August 18, 2021 • 46 mins
In 1978, a man left Mary Vincent for dead. Ten years later, she told a journalist she’d never get over it. This is a story about surviving and about the narrative of the survivor—what we want from her, what she can’t always give us.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Is it a sin? Is it a crime? Loving you
dear like I do.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
If it's a crime, then I'm guilty, guilty of loving you.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
Hi, everyone, welcome back to another episode of Criminal broad
It's a true crime and history podcast about wild women
on the wrong side of the law, on the right
side of the law, women who are law adjacent. Let's say,
have we covered lady lawyers on this podcast?
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Yes?
Speaker 1 (00:36):
We have, Yes, we have several of them. We do
it all here today we're getting into the story of
Mary Vincent. Now, if you know that name, you're probably
screaming along with me. If you don't know that name,
don't worry. You know I'm going to hold your hand
and walk you through the whole thing. And also, you
have some really terrifying facts ahead of you, so I'm
sorry in advance, some really bad things happen in this episode.
(00:59):
I wanted a story, as we near the end of
this podcast, I wanted a real, raw, raw, throw your
fists up in the air, like yes type of story.
You know, a real story where there's some triumph where
you just want to wildly cheer because it's fun to
hear stories like that. Maybe they're not fun all the
way through. But it's cathartic to hear stories like that.
And I had heard this story before on a very
(01:20):
large podcast, which I will mention later in the episode,
And if you know this story, you probably heard it
from that podcast too. But as I started researching, and
as I read the many interviews that Mary Vincent has
given over the years, I was shocked by the fact
that this is not the easy, inspiring narrative that I
(01:42):
had been told it was. This story is much messier,
much more complicated, much more up and down, and one
step forward, two steps back then I expected it to
be then I would like it to be. We're going
to get into that tension in this episode, and it's
a little bit uncomfortable. I'm gonna be honest, because well,
(02:03):
I don't want to tell you all the things I'm
about to tell you in the episode. But it's messy
and uncomfortable. But there still are some moments where you'll
throw your fists up in the air, so it's all
over the place, just like life. I hope you enjoy it.
There are some graphic details in this episode. There are
a couple mentions of sexual assault, and we are headed
towards the Great state of California in the nineteen seventies,
(02:28):
which is a time when you kind of want to
believe it's all like fun and free and like maybe
there's still some hippies hanging around vaguely, but also there
were terrible things happening, and let's go. Mary Vincent had
(03:01):
only been out of the hospital for five months when
she was summoned to appear in the courtroom. There was
a man in the courtroom, and prosecutors wanted her to
talk about him, so Mary showed up her wounds on
full display. She told the courtroom everything that she'd suffered,
everything that he did to her. She was brave as
(03:21):
she talked, and her voice was strong, but she couldn't
look the man in the eyes. He was fifty one,
she was fifteen. When she was finished talking, she got
down from the witness stand to leave. She had to
walk right past the man as he sat there with
his lawyer. She started walking, and the man leaned over
(03:43):
to her, got real close to her ear, and in
a voice so low that no one else could hear him,
he said, I'll finish this.
Speaker 2 (03:52):
Job if it takes me the rest of my life.
Speaker 1 (04:09):
Mary Vincent was born in nineteen sixty three, and by
the time her mother was finished having children, Mary would
have six siblings. Mary's parents had met in the Philippines.
Her mom was from there and her dad had been
stationed there as an airman for the US Air Force.
But now the Vincents lived in America's most notorious city,
Las Vegas. There, Mary's parents both worked in the gambling biz.
(04:33):
Her dad repaired gambling machines and her mom was a
dealer at a casino. As a kid, Mary loved her hobbies.
She swam and she did gymnastics. She sewed through pottery,
she made macroma hangers for her mom's plants, and she danced.
She was so good at dance that she was hoping
to make a real career of it. Her dance instructor
(04:54):
had told her that she could get a job at
the Lido de Paris, a fancy Vegas cabaret, and Mary
had plans to dance there and then move on to
cabarets in Hawaii and Australia. She had it all planned out,
but as a teenager, Mary was starting to struggle. She
didn't like school, and she had fallen in with a
group of friends that her guidance counselor thought were bad news.
(05:17):
She was starting to skip class more and more, and
she was getting into big arguments with her strict dad
about things like wearing makeup. Apparently her dad had quite
the temper, because Mary says that one day one of
her sisters told her that their dad had a migraine
and was coming home all mad at Mary for something
she'd done. You'd better run, said her sister, so Mary did.
(05:42):
For most of the summer of nineteen seventy eight, Mary
was a runaway, or at least a quasi runaway. Sometimes
she'd live with her grandfather and then come back home
and then run away again. Sometimes she'd stay with an uncle.
For a while. She lived with a boyfriend in Saslito, California,
but that relationship ended abruptly when her boyfriend got arrested
(06:02):
on charges of raping a high school girl. At that Mary,
who was also a high school girl, left him. When
she wasn't crashing with family members, she'd find unlocked cars
and sleep inside them. Sometimes she slept behind garbage cans.
That September, she decided to go back to her grandfather's house.
(06:22):
Maybe she was starting to miss home or at least
starting to miss stability. She was up north near Berkeley,
but she needed to go south to where her grandfather lived,
and so on September twenty ninth, she decided to hitchhike.
It was the seventies, everyone was doing it. She didn't
think it was a big deal, and just like that,
someone pulled up and offered her a ride. The driver
(06:45):
was a middle aged guy, balding and paunchy and wearing
a blue jumpsuit, driving a blue van. He seemed pretty
old to her. She figured he was old enough to
be safe. He told her he'd drop her off in
Los Angeles. She opened the door of his van and
climbed inside. Let's take a quick break to hear from
(07:27):
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(09:07):
The man who picked up fifteen year old Mary Vincent
that day was named Lawrence Singleton. He went by Larry.
He was fifty one. He was an alcoholic who worked
for the Merchant Marines and had spent most of his
working life on the high seas. He had several blemishes
on his record, some intoxication charges and a charge called
(09:27):
contributing to the delinquency of a miner. That was a
vague charge that meant he had encouraged a young person
to do something illegal. Maybe it was something involving drinking
or drugs, maybe it was something involving sex. By the
time he picked up Mary, his personal life was in shambles.
He'd been divorced twice, had a huge blow up fight
(09:48):
with his teen daughter earlier that summer. Every time he
got drunk, his awful temper flared up. He hated women.
He probably wouldn't say it, but later most of the
professionals who were with him noted it. He absolutely hated women,
and he couldn't stay away from the booze. It was
a lethal combination. And now here was this sweet young
(10:12):
girl climbing into his van. Larry told Mary that he
was actually heading to Reno, Nevada, but no worries. He'd
had an extra four hundred and seventy two point nine
miles south and drop her off in La. This insane
detour didn't raise any red flags for Mary, maybe she
didn't realize just how much of a detour it actually was.
(10:34):
One thing did raise a red flag for her, though,
When she lit a cigarette and sneezed at the smoke.
She suddenly felt Larry's hand on the back of her neck.
Let's see if you're sick, he said, and tried to
pull her towards him. She wriggled away from his hand
and scooted closer to the passenger door. She was annoyed
at him, but not worried enough to leave. She wasn't
(10:56):
even worried enough to leave when he started swigging from
a milk carton full of alcohol. Instead, she fell asleep.
When she woke, she realized that something wasn't right. The
signs flashing past them on the highway weren't signs pointing
towards La. They were pointing towards Nevada. Mary realized that
(11:16):
they were driving the wrong way. She felt around in
the van in the darkness, and her fingers closed around
a stick perfect She grabbed it, pointed it at Larry
like a sword, and said, I can take care of myself.
Turn around now, and Larry listened. He turned the van around.
(11:37):
He seemed truly apologetic. I'm just an honest man who
made an honest mistake, he said, I'm not gonna hurt you.
But he wasn't an honest man, and he hadn't made
an honest mistake, and he was going to hurt her.
(12:07):
The sun was setting when Larry jerked the steering wheel
to one side and drove off the highway down a creepy,
deserted little road that went to the bottom of a canyon.
