Nicholas Rossi, an American rapist who fled to Scotland after appearing to fake his own death to evade justice, has died in a US hospital after discontinuing treatment. He was serving a Utah sentence for crimes against two women, and his victims have been noti
Nicholas Rossi had been living inside the kind of uncertainty that fugitives try to manufacture. In 2021, he was arrested on a Covid ward in Glasgow, insisting he was someone else — a man who, he claimed, had never been to the United States.
By Thursday evening in the US, the uncertainty ended. The Utah department of corrections said Rossi died in hospital in the US at 8.32pm on Thursday. with the cause given as complications from an existing medical condition. The department said he had chosen to discontinue medical treatment. Once notified, the department said Rossi’s victims and his family were informed.
Rossi, 38, had been serving a jail sentence in Utah after being found guilty of raping two women in separate trials in 2024. Before that conviction, a judge had described him as a “serial abuser of women,” and he was serving 10 years to life for crimes that included sexual assault.
His case first turned on distance — and then on fraud. Rossi had lived in Bristol before moving to Scotland. where hospital staff recognised him as someone US authorities wanted to extradite. The recognition came from distinctive tattoos on his arms, including one depicting a red cross above an angel wing. He was arrested on the Covid ward at the Queen Elizabeth university hospital in Glasgow in 2021.
Rossi did not cooperate. He initially told authorities 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. During a run of preliminary hearings, he sacked at least six lawyers and alleged he had been tortured in prison.
The legal standstill shifted in November 2022, when a judge at Edinburgh sheriff court ruled that he was Nicholas Rossi. He was then extradited to the US to face justice in 2024.
Behind the courtroom fights was a quieter trail that led back to Utah. Utah authorities began searching for Rossi when he was identified in 2018 through a decade-old DNA rape kit tied to the other case. Rossi’s legal name is Nicholas Alahverdian.
That identification mattered to a wider effort in the state. Utah made a push to clear its backlog of rape kits — boxes of DNA evidence — and Rossi was among thousands of rape suspects identified and later charged.
But even after the legal machinery moved, the story fractured. Months after he was charged, an online obituary claimed Rossi died on 29 February 2020 of non-Hodgkin lymphoma. In his home state of Rhode Island. police. along with his former lawyer and a former foster family. cast doubt on whether he was deceased — doubt that followed him across the ocean and into Scotland.
In Utah, the cases against him were presented through the lives he had disrupted. In his first trial. the court heard that one 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. The two began dating and were engaged within a couple of weeks. The victim testified that he grew hostile soon after their engagement and raped her in his bedroom one night after she drove him home. She went to police years later after hearing Rossi was accused of raping another woman in Utah around the same time.
In the second case, the victim went to police soon after Rossi attacked her at his apartment in Orem. She told authorities she had gone there to collect money she said he stole from her to buy a computer.
After news of Rossi’s death. the Utah prosecutor Sim Gill released a statement attributed to him calling Rossi “a sexual predator who tried to escape accountability. ” adding that “The survivors of his heinous acts have the consolation that he died in prison with the knowledge of the crimes he committed.”.
For his victims and their families. the sequence of years — the claimed identity. the extradition. the trials. and the sentences — now ends with a hospital bed and a final hour recorded at 8.32pm on Thursday. For a case built around evasion, the last twist was not a new court filing. It was the decision to stop treatment, followed by death.
Nicholas Rossi Utah department of corrections Scotland extradition Queen Elizabeth university hospital Interpol notice Nicholas Alahverdian rape conviction 2024 serial abuser of women Orem rape case Craigslist ad