Sacramento — Mary Vincent, the 15-year-old whose armes were hacked off last September by a rapist near Modesto, lived for a time last summer with Luis V. Rodriguez and Margaret A. Klaess, the couple charged in the Dec. 2 killing of two California Highway Patrol officers in Yolo County.

Miss Vincent has been identified by both Rodriguez and Miss Klaess as the “Maria” who shared an apartment with them last June in Whittier. Their association was brief, ending three months before Miss Vincent ‘s terrible ordeal in Stanislaus County and six months before the slayings of Officers Roy P. Blecher and William M. Freeman along Interstate 80, a few miles west of Sacramento.

Miss Vincent, visited at her home in Las Vegas last weekend, said the Whittier residence known as the Olive Apartments and the names Luis and Maggie “sound familiar”, but she shook her head when asked if she could remember anything specific about their relationship.

“Is she (Maggie) kind of flat chested?” Miss Vincent asked. The revelation of the association, one more ironic twist in a curious chain of events linking three sensational California crimes of 1978 (the third was the car-trunk killings of James Craig and Edward Barabas in November), could have an impact on the pending trial of Rodriguez.

David Weiner, Rodriguez’s attorney, is considering calling Miss Vincent as a witness. Weiner said he believes Miss Vincent could shed some light on Miss Klaess’ credibility. Miss Klaess mentioned “Maria” on three occasions during her two-day stint on the stand in a Yolo County preliminary hearing that resulted in a holding order against Rodriguez.

On page 16 of the transcript, District Attorney Richard Gilbert’s questioning of Miss Klaess progressed as follows:

Q — And who did you live with at the Olive Apartments?

A — Luis and myself.

Q — No one else lived there with you?

A — A girl named Maria lived there at one time.

Q — And who is Maria? Was she an acquaintance ofeither of yours?

A — Yes. She was a girl we had living there.

Later in the testimony:

Q — How long did you live in Whittier?

A — A month.

On page 231, Weiner’s cross examination touched on Miss Klaess’ jealousy and her reaction to Rodriguez’s attentions:

Q — Who have you threatened over Luis?

A — A little girl named Maria.

And on page 233, Weiner asked: OK, now, did you involve yourself in a physical fight with Maria over Luis?

A — No, I didn’t get the chance.

Q — You tried to, did you?

A — Well, I was going to but instead I tried to start a physical fight with Luis but he won.

Earlier during the same testimony, Miss Klaess described a brief association with Barabas and Craig, who one month later would be shot and left to die in the trunk of a car on the Garden Highway here.

Barabas and Craig were ex-convicts with ties to the Manson Family who allegedly teamed with Rodriguez and Miss Klaess to “rip off” a North Area cocaine dealer about a month prior to the confrontation that led to their deaths (Craig lingered for more then a month in the hospital before succumbing to the wounds and burns he suffered).

Four persons, including two women, have been charged with murder and nine other felony counts in connection with the deaths of Barabas and Craig. There is no evidence that the relationship between Miss Klaess and Rodriguez and Barabas and Craig had anything at all to do with the slayings, and there is no indication that that Miss Vincent’s brief friendship with Rodriguez and Klaess tied her in any way with either of the other two crimes.

Miss Klaess identified “Maria” as Mary Vincent when she told investigators that Maria had lived with her grandfather, Clifford Vincent, a painter. Weiner confirmed that his client, Luis Rodriguez, has also identified “Maria” as Mary Vincent. Yolo County District Attorney Gilbert, the prosecuter in the Rodriguez case, said the connection between Rodriguez-Klaess and Mary Vincent had not been investigated but would be as a precautionary measure to make sure every conceivable angle relating to the case is covered.

Miss Vincent’s attorney in Las Vegas, Keith Galliher, cited the passage of time since the acquaintance. And Miss Vincent’s “press coordinator,” Joel Levy, who is acting as her liaison with the media, protested that public disclosure of a link between Miss Vincent and an accused murderer could have an adverse effect on fund-raising efforts on her behalf.

“I’m trying to do the best I can for Mary, financially, to get money into a trust fund because there’s hardly any money there and and they’ve got a lot of medical bills that are coming up yet,” Levy said. Levy pointed out that Mary is now in a position “of helping other kids”– she has launched a campaign to discourage hitchhiking — “and she’s going to a school for the handicapped, where she’s doing really well.”

Lawrence Singleton, a 51-year-old merchant seaman from Reno, was convicted in March of attempted murder, rape, mayhem, two counts of forcible oral copulation, sodomy and kidnapping in the crimes against Miss Vincent. The girl, who will be 16 years old next week, was found wandering nude, her arms cut off below the elbows, near Interstate 5 last September.

She recovered and has been fitted with prosthetic arms, the hooks she used to point out her attacker in a San Diego courtroom. After the verdict, Miss Vincent announced that her troubled life as a runaway was behind her. “I’m looking forward to a better life with my family,” she said. “I’m trying to get through to other boys and girls it’s no fun having hands like this.”