He had to use the bathroom, he said. Mary had
to use the bathroom too, and so when they stopped,
she hopped out of the van, found a secluded spot
and did her business. She was done and tying one
(12:27):
of her shoes when she felt a huge blow land
on her back, and then another one on the back
of her head. It was Larry. He grabbed her, pushed
her into the back of his van and began tying
her wrists. Don't scream or I'll kill you, he said.
He raped her. Then he got back into the driver's seat,
(12:51):
completely naked, and drove like a madman through the empty canyon.
He stopped the van again. He cut her hands free
and told her he'd let her go of shit. Obeyed him,
and then gave her a cup of alcohol. Drink it
or I'll kill you, he said. She drank it, she
had to. He raped her a second time. She fainted.
(13:13):
While Mary was passed out, Larry made a decision that
would change the course of Mary's life more than anything
else would. He must have decided that he needed to
do away with this girl to dispose of the evidence
of his crime. He figured that Mary would die out
there in the canyon if he just dumped her off somewhere.
But there was one problem. If authorities found her body,
(13:35):
she'd be identified by that most human of identification methods,
the prints on the tips of her fingers. And so
when Mary woke up, Larry told her to get out
of his van and lie down on the edge of
the road. She obeyed him. He rustled around in the
van looking for something, and then he pulled out and
(13:59):
axe and walked towards her. He grabbed her left hand
and roared, you want to be free, I'll set you free.
As Mary screamed harder than she'd ever screamed before, the
axe came down on her left hand and then her
right hand. In that moment, she thought to herself that
(14:23):
it would be easier if she could just die. Then
Larry pushed her over the edge of a cliff, scrambled
down after her, stuffed her into a concrete drainage pipe,
and left bleeding in shock. In agony, Mary lay there.
(14:45):
She couldn't believe that she was still conscious. She felt
an overwhelming desire to go to sleep, but she stayed awake,
feeling every sensation in her body, and she felt overwhelming
that she wasn't alone. Later, she would describe the supernatural experience.
(15:07):
I felt someone there with me, she said, a presence
who wanted me to survive. A voice told me to
get up and get help or someone else would die.
And so she got up. She crawled almost two miles
out of the canyon and toward the highway. She was
(15:29):
completely naked, and as she walked, she held her arms
high overhead to slow the bleeding and to keep the
muscles in her arms from falling out. The first car
that saw her must have thought they'd seen a ghost.
That car turned around and sped away in terror. The
(15:50):
second car that saw her was driven by twenty three
year old Denis Bore and his wife. Suddenly, Dennis saw
the most terrible thing he'd ever seen in his life,
a naked girl covered in blood and dirt, holding her
arms high in the air, missing both of her hands.
He pulled to a stop and lifted the girl into
the passenger seat. She wasn't crying, He said later she
(16:13):
was just moaning. The three of them drove to the
hospital as fast as they could, and before long, Mary
Vincent's story was front page news, and the entire state
of California reeled. The girl who's lying in the hospital
is a human being, said one local mechanic. When you
hunt animals, you treat them with more respect than with
(16:35):
which she was treated. A year later, Dennis Bore and
his wife were planning to leave California. They were so
traumatized by the rescue that Dennis had started carrying a
gun wherever he went, while his wife refused to spend
the night alone. There are just too many people here,
(16:55):
Dennis told a journalist that brings the odds up on
somebody losing their I get in my moods and I
think of it. I'm always on the lookout now. Ten
(17:25):
days after Mary was rescued, Larry Singleton was arrested in Nevada.
In the hospital, Mary would crawl out of her bed
in the middle of the night, still fast asleep, and
run down the hallways moaning. When the night nurse would
tap her on the shoulder and try to wake her up,
Mary would scream in terror. But in the daytime she
(17:46):
was strong. She was given one prosthetic hand, and she
learned how to use it surprisingly fast. Journalists and television
cameras swarmed all over her, and she gave some chipper
interviews where she proudly listed all the things she could
do with her new hand. And she could make sandwiches,
she could bake a pie, she could pour coca cola
into glasses. But her old skills from her previous life
(18:08):
were gone, including her dream of being a dancer. She
later told a journalist that in order to save her
right arm, doctors had to remove a piece of her leg.
There would be no dancing at cabarets for her. Five
months after Mary left the hospital, she had to appear
in court to testify against Larry. He was facing a
(18:29):
black cloud of charges rape, sodomy, oral copulation, kidnapping, mayhem,
a charge that includes intentional maiming of another person, and
attempted murder. In Larry's mind, though he was the victim,
he had a whole story worked out. Mary was a tough,
(18:51):
street smart, pot addled runaway who got into his van
and said, if you don't take me to Los Angeles,
I am going to maim you. And then accuse you
of rape. Yes, Larry Singleton, the man who maimed and
raped Mary Vincent, told police that Mary Vincent had threatened
to maim him. He said that he was so terrified
(19:14):
of being accused of rape that, of course he did
whatever that scary fifteen year old girl had told him
to do. Oh, and the whole bit about both of
her arms being chopped off, well, there were two other
hitchhikers lurking around, and Mary had sex with both of them,
and so well, they probably attacked her and chopped off
her arms and all. The guy with the axe certainly
(19:36):
hadn't been poor innocent Larry, who was the true victim.
Here in court, Mary gathered all her courage and mounted
the witness stand and told the courtroom everything that Larry
had done to her. It was bravery worthy of an adult,
but sometimes she sounded just like a child. When she
was asked to describe the rape, she said, I heard it,
(20:00):
I heard it. Then, as she left the courtroom, Larry
leaned towards her with that horrible threat, I'll finish this
job if it takes me the rest of my life.
At that, Mary ran out of the courtroom. Those words
would ricochet around her mind for the next two decades.
(20:20):
Larry was found guilty and sentenced to fourteen years in prison.
Mary went home to live with her parents Back in Vegas.
She went to a school for handicapped kids and started
going to therapy. But as she tried to heal, her
family began to pull apart at the seams. Her dad
was buying guns and talking loudly about how he was
(20:41):
going to kill Larry Singleton. Her parents were fighting and fighting.
Eventually they'd get divorced. Mary herself was starting to return
to her old wild ways, traumatized by the memories that
she was revisiting in therapy, and her parents just weren't
much help with any of it. They couldn't handle it,
she told a journalist later. They took it harder than me.
(21:03):
I'm telling them I need you, but they couldn't do it.
They were more interested in what they felt about what
happened to me than what I felt. And Mary's friends
weren't that much better. They couldn't deal with what had
happened to her either. I felt like a public spectacle,
she said. There's a certain narrative we like in our
(21:38):
true crime stories. We like a narrative where the victim
or the victim's family transforms like a phoenix rising from
the ashes into a survivor. We like stories of fighters,
of people overcoming terrible things, and we need these stories
to be fairly neat after the blood and guts of
the crime. We like to see our bad guys locked up,
(22:00):
and we want the healing to begin. We want the
healing to begin right away. Otherwise, what's the point? What
was all that horror?
Speaker 2 (22:08):
For?
Speaker 1 (22:10):
For a while, Mary tried to fit into this narrative.
She visited high schools and tried to craft an inspiring message.
Don't hitchhike, don't run away from home. You never know
what sorts of bad people are out there. She gave
these speeches dutifully until one day a boy in the
audience yelled, you deserved to get your hands cut off.
(22:32):
She tried to attend groups designed for victims to share
their pain, but she held her own pain so tightly
inside of her that she looked normal on the outside,
and people seemed to think that she was doing just fine.
In therapy, psychologists tried to get her to empathize more
with what her family members were going through. She found
the whole process crazy making. It was the first time
(22:55):
they had experienced someone like me, she said of therapy.
After a while, I just stopped going. Right after her attack,
Mary had lived in the intense glare of the media spotlight.
People around the country had raised money for her new
arms and held bake sales to support her. But now
the news cycle had moved on, and the speaking tour
(23:17):
didn't pan out, and the victims groups weren't working, and
so what was she to do? She tried to scrape by.
Money was always a problem. She got thirteen thousand dollars
from the California Victim's Fund, but that didn't last forever.
In a civil suit, she was awarded two point five
million dollars from Larry Singleton, but he didn't have a
(23:37):
cent to pay her. Yes, money was a problem, and
so were men. None of the men she dated had
their resources to deal with the depth and intensity of
her pain. I don't think too highly of them anymore,
she told a journalist. They can't cope with the hurt
that goes on inside me or any other victim. Still,
(23:58):
one glorious thing came out of her laateationship. She had
in her mid twenties, she gave birth to a son, Luke.
