2 Suspects Held in Robbery and Rape : Crime: A chance sighting in a courtroom by an alert detective led to arrests shortly before the men were to be freed.

When Beverly Hills Detective Tom Linehan spotted the two men in court, they were waiting to be set free after charges against them were dropped.

Yet their appearances--one short and the other nearly 6 feet tall--reminded Linehan of the descriptions of two men who had invaded a Beverly Hills home two months earlier, beaten and robbed several people and savagely raped a woman.

Linehan, a robbery-homicide detective, returned to the police station, compared the two men’s appearances with artist’s sketches, ran a fingerprint check and hurried back to court within hours on Tuesday. He arrested Altin Louis Jefferson, 19, and Keith Cortez Miller, 29, both of Los Angeles, just hours before they were to have been set free.

Now the two face charges of kidnaping, burglary, robbery, grand theft auto, assault with a deadly weapon and rape as suspects in an incident that began near midnight June 12 when a car bumped a 1989 Cadillac Seville from behind at a stop sign on a Beverly Hills street.

According to Lt. Robert Curtis, this is what happened next:

Two men, one carrying a rifle, came out of the rear car and forced their way into the Cadillac. A 30-year-old domestic had borrowed the car from a friend, and her 32-year-old boyfriend was driving it.

“While in the car, they beat and robbed them and forced the woman to lead them to the home where she worked,” Curtis said.

At the house, in the 300 block of South Rodeo Drive, the kidnapers forced the boyfriend into the Cadillac’s trunk and took the maid to the front door to get into the house, where they found six other people, four men and two women.

“They beat these people and robbed them and, at one point, forced a male resident to lead them downstairs to a safe,” Curtis said. “They tied everyone up on the kitchen floor.”

The intruders brought the maid’s boyfriend in from the trunk of the car, bound him and forced him to join the others on the kitchen floor. Then, Curtis said, they took the maid to a bedroom and raped her.

While they were away, he said, two accomplices--a man and a woman who had been in the rear car during the bumping incident and had followed the Cadillac to the home--stood guard over the trussed victims.

After about an hour and 15 minutes, the four left the house. One of them drove away in the Cadillac. The car was found burning in the 1600 block of West 51st Street a few hours later.

Detectives worked the case for weeks and were without suspects until Linehan, who happened to be in court on another matter, saw the pair in court: Miller, who is 5 feet, 11 inches tall and 180 pounds, and Jefferson, who stands 5 feet, 5 inches tall and weighs 120 pounds.

The two had been arrested in Beverly Hills shortly before midnight Aug. 18, when police said they found a hidden gun, along with handcuffs and tape, in their car.

They were booked on suspicion of robbery. But prosecutors refused to file robbery charges for lack of evidence, and Jefferson and Miller were back in court to be ordered released.

Each is now being held on $350,000 bail.

Meanwhile, investigators are searching for the two others involved in the June incident, and looking into possible similarities between that and other crimes in which robbers have intruded into Westside homes.