NORTH FORT MYERS, Fla. - A man commits a sex crime on a minor in New York and moves to North Fort Myers. But nobody here knows he's a sex offender, not even the mother of a six year old child who rents him a trailer. A loop hole in the law puts a Lee County family at risk.

Kevin Chatterson is indicted in Lee County for failing to register as a sex offender. Authorities say he sodomized a minor in New York in 1999.

WINK News set out to find more information on this sex offender who until his arrest a few days ago was living in our community. We went straight to Florida's sex offender registry--no matches for Chatterson. New York's sex offender database--zero matches. We knew this guy was convicted and we had to find out why wasn't he listed.

Another search on the Internet turns up two addresses in North Fort Myers.

Penny Drive is where we meet Lisa Lowe. She is a widow and mother of a 6-year-old boy who says Chatterson went by "Frank". She says for two years he rented a trailer in her backyard.

"He had been honest and said he had problems out of New York but he just said oh I just violated probation. I said was it a misdemeanor? I looked him up in New York," she says.

We asked Lowe, why she checked New York's sex offender database.

"Just because that's what you do. I have a child here and I want to know who is in my house," she says.

Lowe says it breaks her heart to have to ask her child if anything bad happened.

"He said no, Frank was my friend and I said that's what a lot of kids will say. I said if you change your mind we need to know its very important," she says.

Chatterson eventually moved a block away. A roommate there told us the U.S. Marshall's had arrested the 41-year-old.

The U.S. Marshall's told us they served a warrant from New York state and arrested Chatterson. They say law enforcement lost track of him in 2002 and he was found after an initiative passed in New York to track down "missing" sex offenders.

We then called New York's Division of Criminal Justice Services to find out why he wasn't listed on the database.

"There is no one listed under that name on out site. I can't talk about someone that isn't public," says Public Information Director John Caher.

Caher told me in the early days the the sex offender registry, offenders in New York would be assigned risk levels by an administrator and that information would be posted online.

A few years later a federal judge ruled offenders should first get a formal hearing to determine their risk level.

Chatterson, a high risk, offender, skipped town before his hearing so he was never put on New York's sex offender website.

We asked Caher if he considered this a loophole in the system. "No, it's more of a glitch. The purpose behind any sex offender registry is to provide information. And in certain cases we are precluded from doing that," he says.

Caher says eventually all of the early offenders will get a hearing and the people who skipped town will get caught. It turns out in this case it just took six years.