His name meant light. She had always wanted to be
a mother, and now she was. When I became a mother,
she said, I really had something big to live for.
Her relationship with Luke's father didn't last, but by nineteen
(24:20):
eighty seven she was in a new relationship and living
in Washington State. She was engaged, and on her wedding day,
a guest walked up to her and told her the
worst news in the world. Larry Singleton was free in prison.
When Larry Singleton spoke to the psychiatrist, he often referred
(24:44):
to Mary as the little bitch. Now he was out
on parole. He had served only eight years of his
fourteen year sentence, and he had gotten out early because
of quote good behavior. He was out on parole except
that nobody in California, not a single town or city,
would have him. The public outrage over his release was
(25:05):
so huge that he had to spend his year of
parole living in a trailer on the grounds of San
Quentin Prison. People hadn't forgotten for a second what he'd
done to Mary, and they were certainly not going to
have him as a neighbor. Larry himself was deeply offended
over this. He told a journalist that this sort of
(25:26):
vengeance wasn't the America he knew. Back in Washington State,
Mary's new husband couldn't deal with the news that his
wife's attacker was practically free. He also couldn't deal with
the renewed attention that Mary was getting now that Larry
was out on parole. She was again swamped with interview requests,
with talk of book and TV deals. She was also pregnant,
(25:49):
and so her husband stayed until she gave birth to
their son, Alan, whose name means precious, but after that
he left her. As Mary had told that journalist a
few years earlier, most men couldn't cope with her hurt,
including her own husband. Of course, the news of Larry's
parole made Mary remember all too vividly his last words
(26:13):
to her, I'll finish this job if it takes me
the rest of my life. She started hiring bodyguards, and
she moved around as much as possible so that Larry
wouldn't be able to find her. In the meantime, the
book deals crashed, the movie deals burned, and Mary eventually
had to go on welfare. She borrowed too much money
to make a down payment on a house, and the
(26:34):
house got repossessed just a few months later. Things got
so bad that she and her two boys spent one
winter living in an abandoned gas station. She stopped eating,
her weight plummeted, her prosthetic arms rusted she couldn't afford
to fix them. In the meantime, Larry was continuing the
(26:55):
narrative that he was the victim. In fact, he was
now trying to sue Mary Vincent for kidnapping him. He
claimed that Mary had been smoking PCP in his van,
had used a stick to threaten him and force him
to drive her to Los Angeles, and that she and
(27:15):
those magical mystical two other male hitchhikers had stolen money
from him. He argued that Mary was guilty of the
crime of forcible kidnap for the purpose of robbery. He
told the press that not only was he the victim
of kidnapping, but he was also the victim of a
media smear campaign. I wouldn't be a normal human being
(27:38):
if I didn't work myself into a rage when I
think of how I was treated in the courts and
also in the media. He said, I have spent ten
years of my life in prison, each day being taunted
and threatened. He hadn't wanted to sue Mary. He held
no bitterness in his heart against her, even though she
had kidnapped him and threatened him with a He told
(28:01):
that journalist that before he filed the complaint against her,
he felt like throwing up, and he'd had some trouble sleeping. No,
he hadn't wanted to sue her because he was such
a loving person. But he had to. He had to
sue her in order for the truth to come out.
As every sane person in the state of California rolled
(28:23):
their eyes harder than they'd ever been rolled before. Mary
was also talking to the press. After all, people wanted
to know how she felt now that Larry was out,
But anyone hoping that she'd give the media a rousing
SoundBite about how she'd never be afraid of Larry Singleton
ever again was sorely disappointed. The article which came out
(28:43):
in People magazine made it painfully clear that Mary's life
had been ruined by the attack, and that there was
no chip or message to be exhumed from the wreckage.
Let's just go ahead and read an entire paragraph from
the article Zoomed by anger, Haunted by cold sweat dreams,
in which the accident, as she calls it, spins itself
(29:06):
out in terrible detail. She has been crippled by a
sense of defeat. She considered suicide, she said, but rejected
the idea because I'd chicken out and a part of
me would feel like I can't even do that right.
She could talk haltingly about the psychic aftershocks of her experience,
but could not offer any tidy morals. Although she said
(29:29):
her son, now eighteen months, has given her a reason
to live, her spirit seems to have been destroyed. I'll
never get over this, she said. By the early nineteen nineties,
(29:56):
Mary was dating her bodyguard, a bare knuckle fighter name Bob,
who bred gigantic dogs. She was having nightmares so violent
that she had broken bones, dislocated her shoulder, and cracked
ribs all in her sleep. Larry was living in Tampa, Florida,
where he grew up. At one point someone set up
a bomb near his house. California didn't want him, but
(30:19):
Florida wasn't happy to have him either. Larry's life in
Florida was far from idyllic. He was arrested several times
for shoplifting. In nineteen ninety seven, he attempted suicide, and
he did a stint in a psychiatric hospital because of it.
Nine days after Larry was released from the hospital, a
local painter came by his house to paint it. Larry
(30:43):
had hired this painter earlier, and as the man walked inside,
he heard someone say in a low voice. Help. The
painter looked into the living room and saw something that
he'd never forget. Larry was standing by his cow, naked
and covered in blood. There was a woman slumped on
(31:04):
the couch. The painter ran outside and looked through a
window before telephoning for help. He saw Larry raise his
arm and bring it crashing down on the woman. Again
and again. He heard the sound of bones being crushed.
He later compared it to chicken bones breaking. The woman
(31:27):
on the couch was Roxanne Hayes, a sex worker and
a mother of three. She'd gone to Larry's house on
February nineteenth, nineteen ninety seven, to make a little money,
and she never left. Her seventh grade daughter had to
identify her body at the morgue. Roxanne struggled with addiction
and homelessness, but she was the kind of woman who'd
(31:48):
crawl into dumpsters to save stray kittens. As her boyfriend
told a journalist, she took her kids to the State
Fair and the YMCA, and she told them that they
could be whatever they wanted to be. Her boyfriend told
the journalist that he thought Roxanne would have forgiven Larry
for what he did to her. She would have forgiven
him for everything, that is, except for the fact that
(32:11):
he took her away from her children. In court, Larry
pulled out his well worn victim card. He claimed that
Roxanne had tried to steal his wallet and then had
picked up one of his knives and threatened to decapitate him.
So of course he had to stop her. And so
(32:32):
when he tried to take the knife from her, she
jerked her hand down and away from him, and she
accidentally stabbed herself. She accidentally stabbed herself seven times. Then
Larry said she begged him to hold her, so he
sobbed and stroked her face as she took her last breath.
(32:56):
It was beautiful. Nobody believed Larry Singleton's absurd, repugnant, pathetic,
offensive story for a single second. Mary Vincent, for one
knew that he was lying through his teeth. The State
of Florida flew her down for the trial, where she
sat in the courtroom and said, I was attacked, I
(33:17):
was raped, and my hands were cut off. He left
me to die. And at that she raised one of
her prosthetic arms and pointed it straight at Larry. He
was sentenced to death. The whole experience shook Mary to
her core. She wept for Roxanne Hayes, obsessed over her
(33:38):
final moments in the courtroom. The medical examiner had testified
that Roxanne would have been conscious for four or five
minutes after being stabbed in the heart. Mary's nightmares came back.
She'd dream about her own attack, and then she'd dream
about horrible things happening to other people. And yet the
silver lining to the whole horror was that Larry was
(34:00):
once again behind bars. He was no longer out there
roaming around looking for Mayhem. So slowly Mary found herself
able to function in a way she hadn't for years.
She found herself craving sunlight, and so she moved from
Washington State down to Orange County, California, where she got
(34:21):
a job as a clerk at the District Attorney's office. There,
she met a handsome investigator named Tom Wilson. Their first
date started at brunch and ended with dinner. That night,
she couldn't sleep, so she picked up a pencil with
her prosthetic hands and drew a self portrait for him.
