it all out.

Fingerprints. Get rid of the fingerprints and no one could identify her. No one could get to him. He’d get off scot free.

It was the booze talking, but Larry didn’t know that. Or didn’t care. No matter. A plan had formed in his mind and Larry was nothing if not thorough.

Larry hit the brakes. The van coasted to a stop. By this time, he was so far into the canyon, the blacktop had ended and a dirt road had taken its place.

He jumped out, the door closing with a crash, and he went around back to take the body out. He reached in with one arm and draped the body over his shoulder, and with the other, reached under a tarp and took out a hatchet.

Mary opened her eyes and groaned. From that moment on, Mary Vincent was fully conscious and understood everything that was happening to her.

Now he really had to kill her. Otherwise it was prison for raping her. But he had to remember about the prints. The prints. The hatchet.

Larry forced her down onto the gravel, then took her right arm and held it down. He raised up the hatchet and slammed its sharp edge into the flesh of her arm. Not once, but repeatedly until he had hacked off her right arm below the elbow.

Barely conscious, Mary felt the pain and the blood flowing out of her. She felt him spinning her around. She felt the hatchet blade again, this time on her left arm. After several vicious chops, her left arm fell off below the elbow. Mary collapsed from the shock and blood loss and again lost consciousness.

That’s good, real good, thought Larry. Without hands, there were no fingerprints. And no identification.

Larry picked her up like a rag doll and tossed her over the embankment. Then he climbed down and pulled her into the ditch and started kicking and shoving her into the drainage pipe until he was satisfied that she was safely hidden. Leaving Mary to die, Larry retrieved the two bloody hands and drove off.

What seemed like hours later, Mary regained consciousness and tried crawling out of the drainage pipe and was almost all the way out before she collapsed again. Weighed down by her body, her bloody stumps were immersed in the cool mud.

Mary had had enough trauma for one lifetime. She needed escape and the only escape available to her now was sleep. Soon her eyes closed and she drifted off.

Larry made his way back west through the San Joaquin Valley, through the San Joaquin Pass, until he got to the Oakland Bay Bridge. It was early, the empty hours of the morning, with little or no traffic. That was why the next part would be easy.

As he drove on the bridge’s lower deck, he rolled his window all the way down, and then tossed one arm and then the other out the window. One arm sank in the water below never to be seen again. The other was picked up by the swirling water and carried into an estuary, where it eventually washed up on the rocks.

Mary Vincent lay on the muddy floor of Del Puerto Canyon. Weighed down by her body, the cool thick mud sealed her wounds and saved her from bleeding to death.

As dawn broke, she opened her eyes and blinked, surprised to find herself alive. With the greatest effort of will, the naked fifteen-year-old girl slowly raised herself and walked out of the canyon. The temperature was already climbing into the eighties and sweat poured off her.

All around her was land scorched brown by the sun, eroded by ancient seas until it was unfit for human habitation. Del Puerto Canyon was hell on earth, and Mary had had the bad fortune to be abandoned there.

Suddenly, she heard the sound of cars. Interstate 5 was nearby. That was how they’d gotten into the canyon, she remembered.

Mary took off toward the sound of the cars, following a two-lane blacktop that disappeared over a distant hill. She saw a car approaching over the rise. It began to slow.

Seeing this strange, naked, armless girl in front of him, the driver got scared out of his wits. He braked and turned around, speeding away in a cloud of dust, leaving Mary alone again, with little hope of survival.

The sun continued its ascent into the bright blue sky. The heat rose in waves from the blacktop. Mary struggled forward, topped the rise and continued to walk. She was staggering from side to side, her condition worsening by the minute. It was later reckoned by the county sheriff that she had walked a full two miles from the spot where she was assaulted, an astonishing physical accomplishment considering the trauma she had suffered.

It is unclear how much time passed before the second motorist saw her. His name was Todd Meadows, and he was on his way home from work, using Del Puerto Canyon as a shortcut. At first, when he saw her emerging from the shimmering heat waves, he thought her to be an optical illusion. As he got closer, he saw the illusion was in fact a young girl, a teenager, and she was naked. He slowed down as he got to her and stopped.

Todd got out of the car. That was when he realized that this young, naked girl had no hands! They had been chopped off at the forearm. What was left were dirty, bloody stumps.

