“Do you recognise this guy?” I ask a Costa del Sol cafe owner as I show him an image of a bald, bearded bodybuilder from Scotland.

He raises his eyebrows and looks back with suspicion.

“I think he sometimes came for coffee,” he replies in broken English before the conversation is quickly shut down.

The bodybuilder is a familiar face in this part of the world – he lived here in the Spanish seaside town of Nerja for almost two years.

He is the fitness-fanatic, social butterfly expat Johnny Wilson. But the truth is, Johnny doesn’t exist.

The man behind the made-up name is the violent rapist James Clacher, who faked his own death in Scotland and set up a new life in Spain.

Nerja’s community feels bruised and conned by a serial sex offender who lived under their noses, undetected for so long.

The fake death

At the time of his disappearance in May 2022, Clacher was under investigation for two separate rapes of women he had met on dating app Tinder in 2019 and Bumble in 2020.

As police worked to put all the pieces of the puzzle together, a missing person poster was issued, describing Clacher as an athletic man who drives a Suzuki Swift.

It warned members of the public not to approach him.

Detectives had earlier discovered his car dumped next to Loch Long in Argyll and Bute. A suicide note was left in the vehicle, and messages had been sent suggesting he was no longer alive.

It had the look and feel of a suicide.

It was the perfect rural setting, with the rolling hills and very few people around, where a conman could slip away and hope to never be seen again.

The double life

Nerja is a small town with a population of around 22,000. It sits an hour’s drive from Malaga.

Off the beaten track, it’s tucked away at the foot of stunning mountain ranges and has the feel of a more authentic Spanish experience compared to its rivals like Marbella along the coast.

Accents on its beaches are from elsewhere in Spain and continental Europe, rather than a ‘Brits abroad’ vibe.

To learn how Clacher could slip into this community and create a bogus new identity while being a wanted man, I visit Nerja’s gym.

Workers tell me he trained there every day and describe a “nice man” who was perfectly pleasant, put people at ease and fitted right in.

I am pointed in the direction of a man called Matt, a British expat.

The pair became friends not long after “Johnny” arrived in Nerja. The relationship began with Johnny touting himself as a so-called nutritionist.

“He came highly recommended,” Matt says. “He was giving me nutritional help, and he said he was in the parachute regiment for ten years and came to Spain for a new start.

“He was a very, very nice guy, very charming, I became quite good friends with him. He invited me hiking with him, he invited me round to his house to eat.”

Asked if any of his new friend’s behaviour was suspicious, Matt says: “He gave no hint whatsoever. But looking back, whenever he sent a picture, he would never have his face visible.

“He was very careful about pictures. Whenever he took a picture, he obviously knew that he was being hunted, and he had to lay low, so he never showed his face.

“I only have one picture of him facing away from me looking up a mountain.”

Several people say Johnny had entered an 18-month relationship with a local woman who had no idea about his real identity or the sexual crimes he had committed on vulnerable women.

She is said to be traumatised by how events unfolded.

‘Johnny the gardener’

I get a tip off that Johnny was employed as a gardener at a local residential complex, and we’re told to speak to a man called Megel.

As he emerges from behind the shutters of a pool bar, Megel shakes his head and speaks to other guests in Spanish when I mention ‘Johnny the gardener’.

The atmosphere changes, and those present close ranks.

A member of staff confirms Johnny’s role on site before we are ushered off the premises.

Elsewhere, we discover he earned cash in hand running yoga classes on the beach in an attempt to stay off the books.

“This is the best place to be no one,” says local newspaper journalist Eugenio Cabezas, who has worked here for 20 years.

“If you have committed a crime, you can live here and nobody knows you. It is a good place to disappear.”

The tip-off

The Costa Del Sol has had a reputation over the years as somewhere big British crime bosses would come to hide.

James Clacher was no mafia gangster, but he played the system in Scotland and Spain.

That was until an anonymous person sent an email to Sky News with the title “James Clacher”.

The message, sent on 27 November 2023 at 11.16am, talked about reading news articles on the case.

It stated: “We believe we have seen this man in Nerja… he introduced himself as Jimmy, was Scottish and fit the description.”

The tip-off revealed conversations they had in the local gym and a timeline of three separate encounters or interactions over the space of almost a year.

The police investigation, which had come to a dead end, suddenly had its biggest lead yet.

The UK’s National Crime Agency, along with Spain’s Guardia Civil, went undercover and found their man.

They swooped while Clacher was hanging upside down on gym equipment on the very beach he had created a ‘safe space’ as a yoga instructor.

The moment was captured in dramatic body-cam footage by the Spanish police as the fugitive was tackled to the ground and led off in handcuffs.

Clacher was detained and eventually extradited back to Scotland.

‘He was a complete fantasist’

Matt, the man who thought he was friends with Johnny, speaks of his horror at learning his friendship was a lie.

“I was completely shocked. Completely stunned. I just couldn’t believe it”, he says.

“Being fooled like that by someone, it wasn’t just me. He fooled a lot of people here in Spain as well.

“I had a narrow escape. I am relieved I am away from that situation. He was a complete fantasist.”

The wider expat community in Nerja is shaken.

Pub landlady Cathy, who has lived here for 40 years, says the story was the talk of the town.

“People were stunned and surprised that this happened in our local community,” she says.

“Somebody who had obviously been living here with us which we had no idea about.

“We don’t have that very much here at all. It’s a very nice, safe, good area of Spain to be in.”

Clacher was detained in May 2024. He denied any wrongdoing when his trial began this August, but was found guilty by a jury.

During his trial, jurors heard how he was “very friendly and chatty” on his extradition flight back to Scotland.

He was said to have discussed how he staged his own death and told of how he “survived on berries and puddle water” while initially on the run.

Clacher claimed to have travelled from Loch Long to Inverness, then down the east coast of Scotland.

He was then said to have made his way to England before hiding in a truck to get into France.

Once in France, he then said he got his hands on a bike and cycled to Spain.

The Police Scotland officer Clacher spoke to on the flight home told the jury that Clacher revealed he had been fearful his face was becoming known locally in Nerja, so he considered building a kayak that he would paddle to Morocco.