Officials Again Hoping to Resolve Singleton Problem

SACRAMENTO —  State authorities hinted Friday that they are close to ending the odyssey of paroled rapist Lawrence Singleton, who has been shuttled around the San Francisco Bay Area for more than a month while the Corrections Department has sought to find a community that will accept him.

Corrections officials met with staff members from the offices of Atty. Gen. John Van de Kamp and Gov. George Deukmejian in an effort to resolve the issue.

“Yes, we’ve been working on a plan for the last several days and I hope we’ll be able to make an announcement very soon on it,” Deukmejian said.

“It is an issue that doesn’t go away and it gets thornier the longer that it remains unresolved,” said Chief Assistant Atty. Gen. Steve White, who was involved in the discussions with the Department of Corrections.

Singleton was paroled from the California Men’s Colony at San Luis Obispo on April 25 after serving eight years of his 14-year, four-month sentence for raping a teen-age girl and hacking off her forearms in 1978.

Parole authorities have been stymied in efforts to place him in Florida, where he has relatives, and in Contra Costa County, where he lived before his crime. He has refused to return to prison to serve out his parole because he maintains he is innocent and that returning to prison would be an admission of guilt.

Local officials, outraged by the nature of Singleton’s crime and by the brevity of his sentence, have resisted his parole in their communities. On Monday, Contra Costa County sheriff’s deputies where forced to evacuate Singleton from an apartment in rural Rodeo after a threatening crowd estimated at 500 gathered outside the building.

Deukmejian on Friday cautioned against “mob rule.”

“I’m certainly hopeful that everyone will recognize that we are a society of laws, that we have to respect the law, that we cannot exist in a society where there is mob rule,” Deukmejian said.

“Needless to say,” the governor continued, “the public’s protection is uppermost in our minds and that will be the goal of any final decision that’s made on this subject. So all I can say to you now is that we are working on it and hopefully we’ll be able to make an announcement on it soon.”

Correctional authorities, meanwhile, canceled a Friday meeting with Contra Costa County leaders and announced that they will no longer make public statements about Singleton.

“Due to the sensitivity of the case, we won’t be making any more specific announcements about Singleton,” said Robert Gore, spokesman for the Department of Corrections.

Contra Costa County Administrator Phil Batchelor said he was told Thursday night that the meeting had been called off without explanation, complaining: “The way they have handled the whole thing is unprofessional.”

Singleton’s last known location was in the Contra Costa County city of Concord, but he was moved out after demonstrators surrounded a motel where they mistakenly thought he was staying.