Fugitive rape suspect accused of faking his own death finally faces trial

An alleged American imposter who faked his death in 2020 and fled to Britain to avoid rape charges, only to insist he was someone else when arrested, will finally face trial in Utah, a judge ruled Thursday.

The story of 37-year-old Nicholas Rossi, whose real name is Nicholas Alahverdian, unfolded over a decade across two continents, amid a series of increasingly outlandish claims, a fake obituary and a laughably bad attempt at an English accent.

Rossi appeared in a Salt Lake City courthouse on Thursday, where Judge Barry Lawrence ruled that prosecutors had presented enough evidence to warrant a jury trial.

A convicted sex offender, he is accused of raping a woman in the city of Orem in 2008 and another woman in Salt Lake County later that year. In the first case, Rossi remained undetected as a suspect for about a decade because of a backlog of DNA testing at the state crime lab.

In reality, he grew up in foster homes in Rhode Island – Rossi is the surname of his stepfather, who worked as an Englebert-Humperdinck impersonator on cruise ships in Florida.

But the former refugee has constructed an increasingly dubious maze of surreal claims to avoid trial. Most notably, he is accused of faking his own death in February 2020 and then fleeing the United States. His foster family disputed claims that he suffered from advanced non-Hodgkin lymphoma and dismissed an obituary that claimed the disease took his life. The complaint came after the FBI launched a fraud investigation into Rossi and Rhode Island police issued an arrest warrant for his failure to register as a sex offender for a previous crime.

Rossi was arrested in December 2021 at a hospital in Glasgow, Scotland, where he was recognized as a refugee while undergoing treatment for COVID-19.

Since his arrest, Rossi has claimed that he is actually a former Irish orphan named Arthur Knight who worked his way up from selling books on the street to becoming an academic. In making his unconfirmed claims, he has adopted what can generously be described as a patchy English accent that comes and goes like the wind over the Scottish mountains.

Authorities identified him in the hospital by his tattoos and fingerprints, but he made outrageous claims that the tattoos had been applied to him during his treatment in an induced coma and that the fingerprints were false.

“I conclude that he is as dishonest and deceitful as he is evasive and manipulative,” said Judge Norman McFadyen of Edinburgh Sheriff Court, who ruled that Rossi was indeed the fugitive he claimed not to be last year. “These unfortunate aspects of his character have undoubtedly made what was ultimately a clear-cut case more complicated and lengthy.”

After a two-year battle for his extradition, Rossi was remanded in US custody in January following the Edinburgh court's ruling. At a virtual hearing that same month, court officials struggled to understand him because he insisted on wearing an oxygen mask. He shouted objections to the presiding judge, calling her “M'Lady,” but she ignored him.

On Thursday, Rossi was heard much more clearly, even as he continued to insist he was Arthur Knight, interrupting the judge and insisting the court had the wrong man.

Rossi is scheduled for an arraignment and bail hearing on Oct. 17. Local ABC affiliate KTVX-TV reported that court documents show Rossi is also accused of sexual assault, molestation and a possible kidnapping between 2007 and 2019 in Rhode Island, Ohio and Massachusetts.