A RECURRING NIGHTMARE

There is a theory held by some criminologists that evil eventually melts out of the body. That if you warehouse a man in jail long enough, he will become harmless. Youth’s passions dim. Perversion’s fires cool. Old felons may not exactly reform but are defanged by time. It is this theory that Lawrence Singleton contested last week, after his bloody fashion.

Last Wednesday a painter spotted a struggle while working on a neatly kept house in Tampa’s working-class Orient Park suburb. Inside, a naked man appeared to be throttling a naked woman. The witness called 911, and when a police officer arrived at the door, he was met by an apparition. Lawrence Singleton, says a neighbor, “came out of the house staggering. His shirt was unbuttoned, and he had blood all over his chest.” Apparently drunk, he announced that he had cut himself chopping vegetables. But when he moved casually to answer a ringing phone, the cop saw a bloodied, naked corpse on his living-room floor. After his arrest, Singleton, 69, declared to reporters, “They framed me the first time. But this time I did it.”

In fact, Singleton is notorious for “the first time.” In 1978 a 15-year-old Las Vegas, Nevada, runaway named Mary Vincent hitched a ride outside San Francisco with a balding man in a blue van. The man approached her sexually, backed off, but later–having liquored up–beat her, bound her and raped her twice. Then he got his ax. He chopped off her arms and left her in a concrete culvert to die. She didn’t. The next day, read court records, Vincent was found “wandering nude … holding up her arms so that the muscles and blood would not fall out.” When Singleton, a merchant mariner, was sentenced for the crime, the judge said he wished he could “send him to prison for the rest of his natural life.”

The judge couldn’t. California law at the time set a maximum of 14 1/3 years for the crimes, with sentence reductions for good behavior and work in prison. Singleton’s release after just 8 1/3 years sparked his bizarre drama’s second act. As authorities attempted to settle him in one Bay Area town after another, angry crowds screamed, picketed and eventually prevailed. Singleton ended up spending the rest of his parole in a trailer on the grounds of San Quentin prison.

Further enraging Californians were Singleton’s claims to innocence and his absurd threat of a forcible-kidnap complaint against Vincent. (She won $2.56 million from him in a civil suit, but he had no funds.) When Singleton moved in 1988 to his native Florida, the reception was equally hostile. A Tampa car dealer offered him $5,000 to get out of the state, and a firebomb exploded on his lawn. He had more luck later in Orient Park, where he moved into a house owned by his family. Some neighbors were ignorant of his past. Others felt sure Singleton had put it behind him. He proffered small gifts and helped out with tasks. “He was the kind of person who, when his cat walked on my car, would wash the whole car,” says Corene Bennett, who lives next door. “We fixed him a plate for Thanksgiving.”

Some did much more. Three weeks ago, David Sales, who didn’t know of Singleton’s history, found him slumped over the wheel of his van, a hose running from the tailpipe. “He was foaming at the mouth, and his breathing was really shallow,” Sales recalls. He and his son Danny foiled the suicide attempt. In light of last week’s event, Sales says, “The first thing I thought was, ‘Should I have left that man in there?'”

Sales wasn’t the only one second-guessing. If Singleton had committed any serious crimes in Florida before last week, he wasn’t caught. Police records indicate shoplifting charges. But the absence of intervening atrocities between bookend acts of horror does not lessen the impression that the California picketers were justified and the tolerant Orient Parkers tragically naive. In 1987 Singleton’s parole led to passage of California’s “Singleton bill,” which carries a 25-years-to-life sentence with possible parole for aggravated mayhem. In fact, a spokesman for the state attorney general’s office estimates that subsequent toughening of statutes would now assure Singleton would serve at least 41 years.

Last week’s murder, in turn, stokes a national debate about recidivism among sexual offenders. The Supreme Court is considering the constitutionality of a Kansas law allowing the state to confine violent sexual criminals in mental hospitals beyond their prison terms, citing no mental illness other than a predisposition to similar crimes. The case is not abstract: Kansas is currently holding multiple-sex-crimes offender Leroy Hendricks, 62, whose sentence has expired but who has testified that only death can prevent him from molesting again. During oral arguments, several Justices seemed to share the concerns of critics like Harvey W. Kushner, chairman of the criminal-justice department at Long Island University, who decries indefinite incarceration based “not on what anybody has done but on what we think they might do.” But several dozen states signed an amicus brief backing the law. Chief Justice William Rehnquist expressed the frustration of the court–and the nation–when he asked, “So what is the state supposed to do? Just wait until [Hendricks] does it again?”

For Lawrence Singleton’s victims, such speculation is moot. Mary Vincent, now 34, told the San Jose Mercury News that she was “appalled and horrified. I want to feel safe again. I don’t know what the feeling is like anymore.” Divorced and financially strapped, she is raising one of her two children on her own. The prosthetic hooks she wears have worn out.

Roxanne Hayes, last week’s victim, leaves three children ages 3 to 11. Over the past 11 years she had accrued 99 arrests, mostly on prostitution and drug charges. But she probably had no idea what sort of man she was visiting; Singleton’s first crime predated Florida’s public-notice statute on sex offenders. Said her grieving boyfriend: “Roxanne did nothing to deserve what she got from him.”

–Reported by Tammerlin Drummond/Tampa, Charlotte Faltermayer/New York and Laird Harrison/San Francisco