Nicholas Rossi, American rapist who faked death, dies in US hospital

Nicholas Rossi, the American rapist who absconded to Scotland after appearing to fake his own death in an attempt to evade justice, has died in hospital in the US.

The 38-year-old had been serving a jail sentence in Utah after being found guilty of raping two women in 2008 following two separate trials in 2024.

The Utah department of corrections said he died from complications from an existing medical condition at 8.32pm on Thursday, having chosen to discontinue medical treatment.

A corrections department spokesperson, Richard Piatt, said Rossi’s victims and his family were notified of his death.

Once referred to by a judge as a “serial abuser of women”, Rossi was serving 10 years to life for crimes that included sexual assault. The American had lived in Bristol before moving to Scotland and was arrested on a Covid ward at the Queen Elizabeth university hospital in Glasgow in 2021.

Hospital staff had recognised that he was a person the US authorities wanted to extradite from an Interpol notice due to distinctive tattoos on his arms including one which depicted a red cross above an angel wing.

Rossi initially said the arrest was a case of mistaken identity and claimed to be an Irish-born orphan named Arthur Knight who had never been to the US.

A stream of preliminary hearings took place, during which period he sacked at least six lawyers and claimed to have been tortured in prison. In November 2022 a judge at Edinburgh sheriff court ruled he was Nicholas Rossi and he was extradited to the US to face justice in 2024.

Utah authorities began searching for Rossi, whose legal name is Nicholas Alahverdian, when he was identified in 2018 through a decade-old DNA rape kit tied to the other case.

He was among thousands of rape suspects identified and later charged when Utah made a push to clear its backlog of rape kits, which are boxes of DNA evidence.

Months after being charged, an online obituary claimed Rossi died on 29 February 2020 of non-Hodgkin lymphoma. But police in his home state of Rhode Island, along with his former lawyer and a former foster family, had cast doubt on whether he was deceased.

In his first Utah trial, the court heard the victim had been living with her parents and recovering from a traumatic brain injury in 2008 when she responded to a personal ad Rossi posted on the adverts website Craigslist. They began dating and were engaged within a couple of weeks.

She testified that he grew hostile soon after their engagement and raped her in his bedroom one night after she drove him home. The woman went to police years later after hearing Rossi was accused of raping another woman in Utah around the same time.

The victim in the second case went to police soon after Rossi attacked her at his apartment in Orem. The woman had gone there to collect money she said he stole from her to buy a computer.

After news of his death, a statement attributed to the Utah prosecutor Sim Gill said: “Mr Rossi was a sexual predator who tried to escape accountability.

“The survivors of his heinous acts have the consolation that he died in prison with the knowledge of the crimes he committed.”

The Associated Press contributed reporting