This would be the start of a new identity for her,
(34:43):
Mary Vincent, the Artist. She and Tom got married in
nineteen ninety nine, and she wore her wedding ring on
a chain around her neck. It was a fairy tale
ending for her, she told the press. Tom encouraged her
to look into victim's rights again, and with his support
did She launched the Mary Vincent Foundation, hoping that it
(35:03):
would help victims of violent crime. When she gave a
speech at the opening of the foundation, several hundred people
came to hear her speak. They wept along with her
as she told the story of her attack on stage.
The foundation didn't last though, after a year or so
there were no more news articles about it. Today, a
(35:26):
report on US nonprofits says that the Mary Vincent Foundation
had their exempt status automatically revoked by the IRS for
failure to file certain forms for three consecutive years. What
exactly happened with the foundation is not public knowledge, but
here's a guess. The narrative of the survivor who turns
(35:46):
her trauma into a movement, who starts the foundation and
raises millions and ends up changing the world is an
alluring narrative, but for many that narrative is just too
heavy to Still, it was impossible to deny that what
(36:17):
Mary Vincent was becoming as the years passed by was
something of a badass. Sure, the million dollar book deal
never panned out. She and Tom divorced, and she moved
back to Washington State with her sons, where she lived
on disability and welfare. But her drawing was becoming more
and more of a force in her life. She drew
family portraits on commission, but when she was working just
(36:40):
for herself, she drew female action figures, intense, dangerous, sexy
pin up types with weapons in their hands. It was
harder to be brave at night, as it often is.
Mary had trouble falling asleep, and she could never stay
asleep for very long. Every day, I pray to God
(37:01):
to make a space I can breathe in, she told
a journalist, and every day God gives it to me.
In that space, she did what she could, and she
did it well. She tinkered with her cheap prosthetic arms,
using bits and pieces from stereo systems and old refrigerators,
and she made them better so that her fingers could
turn in any direction. She figured out how to bowl.
(37:25):
She made herself a prosthetic hand just for the bowling alley,
and she became something of a pool shark, so good
at the game that her most competitive friends refused to
play with her. She got herself a twenty one year
old boyfriend. She never used Larry Singleton's name as the
two thousands. Crept On Mary would occasionally resurface for the
(37:48):
purpose of victim's rights, that movement that she always seemed
to have such an uneasy time with. In two thousand
and nine, she gave a speech as part of National
Crime Victims Rights Weeks, and she showed up looking like
a space age wonder woman, with her black tank top
and her metal arms, her long dark hair flowing down
her back. Twenty years earlier, she'd told a journalist that
(38:11):
she'd never get over the attack, and now she added
on to that message, I will never get over being attacked.
I wake up every morning with a constant reminder, she said,
holding up her arms. But I can move past it.
Seven years later, she had fallen back into obscurity when
a podcast that was just starting to get big covered
(38:33):
her story. The podcast My Favorite Murder featured the tale
of Mary Vincent on their eighteenth episode. One of the
hosts had seen Mary in a two thousand and nine
episode of I Survived Today, the podcast gets over thirty
five million downloads a month, and the Mary Vincent episode
(38:54):
is their most popular episode of all time. Mary has
become thing of a hero to the fans of the podcast,
who call themselves Murderinos. You can go on Etsy and
buy a white mug with a black cross on it
for seventeen twenty nine that reads Mary Vincent, Our Lord
and Savior. Finally a Hollywood ending right. A whole new
(39:19):
generation gets to hear the inspiring story of Mary Vincent,
and she becomes truly famous. In the movie version of
this story, a movie that has inexplicably never been made,
even though we're on our what fourth or fifth three
telling of the Ted Bundy story. In the movie version
of this story, Mary Vincent would join the hosts of
My Favorite Murder on stage and say thank you for
(39:40):
keeping my story alive, and say I didn't just survive,
I thrived, and everyone would cry, and she'd go on
Oprah and then write that best selling memoir and everyone
could walk away from the story with a tidy ending,
an ending inspirational enough to put on an Etsy mug.
But Hollywood didn't write Mary's story. Mary has never joined
(40:03):
the hosts of My Favorite Murder on stage, or gone
on Oprah, or written her book. I wasn't able to
find a single quote from her since two thousand and nine.
In one of the last interviews that she did, she
talks about her finances and mentions that she's in debt
and looking for a job. Mary Vincent, the famous survivor
(40:25):
looking for a job. Her story resists the happily and
wealthily ever after, ending that we crave from crime. We'd
like to tell ourselves that there are certain things nobody
can take from us, right, nobody can take our dignity,
our courage, our indomitable spirits. But Larry Singleton took a
(40:46):
whole hell of a lot from the world. He took
innocence from Mary Vincent, and from Roxanne Hayes's seventh grade daughter,
who had to identify her mother's broken body in the morgue.
He took Mary's ability to sleep soundly for the rest
of her life. He took her career as a dancer.
(41:06):
He took a mother away from Roxanne's three children. He
didn't ultimately take Mary Vincent's indomitable spirit, but he came close,
closer than it is comfortable to admit. Today, the laws
in California are tougher because of Larry. If he committed
(41:27):
his crime against Mary Vincent now, he would be given
a much longer sentence. He may never have had the
chance to attack again. Thankfully he is no longer around
to test this theory. He died of cancer in a
prison hospital just after Christmas of two thousand and one.
Nobody mourned him. His obituary headline gave him the title
(41:49):
of despised rapist. When Mary Vincent does get on stage
to talk about crime, her message is always a little
bit vague. She says things like, we all need to
stop long enough to care. We need to stop the violence.
She says, we all must join together to stop this
(42:10):
kind of thing. She says, I don't want anything this
bad to happen to anyone else. She means what she's saying,
of course, but there's a kind of tragedy to these
simplistic statements. We all must join together to stop this
kind of thing. But what could have stopped Larry Singleton? Really,
(42:33):
As one journalist put it, what happened to Mary was
the result of someone's random, violent urge. It was senseless,
and that's the tragedy of her life, the thing she
has to fight like hell to overcome. That she will
always be fighting to overcome. She tries to spin meaning
(42:53):
from what happened to her, but it's like spinning gold
from straw. Back in nineteen seventy eight, that same journalist
watched Mary get coached through a press conference, and the
journalist felt uncomfortable watching the spectacle that she had become.
There was the sickening feeling that the most tragic experience
(43:15):
in young Mary Vincent's life had, in some perverse twist,
become a macabre highlight. The journalist wrote, she was news
and it seemed unfair. And that is the story of
(43:49):
Mary Vincent. Nobody can deny that she is a survivor.
Nobody can deny that what she overcame was incredible, like
freaking scaling Mount Everest with the blind on and no oxygen.
But I thought it was fascinating and heartbreaking that her
narrative was not this tidy arc that we all want,
(44:11):
just like what happened to me was terrible, but then
like every year that went by, I got stronger and
I'm here. It's really a story of the circular and
back and forth and chaotic nature of healing. I think,
and I think that it's important to see a story
like that, because we do love an inspiring narrative. I mean,
(44:32):
I think I've had plenty of inspiring narratives on this
year podcast, and it feels so good, it feels so right.
But maybe that's a bit too much of a burden
to put on survivors. I don't know. It feels like
perhaps the expectation from us the public for people to
have these glow ups, as gen Z says, does gen
Z say that who says glow ups? Our expectation on
(44:55):
people to have these glow ups is perhaps not fair?
All right, everyone, thank you as always for listening for
your sensitive and intelligent responses to these episodes. You can
go to Instagram dot com slash criminal Brods to see
photos of Mary Vincent from her sweet precious photos when
she was only fifteen to her looking like a real
(45:18):
modern day wonder woman in her black tank top. And
I'd also like to thank this week's patrons Jenna, Kay,
Molly b my squad, My squad for this week. Thank
you for supporting the podcast. Anyone else who wants to
become a patron for the last weeks of Criminal Brods
go to patreon dot com slash criminal Broads to support
(45:38):
the podcast. Of course, you can always leave her review.
You know the drill, you know how to support the podcast.
I will see you back here next week for a
story where we are going to go into a little
place called prison and we are going to stay there
for a really long time. Are you ready? Buckley your
(45:59):
receipt else, track your engines, get your oil tested, or
whatever you do with oiling cars, and I will see
you back here next week. Have a good one bye.
