NICHOLAS Rossi, the man who fled from the United States to Scotland after he appeared to fake his own death to avoid rape charges, has died.
Rossi, 38, of Rhode Island in the US, was found guilty of raping two women in Utah in 2008 after two separate trials in 2024. He had been serving two sentences of between five years and life consecutively.
Richard Piatt, director of communications for the Utah Department of Corrections said he had been suffering from "chronic, degenerative conditions", adding that Rossi died in a local hospital on Thursday after "he chose to remove himself from the care that was being provided".
Rossi died at 8.32pm, and his family and victims were notified shortly after.
Piatt said: "Rossi was pronounced dead at a local hospital on Thursday, June 25, 2026, at 20:32.
"Rossi died from complications of an existing medical condition after choosing to discontinue medical treatment.
"This notification follows communication with Rossi's family and his victims."
Rossi – whose legal name was Nicholas Alahverdian – had appeared to stage his own death, when in February 2020, an online obituary said he had died from non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
He had been living in Bristol for some time before then, but the exact date when he left the US for the UK is unclear.
In July 2020, a DNA discovery linked him to one of the rapes in Utah in 2008.
He fled to Scotland, where he lived under the radar until December 2021, when he was arrested at the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow after staff recognised his tattoos.
He said the wrong man had been caught, claimed his name was Arthur Knight and that he was of Irish origin and an orphan.
In November 2022, it was concluded he was in fact Nicholas Rossi, and he was extradited to the US in 2024.
Investigators say he had used at least a dozen aliases in order to evade capture, including Arthur Brown, by which he went before marrying Miranda Knight, whom he is thought to have met while in Bristol. The couple later moved to Glasgow.
He was flown back to America in January 2024 and admitted his real identity several months later during a bail hearing in Salt Lake City.
The following year he was convicted in separate trials and handed a cumulative sentence of at least ten years in prison.
