AFTER walking for miles to get back home to her family, Mary Vincent was relieved when a van pulled over to give her a lift. Mary, 15, had run away from her home in Las Vegan after her parents' divorce and made her way to California. While she had friends and family in the area, Mary felt homesick and decided to go back to her parents when she was picked up by Merchant Seaman Lawrence Singleton in California on September 29 1978.

Being an innocent teen, she thought nothing of it and jumped in to get back to her family in Las Vegas, despite the hitchhikers warning her against it as they could see there was room for them all inside. She said: “I was so tired I just wanted to get home.”. Mary settled into the lorry and fell asleep, and when she woke up the horrors of what Lawrence Singleton, 50, had in store for her began. Instead of driving towards Las Vegas, he had gone a different direction, taking her to no man's land.

Mary freaked out and confronted him, but he swore he made ‘an honest mistake.’. He then goes to turn the lorry around and stops the van over to ‘relieve himself,’ and the reality of the dangerous situation finally hit Mary. While he was out of the van, Mary realises her shoelace is undone and decides to get out and do it up in case she needs to escape. But as she knelt down, she was met with a sledgehammer being struck across her head and blacked out.

When Mary came around she found herself tied up in the back of the lorry naked and was horrifically raped throughout the night and into the morning. She recalls begging Singleton to set her free, promising to not tell anyone about what happened. Once Singleton is done with his sadistic act, he pulls her out of the van and unties her, leaving her naked and chillingly asks “You want to be set free?” I’ll set you free.”.

He then picked up a hatchet and cut off Mary’s left arm below the elbow. 669,000 adults are sexually assaulted in England and Wales every year. Sexual abuse has been attributed to:. (Source: Safeline). Screaming and crying, Mary grabs him with her right arm in shock, but Singleton wasn’t done with enacting his sick abuse. He takes the hatchet again and begins to hack off her right arm as well. While holding on to him, Mary falls backward when she realises her right arm isn’t attached to her anymore.

“He took my left arm and took one swing. And I started to fall, and then he took another swing, and I grabbed his arm, grabbed it real tight, and I couldn’t figure out, holding him real tight on his arm, but I’m still falling,” she recalled. As she looks at Singleton she sees him flicking his arm as he tries to get her detached arm off him. Mary was still conscious but losing massive amounts of blood and went limp.

Singleton assumed she was already dead and decided to take her body and throw it off the railings of the road into a 30-foot cliff. On the way down she breaks four ribs as he drives away, later after being caught by Police, they revealed he cut her arms off so that she couldn’t be identified. Despite being left with life-changing and catastrophic injuries, Mary was not ready to give up. She awoke at the bottom of the cliff and recalls losing blood and wanting to go to sleep but a voice in her head told her not to.

“You cannot go to sleep, you have to get up so they can catch this guy,” she remembers the voice telling her. To stop the bleeding, Mary took what was now left of her arms covered them in mud, and made a mudpack to stop losing blood. She then crawled her way up the 30-foot cliff which took her all day and made her way to the road. I looked like something out of a horror movie. Naked and covered in blood with two stump arms, Mary began to walk along the road for three miles.

She decided her best chance of survival was to flag down a car, but the first car, which was a convertible with two men inside decided to drive on. But Mary didn’t blame the men she later said: “I looked like something out of a horror movie, I didn’t blame them at all.”. She continues to walk on when she passes another car of a couple on their honeymoon, who quickly stops the car and ushers her in to find the nearest hospital.

It was just in the nick of time as Mary had lost half of the blood in her body before being seen by doctors. After intense surgery to save her life, she was fitted with prosthetic arms — a change that would take years of physical therapy for her to adjust to. She also underwent intensive psychotherapy to help her cope with the trauma she’d experienced. At the hospital, she told the police everything she could remember about her attacker, down to the last tiny details.

“I wanted to make damn certain they knew who he was when they saw his face,” Vincent said in 2023. “I described him like you would describe someone to a blind person.”. About a week later, one of Singleton’s neighbors recognised the police sketch of him and alerted authorities immediately. Nine days later singleton was arrested and charged with attempted murder, rape, and a litany of other sexual crimes he committed against Mary.