Speaker 2 (46:10):
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm wrong loving youd like I do.
If it's a crime, then I'm guilty, guilty of loving you.
Is it a sin? Is it a crime? Loving you
dear like I do.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
If it's a crime, then I'm guilty, guilty of loving you.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
Hi, everyone, welcome back to another episode of Criminal broad
It's a true crime and history podcast about wild women
on the wrong side of the law, on the right
side of the law, women who are law adjacent. Let's say,
have we covered lady lawyers on this podcast?
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Yes?
Speaker 1 (00:36):
We have, Yes, we have several of them. We do
it all here today we're getting into the story of
Mary Vincent. Now, if you know that name, you're probably
screaming along with me. If you don't know that name,
don't worry. You know I'm going to hold your hand
and walk you through the whole thing. And also, you
have some really terrifying facts ahead of you, so I'm
sorry in advance, some really bad things happen in this episode.
(00:59):
I wanted a story, as we near the end of
this podcast, I wanted a real, raw, raw, throw your
fists up in the air, like yes type of story.
You know, a real story where there's some triumph where
you just want to wildly cheer because it's fun to
hear stories like that. Maybe they're not fun all the
way through. But it's cathartic to hear stories like that.
And I had heard this story before on a very
(01:20):
large podcast, which I will mention later in the episode,
And if you know this story, you probably heard it
from that podcast too. But as I started researching, and
as I read the many interviews that Mary Vincent has
given over the years, I was shocked by the fact
that this is not the easy, inspiring narrative that I
(01:42):
had been told it was. This story is much messier,
much more complicated, much more up and down, and one
step forward, two steps back then I expected it to
be then I would like it to be. We're going
to get into that tension in this episode, and it's
a little bit uncomfortable. I'm gonna be honest, because well,
(02:03):
I don't want to tell you all the things I'm
about to tell you in the episode. But it's messy
and uncomfortable. But there still are some moments where you'll
throw your fists up in the air, so it's all
over the place, just like life. I hope you enjoy it.
There are some graphic details in this episode. There are
a couple mentions of sexual assault, and we are headed
towards the Great state of California in the nineteen seventies,
(02:28):
which is a time when you kind of want to
believe it's all like fun and free and like maybe
there's still some hippies hanging around vaguely, but also there
were terrible things happening, and let's go. Mary Vincent had
(03:01):
only been out of the hospital for five months when
she was summoned to appear in the courtroom. There was
a man in the courtroom, and prosecutors wanted her to
talk about him, so Mary showed up her wounds on
full display. She told the courtroom everything that she'd suffered,
everything that he did to her. She was brave as
(03:21):
she talked, and her voice was strong, but she couldn't
look the man in the eyes. He was fifty one,
she was fifteen. When she was finished talking, she got
down from the witness stand to leave. She had to
walk right past the man as he sat there with
his lawyer. She started walking, and the man leaned over
(03:43):
to her, got real close to her ear, and in
a voice so low that no one else could hear him,
he said, I'll finish this.
Speaker 2 (03:52):
Job if it takes me the rest of my life.
Speaker 1 (04:09):
Mary Vincent was born in nineteen sixty three, and by
the time her mother was finished having children, Mary would
have six siblings. Mary's parents had met in the Philippines.
Her mom was from there and her dad had been
stationed there as an airman for the US Air Force.
But now the Vincents lived in America's most notorious city,
Las Vegas. There, Mary's parents both worked in the gambling biz.
(04:33):
Her dad repaired gambling machines and her mom was a
dealer at a casino. As a kid, Mary loved her hobbies.
She swam and she did gymnastics. She sewed through pottery,
she made macroma hangers for her mom's plants, and she danced.
She was so good at dance that she was hoping
to make a real career of it. Her dance instructor
(04:54):
had told her that she could get a job at
the Lido de Paris, a fancy Vegas cabaret, and Mary
had plans to dance there and then move on to
cabarets in Hawaii and Australia. She had it all planned out,
but as a teenager, Mary was starting to struggle. She
didn't like school, and she had fallen in with a
group of friends that her guidance counselor thought were bad news.
(05:17):
She was starting to skip class more and more, and
she was getting into big arguments with her strict dad
about things like wearing makeup. Apparently her dad had quite
the temper, because Mary says that one day one of
her sisters told her that their dad had a migraine
and was coming home all mad at Mary for something
she'd done. You'd better run, said her sister, so Mary did.
(05:42):
For most of the summer of nineteen seventy eight, Mary
was a runaway, or at least a quasi runaway. Sometimes
she'd live with her grandfather and then come back home
and then run away again. Sometimes she'd stay with an uncle.
For a while. She lived with a boyfriend in Saslito, California,
but that relationship ended abruptly when her boyfriend got arrested
(06:02):
on charges of raping a high school girl. At that Mary,
who was also a high school girl, left him. When
she wasn't crashing with family members, she'd find unlocked cars
and sleep inside them. Sometimes she slept behind garbage cans.
That September, she decided to go back to her grandfather's house.
(06:22):
Maybe she was starting to miss home or at least
starting to miss stability. She was up north near Berkeley,
but she needed to go south to where her grandfather lived,
and so on September twenty ninth, she decided to hitchhike.
It was the seventies, everyone was doing it. She didn't
think it was a big deal, and just like that,
someone pulled up and offered her a ride. The driver
(06:45):
was a middle aged guy, balding and paunchy and wearing
a blue jumpsuit, driving a blue van. He seemed pretty
old to her. She figured he was old enough to
be safe. He told her he'd drop her off in
Los Angeles. She opened the door of his van and
climbed inside. Let's take a quick break to hear from
(07:27):
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(09:07):
The man who picked up fifteen year old Mary Vincent
that day was named Lawrence Singleton. He went by Larry.
He was fifty one. He was an alcoholic who worked
for the Merchant Marines and had spent most of his
working life on the high seas. He had several blemishes
on his record, some intoxication charges and a charge called
(09:27):
contributing to the delinquency of a miner. That was a
vague charge that meant he had encouraged a young person
to do something illegal. Maybe it was something involving drinking
or drugs, maybe it was something involving sex. By the
time he picked up Mary, his personal life was in shambles.
He'd been divorced twice, had a huge blow up fight
(09:48):
with his teen daughter earlier that summer. Every time he
got drunk, his awful temper flared up. He hated women.
He probably wouldn't say it, but later most of the
professionals who were with him noted it. He absolutely hated women,
and he couldn't stay away from the booze. It was
a lethal combination. And now here was this sweet young
(10:12):
girl climbing into his van. Larry told Mary that he
was actually heading to Reno, Nevada, but no worries. He'd
had an extra four hundred and seventy two point nine
miles south and drop her off in La. This insane
detour didn't raise any red flags for Mary, maybe she
didn't realize just how much of a detour it actually was.
(10:34):
One thing did raise a red flag for her, though,
When she lit a cigarette and sneezed at the smoke.
She suddenly felt Larry's hand on the back of her neck.
Let's see if you're sick, he said, and tried to
pull her towards him. She wriggled away from his hand
and scooted closer to the passenger door. She was annoyed
at him, but not worried enough to leave. She wasn't
(10:56):
even worried enough to leave when he started swigging from
a milk carton full of alcohol. Instead, she fell asleep.
When she woke, she realized that something wasn't right. The
signs flashing past them on the highway weren't signs pointing
towards La. They were pointing towards Nevada. Mary realized that
(11:16):
they were driving the wrong way. She felt around in
the van in the darkness, and her fingers closed around
a stick perfect She grabbed it, pointed it at Larry
like a sword, and said, I can take care of myself.
Turn around now, and Larry listened. He turned the van around.
(11:37):
He seemed truly apologetic. I'm just an honest man who
made an honest mistake, he said, I'm not gonna hurt you.
But he wasn't an honest man, and he hadn't made
an honest mistake, and he was going to hurt her.
(12:07):
The sun was setting when Larry jerked the steering wheel
to one side and drove off the highway down a creepy,
deserted little road that went to the bottom of a canyon.
He had to use the bathroom, he said. Mary had
to use the bathroom too, and so when they stopped,
she hopped out of the van, found a secluded spot
and did her business. She was done and tying one
(12:27):
of her shoes when she felt a huge blow land
on her back, and then another one on the back
of her head. It was Larry. He grabbed her, pushed
her into the back of his van and began tying
her wrists. Don't scream or I'll kill you, he said.
