Bill Harris

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“	You're all alike. Every last one of you.	„
	~ Bill Harris menacing Olivia Benson and Vickie Sayers while revealing the depths of his misogyny.

William "Bill" Harris is the main antagonist of the Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episode "Behave". He is a serial rapist who stalks and repeatedly rapes his victims for years so that they live in fear of him.

He was portrayed by James LeGros, who also played Billy Hill in Thursday and Wade Messer in Justified.

Biography[]

Harris is a sadistic misogynist who stalks and repeatedly rapes women several times over a period of years, returning to assault them again whenever he feels the urge to make a woman "behave". He uses his job as a traveling salesman for a medical supply company to rape women all over the country, stealing their driver's licenses afterward so he can keep track of them and rape them whenever he pleases. His "comfort zone" of victims work in hospitals, including doctors, nurses, administrators, and even patients. He then takes items of their clothing, such as underwear, as souvenirs to relive the experience of raping them. Finally, he tells them, "Be a good girl - behave yourself!".

He was particularly obsessed with one of his victims, Vicki Sayers, raping her four separate times over the span of 15 years. He first raped Vicki in 1995, when she was 16 and working as a candy striper at a hospital in New York City. He took her driver's license and threatened to kill her parents if she told anyone. Three years later, he again attacked Vicki, who by then was a sophomore at Hudson University; he broke into her apartment, tied her up with duct tape, and raped her repeatedly throughout the night and into the next day. He raped her a third time in 2000 in Los Angeles, a week before her wedding, which she called off afterward because she was too traumatized to be intimate with her fiancé. Finally, in 2011, he found her again in New York City, living like a hermit and rarely leaving her apartment because she was terrified of him coming back; he attacked and raped her in an alley, at one point breaking a bottle of liquor over her head so anyone who found her would dismiss her account of what he did to her as drunken babbling.

"Behave"[]

Vicki is taken to a hospital after passing out, bloodied and barely conscious, on a bus. Detectives Olivia Benson and Elliot Stabler of the NYPD's Special Victims Unit try to question her, but she runs out of the hospital and back to her apartment. Benson tracks her down and convinces her to take a sexual assault forensic examination so SVU can collect her rapist's DNA, and Vicki tells her the whole story of what Harris did to her, although she does not know his name.

Benson and Stabler take a police sketch of the rapist, made from Vicki's description, to a hotel that sells the brand of hand sanitizer that the rapist dropped in the alley after assaulting her. The desk clerk says the sketch resembles Harris, a frequent guest, and Benson and Stabler take him in for questioning. He stands in a lineup, and Vicki identifies him as her rapist. Harris has an alibi, however; the night of the rape, he was in Providence, Rhode Island for a trade show. Vicki runs up to him and begs his forgiveness, but he pretends that he does not know her.

Benson eventually discovers that Harris sneaked out of his hotel room and drove to New York City to rape Vicki. Benson resolves to give Harris a taste of his own medicine; she, Stabler, and their SVU colleague Fin Tutuola follow Harris everywhere he goes and out him as a rapist at a trade show. Humiliated and enraged, he threatens Benson and Vicki, and reveals the extent of his misogyny by snarling, "You're all alike, every last one of you." From this statement, Benson deduces that he has other victims, and discovers open rape investigations in several states that fit Harris' M.O.

Unfortunately, the rape kits in nearly every case are either degraded or lost. Benson finally catches a break in Los Angeles, where LAPD Detective Rex Winters tells her he has a warrant to search a storage space that Harris has rented for the past 10 years. Benson and Winters find photographs and videotapes of all of Harris' victims, along with their driver's licenses and detailed notes about their movements that span years. Winters says that the cases against Harris in Los Angeles have all passed the statute of limitations, but that Benson still has a chance to arrest him in New York City.

Benson collects several rape kits proving that Harris raped Vicki and arrests him, and Assistant District Attorney Sherri West charges him with several counts of rape and sexual assault in the first degree. Harris catches another lucky break, however, when Judge Elizabeth Donnelly reluctantly dismisses the charges because the DNA evidence in the rape kits are too degraded. While examining the evidence again, however, Benson realizes that the duct tape Harris used to bind Vicki must still be in SVU's evidence locker. Sure enough, she finds the duct tape, which has Vicki's and Harris' DNA on it. Benson also asked Vicki how long Harris stayed at her home, as she revealed that he stayed the whole night and into the next day. With that, Benson and Stabler arrest Harris for kidnapping, a crime that will put him in prison for 25 years, and take him to their station house, where Vicki is waiting. Panicked, Harris tells Vicki he loves her and that what he did to her was not rape, but she is unmoved. As Benson and Stabler lock him up in a holding cell, Vicki catches the door and throws Harris' own words back in his face: "Now I'll always know where you are. Be a good boy. Behave yourself." She slams the cell door shut and leaves, finally free of him. It was also implied Harris would be charged for other rapes that match his MO, presumably adding more to his sentence.

External links[]

Bill Harris on the Law & Order Wiki

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Villains

Exiled: A Law & Order Movie
Gianni Uzielli