The Man of Many Faces

Speaker 1 Grand Canyon University is one of the largest universities in the country.

Speaker 1 Praised for its community and impact, GCU integrates a welcoming Christian worldview and open discourse into over 300 online programs.

Speaker 1 Redefine your online education through GCU's industry-driven, academically rigorous programs. In 2024, online students received over $161 million in institutional scholarships.
Find your purpose.

Speaker 1 Private, Christian, affordable. Discover available scholarships at gcu.edu/slash slash myoffer.

Speaker 4 It's time for Black Friday, Dell Technologies' biggest sale of the year. Enjoy huge savings on select PCs like the Dell 16 Plus featuring Intel Core ultra processors.

Speaker 4 Plus, earn Dell rewards and enjoy many other benefits like free shipping, price match guarantee, and expert support. They also have huge deals on accessories that pair perfectly with your Dell PC.

Speaker 4 and make perfect gifts for everyone on your list. Shop now at dell.com slash deals.

Speaker 6 Tonight on Dateline.

Speaker 8 You tried to put me through help, but I am still here.

Speaker 6 A dramatic turn in the case of a fugitive with multiple identities and more than a dozen accusers.

Speaker 10 He seemed very sympathetic and reassuring. He said he graduated Harvard.

Speaker 8 He went from charming to a monster in a heartbeat. Stop ignoring me! I wondered if he was going to kill me in that basement.

Speaker 7 Nicholas has quite an alleged spree of assaults.

Speaker 15 He does.

Speaker 2 He was a devil spawn. He really was.

Speaker 16 I learned that Nick was being sought by the FBI for fraud.

Speaker 18 He just kind of disappeared.

Speaker 19 He said, well, we believe he's faked his own death, that he's in Europe.

Speaker 7 Did you sexually assault anyone? Did you defraud anyone?

Speaker 11 No, no, no, no, no.

Speaker 21 Anthony, that.

Speaker 22 That's a right, no. That's a right, no, no.

Speaker 7 I felt like you kind of represented all the women in that moment.

Speaker 13 Three.

Speaker 8 The judge needs to know: this is not a man you can trust.

Speaker 6 After a years-long manhunt, will an international con man, now back on U.S. soil, finally face justice?

Speaker 3 I'm Lester Holt.

Speaker 6 This is Dadeline.

Speaker 6 Here's Andrea Canning with The Man of Many Faces.

Speaker 7 Mary Grabinski arrived in Salt Lake City on a mission.

Speaker 7 One that began a long time ago.

Speaker 11 Does this feel a little bit like a full circle moment?

Speaker 8 It does.

Speaker 7 In 2008, she survived a sexual assault. Today, she'll see her attacker once again.
And this time, she'll watch him face charges from another accuser.

Speaker 8 He's a danger. He's a menace.

Speaker 7 Mary's battle for justice led investigators to more women women and sparked an international manhunt.

Speaker 11 He thrives on hurting people.

Speaker 7 Now she's hoping he'll finally be stopped.

Speaker 8 It's heartbreaking because I should have been the last one.

Speaker 5 It should have ended with me.

Speaker 7 Tonight, a surprising revelation from her attacker, someone Dateline has been tracking for years.

Speaker 7 To authorities, he's Nicholas Alaverdian, a convicted sex offender,

Speaker 7 a con man with multiple identities.

Speaker 7 But he told us he's an innocent Irish orphan named Arthur Knight, wrongly accused of horrific crimes.

Speaker 13 So, are you saying that they've got the wrong guy?

Speaker 22 Andrea, I am not Nicholas Alave.

Speaker 7 And are you crying, Arthur?

Speaker 22 Forgive me. I'm sorry.
I can't walk. People say that's not.
Let me try to stand up. Let me try to stand up.

Speaker 7 A lot has happened since that interview, and it's not over yet.

Speaker 24 How does does Mr. Rossi plead to the crimes charged in the information?

Speaker 15 Not guilty, Your Honor.

Speaker 7 To understand how we got here, we need to go back in time to Rhode Island, the place where Nicholas Aliverdian, the man with many faces and names, was born. It was 1987, just outside of Providence.

Speaker 9 Gentle soul,

Speaker 9 smiling face. He run into my arms,

Speaker 26 always happy to see me.

Speaker 9 He was just a happy child.

Speaker 7 Michael Aliverdian is Nicholas's uncle. He says behind his nephew's smile was a childhood that was anything but idyllic.
What was the family dynamic like with Nicholas when he was a child?

