America's Most Wanted Paedophile, on the Run for 17 Years, Is Caught Living in London

From the archive: first published September 26, 2011. This report is based on contemporaneous coverage of the case.

A convicted child molester described as one of America's most wanted sex criminals was found to have been secretly living in London, ending nearly two decades on the run.

Shawn Sullivan, 42, had been wanted in the United States since 1994. Prosecutors in Dakota County, Minnesota, charged him with molesting two 11-year-old girls and with having sex with an unconscious 14-year-old girl in the early 1990s.

Sullivan's flight took him first to Ireland, where he received a suspended jail sentence for sexually attacking two 12-year-old girls. He married an Irish woman in 1996. In 2007 Interpol added him to its most wanted list. The following year, he moved to England on an Irish passport, traveling under the Gaelic spelling of his surname, O'Suilleabhain, and settling near Barnes in south-west London.

He was arrested by London's Metropolitan Police in 2010. That December he was granted bail on condition that he wear an electronic tag and observe a strict curfew. The trail that led to him involved U.S. Marshals Service investigators working with authorities in Ireland, Spain, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.

In February 2011 the British Home Secretary signed an extradition order returning him to the United States, which Sullivan contested. Minnesota prosecutors sought him to stand trial; if convicted, reports said he could have faced decades in prison.

The case took a final turn in June 2012, when Britain's High Court dropped the extradition proceedings. Judges ruled that Sullivan faced a real risk of being placed in Minnesota's civil commitment program for sexually dangerous persons after any sentence — a prospect they held would amount to a flagrant denial of his rights — because U.S. authorities had not guaranteed he would be kept out of it.

Editor's note: this article was rewritten during our editorial review. The original 2011 version reproduced a press article verbatim and broke off mid-sentence; the text above is an original summary of the reported facts, with the later outcome of the extradition case added.