The Mad Chopper Read online

  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.

  His night’s work done, Larry headed on home.

  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.

  “Help me,” she shouted weakly.

  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.

  “Help me,” she implored.

  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.

  Chapter Two

  Modesto is the West, in the best sense of the word. In the West, people have a profound sense thatjustice 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.

  “He’s a merchant seaman,” said Mary. “He talked about that a lot.”

  “Merchant seaman,” Breshears jotted down in his notebook.

  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 s
he 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.

  “No,” replied Mary, feeling very relaxed.

  “Who was?”

  “Another man.

  “Where?”

  “Someplace in the San Rafael area.”

  “Describe what happened.”

  “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.”

  “And why did Mary want to go to Los Angeles?” Breshears wondered aloud.

  “Mary was going there to see her grandfather,” the girl answered simply.

  “And her grandfather’s name?”

  “Ricker Vincent.”

  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?”

  “Yes,” answered Mary, relaxing even further into the trance.

  “What happened next? Was that when the man with the ax picked her up?”

  “No. Somewhere in there, Mary hitched a ride with a woman.”

  “What kind of car was the woman driving?”

  “It was like a Jeep. And she had two men and a dog with her.”

  “Did Mary talk at all with the woman during the ride?”

  “Maybe a little.”

  “About what?”

  “About going to visit her grandfather.”

  “Where did she drop Mary off?”

  “Not sure.”

  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.

  “What happened after Mary was dropped off?” Breshears continued.

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

  “Can’t be sure?”

  “No.”

  “Okay, go on.

  “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.”

  Mary stopped and thought for a second.

  “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.

  Breshears and Reese kept looking, but failed to find the house Mary had described. They personally went to every single newspaper and TV station they could think of, and called every reporter they had ever done business with. The message was always the same: “Please run this picture and this information.”

  They drove back down to Modesto to get a change of clothes, then headed out again to Vallejo to take one more shot at it. In the car on the way back, they got a call from the office. It was about a tip.

  While they were up in Vallejo, the sheriff’s office in Modesto had received thousands of tips, from both anonymous and known sources. The department had checked out the ones that sounded reasonable, and had come up with nothing. But there was this one caller who had just called in and she sounded real. It was a woman, Sondra Ruben, who lived up in Martinez.

  “I think this guy you’re looking for is my former neighbor, Larry Singleton,” she told police.

  Singleton, she explained, looked exactly like the sketch in the paper, the one the police artist had done. And he had a blue van that looked like the one described in the newspaper articles.

  Sondra had moved out of San Pablo a few years before, but the guy in the paper was the spitting image of her former neighbor, Lawrence Singleton. A quick check of the phone book showed that Singleton still lived in the same house.

  “He had a daughter and he has a house in Sparks, Nevada,” Sondra continued. “And he’s a seaman. A merchant seaman.”

  Everything was fitting, ever
ything was joining together at the seams, Breshears thought. It was hard for him to suppress his excitement. He was like a hunting dog on the scent. He smelled blood.

  Sondra gave the cops her former address in San Pablo. Breshears and Reese were traveling in the same general direction as San Pablo. They veered off and took the freeway to the town, which was actually a suburb of San Francisco.

  Singleton’s address was in a quiet, residential neighborhood, nothing to distinguish it from any other in the Bay Area, or anywhere else for that matter. Pulling the car to the curb, they quickly got out. It was late afternoon, but still daylight. Slowly, they walked up the driveway, and onto the sidewalk. No one appeared to be home.

  Sitting on the sill in the front bay window, just as Mary Vincent had described it, was a first aid kit.

  This is definitely our guy, Breshears thought. We got him.

  The front door was locked. They didn’t try to enter any other way. That was all they needed—entering without a warrant. With the current liberal bent of the Supreme Court, anything they found, no matter how incriminating, could be thrown out.

  Getting back in the car, they drove down to a convenience store they’d passed on the way up. There was a pay phone there and Breshears quickly pulled the receiver off the hook and dialed.

  “Let me speak to Don Stahl. This is Breshears,” he said into the mouthpiece. Stahl was the district attorney of Stanislaus County. He would prosecute the case when it was made.

  “Don, it’s me. We’re in San Pablo. Look, we found him. We got a tip from someone who saw the sketch in the paper and knew him. Suspect’s name is Lawrence Singleton. Call ahead to Sparks and check on his whereabouts over there. Our source says he’s got another house there.”

  Soon the cops in Sparks would locate Singleton’s house and descend on him like a blue plague. While that was happening, Breshears and Reese called in the Costa County Sheriff’s office. Briefing them on the case, which they knew about from all the publicity, it wasn’t hard to get the county sheriff to obtain a search warrant for Singleton’s San Pablo house.