The twists and turns, bizarre lies and missed opportunities in the global hunt for child sex abuser Charles Batham are only now coming to light.
The tall, eccentric Englishman fled Australia and remained on the run for a full nine years, only to be captured in the middle of the COVID pandemic in Italy.
At the centre of it all is a woman called Sherrie, whose tenacity helped solve an international manhunt.
Warning: This story contains descriptions of sexual assault
"It still shocks me to think about everything that's happened," she told Background Briefing.
"I know I did everything that I could.
The assault
It is the early 2000s in the tropical town of Broome. Sherrie is nine years old.
Her parents have become friendly with a new face in town – a tall man, with gingery hair, called Charles Batham.
The Englishman has set up a business taking tourists on scenic flights in his distinctive ultralight aircraft.
One day she heads over to his place, to the silver double-decker bus where he lives on a bush block next to the airport.
"We've gone inside for a drink and we've gone into this little shipping container office thing," she says.
"He sits me on his lap … and he starts showing me pictures of him having group sex with a bunch of dudes and this woman — she wasn't very old."
Within minutes, Batham was sexually molesting her.
She was distressed and made up an excuse to leave.
It would be almost a decade before she reported it to police.
By then, Batham was an international fugitive slipping across Europe like a ghost, while police scrambled to catch him.
The escape
It was the steamy wet season of 2010 when Batham's charade as a respectable business-owner came crashing down.
There were rumours around town about his strangely close relationship with young girls, and child protection authorities tipped off the Broome detectives.
Within days, police raided Batham's double-decker bus and converted aircraft hangar, seizing computers, a camera, and a printed photo showing a child being sexually exploited.
The 66-year-old was charged and released on bail.
A search of his computers revealed hundreds more illegal images, including photos Batham had taken of a young local girl — a second girl, not Sherrie — being directed to use a sex toy he had given her.
But within days, the Englishman had disappeared. Police would later find out he had flown to Perth, boarded a plane to Malaysia, and then surfaced in his British homeland.
They were stunned, as was the Broome community.
"It came as a complete surprise when he sold his assets and obviously fled," Detective Sergeant Bruce Bowers says.
"We obviously did not expect that.
WA Police has revealed that Batham left a farewell note.
Detective Sergeant Wayne Davies says it confirmed the intention to escape.
"A gentleman who was a friend of Batham's came into the police station and handed us a letter and said, 'I have just received this letter from Charles'.
"Basically it was a letter saying that he was now a fugitive, and would be far away by the time his friend read the letter."
The two detectives had no idea the case would tie them in knots for the next nine years.
WA Police has defended the decision to release Batham on bail, saying it was based on the information they had at the time.
"Our main priority was putting in place protective bail conditions to make sure he was not going to pose any risk to the victim or other children," Detective Sergeant Davies explains.
"And we had no inkling he would travel overseas.
"He had a well-established business in town, and was prominent within the Broome tourism industry, and he had lots of assets like aircraft."
They would later discover he had been quietly selling his belongings, preparing for a life on the run.
The police mobilised, notifying Interpol and distributing photos of Batham at airports and ultralight flying clubs around the United Kingdom.
And they started digging into his past, which — it turns out — was full of warning signs and suspicions.
The backstory
Charles Batham was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland in 1944.
His parents were in the British Navy and away a lot, so he attended boarding school in England.
At just 17, he went to Africa to do big-game hunting at his uncle's safari park.
Within a few years, he was living in a share house in Cape Town, South Africa.
John Paton, who lived with Batham for about a year, says he could be good company.
"He was tall and had reddish-blonde, curly hair, and he made a characteristic snorting noise when he spoke," Mr Paton says.
"He was quite amusing ... but we didn't really have enough in common to become mates."
But soon John Paton noticed something strange. Something that made him deeply uncomfortable.
"He did have this habit of picking up rather young girls," he says.
"They were about 14 or 15 years old … and it was remarked upon at the time.
If there was sex involved, it was illegal.