Speaker 9 There was turmoil in the family. My brother had some issues, so there were quite a few fights, arguments, that type of thing.

Speaker 7 Nicholas's father was a felon convicted of writing fraudulent checks, dealing drugs, and domestic assault.

Speaker 7 The situation at home in Cranston, a suburb of Providence, became so dangerous, Michael says Nicholas's mother got a restraining order and went into hiding with Nicholas and his younger brother and sister.

Speaker 7 The couple eventually divorced.

Speaker 9 I'm sure that took its toll on Nicholas and his siblings.

Speaker 7 And things only got worse. By the time Nicholas turned 12, His mother was unable to care for him, so he ended up in foster care, floating between different families and group homes.

Speaker 24 According to Nick, he was treated poorly. He was raped, assaulted.

Speaker 7 Tom Mooney writes for the Providence Journal and has been reporting on Nicholas for years. He's a consultant on this story.

Speaker 7 He says, despite living through one trauma after the next, Nicholas was determined to make something of his life. A family court judge gave him that chance.

Speaker 24 Arrangements were made to give Nick a job at the Statehouse as a Statehouse page.

Speaker 24 Pages are teenage kids who do clerical work.

Speaker 7 It was the perfect fit for Nicholas and he became a fixture at Rhode Island's seat of power.

Speaker 28 I was a rep from 2000 to 2004. I first met Nick across from the rotunda and he was about 14 years old and he was a page.

Speaker 7 Former state representative Brian Coogan says the teenager impressed everyone with a tireless work ethic and a brilliant mind.

Speaker 28 He would read bills that most reps and senators wouldn't read. He'd read it from front to back.
So he was like a lawyer by trade.

Speaker 7 Nicholas spent long days at the Statehouse wowing legislators before returning home to his other life.

Speaker 28 Nick was actually pretty much a ward of the state.

Speaker 7 Coogan was so taken with Nicholas and everything he'd been through that he briefly considered adopting him. That didn't work out.
By 19, Nicholas aged out of the system and later went to college.

Speaker 7 Five years after that, he was back at the Statehouse, this time fighting to bring change to the foster care system.

Speaker 24 That's how he got attention from the media. That's how he got great support and sympathy from lawmakers.

Speaker 7 We found one state rep who remembers Nicholas as a young shining star on the hill.

Speaker 30 If you see people with compassion that really want to advocate for something, that's Nick.

Speaker 7 In 2011, Representative Raymond Hull was newly elected when he was approached by Nicholas. He describes him as a young man with a tenacious spirit, determined to make a difference.

Speaker 30 I said, Nick, whatever I can do for you, how to help you. And I think I even sponsored a couple of bills for him to try to change the processes of DCYF.

Speaker 7 DCYF, the Department of Children, Youth, and Families, the agency Nicholas claimed failed to protect him as a teenager. And I was subjected to torture, beatings, assault in various forms.

Speaker 7 Nicholas sued DCYF. They denied the allegations and the case was ultimately settled.

Speaker 7 The details of the settlement are sealed, but the stories Nicholas told people about his experience brought him sympathy and some powerful allies.

Speaker 28 Nick would have his rallies here and ask people to support him, come down.

Speaker 31 It's kids.

Speaker 7 And you know what?

Speaker 11 Kids are more important.

Speaker 7 Nicholas reconnected with his uncle, Michael Aliverdian. Michael says he was impressed at the man his nephew had become.

Speaker 9 I was amazed at his knowledge, his intelligence, what he was trying to do, which I thought was a great thing. He was trying to protect children.

Speaker 7 And he continued to do that for the next several years. But his crusade was about to be cut short.
He contacted the press in Rhode Island with a tragic announcement.

Speaker 24 He had this terminal illness, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.

Speaker 7 And less than two months later, the news was out. Nicholas Aloverdian was dead at the age of 32.

Speaker 32 Nicholas Aloverdian passed away from a long battle with cancer.

Speaker 7 But before long, new information about Nicholas would start making its way around Rhode Island, leaving everyone wondering how well they really knew him.

Speaker 19 Shortly afterwards, I got a call from the state police.

Speaker 7 Getting to the bottom of what happened to Nicholas would become a game of cat and mouse, spanning three countries, involving multiple law enforcement agencies. The FBI is investigating you.

Speaker 7 You're being looked at for kidnapping, sexual assault, fraud,

Speaker 7 with a conclusion stranger than fiction. Did this case just keep getting crazier and crazier?