Mary collapsed into Todd’s arms. He carried her to his car, put her inside and drove. He headed for a nearby air strip. When he got there, he dialed 911. Soon, an ambulance came and transported Mary to the local hospital.

Her assailant’s attack had left Mary Vincent in need of surgery. The surgeon amputated more of each forearm so prosthetic arms could be fitted later.

Police made sure that surgeons kept a record of the before X rays. If they ever found the missing hands, they could forensically be matched up to Mary’s stumps and used as evidence against her assailant at trial. That is, if there was a trial. The cops had to first catch the depraved son of a bitch who had done this to her. And with a common first name like “Larry,” the odds were against it.

Modesto is the West, in the best sense of the word. In the West, people have a profound sense that justice will prevail. That’s exactly how Richard Breshears felt.

Breshears was a tall, lanky young police detective, bright and ambitious, with a studious manner set off by his spectacles. Experienced in different kinds of investigations, from homicides to burglaries, he was assigned the Vincent case as chief investigator.

The newspapers played up the crime’s sensational nature. But when you stripped away the sensational aspects of the case, despite the vicious nature of the attack—neither Breshears or anyone else on the Modesto police force could recall such a grisly crime where the victim had survived—it was a brutal case of assault, pure and simple.

While Mary Vincent lay recovering in her hospital room, his job was to find the “bad guy,” and that’s just what he was going to do. Breshears went to the hospital to interview Mary for any information she could give him.

In relating the events of the night she was picked up, Mary mentioned that the man took her to a house somewhere in the north bay area. “He had a first aid kit that he’d placed in the front window, by the door,” she recalled. “He also said that he had another house around Reno.”

Mary described what her assailant looked like. Armed with that information, Breshears put out the suspect’s description over the teletypes, hoping that they’d get lucky and someone would see Larry or maybe stop him for a traffic violation and arrest him. It sometimes happened like that.

What kind of human being cuts off a young girl’s arms? Breshears was determined to catch this guy and put him away for a long, long time. If he could get lucky, or if he worked hard enough, he’d get the guy, and the law would do the rest.

In analyzing the attack, it became clear that it was a pass-through crime, that is, a random act of violence, the kind people always worried about happening to them and seldom did. Mary Vincent happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Actually, Breshears didn’t know where she’d been picked up. That was rather frustrating. Mary said it was somewhere roughly in the Bay Area, but it wouldn’t be until his investigation was further advanced that it became clear she had been picked up on Berkeley’s campus.

In those early days of the investigation in October, 1978, there wasn’t much to go on. The hope was that somewhere, somehow, some law enforcement officer would see the A.P.B. on the man the press called “The Mad Chopper,” and identify him. Breshears, though, wasn’t going to count on luck or serendipity solving his case. He needed the help of Tom Mack.

Tom Mack was a freehand sketch artist who worked for the San Jose Police Department. His work in law enforcement circles was renowned. Mack relied on his ability as an artist, not the mix-and-match feature kits used routinely in law enforcement.

Mack arrived in Modesto and went to see Mary immediately. Based upon her description, Mack drew a picture of an intense-looking, middle-aged man.

“That looks just like him, as if he was standing there,” said Mary, gesturing to the empty space beside her bed.

Breshears had the sketch copied and distributed to police officers, newspapers, and TV stations. The media, meanwhile, had latched onto the story like a leech to a warm-blooded animal.

The Modesto Bee, the local paper, had the exclusive because they were so close to the action, but newspapers up and down the coast sent reporters out to cover the story of the girl whose hands had been chopped off.

Gone from the front pages of the state’s papers was the search for The Hillside Strangler, the serial killer preying on the women of Los Angeles County. Now, it was The Mad Chopper who garnered the ink and sent a shiver up and down the collective spine of the state’s populace.

Once the wire services went with the story, it became national news, on the front pages of newspapers coast to coast. But no one knew who Mary was, because Breshears and company had to keep her identity secret. Since Mary was underage, she was identified in the media only under the pseudonym of “Maria.”

Police agencies in Northern California, of course, were only too anxious to assist in the investigation. No one had ever heard of a crime as heinous as the one perpetrated on Mary Vincent and everyone was anxious that her assailant be caught. It also helped considerably that there weren’t many all points bulletins for severed hands.

Across the police teletypes flashed word from Modesto to be on the lookout for Mary’s hands.

When Sondra Ruben picked up the paper that morning, the last thing she expected was to see a sketch of her former neighbor, Lawrence Singleton on the front page. But there he was. At least, she thought that was him.