It seems strange now that it wasn't reported to police, but John Paton says he did try to raise it with Charles.
"But he didn't want to discuss it, and he would just mumble or snort and carry on."
When Batham moved out he was already talking about the global adventure that would make him semi-famous.
He was going to break a world record.
The 'world record'
It is 1985 and Batham is celebrating.
Ten years since he left Cape Town, he is claiming to have broken a world record by crossing 90 countries in 10 years on his motorbike.
He cruises into Sydney on a battered Honda Goldwing, with a petite French girlfriend in tow.
The pair have attracted press coverage throughout their global road trip, and their arrival is such a big deal that the lord mayor of Sydney turns out to welcome them.
A news photographer captures Batham parked on the steps of the Opera House, beaming and sipping champagne.
Batham would tell this story of making the Guinness Book of Records for years to come.
But it turns out it was a lie.
The Guinness Book of Records has told the ABC it has no record of Charles Batham, or his record-breaking claim.
He would spend the next decade living in Sydney, partying and regaling people with tales of his globetrotting adventures.
The business he ran during this period raises questions. He hired a dozen teenage girls to sell roses in restaurants. They wore short white dresses with a red cape.
It would be years before allegations from this period emerged. By then, he had moved on to Broome, where his double-life would eventually unravel.
The chase
WA Police have revealed for the first time how tantalisingly close they came to catching him within weeks of arriving in England.
It is April 2011, just a couple of months after Batham's escape.
The detectives are working late into the night in their cramped Broome office to track him.
They've got a tip-off that a tall, chatty pilot named Charles had turned up in Sussex, and the English police have promised to pay him a visit.
The officers approach Batham's Fiat Campervan, and speak with the 67-year-old fugitive.
He was headed for an airfield in Kent, he told them, to look for work as a pilot.
Frustratingly, the English police officers could not arrest him because of international policing protocols.
The intricate international arrest and extradition orders were not yet in place to allow overseas police to detain him.
And so Charles Batham drove away to the port of Dover. He crossed the English Channel, and slipped away to continental Europe for another nine years.
Back in Broome, the detectives were gutted.
"It was very disappointing," Detective Sergeant Bruce Bowers says.
"Keep in mind we were in contact with the victims, and wanting more than anything to get a resolution for them.
The victims
It is May 2011, just a few weeks after Batham's close encounter with the British police.
The stakes are about to be raised.
A woman and her son have moved into the property where Batham had parked his double-decker bus in Broome.
One morning, the seven-year-old boy finds a small, pink, plastic USB stick lying in a sandpit. His curious mother plugs it into her computer, and is horrified by what she finds.
The USB contains contains dozens of photos of Batham sexually assaulting an eight-year-old girl.
They are distressing images; some fall within the most severe category of child-abuse material.
More serious offences are added to Charles Batham's arrest warrant, for the assault on Sherrie and the girl in the photographs.
But he is still tens of thousands of kilometres away, and still evading capture.
As the years tick by, Sherrie grows frustrated.
By this stage she is living in Queensland and has two children of her own.
The horror of what Batham has done to her has not diminished.
The trauma is tangible, and the thought of her abuser tripping around Europe unbearable.
"I was getting desperate by this point … I was pissed off," she says.
So in 2019 — eight years after Charles Batham fled Australia — she started an online campaign to find him.
"I took it upon myself to make a Facebook page to try and raise awareness," she says.
"I thought, 'I don't know where he is, I don't know anything … is he dead?'"
WA Police informed her that Charles Batham was still alive and in possession of a new passport under the name Charles Shannon.
Sherrie posted a screenshot online, in a post that triggered tip-offs from around the world, and a collaboration with the ABC to try catch him.
Sherrie had found Charles Batham – but the case was far from closed.
The full story of how Charles Batham was captured will be told in Part 2 of the Background Briefing investigation to be released on March 4.
Part 1 of the Background Briefing investigation How to Catch a Fugitive is available now.