Speaker 33 It seems to get crazier by the minute.

Speaker 17 Sad news to pass along.

Speaker 32 Nicholas Alaverdian passed away from a long battle with cancer.

Speaker 17 Nicholas Alaverdian was 32.

Speaker 7 His obituary, sent out by the Office of Nicholas Aliverdean, ran in local papers in the Boston Globe.

Speaker 7 The piece lauded Nicholas as a beloved community leader, peacemaker, warrior, and Rhode Island legislators paid tribute to him.

Speaker 34 It's a House resolution expressing the passion of Nicholas Alibertian.

Speaker 15 Very, very sad.

Speaker 35 May you rest in peace, Nicholas.

Speaker 7 His uncle was also sad, but proud.

Speaker 9 He accomplished something.

Speaker 7 Father Bernard Healy of Our Lady of Mercy Catholic Church got a call from a woman who said she was Nicholas's widow, a woman named Louise.

Speaker 19 She said she was in Switzerland. He had died.
She asked if she could have a memorial mass here at Our Lady of Mercy.

Speaker 7 Is this something that you were happy to do?

Speaker 19 Do you do it?

Speaker 19 I said, we have memorial masses for anybody.

Speaker 7 So she sent Nicholas's bio for the priest to reference at the Mass.

Speaker 19 And after reading that biography, you would think that he was a cross between Mother Teresa and Nelson Bandela.

Speaker 7 At that point, Father Healy wasn't sure how to respond.

Speaker 19 Shortly afterwards, I got a call from the state police. We'd ask you not to have the Mass because Nicholas is not dead.

Speaker 21 Oh, wow.

Speaker 19 They said, we believe he's faked his own death, that he's in Europe. Oh my gosh.

Speaker 7 He faked his own death? But why would a respected man who'd become such a positive force for change try to fool everyone?

Speaker 7 Turns out he had a darker side and it apparently emerged early in his life.

Speaker 2 I said, these kids need a father figure.

Speaker 7 David Rossi is Nicholas's adoptive father. Nicholas was eight when David married his mom in 1996.

Speaker 7 The two fell in love in a Rhode Island nightclub where David was an Engelbert Humperton impersonator who mingled with his idol and sang his hit songs.

Speaker 36 So I sing it asleep

Speaker 36 after

Speaker 2 11. She was waitressing and she was absolutely beautiful.
We got serious, we got married.

Speaker 7 That's when Nicholas Aliverdian became Nicholas Rossi.

Speaker 7 Even at a young age, David could tell he was a bright kid.

Speaker 2 Computer whiz, math whiz, just in general. Very Very high IQ, but he knew it.
And he took advantage of it. He would threaten people.
I'll get out my computer. I'll ruin your life in five minutes.

Speaker 7 Along with those threats came physical violence by Nicholas. David remembers one morning before school when Nicholas wouldn't stop hitting his mother.

Speaker 2 He was swinging at her, swinging at me.

Speaker 25 I picked him up, put him on the bus in his underwear.

Speaker 5 The bus drove away.

Speaker 25 The school called us. But you know,

Speaker 25 You're at a point where you don't know what to do with this kid.

Speaker 2 He ruined every Thanksgiving, every Christmas, every birthday for him and his siblings. He was wicked.
He was a devil spawn.

Speaker 11 He really was.

Speaker 7 David says it got to the point where Nicholas's behavior was so bad they had to institutionalize him several times, but nothing seemed to work.

Speaker 25 They threw him out of there. Nobody could handle him.

Speaker 7 David admits he eventually hit a breaking point. When Nicholas was 10 years old, the family took a trip to Disney World.
He says Nicholas attacked his mother again.

Speaker 25 He started hitting her.

Speaker 2 When I tell you, I snapped like that, I couldn't take them on.

Speaker 25 I beat the hell out of him.

Speaker 2 I put him in the hospital.

Speaker 25 What?

Speaker 25 Yeah.

Speaker 2 I lost it.

Speaker 25 I'm ashamed of it.

Speaker 11 I always will be.

Speaker 4 She had to pull me off him.

Speaker 7 He's a child, though, and you're an adult, and that's child abuse.

Speaker 27 I snapped.

Speaker 25 All the years, all the years of the problems and the trouble with him.

Speaker 7 David was arrested for assault in Florida, but Nicholas's mom asked to have the charges dropped, and the case went nowhere. Shortly after, David walked out on the family.

Speaker 7 That was about the time Nicholas ended up in foster care.

