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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