From Victim to a Voice for the Suffering

Because Mary Vincent doesn’t have hands, she can’t wear a wedding ring. Her new husband bought a big diamond on a thick silver chain she can wear around her neck. When they go for walks, he holds one of the metal hooks attached to each of her 5-pound prosthetic arms.

It was 21 years ago that Vincent, then a 15-year-old hitchhiker, was picked up by Lawrence Singleton, who hit her head with a hammer, raped her and cut her forearms off with a hatchet. He left her for dead in a drainage ditch near Modesto.

After years of living in fear, unable to look strangers in the face and dwindling to 98 pounds, Vincent has slowly regained her health and confidence and is preparing to step into the public arena as a victims rights activist.

With support from her husband--an investigator with the Orange County district attorney’s office--she has started the Mary Vincent Foundation with $5,000 in donations. Her campaign begins Monday with a speech in Ventura County.

“I don’t want anything this bad to happen to anyone else,” said Vincent at her Anaheim Hills home.

Although the foundation is still in its infancy, she wants to eventually be able to help young crime victims pay for medical and other expenses. She hopes to garner support for the foundation through speaking engagements across the country.

She said her entry into the spotlight is a pivotal turn after years of feeling listless and depressed, moving from town to town, unskilled and unable to hold down a job.

“I couldn’t even lift my head up,” she said. “I was too afraid.”

She won a $2.5-million judgment against Singleton, who was sentenced to 11 years in prison for raping and mutilating her, but never collected a cent from the former merchant seaman, who had little money.

She received $13,000 from a California victims fund and lived mostly on welfare and donations from strangers who read about her case. The contributions ranged from a $1 bill from a Costa Mesa girl to $15,000 from a businessman in Carlsbad.

Singleton was released for good behavior after eight years and, after public outcry, served his parole in a rented trailer on the grounds of San Quentin. He then moved to Florida, where he lived for years. He is now on death row for stabbing a 31-year-old woman to death in 1997 with a boning knife in Tampa.

Meanwhile, Vincent had moved to Washington state, where she married her first husband in 1987. She blames her divorce after three years on the stress of knowing that Singleton was a free man. She was terrified that he would find her and kill her, “finish the job,” as he promised he would do.

She couldn’t eat and ended up a skeletal 98 pounds. She was paralyzed with fear whenever she left her house. After her divorce, she and her two boys, Alan and Luke, moved into an unheated, abandoned gas station in Gig Harbor, a small town near Tacoma.

“I didn’t have my self-esteem,” she said. “If someone came around the corner, I’d jump.”

Last year, in an effort to lift her spirits, Vincent moved from the cloudy Northwest to sunny Orange County, where she found an inexpensive apartment in Tustin and got her first paying job, a clerical position at the district attorney’s office.

It was then that her life began to stabilize, Vincent said. She started to think about using her experience with suffering to help other victims of crime--particularly children.

And after she testified in the Tampa case against Singleton, giving her national exposure that prompted many around the country to send her donations, Vincent suddenly had a modest amount of money to create a foundation to support that goal.

It was in the district attorney’s office that she met her new husband, Tom Wilson, 52, who has encouraged her to pursue her project. Vincent is relieved to have Wilson serve as her bodyguard and her manager for the upcoming speaking tour. She hasn’t spoken in public for more than 15 years, since a friend persuaded her to talk at a high school and she was heckled by a teenager who yelled, “You got what you deserved.”

Vincent says Wilson has helped her be more playful, to walk with better posture and to keep her chin up in public. A doting husband, he rubs her shoulders when the leather straps that secure her artificial limbs dig into her skin. He set up a studio for her to spend time drawing.

“With everything that’s happened to Mary, you’d think she’d be bitter,” he said. “But she’s not. She has a heart of gold.”

In April, Vincent was invited to Sacramento during Crime Victims Rights week and presented Gov. Gray Davis with a charcoal portrait she drew of him. She has also been invited to speak at “Stop the Violence Day” at a Giants game in San Francisco on Sept. 12.

Vincent is excited about her future and has started recording her thoughts and memories for a book about her life.

She said her fight for survival has found a purpose: to help other crime victims by telling her story.

“Even when it wasn’t going so well,” she said, “it was better than death.”