A Rhode Island man who faked his own death, fled the United States and lived as a fugitive in Scotland before being arrested and extradited has been convicted of rape, the first of two sexual assault cases he is facing.
A jury in Salt Lake City on Wednesday found Nicholas Rossi, 38, guilty of the 2008 sexual assault of a former girlfriend who was trying to break up with him. He is also awaiting trial on rape charges in connection with another 2008 incident in Utah County, Utah.
In a statement, Salt Lake County District Attorney Sim Gill praised the survivor of the 2008 incident “for her willingness to come forward, years after this attack took place. We appreciate her patience as we worked to bring the defendant back to Salt Lake County so that this trial could take place and she could get justice.”
The prosecutor in Salt Lake County charged Mr. Rossi with rape in 2022. At the time, Mr. Rossi was living under an assumed name in Scotland, after having faked his death in the United States under a different alias.
The authorities in Utah had searched for Mr. Rossi ever since investigators first began sifting through backlogs of rape kits in 2018 in Utah County and named him as a suspect in a sexual assault a decade earlier. His DNA was found to match evidence retrieved from the victim in that assault, the Utah County Attorney’s Office said at the time.
Mr. Rossi had already been convicted in 2008 of sexual imposition and public indecency, which required him to register as a sex offender.
But Mr. Rossi, who has gone by multiple aliases, had fled in 2017 to Britain or Ireland, law enforcement officials said, and later settled in Scotland under an assumed name. In 2020, using the name Nicholas Alahverdian, he orchestrated an elaborate ruse to fake his death, creating an obituary that said he had died of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma at age 32. An online memorial page contained glowing tributes to Mr. Alahverdian, including purported messages from a congressman and the mayor of Providence, R.I.
Mr. Rossi was very much alive.
In 2021, he was identified at a hospital in Glasgow, where he was being treated for Covid-19 and had at one point been on a ventilator. Investigators were able to identify him through photographs after his DNA and fingerprints had been provided to Interpol, and he was arrested in December 2021.
Appearing in court in Edinburgh after his arrest, Mr. Rossi identified himself as Arthur Knight and said he was an Irish orphan, had never been to the United States and was being framed. A Scottish court in 2023 ruled that Mr. Rossi could be extradited to the United States, calling him “deceitful,” “evasive” and “manipulative.”
Investigators said they had connected Mr. Rossi to a web of potential victims in Utah and beyond. He followed a pattern, officials said: meeting women online, luring them to a public place, then taking them somewhere private and touching them without their consent.
When victims resisted, Mr. Rossi would threaten to kill himself or force a “non-consensual sexual encounter,” according to court documents.
Appearing in court in Salt Lake City this week in a suit and tie, Mr. Rossi was brought into the courtroom in a wheelchair and used an oxygen tank. He declined to testify, and was impassive as the jury’s verdict was read in court.