Alleged Belmont Rapist Is Charged

Sixty-four burglary and sex crime charges were filed Wednesday against the alleged Belmont Shore serial rapist, who appeared briefly in a Long Beach courtroom as his bereft mother, who said she prays for his salvation, sat in the front row.

Alice Rathbun said that her son, Mark Wayne Rathbun, was “ashamed, embarrassed, remorseful” when she saw him in jail before Wednesday’s hearing, and that he told her, “ ‘Mom, don’t worry, I’ll pay for what I’ve done,’ ” Alice Rathbun recalled.

“I said, ‘Then it’s true?’ He didn’t say anything, but his eyes were red from crying.”

Rathbun, 32, was assigned a court-appointed public defender but did not enter a plea because that attorney was not present. Rathbun’s arraignment was postponed until Wednesday, and a judge ordered him held at the Los Angeles County Jail in lieu of $11-million bail.

Rathbun, a Long Beach Polytechnic High School graduate and Junior ROTC member who grew up the only child of a Vietnam War widow, said little during the afternoon proceeding.

He waived his right to a timely arraignment as he sat in the back row of the defendant’s box, wearing the cream-colored T-shirt with the letters “ATM” in which he was arrested Sunday night in Oxnard.

Patrol officers on the east side of Long Beach, where a majority of the 31 attacks attributed to the serial rapist occurred since 1996, stopped Rathbun as he sat on a bike a few blocks from the site of the last attack early Thursday.

Rathbun was arrested on suspicion of possessing a crack pipe and submitted a DNA sample before he posted $250 bail late Friday night and was released.

But detectives followed his movements, which included two trips to Oxnard, where he helped a friend move, until DNA test results by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Crime Lab matched Rathbun’s DNA to that retrieved from a dozen crime scenes of the serial rapist. He was arrested and returned to Long Beach City Jail.

On Wednesday, the Los Angeles County district attorney filed a criminal complaint that charged Rathbun with the 64 counts that occurred in 14 attacks.

The serial predator’s spree began with two attacks in 1996 in Seattle, and Rathbun may be charged there, authorities said Wednesday. The first attack in Southern California was Jan. 17, 1997, in Long Beach.

The criminal complaint charged Rathbun with 10 attacks in Long Beach -- including an attempted assault Nov. 7 -- two in a Los Alamitos mobile home park five minutes apart and two in Huntington Beach.

DNA evidence found at 12 of the residences matches Rathbun’s, said Deputy Dist. Atty. Richard Goul. Rathbun is charged with two other attacks based on other evidence. If convicted of all charges, Rathbun would spend the rest of his life in prison.

His mother, Alice Rathbun, 75, a retired cafeteria worker at St. Mary’s Hospital in Long Beach, wore dark glasses, a gold cross and a denim cap as she arrived at the hearing. She was accompanied by her sister and a friend who offered moral support in the face of a press mob that enveloped her before the hearing.

Was there anything that she could recall, she was asked, that might have driven him to attack these women?

“I think it’s the drugs,” she said. Her son, she said, smoked marijuana and used crack cocaine.

She apologized “on behalf of my son” to the women whom he is accused of raping or assaulting over the years, and said he now has to “make his goal redemption ... from God.”

“I will always love my son,” she said. “No matter what. And I told him that.”

She said that she was stunned by the charges, but noted that after his arrests as a teenager for trespassing, perhaps he did not get the proper psychological counseling that a priest had urged.

Was there any trauma, she was asked, that might have driven him to this, such as the death of his father or another male role model? Alice Rathbun said that her son’s father was killed in Vietnam in 1969, before Mark was born, and that another man she might have married died in a car accident.

“My love affairs,” she conceded almost ruefully, “have been fiascoes.”

Yet Mark was “a happy person, a happy child. He was always smiling as a kid, very friendly,” she recalled. Rathbun lived with her and he took good care of her, she said. Alice Rathbun recalled that they had watched television news accounts of the serial rapist. “I’d say, ‘Oh, my, look, that’s a terrible crime.’ He would say, ‘Yeah.’ ”

According to court documents and police, Rathbun has worked over the years at a variety of mostly low-paying jobs: handyman’s helper, commercial fisherman (what led him to Seattle in the mid-1990s), supermarket bagger, parking valet and Christmas tree deliveryman.

Some of the jobs offered him the “opportunity” or proximity to the women or homes, said Long Beach Police Cmdr. Linda Beardslee, who is heading a task force of agencies investigating the serial sex crimes. Detectives have yet to determine if the victims were linked.

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Times staff writers Jose Cardenas and Louis Sahagun contributed to this report.