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Walking to his young son’s bedroom to check his clothes against footage of a day care worker’s abuse, Tom* had one thought: “This doesn’t happen to us.”
The clothing matched, and an unthinkable realisation followed.
“It’s almost overwhelmingly upsetting to the point when you almost block it out of your mind,” Tom said.
“There was a strong desire to believe that whatever happened, it was not a big deal.”
Tom shared his story with the Herald as police revealed how they caught his child’s abuser, Sydney day care worker David William James. The 27-year-old was sentenced on Thursday to 12 years’ prison with a non-parole period of seven years for sexual offences relating to nine children.
How a day care worker lured children with threats
Tom learnt the heartbreaking truth as detectives began uncovering James’ depravity.
During a day care shift, the day care worker had ordered Tom’s son to clean up in the staff bathroom, having earlier told him to play in mud.
“If you don’t come in here, your mum’s going to be really mad at you.”
The seven-year-old told him he knew the area was out of bounds for kids, but obeyed once he was threatened.
Inside the sink area, the boy was abused and filmed.
Tom had seen James in passing, describing him as shy and avoidant of eye contact. He could not have imagined what he was capable of.
After the AFP contacted him and his ex-wife, and they identified that their son was a victim, disbelief was eventually replaced with devastation and cynicism.
“It has made me not so naive about the world,” Tom said. “It’s affected my job a lot. I go to therapy. I have looked into the reality around us, and I have a lot less trust in people.”
Initially, his son would get angry whenever he was asked about what happened. After time, he opened up to his mother. He said he wanted “Mr James to die”.
The parents struggled with balancing their desires to help police get the predator off the streets and shield their son from the horrors that had been committed against him.
The hunt for “Remy”
James first came to the attention of police under his dark web pseudonym “Remy”.
Remy always posted on his favourite dark web forum between 9:30pm and 2am Sydney time, where users shared photos and perverse fantasies about real-life children.
It was likely the paedophile was Australian, given the hours he kept, but there were few clues about his identity. Despite being an active member, Remy didn’t slip up.
That was until September 2024, when he posted six photos of little boys. One, wearing blue shirt and shorts, sat on his father’s shoulders in a crowd.
Officers from Queensland Police’s Operation Whiskey Beau were watching, and scraped Remy’s metadata from the single image.
They passed it to the Australian Federal Police, who put Remy at a time and a place: the Matsuri Japanese Festival, 5:13pm, 13 September 2024, Chatswood Mall.
Footage from the festival shows a blur of colour and activity. Officials speak under red and white lanterns, families browse kimonos and buy bowls of ramen from street vendors, and children fold origami paper for a game.
On grainy CCTV from cameras outside the Commonwealth Bank, a boy in a blue and orange shirt, on a man’s shoulders, appears in frame.
Behind them, a loner in a black jacket looks over his shoulder, takes a phone from his pocket and snaps an image before vanishing off-screen in the direction of the train station.
A moment later, the man is caught on a second camera headed into the Orchard Hotel to buy a beer. He paid with a card.
The next day, detectives went to a stately, brick federation cottage in Artarmon, into the childhood bedroom of James.
Adopted into a wealthy family, educated at prestigious private school Knox, and having once trained as a police officer before leaving the force soon after graduating, James seemed strangely calm, slightly smug, and not overly bothered by the intruders with badges and guns.
He stonewalled, refusing to give investigators the passwords to his devices.
Refusing a digital access order, as that offence is known, carries a maximum of two years’ imprisonment. But that’s an easy calculation for those staring down decades if the content of their phone is uncovered.
James’ only hope was the detectives in AFP Operation Arctile would never see the images and videos he’d taken of nine children, exposed in day care centre bathrooms, while he performed heinous acts standing behind them.
It was an “egregious betrayal”, James later acknowledged in court, to use children under his care to make abuse material for the enjoyment of his paedophile companions.
A race against time and refusal to hand over passwords
Even as James was led from his home in handcuffs, investigators concluded he was confident of avoiding serious jail time.
“He had sat on the dark web, behind a veil of anonymity, getting away with it for a period of time,” one investigator said.
A court released James on bail after five days. He was still only facing a single charge of refusing to hand over his passwords.
It was a race against time to either crack James’ phone or find definitive evidence that he was Remy.
“We didn’t want him coming out again,” one investigator said.
“There are children at immediate risk, that’s it.”
James’ encryptions didn’t survive the month. On October 10, his phone unlocked inside the AFP’s digital forensic laboratory and disgorged 22 images and videos containing child abuse material of victims aged between five and eight.
Police rearrested James, this time with a heavier set of charges including four counts of using a child under 14 years to make child abuse material, three counts of doing and filming a sexual act with a child to create abuse material, and four counts of producing or possessing child abuse material.
“We didn’t even need your passwords,” they told him.
But it was the start of the most difficult chapter in operation Arctile. James had recorded the children during his day care shifts. As with Tom’s son, some content was recorded in “out of bounds” areas to children.
No faces of any victims were in any of James’ perverse images. That meant the AFP’s victim-identification team spent months analysing the patterns of tiles, the shapes of urinals and layouts of toilets, patterns on children’s underwear and catalogues of shoes, trying to narrow down the scenes of the recordings.
James had worked at 58 centres, casually, and the number of children he could access was in the hundreds.
The victim ID team tracks down at-risk children to get them away from abusers, but in a case like Arctile, their work also allows investigators to reach out directly to victims rather than alerting every parent who had a child at James’ centres.
It’s an approach that quarantines the traumatic information to the directly impacted families and allows detectives to arrive with psychologists already in tow, and prevents contamination of the case by the horrified wider school community.
The Herald was in court, by chance, for James’ first appearance on the child abuse charges and chose not to oppose a non-publication order over his identity until his victims could be identified.
It took a year for the victim ID team to find all nine from the small details in the images.
Their identities were confirmed by horrified parents like Tom. Some told a court James had destroyed their sense of safety and trust in others.
On Thursday, James sat emotionless as he learnt he would remain behind bars until at least 2031, with time already served.
Judge Guy Newton condemned his abuse of trust and authority to feed sexual gratification.
“In the community [he] was a pro-social young man who had actively pursued a career in policing, was well-engaged with others and was self-confident,” he said.
“However, in private [he] harboured deviant sexual interests … James has led a dual life.”
While Tom – alongside all victims’ families – will serve their own life sentence for the unforgivable betrayal, he was satisfied with James’ punishment.
Tom said his biggest disappointment was with interaction of the childcare and state government protection systems. James was fired from working at centres owned by Primary OSHCare’s parent company, Junior Adventures Group, after a number of complaints. However, he was offered continued casual work with recruitment company Randstad because his Working With Children Check was not affected.
He hoped improvements would come from a recent overhaul of the system, including a new National Early Childhood Worker Register which centralises clearances, qualifications, training and enforcement actions of all childcare and outside of school hours (OOSH) care centre staff. However, he felt men like James would continue to find loopholes within an overstretched system.
“I had a lot of trust in the system, but it was all disjointed,” Tom said.
However, he felt that the fact police “even caught the guy is testament to some of the systems we have in place working”.
*Tom is a pseudonym
Anyone needing support can contact 1800 RESPECT (1800 737 732), National Sexual Abuse and Redress Support Service 1800 211 028, Lifeline 13 11 14, and Kids Helpline 1800 55 1800.
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