‘88 Finishing Touches : New Beginning Brings Cheer to Mary Vincent

In summer, Mary Vincent celebrated a new beginning. She was married.

This winter, there was a greater joy. Mary Vincent gave birth to a son, Alan.

“He’s like (husband) Matt, very quiet, rather serious and a thinker,” she said. “Then he bursts into fun and devotes his waking hours to keeping me busy.”

Until 1988, fun was never the substance of Mary Vincent’s young life. In 1978, as a teen-ager hitchhiking near Sacramento, she was raped by retired merchant seaman Lawrence Singleton. He then cut off her forearms with five swings of a hatchet.

The decade that followed was a continuance of physical pain and emotional despair for Mary Vincent. There were personal rejections, professional failures, the trauma of testimony before her attacker was jailed--and the relentless, damaging media pursuit of her life that finally forced her into reclusion in the Pacific Northwest.

In August, however, she married a 23-year-old landscaping foreman, and life, she said after the very private ceremony, “just began all over again . . . it seems like the beginning of another life, a better life.”

The better life revealed itself days after The Times published her wedding story.

More than 300 letters and cards of congratulations and good wishes arrived--most containing checks and cash, sufficient for Mary and Matt to bank toward the down payment on their first home. There were offers of homes and condominiums in Hawaii--because in their wedding interview, the couple said they hoped to be able to afford an island honeymoon.

But the honeymoon has been delayed--by Matt’s enrollment in computer repair school and by the birth of Alan, who joins her first-born, Luke, now 3, by a previous relationship.

Of her present life: “I love marriage and life is a lot better,” Vincent says. “Having my own family has become a very strong part of my life.”

Of her future: “It’s all looking pre-e-e-e-etty good.”