Speaker 7 It was a few years later when state rep Ryan Coogan considered adopting him. Did he straight up ask you, will you adopt me?

Speaker 9 Yes, he did.

Speaker 7 Nicholas was 14 when he called Brian one day from the courthouse crying. He said he was about to be shipped off to yet another group home if he wasn't adopted that very day.

Speaker 7 Brian raced over to the courthouse.

Speaker 28 The judge said, do you know what's going on with this kid? I said, Judge, he's being abused. He's, you know, he's got mocks on him, scratches, bruises.
The judge says he had his whole file.

Speaker 28 He says, I can't show you this file, but trust me, everything he's telling you that's being done to him, he's actually doing to the other kids.

Speaker 28 Wow.

Speaker 7 So those are big allegations.

Speaker 28 Big, big.

Speaker 7 Since records involving children are sealed, the allegations made against Nicholas can't be verified. Coogan took the judge's advice and didn't adopt Nicholas and maybe dodged a bullet.

Speaker 7 Veteran reporter Tom Mooney thinks so.

Speaker 24 There are innumerable people who have come to his aid over the years, who have wanted to help him, who he ultimately turns on. That sort of gets to that other side of Nick Aliverian.

Speaker 7 When Nick was 18, he moved to Ohio. He was about to age out of the foster care system when a couple from Dayton agreed to take him in.

Speaker 7 In 2008, at age 21, he began attending Sinclair Community College in Dayton. That's when he first met Mary Grabinski.

Speaker 8 I was 19 years old. I was in my first quarter of college.
I was just starting life.

Speaker 7 She says Nicholas reached out to her on MySpace.

Speaker 8 He told me that he was new to the area and he wanted to have friends in the area.

Speaker 7 She told Nicholas she had a boyfriend and wasn't interested in anything romantic. He assured her it was not a problem.

Speaker 7 Soon after, they agreed to meet for lunch at the school cafeteria and she brought along a friend.

Speaker 8 He was extremely friendly. We hit it off and he was charming.
He was so easy to talk to. He was a good listener.
We had a good time. Yeah.

Speaker 7 Afterward, Nick asked Mary if he could walk her to her next class. Since it was the middle of the day on a busy college campus, she thought, why not? Her classroom was in the basement.

Speaker 8 So when he took me into the basement, I didn't think anything weird of it.

Speaker 7 But in that basement, Mary encountered a terrifying version of Nicholas Alaverdean.

Speaker 8 There were a couple of times I wondered if he was going to kill me in that basement.

Speaker 40 Some stories never make national headlines, but stories from small towns and coastal communities deserve recognition too.

Speaker 41 I'm Kylie Lowe, host of Dark Down East, a true crime podcast that gives voice to victims through investigative journalism and powerful storytelling.

Speaker 46 Set in my home state of Maine and the greater New England area, it's my goal to dig through the archives to bring the stories of the people at the heart of these cases to light.

Speaker 48 Listen to Dark Down East, wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 50 If you're a smoker or dipper ready to make a change, you really only need one good reason.

Speaker 52 But with Zen Nicotine Pouches, you'll discover many good reasons.

Speaker 23 Zen is America's number one nicotine pouch brand.

Speaker 55 Plus, Zen offers a robust rewards program.

Speaker 23 There are lots of options when it comes to nicotine satisfaction, but there's only one Zen.

Speaker 54 Check out zinn.com slash find to find Zen at a store near you.

Speaker 56 Warning, this product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical.

Speaker 27 A massage chair might seem a bit extravagant, especially these days. Eight different settings, adjustable intensity, plus it's heated, and it just feels so good.

Speaker 27 Yes, a massage chair might seem a bit extravagant, but when it can come with a car,

Speaker 27 Suddenly it seems quite practical. The Volkswagen Tiguan, packed with premium features like available massaging front seats, it only feels extravagant.

Speaker 7 In the winter of 2008 on an Ohio college campus, 21-year-old Nicholas Rossi walked Mary Grabinski to class. Once they reached the bottom of a stairwell, she says Nick suddenly turned on her.

Speaker 8 He pins me up against the wall and he starts both hands going up my shirt.

Speaker 7 And what are you saying to him?

Speaker 8 I'm saying, hey, can you please get off me? I need to go to my class.

Speaker 7 Did he stop?

Speaker 5 No.

Speaker 8 He had his hands up my shirt. I just couldn't push him off me.

Speaker 7 She saw another student coming down the stairs, but Mary was too paralyzed to scream.