He raped her. Then he got back into the driver's seat,
(12:51):
completely naked, and drove like a madman through the empty canyon.
He stopped the van again. He cut her hands free
and told her he'd let her go of shit. Obeyed him,
and then gave her a cup of alcohol. Drink it
or I'll kill you, he said. She drank it, she
had to. He raped her a second time. She fainted.
(13:13):
While Mary was passed out, Larry made a decision that
would change the course of Mary's life more than anything
else would. He must have decided that he needed to
do away with this girl to dispose of the evidence
of his crime. He figured that Mary would die out
there in the canyon if he just dumped her off somewhere.
But there was one problem. If authorities found her body,
(13:35):
she'd be identified by that most human of identification methods,
the prints on the tips of her fingers. And so
when Mary woke up, Larry told her to get out
of his van and lie down on the edge of
the road. She obeyed him. He rustled around in the
van looking for something, and then he pulled out and
(13:59):
axe and walked towards her. He grabbed her left hand
and roared, you want to be free, I'll set you free.
As Mary screamed harder than she'd ever screamed before, the
axe came down on her left hand and then her
right hand. In that moment, she thought to herself that
(14:23):
it would be easier if she could just die. Then
Larry pushed her over the edge of a cliff, scrambled
down after her, stuffed her into a concrete drainage pipe,
and left bleeding in shock. In agony, Mary lay there.
(14:45):
She couldn't believe that she was still conscious. She felt
an overwhelming desire to go to sleep, but she stayed awake,
feeling every sensation in her body, and she felt overwhelming
that she wasn't alone. Later, she would describe the supernatural experience.
(15:07):
I felt someone there with me, she said, a presence
who wanted me to survive. A voice told me to
get up and get help or someone else would die.
And so she got up. She crawled almost two miles
out of the canyon and toward the highway. She was
(15:29):
completely naked, and as she walked, she held her arms
high overhead to slow the bleeding and to keep the
muscles in her arms from falling out. The first car
that saw her must have thought they'd seen a ghost.
That car turned around and sped away in terror. The
(15:50):
second car that saw her was driven by twenty three
year old Denis Bore and his wife. Suddenly, Dennis saw
the most terrible thing he'd ever seen in his life,
a naked girl covered in blood and dirt, holding her
arms high in the air, missing both of her hands.
He pulled to a stop and lifted the girl into
the passenger seat. She wasn't crying, He said later she
(16:13):
was just moaning. The three of them drove to the
hospital as fast as they could, and before long, Mary
Vincent's story was front page news, and the entire state
of California reeled. The girl who's lying in the hospital
is a human being, said one local mechanic. When you
hunt animals, you treat them with more respect than with
(16:35):
which she was treated. A year later, Dennis Bore and
his wife were planning to leave California. They were so
traumatized by the rescue that Dennis had started carrying a
gun wherever he went, while his wife refused to spend
the night alone. There are just too many people here,
(16:55):
Dennis told a journalist that brings the odds up on
somebody losing their I get in my moods and I
think of it. I'm always on the lookout now. Ten
(17:25):
days after Mary was rescued, Larry Singleton was arrested in Nevada.
In the hospital, Mary would crawl out of her bed
in the middle of the night, still fast asleep, and
run down the hallways moaning. When the night nurse would
tap her on the shoulder and try to wake her up,
Mary would scream in terror. But in the daytime she
(17:46):
was strong. She was given one prosthetic hand, and she
learned how to use it surprisingly fast. Journalists and television
cameras swarmed all over her, and she gave some chipper
interviews where she proudly listed all the things she could
do with her new hand. And she could make sandwiches,
she could bake a pie, she could pour coca cola
into glasses. But her old skills from her previous life
(18:08):
were gone, including her dream of being a dancer. She
later told a journalist that in order to save her
right arm, doctors had to remove a piece of her leg.
There would be no dancing at cabarets for her. Five
months after Mary left the hospital, she had to appear
in court to testify against Larry. He was facing a
(18:29):
black cloud of charges rape, sodomy, oral copulation, kidnapping, mayhem,
a charge that includes intentional maiming of another person, and
attempted murder. In Larry's mind, though he was the victim,
he had a whole story worked out. Mary was a tough,
(18:51):
street smart, pot addled runaway who got into his van
and said, if you don't take me to Los Angeles,
I am going to maim you. And then accuse you
of rape. Yes, Larry Singleton, the man who maimed and
raped Mary Vincent, told police that Mary Vincent had threatened
to maim him. He said that he was so terrified
(19:14):
of being accused of rape that, of course he did
whatever that scary fifteen year old girl had told him
to do. Oh, and the whole bit about both of
her arms being chopped off, well, there were two other
hitchhikers lurking around, and Mary had sex with both of them,
and so well, they probably attacked her and chopped off
her arms and all. The guy with the axe certainly
(19:36):
hadn't been poor innocent Larry, who was the true victim.
Here in court, Mary gathered all her courage and mounted
the witness stand and told the courtroom everything that Larry
had done to her. It was bravery worthy of an adult,
but sometimes she sounded just like a child. When she
was asked to describe the rape, she said, I heard it,
(20:00):
I heard it. Then, as she left the courtroom, Larry
leaned towards her with that horrible threat, I'll finish this
job if it takes me the rest of my life.
At that, Mary ran out of the courtroom. Those words
would ricochet around her mind for the next two decades.
(20:20):
Larry was found guilty and sentenced to fourteen years in prison.
Mary went home to live with her parents Back in Vegas.
She went to a school for handicapped kids and started
going to therapy. But as she tried to heal, her
family began to pull apart at the seams. Her dad
was buying guns and talking loudly about how he was
(20:41):
going to kill Larry Singleton. Her parents were fighting and fighting.
Eventually they'd get divorced. Mary herself was starting to return
to her old wild ways, traumatized by the memories that
she was revisiting in therapy, and her parents just weren't
much help with any of it. They couldn't handle it,
she told a journalist later. They took it harder than me.
(21:03):
I'm telling them I need you, but they couldn't do it.
They were more interested in what they felt about what
happened to me than what I felt. And Mary's friends
weren't that much better. They couldn't deal with what had
happened to her either. I felt like a public spectacle,
she said. There's a certain narrative we like in our
(21:38):
true crime stories. We like a narrative where the victim
or the victim's family transforms like a phoenix rising from
the ashes into a survivor. We like stories of fighters,
of people overcoming terrible things, and we need these stories
to be fairly neat after the blood and guts of
the crime. We like to see our bad guys locked up,
(22:00):
and we want the healing to begin. We want the
healing to begin right away. Otherwise, what's the point? What
was all that horror?
Speaker 2 (22:08):
For?
Speaker 1 (22:10):
For a while, Mary tried to fit into this narrative.
She visited high schools and tried to craft an inspiring message.
Don't hitchhike, don't run away from home. You never know
what sorts of bad people are out there. She gave
these speeches dutifully until one day a boy in the
audience yelled, you deserved to get your hands cut off.
(22:32):
She tried to attend groups designed for victims to share
their pain, but she held her own pain so tightly
inside of her that she looked normal on the outside,
and people seemed to think that she was doing just fine.
In therapy, psychologists tried to get her to empathize more
with what her family members were going through. She found
the whole process crazy making. It was the first time
(22:55):
they had experienced someone like me, she said of therapy.
After a while, I just stopped going. Right after her attack,
Mary had lived in the intense glare of the media spotlight.
People around the country had raised money for her new
arms and held bake sales to support her. But now
the news cycle had moved on, and the speaking tour
(23:17):
didn't pan out, and the victims groups weren't working, and
so what was she to do? She tried to scrape by.
Money was always a problem. She got thirteen thousand dollars
from the California Victim's Fund, but that didn't last forever.
In a civil suit, she was awarded two point five
million dollars from Larry Singleton, but he didn't have a
(23:37):
cent to pay her. Yes, money was a problem, and
so were men. None of the men she dated had
their resources to deal with the depth and intensity of
her pain. I don't think too highly of them anymore,
she told a journalist. They can't cope with the hurt
that goes on inside me or any other victim. Still,
(23:58):
one glorious thing came out of her laateationship. She had
in her mid twenties, she gave birth to a son, Luke.
