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I don't recognize that person.

He's obviously a monster.

He is completely unhinged. Maybe he always had a dark side. He was putting his hands around my neck. And then all of a sudden he turned. I remember just feeling like this was going to be my life forever.

We were on him pretty quick. Arms out. Arms out to your side.

I said, You know what? I'm the one that turned your plates in.

You lied to the wrong American girl.

A man from Inverness has been arrested in Colorado. Kim Avis has been on the lam for five months. Well, tonight he is behind bars.

Inverness market trader, Kim Avis. Kim Avis. Kim Avis. Kim Avis. Kim Avis. It's the 29th of April, 2021, the High Court in Glasgow. After months of being the subject of an international manhunt, the trial that Kim Avis did everything he could to outrun is finally about to start. It's a gray, overcast day, and I'm making my way towards the court. It's now two years since I started working on this story, and more than a decade since I last saw Kim Avis in person. I arrive and take my seating the press section of the court. Then I hear the clunking of some doors being unlocked. Kim Avis is being brought up from the cells. He's flanked either side by security officers, and he's handcuffed. He settles into the dock, a wooden box encased in thick of glass. He's wearing a gray suit with an olive green shirt. Covid restrictions are still in place, which means Kim is wearing a face mask, but despite that, I can tell he looks gaunt. His dampened hair now has gray through it. Older and perhaps a little weaker than I remembered him, but somehow, he still looks intimidating.

The Judge, Lord Sanderson, walks into court draped in red and cream robes, and we all rise.

Kim Avis is on trial, charged with 24 offenses, including multiple rapes and sexual assaults, all against four women.

I remember telling him to snap out of it as well while trying to look at him. I remember there was absolutely nothing there.

He was pinning me down and he looked He was crazy. He had a crazy look on his face.

I was thinking, Oh, gosh, is he going to rape me?

Two of those women were actually children at the time the offenses took place. I'm Miles Bonner, and this is Dead Man Running. Episode 5, Trial. The upcoming trial was the talk of my hometown of Inverness. Kim had seen to that with his plot to fake his own death in California, sparking a manhunt and a media circus with him at the center. But behind all that were the women who'd come forward to seek justice, and they, too, were preparing for their day in court.

He had then made it this massive public thing. So your world news almost is It's just getting attention everywhere. People in Inverness are speaking about it. It's just everywhere.

You'll remember Jade from episode 2. She'd started the investigation into Kim when she went to the police in 2015. Now it was time for her to go to court.

I went to Glasgow the night before the trial, and you're put up in a hotel. So it was just horrible, uneasy feeling, really, I suppose for that night, I didn't sleep great. Horrible, stressy feeling, I suppose. And then in the morning, it was just butterflies and just wanting to get it out of the way, really, and just really bizarre walking into the court. It wasn't a very nice environment to walk into. You've got to go in and recount these quite graphic things in quite great detail.

I'm Graham Jessup. I'm a high court prosecutor at King's Council and advocate deputy working in Crown Office and Procure Fiscal Service. I've been involved in criminal justice for a long time.

Graham's role was to lead the case against Kim Avis on behalf of the prosecution.

I would have recognized in the Avis case from the outset that there were a number of vulnerable witnesses in this case, and in addition, that the prosecution were relying on mutual corroboration to prove the case.

Cureum is highly experienced. He knew this case would be tricky and that careful planning was required.

I read all the statements. I consider the witnesses, and I try to present the case in a strongly persuasive manner as possible. So part of that consideration is deciding which witnesses to lead with.

Although Jade was the first to go to the police, she wouldn't be the first of the four women to give evidence. That would Lisa. Lisa wasn't actually in the courtroom. Instead, we saw her on a screen. She was clearly nervous but was still able to give her evidence. Lisa isn't her real name. Her words here are spoken by an actor, and the following evidence is distressing.

He got me a smoothie. I remember the smoothie tasting very strange. I felt very strange.

