An Inverness rapist who faked his death in the US in a bid to dodge justice is the subject of a new BBC documentary.
Kim Avis was jailed in 2021 for 15 years after an 11-year campaign of abusing women and women and children in the Highlands.
BBC’s flagship Scottish investigative series Disclosure is now set to tell ‘the untold story’ at 9pm on Wednesday March 27.
Dead Man Running is “the extraordinary story of how the darkest of crimes were hidden in plain sight for decades.”
The episode description reads: “A missing man, a hunt across the US and the untold story of an eccentric Inverness street trader who became an international fugitive.
“Did Kim Avis really drown in the waters off California’s infamous ‘Mortuary Beach’?”
How Inverness street trader Kim Avis was caught after faking death
Avis was a well-known street trader and occasional busker in Inverness.
He was known by at least three names – Kim Gordon, Kim Vincent and Kem Avis-Vincent – and was thought to have moved to the Highlands capital in the 1980s.
Avis was first reported missing on February 25 2019.
His then-17-year-old son alerted police after he failed to return from a swim, at Monastery Beach in Carmel, California.
The beach is known as ‘Mortuary Beach’ as more than 30 people have died there.
He was originally treated as a missing person – but it was soon revealed that he had failed to appear in court in Scotland to face rape and sexual assault charges.
A manhunt was launched and he was arrested over 1,000 miles away in Colorado Springs five months later.
Avis eventually went on trial at the High Court in Glasgow and was ultimately found guilty of 14 charges on two girls and two women between 2006 and 2017, mainly in Inverness – including at his property called Wolves Den.
He was jailed on June 11, 2021.
Conversation