A convicted rapist who had lived in Scotland under aliases for years and faked his own death died in Utah on Thursday, the authorities said.
A life on the run caught up to Nicholas Rossi in 2021, when he was arrested in Glasgow after being recognized by a nurse treating him for Covid.
Investigators said Mr. Rossi had tried to elude arrest by putting up a fake memorial page, which claimed one of his known aliases died from non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
Mr. Rossi died on Thursday in a hospital from what the Utah Department of Corrections would only describe as “an existing medical condition” after he stopped seeking medical treatment.
A recent photo of Mr. Rossi inside prison showed him relying on oxygen.
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.
In 2025, he was convicted in two cases related to raping former girlfriends. He was sentenced to 10 years to life.
Sim Gill, the Salt Lake County prosecutor who oversaw Mr. Rossi’s second rape case, said he believed it when he heard of Mr. Rossi’s death.
“He died knowing he was caught,” Mr. Gill said. “Even though he didn’t spend a long time in prison, there’s some justice to that.”
In October, a judge who sentenced Mr. Rossi called him a “serial abuser of women” and “the very definition of a flight risk.”
Mr. Gill said Mr. Rossi had a pattern of meeting women online and “sweeping them off their feet” before turning increasingly controlling.
Mr. Rossi had purchased a wedding ring for a girlfriend before she “saw red flags and called it off,” Mr. Gill said. Mr. Rossi was found guilty of raping her and another girlfriend in 2008.
“He was a master manipulator,” Mr. Gill said. “She saw through him.”
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.
He faked his death in 2020 by using an alias, Nicholas Alahverdian, on a memorial page, which said his ashes had been “scattered at sea.”
“His last words were ‘fear not and run toward the bliss of the sun,’” the page reads. “Mr. Alahverdian was a painter, author, amateur ornithologist, political scientist, sociologist, accomplished orator, and child welfare reform advocate.”
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.
He was caught in 2021 in a Glasgow hospital after an “attentive nurse” treating him for Covid recognized a “distinctive tattoo” from an Interpol wanted persons notice, Mr. Gill said.
The Associated Press reported that the tattoo was the crest of Brown University, which Mr. Rossi never attended.
“It was happenstance,” Mr. Gill said of the nurse. “Somebody was paying attention.”
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.
Mr. Gill added that Mr. Rossi never appeared to show remorse for his crimes.
“He lied to the world, and he also lied to himself,” Mr. Gill said.