His name meant light. She had always wanted to be
a mother, and now she was. When I became a mother,
she said, I really had something big to live for.
Her relationship with Luke's father didn't last, but by nineteen
(24:20):
eighty seven she was in a new relationship and living
in Washington State. She was engaged, and on her wedding day,
a guest walked up to her and told her the
worst news in the world. Larry Singleton was free in prison.
When Larry Singleton spoke to the psychiatrist, he often referred
(24:44):
to Mary as the little bitch. Now he was out
on parole. He had served only eight years of his
fourteen year sentence, and he had gotten out early because
of quote good behavior. He was out on parole except
that nobody in California, not a single town or city,
would have him. The public outrage over his release was
(25:05):
so huge that he had to spend his year of
parole living in a trailer on the grounds of San
Quentin Prison. People hadn't forgotten for a second what he'd
done to Mary, and they were certainly not going to
have him as a neighbor. Larry himself was deeply offended
over this. He told a journalist that this sort of
(25:26):
vengeance wasn't the America he knew. Back in Washington State,
Mary's new husband couldn't deal with the news that his
wife's attacker was practically free. He also couldn't deal with
the renewed attention that Mary was getting now that Larry
was out on parole. She was again swamped with interview requests,
with talk of book and TV deals. She was also pregnant,
(25:49):
and so her husband stayed until she gave birth to
their son, Alan, whose name means precious, but after that
he left her. As Mary had told that journalist a
few years earlier, most men couldn't cope with her hurt,
including her own husband. Of course, the news of Larry's
parole made Mary remember all too vividly his last words
(26:13):
to her, I'll finish this job if it takes me
the rest of my life. She started hiring bodyguards, and
she moved around as much as possible so that Larry
wouldn't be able to find her. In the meantime, the
book deals crashed, the movie deals burned, and Mary eventually
had to go on welfare. She borrowed too much money
to make a down payment on a house, and the
(26:34):
house got repossessed just a few months later. Things got
so bad that she and her two boys spent one
winter living in an abandoned gas station. She stopped eating,
her weight plummeted, her prosthetic arms rusted she couldn't afford
to fix them. In the meantime, Larry was continuing the
(26:55):
narrative that he was the victim. In fact, he was
now trying to sue Mary Vincent for kidnapping him. He
claimed that Mary had been smoking PCP in his van,
had used a stick to threaten him and force him
to drive her to Los Angeles, and that she and
(27:15):
those magical mystical two other male hitchhikers had stolen money
from him. He argued that Mary was guilty of the
crime of forcible kidnap for the purpose of robbery. He
told the press that not only was he the victim
of kidnapping, but he was also the victim of a
media smear campaign. I wouldn't be a normal human being
(27:38):
if I didn't work myself into a rage when I
think of how I was treated in the courts and
also in the media. He said, I have spent ten
years of my life in prison, each day being taunted
and threatened. He hadn't wanted to sue Mary. He held
no bitterness in his heart against her, even though she
had kidnapped him and threatened him with a He told
(28:01):
that journalist that before he filed the complaint against her,
he felt like throwing up, and he'd had some trouble sleeping. No,
he hadn't wanted to sue her because he was such
a loving person. But he had to. He had to
sue her in order for the truth to come out.
As every sane person in the state of California rolled
(28:23):
their eyes harder than they'd ever been rolled before. Mary
was also talking to the press. After all, people wanted
to know how she felt now that Larry was out,
But anyone hoping that she'd give the media a rousing
SoundBite about how she'd never be afraid of Larry Singleton
ever again was sorely disappointed. The article which came out
(28:43):
in People magazine made it painfully clear that Mary's life
had been ruined by the attack, and that there was
no chip or message to be exhumed from the wreckage.
Let's just go ahead and read an entire paragraph from
the article Zoomed by anger, Haunted by cold sweat dreams,
in which the accident, as she calls it, spins itself
(29:06):
out in terrible detail. She has been crippled by a
sense of defeat. She considered suicide, she said, but rejected
the idea because I'd chicken out and a part of
me would feel like I can't even do that right.
She could talk haltingly about the psychic aftershocks of her experience,
but could not offer any tidy morals. Although she said
(29:29):
her son, now eighteen months, has given her a reason
to live, her spirit seems to have been destroyed. I'll
never get over this, she said. By the early nineteen nineties,
(29:56):
Mary was dating her bodyguard, a bare knuckle fighter name Bob,
who bred gigantic dogs. She was having nightmares so violent
that she had broken bones, dislocated her shoulder, and cracked
ribs all in her sleep. Larry was living in Tampa, Florida,
where he grew up. At one point someone set up
a bomb near his house. California didn't want him, but
(30:19):
Florida wasn't happy to have him either. Larry's life in
Florida was far from idyllic. He was arrested several times
for shoplifting. In nineteen ninety seven, he attempted suicide, and
he did a stint in a psychiatric hospital because of it.
Nine days after Larry was released from the hospital, a
local painter came by his house to paint it. Larry
(30:43):
had hired this painter earlier, and as the man walked inside,
he heard someone say in a low voice. Help. The
painter looked into the living room and saw something that
he'd never forget. Larry was standing by his cow, naked
and covered in blood. There was a woman slumped on
(31:04):
the couch. The painter ran outside and looked through a
window before telephoning for help. He saw Larry raise his
arm and bring it crashing down on the woman. Again
and again. He heard the sound of bones being crushed.
He later compared it to chicken bones breaking. The woman
(31:27):
on the couch was Roxanne Hayes, a sex worker and
a mother of three. She'd gone to Larry's house on
February nineteenth, nineteen ninety seven, to make a little money,
and she never left. Her seventh grade daughter had to
identify her body at the morgue. Roxanne struggled with addiction
and homelessness, but she was the kind of woman who'd
(31:48):
crawl into dumpsters to save stray kittens. As her boyfriend
told a journalist, she took her kids to the State
Fair and the YMCA, and she told them that they
could be whatever they wanted to be. Her boyfriend told
the journalist that he thought Roxanne would have forgiven Larry
for what he did to her. She would have forgiven
him for everything, that is, except for the fact that
(32:11):
he took her away from her children. In court, Larry
pulled out his well worn victim card. He claimed that
Roxanne had tried to steal his wallet and then had
picked up one of his knives and threatened to decapitate him.
So of course he had to stop her. And so
(32:32):
when he tried to take the knife from her, she
jerked her hand down and away from him, and she
accidentally stabbed herself. She accidentally stabbed herself seven times. Then
Larry said she begged him to hold her, so he
sobbed and stroked her face as she took her last breath.
(32:56):
It was beautiful. Nobody believed Larry Singleton's absurd, repugnant, pathetic,
offensive story for a single second. Mary Vincent, for one
knew that he was lying through his teeth. The State
of Florida flew her down for the trial, where she
sat in the courtroom and said, I was attacked, I
(33:17):
was raped, and my hands were cut off. He left
me to die. And at that she raised one of
her prosthetic arms and pointed it straight at Larry. He
was sentenced to death. The whole experience shook Mary to
her core. She wept for Roxanne Hayes, obsessed over her
(33:38):
final moments in the courtroom. The medical examiner had testified
that Roxanne would have been conscious for four or five
minutes after being stabbed in the heart. Mary's nightmares came back.
She'd dream about her own attack, and then she'd dream
about horrible things happening to other people. And yet the
silver lining to the whole horror was that Larry was
(34:00):
once again behind bars. He was no longer out there
roaming around looking for Mayhem. So slowly Mary found herself
able to function in a way she hadn't for years.
She found herself craving sunlight, and so she moved from
Washington State down to Orange County, California, where she got
(34:21):
a job as a clerk at the District Attorney's office. There,
she met a handsome investigator named Tom Wilson. Their first
date started at brunch and ended with dinner. That night,
she couldn't sleep, so she picked up a pencil with
her prosthetic hands and drew a self portrait for him.
