Man Held in 2 Rapes May Be Tied to Dozens : Crime: Police believe he has been attacking women since the mid-1970s. He allegedly preyed on prostitutes and transients reluctant to testify.

Los Angeles police have jailed a convicted sex offender they say has been systematically raping and imprisoning women transients and prostitutes in the city’s most blighted areas over the last 14 years.

Lemuel Z. Harris of Hollywood, who has spent six of those years in prison, has taunted authorities who have arrested him at least 17 times, challenging them to find alleged victims he knows are reluctant to come forward.

Harris has been charged with 22 felony counts stemming from the alleged kidnaping and rape of one woman last August and the alleged rape of another woman he is accused of holding forcibly in his apartment for a week last July.

Harris, 36, pleaded not guilty in Los Angeles Superior Court on Sept. 5 and is being held in lieu of $500,000 bail at the Hall of Justice jail downtown. A pretrial hearing has been set for Nov. 14.

Court records and statements from law enforcement officials indicate authorities have suspected Harris of committing rapes and other sex crimes against at least 12 women--and perhaps dozens of others--since at least 1976.

Deputy Public Defender Rita Smith, who represented Harris until last week, said authorities are “exaggerating” the case against her former client and that “there are some grave problems of proof,” including the disappearance of one of the alleged victims.

Efforts to interview Harris were unsuccessful because he does not currently have a lawyer and jail officials require an attorney’s consent before authorizing access to inmates.

Los Angeles Police Detective David Lambkin said the current case matches a pattern in which Harris has lured prostitutes, drug addicts and other “down-and-out” women to his apartment and kept them against their will for days, repeatedly raping and sexually assaulting them.

“The fact is we have dealt with him for 15 years and he hasn’t stopped,” said Lambkin, of the Hollywood Division Sex Crimes Unit. “Being arrested doesn’t affect this guy. It doesn’t faze him.”

While running a background check on Harris last November, Lambkin said he noticed that authorities in several different jurisdictions--in parts of the Westside and downtown Los Angeles--had questioned the convicted offender on numerous occasions.

The problem, as Lambkin and other authorities put it, is that Harris allegedly preys on the types of victims who so fear police because of their own illicit activities that they vanish even before charges can be filed. Consequently, cases are thrown out of court for lack of evidence or victims.

And, when Harris is brought in for questioning, he cites chapter and verse of state laws that stipulate he must be released within a certain amount of time since no victim has come forth, according to Lambkin and his partner, Los Angeles Police Detective Chris Ilizaturri.

“He uses that to his advantage and he is not afraid to verbally express that to you,” Lambkin said. “He’ll say to (authorities)--’You don’t know where the victim is, do you?”’ and authorities have to let him go free.

Deputy Dist. Atty. John F. Gilligan of the district attorney’s Sexual Crimes and Child Abuse Division, who is overseeing the case currently in Superior Court, described Harris as someone who uses the law--and the vulnerability of his victims--to stymie efforts to prosecute him.

“This is someone who is pretty sophisticated and knows how the system works,” said Gilligan. “It is clear that he should be incarcerated and the public be protected for as long as possible.”

But the same problem that has hamstrung authorities in the past has cropped up again in the case to be heard next month: Although one victim has agreed to testify, their strongest witness--a 31-year-old woman who alleges that she escaped from Harris’ apartment two days after he abducted her at knifepoint and kept her as a sex slave--is nowhere to be found.

“She is scared to death of him,” said Gilligan. “. . . We have looked all up and down the state, tried to trace her through school records and back to Missouri where she has family, and we cannot find her.”

“We have basically dropped everything and worked this case because we know the gravity of the situation. . . . We’ve let 30 or 40 other cases just sit while we work on this case,” said Lambkin, a veteran sex crimes detective.

The case has been continued several times at the request of public defenders. Last week, Smith declared that her office had a conflict in representing Harris, and the case will be turned over to a private attorney or the county’s Alternate Defense Council, she said.

Harris, a 6-foot-2, 195-pound man, has worked several door-to-door retail jobs and has moved frequently, detectives said. Neighbors who were questioned by police said they knew little of his background and that he kept to himself.

According to a confidential December, 1989, court report obtained by The Times, a Superior Court investigator reported that Harris has been arrested 17 times from 1973 to 1988. Many of the arrests were for crimes of a sexual nature.

The report was prepared by court investigator Brenda J. Broom for a bail hearing on an unrelated case in which Harris was charged with 11 counts of rape, sodomy and related offenses. Broom wrote that Harris was a threat: “The known criminal record is lengthy and reflects a propensity towards violence against persons.”

Her supervisor, Assistant Director Terry Clark of the Pre-Trial Services Division of Superior Court, refused to comment on the report or the Harris case, saying it was confidential.

As early as 1979, prosecutors were going on record saying they were concerned about Harris, who was convicted more than 10 years ago on charges of kidnaping and forcible oral copulation, according to Superior Court records.

“As far as him being a danger . . . I think there are things in his past which do show that,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Phil Rabichow said during a Feb. 9, 1979, probation and sentencing hearing for Harris, after he had undergone a battery of psychiatric tests by corrections officials. Rabichow told a judge at the hearing that Harris was accused of raping an 18-year-old girl in 1976, and was later arrested for soliciting a “lewd act.”

Harris was convicted and began serving a state prison term March 4, 1980. He was paroled from the medium-security Correctional Training Facility at Soledad on Sept. 27, 1984, according to state Corrections Department spokesman Michael Van Winkle. After Harris violated the terms of his parole, he was sent back to prison Aug. 8, 1985, and stayed there until his release Oct. 7, 1987, Van Winkle said.

According to police records, Harris was arrested June 13, 1988, and booked on suspicion of sodomy, and arrested again Nov. 19, 1989, and booked on suspicion of rape. Charges were not filed because the alleged victims refused to cooperate with police, authorities said.

Harris was then arrested Dec. 3, 1989, and booked on suspicion of rape. In that instance, prosecutors ultimately filed a case alleging that Harris persuaded a woman to go to his apartment and kept her there against her will for five days, raping her and forcing her to have oral sex, according to court documents.

In all, 11 felony counts were filed against Harris after the Dec. 3 arrest, including seven counts of forcible oral copulation, one count of rape and one of false imprisonment. In the end, all the charges were dropped when the woman vanished and detectives couldn’t find her, Deputy Dist. Atty. Laura Foland-Priver said.

“It’s frustrating,” Foland-Priver said Friday. “You know that he committed a very serious crime, and you can’t get him--you don’t have a witness.”

Harris was again arrested June 9 by Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies in West Hollywood on suspicion of rape, kidnaping and assault with a deadly weapon, said Deputy Lynn McKeon, but charges were dropped when the alleged victim could not be located.

In the current case, he was arrested by Los Angeles police on Aug. 13, 1990, at his Hollywood apartment in the 3600 block of Barham Boulevard. He has been in custody ever since.

Police and prosecutors say the pattern underscores difficulties they face while trying to solve rape cases involving some of society’s most disenfranchised citizens--its prostitutes, drug abusers and transients. Many experts, including Lambkin, believe such attacks are sharply on the increase, but only one in 10 are reported to authorities. Most are dropped before trial.

“It’s no secret, I don’t think, that this guy will do this again. I’m trying to save another victim out there from going through this,” Lambkin said, “and I’m trying to put an end to this right now so I don’t have to keep dealing with this for the rest of my career.”