A woman who was abused by a serial rapist is to tell her story in a BBC documentary for the first time since her abuser’s arrest.
Kim Avis was jailed for 15 years in 2021 for sex offences including rapes, having subjected four women to years of abuse, fled to the US, and staged his own death to avoid the charges.
Avis previously sold jewellery from a stall in Inverness in the Scottish Highlands and was well known to locals in the area for raising money for charity through fun-running events.
The BBC’s documentary, Disclosure: Dead Man Running, will hear from Jade Skea, a survivor of Avis’ abuse.
The broadcaster said it marks the first time Ms Skea has spoken about how she helped bring the man to justice for his crimes.
The pair met when she was a teenager in the early 2000s at his jewellery stall, which she would frequent with friends.
By the time she turned 18 she had been regularly seeing Avis, who was in his 40s.
In the documentary, she said: “He wasn’t like other adults.
“We kind of felt like he was one of us.”
Avis would eventually isolate young Ms Skea from her family and friends and moved her into a static caravan outside of the city, which nobody visited other than him.
Ms Skea said this was all “part of the plan” to just “have me cut off from everything”.
Shortly after, Avis raped her for the first time.
Ms Skea said: “He came to visit me one night, and he was just acting quite erratically, and he was upset about something.
“He got on top of a picnic table that was outside the caravan, and he started howling, and just making bizarre animal noises.”
He would then rape her again in his house, which he dubbed the “Wolves’ Den”.
Ms Skea said: “I remember just feeling like that was just kind of the end, this was going to be my life forever.”
Avis’s abuse would begin to unravel in 2015 after Ms Skea reported him to the police, which she says he thought she would never do.
Avis then appeared in court charged with multiple rapes and sexual assault against a total of four women after another three reported him.
He was released on bail and a trial date was set for March 2019.
However, he sold his property for £245,000 and promptly fled to Monastery Beach, Carmel-by-the-sea, California, US.
The area, known colloquially as “Mortuary Beach” due to frequent drownings, is where Avis would stage his own death.
Avis’s eldest son, who was with him in the US, reported him missing, and after a three-day search, local police were certain his supposed drowning was a hoax.
A few months later, he re-emerged near Colorado Springs, around 1,300 miles from where he was reported as missing.
Using the alias Cameron MacGregor, he spent around 3,000 US dollars at a gemstone stall, run by a woman who features in the documentary, known only as Angie.
She said: “He was really elusive.
“I knew something was wrong”.
She got to know Avis under his MacGregor pseudonym saying he appeared rough around the edges but always carried a sizeable sum of cash on him.
She suspected “MacGregor” was not who he said he was after she asked him to show her his passport, while claiming to be a US citizen.
Angie said he “got mad” and drove off for around an hour when she challenged him to show her proof of citizenship.
She added: “I’m like, ‘this is strange, this is really peculiar, he’s talking about a witch hunt, something isn’t right here’.
“I took a picture of his car licence plates.
“I had a police friend and I said will you run these plates.”
Angie was later contacted by a government agency that hunts fugitives.
She said: “They said ‘stay away from him, he’s dangerous’.
US marshals and police then attempted to track his movements, eventually capturing his last moments as a fugitive on police bodycams.
He was placed in a federal prison, awaiting extradition to Scotland.
While he was in federal prison, Angie visited him three times. Avis had no idea she was likely behind his arrest.
After Avis was returned to prison in Scotland, Angie visited him twice more and on the last occasion she decided to let him in on a secret.
While there, Angie visited him three times, and on her last visit before he was returned to Scotland, she told him: “I said ‘You know what, I’m the one that turned your plates in'”.
After two years on the run, Avis was finally sentenced to 15 years in jail at the High Court in Edinburgh, following a trial, and imprisoned in HMP Edinburgh.
Ms Skea said: “He will absolutely ruin anyone that he’s around long enough.
“And I don’t think that, you know, he should ever, ever be out in public again.”
Disclosure: Dead Man Running, airs on BBC One Scotland on Wednesday at 9pm.
