Further Reading for Lawrence Singleton & Franklin Delano Floyd
The Mad Chopper: How the Justice System Let a Mutilator Free, This Time to Kill
A Beautiful Child: A True Story of Hope, Horror, and an Enduring Human Spirit
Weird Land : The True Story of Kidnapper Franklin Floyd
Episode: 18
Episode Link
Info
Lawrence Singleton (July 28, 1927 – December 28, 2001) was an American serial killer known for perpetrating an infamous rape and mutilation of an adolescent hitch-hiker, Mary Vincent, in California in 1978. Released from prison after serving only eight years of his fourteen-year sentence, he went on to murder a woman in Florida, for which he was sentenced to death in 1997. He died in 2001 of cancer before the sentence could be carried out. It is believed that he may have killed over a dozen women in his lifetime.
On September 29, 1978, Lawrence Singleton picked up 15-year-old Mary Vincent of Las Vegas while she was hitchhiking in Berkeley, California, raped her, and then severed both her forearms with a hatchet and threw her off a 30-foot cliff outside of Modesto, California, leaving her naked and near death. She managed to pull herself back up the cliff and alert a passing couple, who took her to a hospital. By the time of Singleton’s arrest, Vincent wore prosthetic arms.
Six months after the assault, Vincent faced Singleton at his trial, where her testimony helped to convict him. Singleton was sentenced to 14 years in prison, the maximum allowed by law in California at that time. The presiding judge remarked: “If I had the power, I would send him to prison for the rest of his natural life.”
Franklin Delano Floyd (born June 17, 1943) is an American death row inmate. He was convicted of the 1989 murder of Cheryl Ann Commesso, a mother of three from Florida, as well as the kidnapping of his 6-year-old stepson from his elementary school in Choctaw, Oklahoma. Floyd is also considered a person of interest in the 1990 hit-and-run death of his wife Sharon Marshall. It was later discovered that before becoming his wife, Sharon had been raised by Floyd from an early age as his daughter and was herself kidnapped by Floyd as a child.
Sharon’s true identity remained a mystery until 2014, when she was positively identified as Suzanne Marie Sevakis, the daughter of a woman to whom Floyd was briefly married. He disappeared with Suzanne, her two sisters and infant brother while her mother was serving a 30-day jail sentence in 1975. Suzanne’s brother has never been located.