Nicholas Rossi was convicted by a Salt Lake County jury following a three-day trial. The guilty verdict came just hours after he declined to testify in his own defence.
An American fugitive who faked his death and fled to Britain to avoid prosecution for rape faces a potential life sentence after being found guilty in Utah.
Nicholas Rossi, 38, was convicted by a Salt Lake County jury following a three-day trial. The proceedings saw his accuser and her parents give evidence in a case dating back more than 15 years. The guilty verdict came just hours after Rossi declined to testify in his own defence.
He will be sentenced on 20 October and is due to stand trial in September for a separate rape allegation in Utah County. Under state law, first-degree felony rape carries a penalty of five years to life in prison. Salt Lake County District Attorney Sim Gill praised the victim’s courage in coming forward after so many years.
“We are grateful to the survivor in this case for her willingness to come forward, years after this attack took place,” Gill said. “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. It took courage and bravery to take the stand and confront her attacker to hold him accountable.”
Rossi, whose legal name is Nicholas Alahverdian, was identified in 2018 through DNA evidence preserved in a rape kit from the 2008 assault. His case emerged during a statewide effort to clear Utah’s backlog of untested kits, leading to charges in Utah County later that year.
Months after the charges were filed, an online obituary claimed Rossi had died on 29 February 2020 from late-stage non-Hodgkin lymphoma. But police in Rhode Island, along with his former lawyer and foster family, doubted the story.
He shortly fled to England before marrying a woman and moving to Scotland. In December 2021, he was arrested in a Glasgow hospital while being treated for COVID-19 after staff recognised his tattoos from an Interpol notice. Extradited to Utah in January 2024, Rossi continued to insist he was an Irish orphan named Arthur Knight and claimed he was the victim of a frame-up.
Investigators say he used at least a dozen false identities during his years on the run. In court this week, he appeared in a wheelchair, dressed in a suit and tie, and using an oxygen tank. Prosecutors portrayed him as a manipulative predator who targeted a vulnerable young woman recovering from a traumatic brain injury.
The victim testified that she met Rossi after responding to a Craigslist personal advert. They began dating and became engaged within two weeks. She told the court he quickly began asking for financial help, from paying for meals and repairing his car to lending him $1,000 to avoid eviction and taking on debt to buy their engagement rings.
The relationship turned hostile soon after the engagement. The woman told jurors Rossi raped her one night in his bedroom after she drove him home. Initially, she did not report the assault due to what she described as dismissive comments from her parents.
She came forward a decade later after seeing media reports linking him to another alleged rape from the same year.
Defence lawyers argued the woman harboured resentment over paying his expenses and fabricated the rape allegation years later to damage him when he gained public attention. Attorneys for Rossi did not respond to requests for comment following the verdict.
The second alleged victim in the Utah County case, due to testify in September, told the court this week that Rossi attacked her in his Orem apartment in September 2008. She had gone there to recover money she claimed he had stolen to buy a computer. When police first questioned Rossi over that incident, he accused her of raping him and threatening to have him killed.
Before allegedly faking his death, Rossi, who grew up in Rhode Island foster homes, was wanted in the state for failing to register as a sex offender.
The FBI says he also faces fraud charges in Ohio, where he was previously convicted on sex-related offences in 2008. Fugitive who faked death convicted of 2008 rape after dramatic transatlantic pursuit