a fake memorial page<\/a>, which claimed one of his known aliases died from non-Hodgkin lymphoma.<\/p>\nMr. Rossi died on Thursday in a hospital from what the Utah Department of Corrections would only describe as \u201can existing medical condition\u201d after he stopped seeking medical treatment.<\/p>\n
A recent photo of Mr. Rossi inside prison showed him relying on oxygen.<\/p>\n
Law enforcement officials said Mr. Rossi fled to Britain or Ireland in 2017 before settling in Scotland. Mr. Rossi, 38, was extradited in 2024 to Utah.<\/p>\n
In 2025, he was convicted in two cases related to raping former girlfriends. He was sentenced to 10 years to life.<\/p>\n
Sim Gill, the Salt Lake County prosecutor who oversaw Mr. Rossi\u2019s second rape case, said he believed it when he heard of Mr. Rossi\u2019s death.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe died knowing he was caught,\u201d Mr. Gill said. \u201cEven though he didn\u2019t spend a long time in prison, there\u2019s some justice to that.\u201d<\/p>\n
In October, a judge who sentenced Mr. Rossi called him a \u201cserial abuser of women\u201d and \u201cthe very definition of a flight risk.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr. Gill said Mr. Rossi had a pattern of meeting women online and \u201csweeping them off their feet\u201d before turning increasingly controlling.<\/p>\n
Mr. Rossi had purchased a wedding ring for a girlfriend before she \u201csaw red flags and called it off,\u201d Mr. Gill said. Mr. Rossi was found guilty of raping her and another girlfriend in 2008.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe was a master manipulator,\u201d Mr. Gill said. \u201cShe saw through him.\u201d<\/p>\n
In 2008, Mr. Rossi, of Rhode Island, was required to register as a sex offender after being found guilty on charges related to groping a college student in Ohio, prosecutors said.<\/p>\n
He faked his death in 2020 by using an alias, Nicholas Alahverdian, on a memorial page, which said his ashes had been \u201cscattered at sea.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHis last words were \u2018fear not and run toward the bliss of the sun,\u2019\u201d the page reads. \u201cMr. Alahverdian was a painter, author, amateur ornithologist, political scientist, sociologist, accomplished orator, and child welfare reform advocate.\u201d<\/p>\n
By then Mr. Rossi had been identified as a rape suspect after DNA evidence was found in a backlog of rape kits from a national database for registered sex offenders.<\/p>\n
He was caught in 2021 in a Glasgow hospital after an \u201cattentive nurse\u201d treating him for Covid recognized a \u201cdistinctive tattoo\u201d from an Interpol wanted persons notice, Mr. Gill said.<\/p>\n
The Associated Press reported that the tattoo was the crest of Brown University, which Mr. Rossi never attended.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was happenstance,\u201d Mr. Gill said of the nurse. \u201cSomebody was paying attention.\u201d<\/p>\n
In an Edinburgh courtroom after his arrest, Mr. Rossi claimed he was being framed. He said he was Arthur Knight, an Irish orphan who had never been to the United States.<\/p>\n
Mr. Gill added that Mr. Rossi never appeared to show remorse for his crimes.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe lied to the world, and he also lied to himself,\u201d Mr. Gill said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A convicted rapist who had lived in Scotland under aliases for years and faked his own death died…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":280211,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[34199,17075,11291,3140,9,11,10,107579,81298,107578,9360,1844],"class_list":["post-280210","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-death-and-dying","tag-decisions-and-verdicts","tag-frauds-and-swindling","tag-fugitives","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news","tag-nicholas-1987","tag-prisons-and-prisoners","tag-rossi","tag-scotland","tag-utah"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280210","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=280210"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280210\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/280211"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=280210"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=280210"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=280210"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}