Lisa went She began to tell the court that after this, Kim Avis raped her for the first time. She was a teenager.

I remember he was ripping off my underwear, ripping them off and taking off my dress. I was trying to get him to stop. I remember just feeling very limp in a way. I felt quite in shock.

I watched as Kim rocked back and forth as Lisa spoke. She couldn't see see or hear him, but he was grunting in loudly scribbling notes. I remember the security guards looking quizzically at Kim during some of this. Lisa told the court that Kim made her look in a mirror while he raped her.

I do recall him saying, telling me, Look. He said, Look, look at this, look at this. I remember if I didn't look in the mirror, he would get annoyed or angry.

At points, Lisa couldn't bring herself to say some of the words, so she would spell them out instead. Lisa told the court of multiple instances of sexual assault, attempted rape, and rape, all at the hands of Kim. The rest of the court sat in silence as Lisa continued.

I remember screaming at him, and I remember telling him to snap out of it as well while trying to look at him. I remember there was absolutely nothing It was like he was in a trance or something.

Lisa said Kim Avis told her he would die if she told anyone what he'd done. He cut his wrists in front of her. He even threatened to hang himself, holding a rope up to her face as if to prove he meant it. Kim made this threat to several of the women. Lisa gave evidence for two days and faced cross-examination from Kim's defense team. I remember them asking her, Have you imagined this? She replied through sobs, I am telling the truth. As another woman took the stand, I saw Kim Avis smile at his lawyer. I don't know why he did that. Unlike Lisa, this woman who we're calling Kate was in the courtroom, meters away from Kim. Again, her words are spoken by an actor.

If it was really bad, he would throw things, he would hit himself. He put his hands around my throat.

Like Lisa, Kate said Kim self-harmed in front of her. I remember making an audio diary of what she had said when I left the court that day, back in 2021.

Kim was shaking his head through out the testimony by him, especially when it came to talking about his violence, throwing things, hurting himself. There was a lot about him banging his own head, and the police actually testified that he was covered in white scars, which they believed were historical cuts that had healed up over time.

Despite her understandable nerves and Kim's pretty brazen attempts to put her off by making noises and passing notes to his lawyer, Kate continued to tell her story.

I told him that I didn't want to have sex. He would have sex with me anyway. I would tell him to stop. He would carry on.

I remember thinking how awful it must be for these women to have to face this man to speak about what he did to them. Journalist Catherine Alan Sutherland remembers looking through the indictment, the document that sets out the charges against Camaevis.

It was several pages.

It was violent, it was controlling, it was sadistic. I've got absolutely heartbroken for those women.

The first week of the trial was now over.

It's been a really difficult listen, but I cannot imagine how horrendous it must have been to actually speak about those of those crimes. A lot of evidence in there that was just absolutely harrowing.

I was just sitting in the room just waiting to get called in.

And then it was Jade's turn to take the stand.

That was just one of the worst parts. It was just the apprehension of not knowing what the defense were going to say or what they were going to ask. I think just hoping that the jury were I'm going to see through the lies that Kim told.

Due to COVID, the jury was housed in a nearby cinema. Their 15 faces each appeared in close up in separate boxes on a large screen. During the evidence, I found myself looking at this screen often, wondering what the jurors were thinking. It added a strange dimension to what was a grueling trial. Now Jade had to tell that wall of faces what had happened to her while Kim sat there listening.

I asked for a screen. I didn't want to see his face. I don't ever want to see his face again. And it wasn't a fear thing. I just had no desire to see him at all.

Over several hours, Jade told the court what she had experienced. She spoke of how Kim would rape her, how he would violently attack her, and how he isolated her from friends and family.

He was acting crazy, and he was making noise and howling and causing a scene. He came in, he was telling me that he needed to sleep with me right now. I did tell him that I didn't want to. I remember him pulling off my clothes. I remember I was wearing a nighty, and he just held me down, and he had sex with me. And I just remember initially trying to push him off and fight him off. And I just resigned to it because I was so low at that point. The thing with rape is it's not always a case of your physically fighting somebody off of you. Just remember lying there and feeling like I am literally going to be stuck here forever.

