Nicknamed “mortuary beach” for its treacherous waters and steep drops, Monastery Beach sees about a dozen rescue missions each year, the Monterey Herald reported.
“I don’t know if he picked the beach for a reason, or if it was just dumb luck,” said Chief Deputy John Thornburg. “But it’s the right beach, if you know what I mean — if that’s truly what his goal was.”
For three days, emergency responders and the Coast Guard searched for Avis with a drone, a helicopter and divers. However, an interview with Avis’s son was the beginning of the story’s unraveling, Thornburg said.
When the son called 911, the Press and Journal reported, the teenager said that the two had been camping in the Monastery Beach area and that Avis went for “a bit of a swim” after dark.
Authorities questioned Avis’s son, who could not recall crucial details — for instance, how the two had traveled about 300 miles from Los Angeles to Monterey County, or where his father had disappeared into the water. The teenager’s minimal packing and lack of suitable equipment for camping also raised concern, police said.
“If you were to go to someplace for a week, you would take a week’s worth of stuff,” Thornburg said. “There was one backpack with a few odds and ends in it, not something that would show that somebody was a true tourist who happened to come to Carmel Valley, Monterey County, want to go for a swim and just happen to pick the wrong beach.”
The final twist in the investigation came two weeks later, Thornburg said, when police received a call from across the Atlantic.
“We were notified by the folks in Scotland that he was wanted there,” he said. “So when we reached out to Scotland, and they confirmed he was wanted, we realized he had a motive to fake a disappearance.”
Scottish authorities had issued a warrant for Avis’s arrest after he did not appear at his March 11, 2019, pretrial hearing, according to a complaint in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. The investigation was then turned to the U.S. Marshals Service, which is tasked with apprehending foreign fugitives.
For months, investigators searched for Avis, following alleged sightings of the man throughout the area, but they would find him 1,300 miles away after he was spotted in a Colorado Springs motel on July 26, 2019.
Three days before Avis’s arrest, a person told a Colorado Springs Police Department officer about someone who “had given a false name and had been acting suspicious,” the U.S. Marshals Service said in an email. The resident also provided a photo of a man who fit Avis’s description.
The Scot admitted to using disguises when in public and consistently sleeping in different locations to elude authorities. Avis also told officers that he had traveled to more than 10 states in the western and southern United States and had hidden in the mountains outside Colorado Springs, according to the Marshals Service.
Avis was extradited to Scotland on Sept. 6, 2019 — seven months after his disappearance.
Once Avis was in Scotland, his trial continued to loom as the coronavirus pandemic took hold of the world. In June 2020, he was denied bail by Judge Valerie Stacey after prosecutors argued that Avis’s “failure to appear in court was deliberate,” the Ross-shire Journal reported.
Lorenzo Alonzi, Avis’s attorney, declined The Washington Post’s requests for comment; however, he told the High Court in Glasgow that his client was unable to attend his March 11, 2019, hearing after being swept away by the waters of Monastery Beach.
“He has already been on remand for almost a year and since March has spent 22-and-a-half hours each day locked in his cell,” Alonzi said, according to the Ross-shire Journal. “It was always his intention to appear for court. He traveled to the States for a holiday and was involved in a distressing incident.”
It would take another year for Avis to be convicted of raping three women — one of them when she was 12, according to court documents — and sexually assaulting an 11-year-old girl.
Avis was sentenced on June 11 to 12 years in prison for his sexual crimes and three years for not appearing in court in March 2019.
He denied the charges, likening prosecutor Graeme Jessop’s listing of his crimes to “reading a film script.” He added that “it is untrue. It is disgusting,” the BBC reported.
Fraser Gibson, a prosecutor in Scotland, said Avis “went to great lengths to evade justice for his crimes,” the BBC reported this month. “Thanks to the efforts of police and prosecutors, working together with U.S. law enforcement, he has been brought to justice.”
Shortly after Avis was declared missing in California, Monterey County’s child protective services helped his son return to Scotland, authorities said. The teen was not charged with filing a false report after calling 911 to tell of Avis’s disappearance.
His father, he had said in the 911 call, was an experienced swimmer who once crossed Loch Ness for charity.
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