Rapist ‘should never be released’ says ex-partner

The former partner of convicted rapist Kim Avis said he should never be released from prison. Jade Skea knew Avis for more than a decade, having met him when she was just 15.

She became involved with the Inverness busker when she was 18 and he was 42 and they lived together in a caravan in woods near the city.

But she said the man, who thought of himself as a wolf, became violent and controlling and also raped her.

Avis was known to many in Inverness where he sold jewellery from a pitch in the city centre.

He also raised thousands of pounds for charity and revelled in his status as a minor local celebrity.

With his hippy-style straggly hair and bandana, he was regarded generally as strange rather than dangerous. His charity work offered another layer of credible eccentricity.

But for years he managed to hide his criminal secret as a sexual predator who

raped and molested a number of women and girls.

When his crimes began to emerge, he fled to the US where he faked his own death in an effort to escape justice.

From an Inverness street trader, Avis had become an international fugitive who went on the run for months.

In 2021 he was jailed for 15 years after being convicted of 14 charges.

A new BBC Disclosure programme, Dead Man Running, to be screened tonight, tells the story of Avis’s double life and his extraordinary failed bid to escape justice.

Jade tells the programme she became Avis’s girlfriend in 2005 and was “besotted” with him.

He isolated her from friends and took her bank card, often leaving her alone in the caravan.

She said Avis likened himself to predatory animals, like wolves and lions, and named his house Wolves Den. Jade recalls that one night he stood on a table and began howling and making bizarre animal noises. After that, she said Avis raped her for the first time.

On another occasion he smacked her head off a headboard and then got on top of her and started punching her. Another time, she said, he threw her down stairs when she was pregnant.

But in 2015 she went to the police: “I felt at that point I knew I had to do that. There was no other option.”

After a police investigation was launched three other women came forward saying Avis had raped and abused them too.

Avis should have originally stood trial in March 2019.

But he fled to California where he was later reported missing on February 25 by his 17-year-old son, Reuben. He was said to have last been seen going for a swim at Monastery Beach in Carmel.

The case was initially treated as a missing person, with widespread searches carried out by the local coastguard, a sheriff office drone and a dive team.

But on the third day police realised it was a hoax.

A manhunt over the intervening months ended with Avis being caught 1,300 miles away in Colorado.

At his trial in Glasgow, Jade gave evidence behind a screen. She said: “I didn’t want to see his face. I never want to see his face again.”

On his sentence, she said: “I don’t think he should ever be released. He is a danger to anyone he is in contact with in some way.”

Disclosure: Dead Man Running, tonight at 9pm on BBC One Scotland, also on iPlayer.

DEAD MAN RUNNING: Kim Avis fled to America before his trial in 2019 and after a manhunt he was found in Colorado.

Jade Skea was raped.