Jade was strong under cross-examination. Even when the defense put to the court that it was in fact Jade who was the aggressor. They said she had domestically abused Kim.

There was an occasion where he was splitting wood when he brought an ax back on his head and injured himself. I remember saying to him, You should go to A&E and get that checked out. I didn't find this out until right before the trial that he'd actually gone in there and told the nurses or the doctors that I had struck him on the head with a hammer. So there was a lot of just really vindictive stuff like that that had gone on that I wasn't even aware of.

The defense played tapes that Kim had secretly made of Jade. They were recordings of arguments between her and Kim. Evidence, the defense claimed that he was the victim in all this.

When did you realize he was secretly recording you?

I can't remember the first time that I was aware that he was recording me. I do remember he would record conversations with anyone he wasn't getting on well with, it seemed. That is unusual behavior because you'd only ever record a conversation if you were worried about some legal issue or you were in danger of some kind, and it's sneaky and bizarre.

The defense claimed that Jade's motive for coming forward may have been financial.

There was a lot of emphasis on Kim saying that Everyone was after his money. All the time that I was with Kim, I didn't really receive anything much from him. So it was just a lot of nonsense, really. At the end of the cross-examining examination. I just remember the solicitor saying, Are you sure that this happened this way? Is it not the case that you manipulated Kim into this situation?

I thought Jade stood up well for herself to despite Kim's attempts to distract her.

I do remember him making noises when I was giving evidence and just being moderately disruptive and making me aware of his presence thing, even though there was the screen there.

Kim Avis was loud, abrupt, obnoxious throughout the whole trial. He would grunt during evidence or scribble down notes really loudly, passing them between his defense council and to his solicitor who was sitting near me. And he was just making a show of the whole thing. I felt like he was trying to put them off, that he was trying to make them know that he was there and that he was listening and make them crumble. But there was one point which just completely stood out to me. The youngest victim, the smallest victim, she asked for her screen to be removed, and then she stared him right into his eyes, and he just sat back, slumped in his chair, and he didn't make a single noise.

He just sat there in silence and listened to her evidence.

I was very confused, and I didn't know what was happening.

This is Emily. Again, not her real name. And her words are also spoken by an actor.

I didn't want to say no because I didn't want to make him feel bad by refusing. I just did what I was told, I guess. He was taking pills. He offered me some pills. I'm not sure what they were. I didn't take them because I thought that they were bad. They said something like, They would help me sleep or that they would make me happy. He was on top of me and he was pinning me down and he looked crazy. He had a crazy look on his face. He was pinning me down and he wouldn't let me up. And I was trying to pull his hair, but he wouldn't let me up and he had his hand over my mouth.

Emily scared Kim down and told the court how he'd sexually assaulted her when she was a child.

And it was just such a stop you in your tracks moment. She then broke down in tears and then managed to continue after that. But it was just so much anger. It was just palpable. The whole room was just so tensed up by that. So, yeah, there's been more to this case than I could have ever imagined.

That was quite a bold thing to do to then just look him in the eye and say, No, this is what you've done. So I was quite proud when I heard that, to be honest.

As Emily's evidence came to an end, Kim Avis, who she had silenced, remained still. From where I was sitting, it felt like a major moment in the trial. Kim's facade, the persona he was portraying to the jury and to the courtroom, just fell away. The evidence against him had been heard, and it won't come as a surprise to you that Kim, a man who loved being center stage, took the in his own defense. Here's prosecutor Graham Jessup again.

An accused person has no obligation to give evidence, and is perfectly entitled to not go into the witness box and give evidence. But if an accused person likes to go into the witness box, then obviously it's an opportunity to cross-examine him.

Kim was wearing the same olive green shirt and gray suit. About to give evidence, he seemed more stressed than usual.

