‘This doesn’t happen to us’: Family’s horror after Sydney day care abuser unmasked

How notorious Sydney daycare paedophile David James was caught by police

This doesn’t happen to us’: Family’s horror after Sydney day care
abuser unmasked

Perry Duffin and Clare Sibthorpe
July 4, 2026 — 1:50pm
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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.
David James was on Thursday to 12 years’ prison with a non-parole
period of seven years.Michael Howard
“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.”
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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.
Police obtained CCTV showing abusive childcare worker David James, far
right, in Chatswood.NSW Police
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.
CCTV of James at the Orchard Tavern.NSW Police
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.
An earlier court sketch of David James.Rocco Fazzari
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.
David James’ entry in the Knox Grammar yearbook from 2017.
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.
“The fact that they even caught the guy is testament to some of the
systems we have in place working.”
*Tom is a pseudonym
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