Thursday, Feb. 19, 1998 | 11:15 a.m.
"She put both her arms around me and asked me to hold her. So I held her tight. We were embracing," said Singleton, who first made national news 20 years ago when he raped a teen-ager in California and chopped off her forearms, leaving her for dead.
He said that he soon realized Roxanne Hayes, 31, was bleeding heavily from stab wounds. She had seven - six to the breast and abdomen and one to the face.
"Then I really panicked. And I went all to pieces," said Singleton, 70.
He said he meant to call 911, but picked up the remote control instead and threw it down.
"I told her, 'We've got to get to the hospital,"' Singleton testified. "She put her arm on my shoulder and she half-walked and I half-carried her." But his bad knee went out and they both fell to the living room floor.
"I sat there and cried and rubbed her face and tried to talk to her. I sat there and cried for maybe 10 minutes," he told jurors.
Asked by his attorney if Hayes responded, Singleton replied:
"Not at all. She was dead."
Singleton, who grabbed headlines again about a decade ago when California towns refused to accept him after his early parole in the rape-mutilation case, said he was drunk and over-medicated when he brought Hayes home.
Prosecutors had rested their case Wednesday, hours after showing jurors a police videotape of the nude victim, sprawled on Singleton's living room floor, stabs wounds dotting her chest and stomach.
"There's the victim," Hillsborough County Sheriff's Detective Larry Lingo said as jurors saw Hayes, lying on her back on blue carpet, her eyes slightly open and strands of her long hair in her mouth.
Police found her body after a house painter walked in and saw Singleton standing over a woman, his hands clutching her throat as she weakly cried for help, according to trial testimony. The painter rushed next door to call for help.
Singleton's lawyers are trying to save him from death row not by saying he didn't do it, but by arguing that she died during a struggle. In opening arguments, defense attorney Jill Menadier described the stabbing as a "spontaneous outburst of emotion," not something he planned.
Singleton told a paramedic treating him at the scene that Hayes had struck him with a knife, another detective testified Thursday.
"She would have got me. She hit me with a knife," Detective Linda Burton quoted Lawrence as telling the paramedic.
But Singleton also said, "I'm a murderer now" and said he deserved the gas chamber, Burton told a prosecutor on cross examination.
The defense opened its case Wednesday afternoon with neighbor Danny Sales, testifying Singleton appeared drunk when a sheriff's deputy knocked on his door that evening.
"He acted like he had quite a bit to drink. His speech wasn't all there and his walk wasn't too straight," said Sales.
But, he added later: "I wouldn't say he was that far drunk. He was still able to walk around."
After his arrest, Singleton told reporters he killed the woman. In a videotape of the interview played for jurors, a reporter asked him: "Why did you do it, sir?"
"I don't know," he replied, as a deputy helped him into the back of a squad car.
In 1978, Singleton, a former merchant marine, was convicted of raping 15-year-old hitchhiker Mary Vincent, chopping off her forearms with an ax and leaving her for dead on the side of a road in California. She survived to testify against him.
He was paroled in 1987, amid predictions he would try to kill again. Singleton served his parole on prison grounds after several California communities refused to let him live there, and he later returned to his home state of Florida.
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