He was so nervous. Understandably, he's on the trail for his life. He wasn't coming across well at all.

He told the court he moved to Inverness in the early 1990s, and before living in the Highlands, he said he'd been in the West Coast of Ireland, where he trained horses. He said he rode in to Inverness on one of those horses, and in the early days, slept rough under his car, outside the town. Apparently, he managed to get on his feet thanks to money from his father. He moved into a chalet beside Clava Cairns, an ancient burial ground outside Inverness, and then scraped enough cash together to build his first house. On the stand, he was erratic, flitting between emotional and composed. He would even talk over his own defense council who was trying to ask him questions, and he said that the whole trial was a conspiracy or witch hunt against him. A plot by the women who'd come forward who were all motivated by money.

But what I did think was ludicrous, which obviously I didn't really find out a lot of until afterwards was that he had said that about everyone involved in the trial, that everyone was hurting him and out to get him and acting like it was this big conspiracy, basically, against him.

Now, It was time for Kim Avis to be cross-examined. Prosecutor Graham Jessup asked about the various instances of self-harm. I don't hit myself. Not true. She's made it up. Rope Over your neck? No. The prosecutor then moved on to the various rape and sexual assault charges. Absolutely did not happen. All four women are wrong. Correct. All four of these women are lying? Yes.

The advocate deputy, Graham Jessup, he finished on going through all the similarities in the four women's evidence and putting all those allegations to him. He denied all of them, saying, No, that's disgusting. I would never do that. It goes against everything that I believe in, and this, that, and the other. And there was also reference for the first time in this trial with him missing his court date in Edinburgh, his high court date. And he actually even mentioned why he did miss that court date.

I had a breakdown on Monestry Beach.

I was scared I'd get wrongfully convicted.

You remember that Monestry Beach was the place where Kim tried to make it look like he drowned. So it went back and forth. The defense really didn't I don't want this conversation about fleeing the court case coming up in any more depth, which I can imagine it doesn't look good for them.

Anyway, tomorrow is a three o'clock start because Brook's giving evidence.

Barouk, you've not heard her name before. When Kim attempted to stage us in death and went on the run, he had a wife, an American wife, then living in Montana with her child. Appearing via a video link from a court in the US, her testimony began in dramatic style as she told the court she was divorcing Kim. Kim just sat in silence as he absorbed this news. During questioning, Brook denied ever knowing that Kim had been due in court before he faked death. This line of questioning provoked a number of objections from the defense, but Lord Sanderson swotted them away and allowed Brook to talk about Kim and his travels across the US. Not that she seemed to know much about it.

There's a point where she's made aware that Kim has then left for the States, and she finds this out, she says, by receiving letters, she said that there was many, many, many letters letters that he sent during that period of being missing in the States. And then the last letter she gets, or one of the last letters, is from from prison, Colorado. It was really interesting on that front that you've got this communication that's going on when Kim's on the run. And then, Bruce says, knowing that Kim's in the court, I'm sorry to hurt his feelings or something along those lines, but I didn't actually read all those letters.

I remember her head dropped when she said this. Again, Kim just sat in silence. This was a very different Kim Avis to what we'd seen earlier in the trial. The showman, the charismatic figure I remember from Inverness who loved the limelight. The man who'd created all that fuss with a stunt at Monastery Beach. Had the tide now turned against him. As the trial wrapped up, Graham Jessup gave the closing speech for the prosecution. He hammered home the main points that Kim Avis was controlling and aggressive, that he used threats of suicide and self-harm as a means of keeping his victims from talking. But perhaps the main thing that he wanted to land with the jury was how similar these accounts were, these accounts which had come from four different women. Such similarities are really important in a case like this.

The law in Scotland is that nobody can be convicted on the evidence of one witness alone. There must be evidence from two separate sources. That's corroboration. And in certain circumstances, particularly in sexual offenses, there is often only one eye witness the victim or complainer. And And in these circumstances, the law allows for mutual corroboration.

