Briton facing rape charges ‘faked death on US beach’
A BRITISH man facing multiple rape charges in Scotland is believed to have tried to fake his own death on a beach in California.
Police in Monterey County spent two days searching for Kim Gordon, who was visiting the US with his 17-year-old son.
According to his son’s call to emergency services, Gordon said he wanted to go for a swim at Monastery Beach, Carmel, on Monday evening and then vanished.
Divers searched the sea and beach, where they found his clothes neatly folded, but officers became suspicious when the boy gave different versions of how the pair had gone to the county.
US police believe Gordon, also known as Kim Avis – who is in his 50s and is due in court in Edinburgh on March 11 to face a reported 24 rape charges – is still alive and on the run.
It is not clear whether he was charged before or after he left for the US, or how he was able to fly there while under investigation. His son, Ruben Avis, has since returned to their home near Inverness while US federal agents have joined the hunt for his father, whose manner of disappearance has echoes of BBC sitcom The Fall And Rise Of Reginald Perrin. Captain John Thornburg of the Monterey sheriff’s office said: ‘We got a 911 call saying that he had gone swimming off one of our beaches and hadn’t returned.
‘This was 7.15pm, which was a little unusual to go swimming because it was dark. We treated it as a missing person, as a swimmer in distress. It’s a very dangerous beach. For the next two days we put dive teams in to try to locate him and he wasn’t [there].’
He added: ‘We don’t believe he went into the ocean. We think it’s more related to trying to get out of the charges.’
Captain Thornburg said Ruben’s story started to ‘fall apart’ when he was asked how they got to Monterey County from Los Angeles. His differing versions were that they hitch-hiked, used a rental car or caught the bus – and there was no record or receipt for either of the latter two.
He also said Ruben did not seem to be ‘severely upset’.
Ruben yesterday refused to comment. His father, originally from Suffolk, is a busker and jewellery trader in Inverness and has reportedly raised thousands for charities.