Sondra, a forty-three-year-old housewife, lived in Martinez, one of the small towns that dotted the coastline north of San Pablo Bay. She had previously lived in the nearby town of San Pablo and her neighbor had been a merchant seaman named Lawrence Singleton.

Looking again at the sketch on the front page, Sondra wasn’t so sure. The nose was broader in the sketch, the eyes closer to the nose. The lips were thicker and the hairline farther back. Still …

She didn’t know what to do. The last thing she wanted to do was accuse an innocent man—a former neighbor no less—of such an awful crime. Eventually, she decided to sleep on it. She would take two days before she made her decision.

Breshears had been trained in forensic hypnosis, the science of hypnotizing a person to recall a traumatic, criminal event, in the hope that details surrounding the crime, embedded in the victim’s subconscious, would float to the surface. These could then be used to track down the assailant. With few leads to go on, Breshears was ordered by his boss, Lieutenant Chuck Curtis, chief of Stanislaus County Sheriff’s detectives, to hypnotize Mary and see what he could come up with.

Breshears went to her hospital room to do the procedure. He explained that there wouldn’t be any pain, and she wouldn’t consciously remember any of the events. Breshears intended to have her remember the things that happened in the third person, as if they had happened to someone else, and in that way, distance Mary from the event.

Using a pen that he moved back and forth in front of her, Breshears soon found Mary to be a very willing subject. Once she was in the hypnotic state, he began to ask his questions.

“Was the man that picked Mary up, the first person she took a ride with?” Breshears asked.

“Mary was picked up by this man,” she related as if “Mary” were someone else. “He was alone in his car. He drove her north, around the San Pablo Bay on Highway 37. Before he dropped her off, he wrote out directions on how she could get to Los Angeles.”

“What did the directions say?” Breshears was trying to figure out the route Mary took, to pin down where the nut who cut her hands off had picked her up.

“The directions were to take Highway 37 to Interstate 80 to Interstate 5 to Los Angeles.”

Now they were getting down to it. Mary Vincent had been hitching a ride to see her grandfather, who lived in the L.A. area, when the “bad guy” got her.

“So Mary was let off in the Bay Area, where she intended to hitch another ride?”

If they could find this woman, she could tell the detectives where Mary was dropped off and therefore, where she was next picked up by the nut with the ax.

“Mary talked to a man standing on a ladder. It was leaning against a building, I think, or maybe a roof.”

“Mary asked him where she could hitch a ride to Los Angeles. He pointed out a place across the street, where some others were hitching.”

“The man made Mary a sign on cardboard. I think it said, ‘Going to L.A.’”

That was all the useful information she could recall. Breshears’s boss, Curtis, intended to have detectives cover in a plane the route Mary took for the purpose of identifying the places Mary recalled. In doing so, maybe they’d come up with a lead that would lead them to her assailant.

But time and time again, despite advances in police investigative procedures, despite things like forensic hypnosis, or high-tech searches, cases are solved in the old-fashioned way—with shoe leather.

Breshears knew it was time to take out his walking shoes. Armed with the sketch Mack had made, Breshears and the other detectives working the case hit the road.

There is one fact in any homicide investigation that is not known to anyone but the detectives, the bad guy, and the victim. It is usually a detail, sometimes minute, sometimes major, of the way the crime was committed.

In Mary’s case, that detail was her assailant’s house. Mary remembered what it looked like and described it in detail to Tom Mack—down to the man’s dogs. If they could locate the house, they’d locate the suspect.

During one of Mary’s hypnosis sessions with Breshears, she had told him that in order to get to Larry’s house, they had to pass over twin highway bridges. Looking at a map, in the area where Mary was picked up, they spotted a town called Vallejo with twin bridges leading into it.

Breshears and his partner, Marc Reese, drove out to Vallejo. They spent five days looking at every single house in the town, trying to match the reality with the description Mary had given them. At night, when they signed in at local motels with their official titles, the desk clerks would invariably ask, “You think that guy lives here?” Everyone was nervous.

Still, it was understandable. To most people, an assault is not palpable unless it happens to them. It’s always some other guy who gets hurt by someone who lives outside the community. Then one day some cop stops by, asking questions about a person who could be your neighbor and suddenly it isn’t TV anymore, but real life, and you have a psycho in your midst.