This is known in Scott's law as the Mouroff doctrine, named after the first person to be convicted in this way.

If there are similarities in the time, character, and circumstance of the two or more offenses, then the jury is entitled to take the evidence of one victim and use the evidence of the other victim to the other crime to corroborate each other.

The closing speech on the prosecution laid out the full of the evidence against Kim. His defense stated that all they had was the word of the woman and that there was no independent evidence.

It's been a complete roller coaster of a case, so I don't know what the jury must be thinking And I suppose we'll find out tomorrow.

It was time for the jurors to make their deliberations. They would have to decide who they were more convinced by, Kim or the woman.

Who knows how long it will take. It's probably going to be about four hours or something like that. So I'm going to go back in about an hour and a half or two just in case it gets called early, but there's a lot to get through. Yeah, there was a real strange moment where... I don't know why. I'm not normally a court reporter, so maybe that isn't strange. But when there was a break, everyone is chatting about TV shows that they like and having a laugh and talking about the weather. And even the security guards, either side of Kim are chatting away to each other about whatever. And it's just like the whole room, just they've been working for the last two weeks and they're coming to the end of it and everyone's quite jovial and getting the crack. And Kim is just sitting there staring into the abyss. Such a strange image. And I have no idea how this is going to go.

Then we were called back into court.

And Kim seemed really calm, really calm. The jury came back on screen and he seemed pretty relaxed. And one of the members of the jury, a woman, came forward and she was the one to deliver the verdict. And she went through the charges. So this is how it went. So he was found guilty on Charge 2, which was rape, found guilty on Charge 5, which was rape- Kim was found guilty of 14 charges between 2006 and 2016 against all four women.

When the guilty verdict came in, you'd think that you would just feel this massive relief, but it wasn't really like that. It was like adrenaline. So it was just... You just felt like your whole body was vibrating almost like it was shaking. But it was just such a long time for it to get to that point. It was like You really had been in a battle for years. So it was like just so much had gone on. So it wasn't just this happy feeling. There was definitely more to it.

I didn't know how this was going to go, but there we have it. It was really clear that the jury found him guilty on all those charges and had them read back to him. He shouted, It's a tragic day for truth and justice, Your Honor. And then he was led away.

Kim was led below the court and taken back to prison in Edinburgh to wait his sentencing. When that came around, he was jailed for 15 years, 12 years for his crimes against the women, and three years for missing his court date.

A rapist who tried to evade justice by fleeing the country before faking his own death has been jailed for 15 years.

Inverness market trader, Kim Avis-With Kim gone, Jade could begin to try and process everything she had been through.

There's a lot of things I just look back on and I almost dissociate from it. I just feel really that I'm just disgusted that people can act that way, that he could take all these young people and ruin their life to some degree or do these things to them. It just makes me angry. It's like the physical violence, all of that. I think people have this view that that should bother you more, but it's all the mental stuff, it's the games and the manipulation and all of the stuff that really hurts. If somebody punches you and you're okay, then you can just almost walk away from something like that. That side of it was not nearly as bad as all the other insidious stuff going on in the background.

The trial was over. Kim was jailed. Perhaps as four victims could now start looking towards their own futures out from under his control. And it was time for me to start thinking about what my next story was going to be, to leave Kim Avis behind. And then a letter arrived from Edinburgh Prison addressed to me. It was Kim. That's next time on Dead Man Running. So you don't miss episodes, hit subscribe on BBC Sounds or wherever you get your podcasts. If you have any information you'd like to share on this story, the email is disclosure@bbc. Co. Uk. It's worth noting, Kim Avis goes by the following names, Vince or Vinnie Avis, Kim or Kim Gordon, and Cameron McGregor. That email again: disclosure@bbc. Co. Uk. If you've been affected by sexual abuse, self-harm, or suicide, details of support can be found at: bbc. Co. Uk/actionline.