This would be the start of a new identity for her,
(34:43):
Mary Vincent, the Artist. She and Tom got married in
nineteen ninety nine, and she wore her wedding ring on
a chain around her neck. It was a fairy tale
ending for her, she told the press. Tom encouraged her
to look into victim's rights again, and with his support
did She launched the Mary Vincent Foundation, hoping that it
(35:03):
would help victims of violent crime. When she gave a
speech at the opening of the foundation, several hundred people
came to hear her speak. They wept along with her
as she told the story of her attack on stage.
The foundation didn't last though, after a year or so
there were no more news articles about it. Today, a
(35:26):
report on US nonprofits says that the Mary Vincent Foundation
had their exempt status automatically revoked by the IRS for
failure to file certain forms for three consecutive years. What
exactly happened with the foundation is not public knowledge, but
here's a guess. The narrative of the survivor who turns
(35:46):
her trauma into a movement, who starts the foundation and
raises millions and ends up changing the world is an
alluring narrative, but for many that narrative is just too
heavy to Still, it was impossible to deny that what
(36:17):
Mary Vincent was becoming as the years passed by was
something of a badass. Sure, the million dollar book deal
never panned out. She and Tom divorced, and she moved
back to Washington State with her sons, where she lived
on disability and welfare. But her drawing was becoming more
and more of a force in her life. She drew
family portraits on commission, but when she was working just
(36:40):
for herself, she drew female action figures, intense, dangerous, sexy
pin up types with weapons in their hands. It was
harder to be brave at night, as it often is.
Mary had trouble falling asleep, and she could never stay
asleep for very long. Every day, I pray to God
(37:01):
to make a space I can breathe in, she told
a journalist, and every day God gives it to me.
In that space, she did what she could, and she
did it well. She tinkered with her cheap prosthetic arms,
using bits and pieces from stereo systems and old refrigerators,
and she made them better so that her fingers could
turn in any direction. She figured out how to bowl.
(37:25):
She made herself a prosthetic hand just for the bowling alley,
and she became something of a pool shark, so good
at the game that her most competitive friends refused to
play with her. She got herself a twenty one year
old boyfriend. She never used Larry Singleton's name as the
two thousands. Crept On Mary would occasionally resurface for the
(37:48):
purpose of victim's rights, that movement that she always seemed
to have such an uneasy time with. In two thousand
and nine, she gave a speech as part of National
Crime Victims Rights Weeks, and she showed up looking like
a space age wonder woman, with her black tank top
and her metal arms, her long dark hair flowing down
her back. Twenty years earlier, she'd told a journalist that
(38:11):
she'd never get over the attack, and now she added
on to that message, I will never get over being attacked.
I wake up every morning with a constant reminder, she said,
holding up her arms. But I can move past it.
Seven years later, she had fallen back into obscurity when
a podcast that was just starting to get big covered
(38:33):
her story. The podcast My Favorite Murder featured the tale
of Mary Vincent on their eighteenth episode. One of the
hosts had seen Mary in a two thousand and nine
episode of I Survived Today, the podcast gets over thirty
five million downloads a month, and the Mary Vincent episode
(38:54):
is their most popular episode of all time. Mary has
become thing of a hero to the fans of the podcast,
who call themselves Murderinos. You can go on Etsy and
buy a white mug with a black cross on it
for seventeen twenty nine that reads Mary Vincent, Our Lord
and Savior. Finally a Hollywood ending right. A whole new
(39:19):
generation gets to hear the inspiring story of Mary Vincent,
and she becomes truly famous. In the movie version of
this story, a movie that has inexplicably never been made,
even though we're on our what fourth or fifth three
telling of the Ted Bundy story. In the movie version
of this story, Mary Vincent would join the hosts of
My Favorite Murder on stage and say thank you for
(39:40):
keeping my story alive, and say I didn't just survive,
I thrived, and everyone would cry, and she'd go on
Oprah and then write that best selling memoir and everyone
could walk away from the story with a tidy ending,
an ending inspirational enough to put on an Etsy mug.
But Hollywood didn't write Mary's story. Mary has never joined
(40:03):
the hosts of My Favorite Murder on stage, or gone
on Oprah, or written her book. I wasn't able to
find a single quote from her since two thousand and nine.
In one of the last interviews that she did, she
talks about her finances and mentions that she's in debt
and looking for a job. Mary Vincent, the famous survivor
(40:25):
looking for a job. Her story resists the happily and
wealthily ever after, ending that we crave from crime. We'd
like to tell ourselves that there are certain things nobody
can take from us, right, nobody can take our dignity,
our courage, our indomitable spirits. But Larry Singleton took a
(40:46):
whole hell of a lot from the world. He took
innocence from Mary Vincent, and from Roxanne Hayes's seventh grade daughter,
who had to identify her mother's broken body in the morgue.
He took Mary's ability to sleep soundly for the rest
of her life. He took her career as a dancer.
(41:06):
He took a mother away from Roxanne's three children. He
didn't ultimately take Mary Vincent's indomitable spirit, but he came close,
closer than it is comfortable to admit. Today, the laws
in California are tougher because of Larry. If he committed
(41:27):
his crime against Mary Vincent now, he would be given
a much longer sentence. He may never have had the
chance to attack again. Thankfully he is no longer around
to test this theory. He died of cancer in a
prison hospital just after Christmas of two thousand and one.
Nobody mourned him. His obituary headline gave him the title
(41:49):
of despised rapist. When Mary Vincent does get on stage
to talk about crime, her message is always a little
bit vague. She says things like, we all need to
stop long enough to care. We need to stop the violence.
She says, we all must join together to stop this
(42:10):
kind of thing. She says, I don't want anything this
bad to happen to anyone else. She means what she's saying,
of course, but there's a kind of tragedy to these
simplistic statements. We all must join together to stop this
kind of thing. But what could have stopped Larry Singleton? Really,
(42:33):
As one journalist put it, what happened to Mary was
the result of someone's random, violent urge. It was senseless,
and that's the tragedy of her life, the thing she
has to fight like hell to overcome. That she will
always be fighting to overcome. She tries to spin meaning
(42:53):
from what happened to her, but it's like spinning gold
from straw. Back in nineteen seventy eight, that same journalist
watched Mary get coached through a press conference, and the
journalist felt uncomfortable watching the spectacle that she had become.
There was the sickening feeling that the most tragic experience
(43:15):
in young Mary Vincent's life had, in some perverse twist,
become a macabre highlight. The journalist wrote, she was news
and it seemed unfair. And that is the story of
(43:49):
Mary Vincent. Nobody can deny that she is a survivor.
Nobody can deny that what she overcame was incredible, like
freaking scaling Mount Everest with the blind on and no oxygen.
But I thought it was fascinating and heartbreaking that her
narrative was not this tidy arc that we all want,
(44:11):
just like what happened to me was terrible, but then
like every year that went by, I got stronger and
I'm here. It's really a story of the circular and
back and forth and chaotic nature of healing. I think,
and I think that it's important to see a story
like that, because we do love an inspiring narrative. I mean,
(44:32):
I think I've had plenty of inspiring narratives on this
year podcast, and it feels so good, it feels so right.
But maybe that's a bit too much of a burden
to put on survivors. I don't know. It feels like
perhaps the expectation from us the public for people to
have these glow ups, as gen Z says, does gen
Z say that who says glow ups? Our expectation on
(44:55):
people to have these glow ups is perhaps not fair?
All right, everyone, thank you as always for listening for
your sensitive and intelligent responses to these episodes. You can
go to Instagram dot com slash criminal Brods to see
photos of Mary Vincent from her sweet precious photos when
she was only fifteen to her looking like a real
(45:18):
modern day wonder woman in her black tank top. And
I'd also like to thank this week's patrons Jenna, Kay,
Molly b my squad, My squad for this week. Thank
you for supporting the podcast. Anyone else who wants to
become a patron for the last weeks of Criminal Brods
go to patreon dot com slash criminal Broads to support
(45:38):
the podcast. Of course, you can always leave her review.
You know the drill, you know how to support the podcast.
I will see you back here next week for a
story where we are going to go into a little
place called prison and we are going to stay there
for a really long time. Are you ready? Buckley your
(45:59):
receipt else, track your engines, get your oil tested, or
whatever you do with oiling cars, and I will see
you back here next week. Have a good one bye.
Speaker 2 (46:10):
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm wrong loving youd like I do.
If it's a crime, then I'm guilty, guilty of loving you.
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