Speaker 8 Probably just thought we were horny teenagers and ran right out.

Speaker 7 Nicholas was undeterred.

Speaker 8 He went from, you know, touching my shirt to, you know, taking my pants off.

Speaker 7 And yeah oh he's pulling your pants down yeah he's touching himself oh my gosh what is going through your mind as all this is is happening in front of you i thought for sure he was going to rape me but i did there were a couple of times i wondered if you know he was he was going to kill me in that basement what does he say when he is finished pretty much he he finishes and i just went to my class too stunned to process what had happened She says when her class was over, he was back.

Speaker 7 Nicholas was standing outside her classroom. When he saw saw her, he profusely apologized.

Speaker 8 He was begging me at that point not to press charges or to tell anybody what had happened.

Speaker 7 Mary ignored him and went straight to the campus police. After starting an investigation, they sent her to the local prosecutor's office.

Speaker 8 When I first talked to the prosecutors, they said that they didn't have enough evidence to pursue a case against him.

Speaker 7 They didn't want to do anything.

Speaker 8 No, not at first. It wasn't until they got a police report stating his version, saying that I was the aggressor.

Speaker 7 Probably their gut feeling, too, was looking at you and saying, really? Yeah. She's the aggressor? You said you were 90 pounds? Yeah,

Speaker 7 I was very thin back then, yeah.

Speaker 7 There was something about the way Nicholas attacked her that made her feel like he'd done this before.

Speaker 8 It almost felt ritualistic. I knew I was not his first, but I wanted to make sure I was the last.

Speaker 7 In fact, Mary learned that another woman in Ohio, just 15 days earlier, reported to police that Nicholas Rossi had sexually assaulted her, but she decided not to pursue it further.

Speaker 7 In Mary's case, he was charged with public indecency and sexual imposition, which means sexual contact against a person's will. What did he take from you in that moment?

Speaker 8 Pretty much my will to live.

Speaker 8 But that was just the beginning for me.

Speaker 7 Yeah, it didn't end there. No.

Speaker 7 Nicholas pleaded not guilty and the case case went to trial. Mary says that's when she was victimized yet again.

Speaker 8 The worst part was his defense coming at me and picking me and my story apart. Talking about what happened to me wasn't hard.

Speaker 8 Having someone, you know, question who I am as a person and question my integrity, that was hard.

Speaker 7 But the attack on Mary's credibility didn't work. The judge believed her and convicted Nicholas on both charges.

Speaker 7 Mary says he showed up to his sentencing wearing a three-piece suit and holding something she'd never seen him with before.

Speaker 8 He brought a cane and came in with a limp, and neither of the other two hearings that we had did he pretend as if he was injured. You know, he walked fine.

Speaker 7 Did you think it was a show?

Speaker 8 I know for sure it was a show.

Speaker 7 And she thinks his show may have had an effect. Nicholas got no jail time.
What did the judge sentence him to?

Speaker 8 He did sentence a fine.

Speaker 8 He had to attend a sex offender rehabilitation program. He had to register as a sex offender for 15 years.

Speaker 7 But that wasn't the last Mary would hear from Nicholas. A few months later, she got word that the judge was taking another look at the case.
Nicholas claimed he had new evidence that would clear him.

Speaker 8 He has a fake Myspace blog that's supposed to be authored by me.

Speaker 7 It implied Mary lied and got Nick arrested because she didn't want her boyfriend to think she cheated on him with Nick. What did you say to the prosecutor?

Speaker 8 I said I didn't write that.

Speaker 7 The judge agreed the post was fake and closed the case, but Nicholas still wouldn't let it go.

Speaker 8 He tried to sue all the prosecutors involved. He ended up suing me.
He was saying that because he had to register as a sex offender, it was hard for him to get dates and employment opportunities.

Speaker 7 So now Mary had to defend herself again against the man who sexually assaulted her. She had to borrow money from her parents to hire an attorney.
What emotions are you feeling?

Speaker 8 It's pretty much fear the whole time.

Speaker 7 Fear. Yeah.

Speaker 8 Fear that I, you know, the litigation could go his way and I have to pay him millions of dollars.

Speaker 7 All the while, Nick cyber-stalked her, carrying out an online smear campaign on a men's rights website called A Voice for Men, posting pictures of her and her personal information.

Speaker 7 Eventually, the case was thrown out and Nicholas was ordered to pay Mary's legal fees. But amazingly, it wasn't over.
over.

Speaker 8 My husband called him crazy on a blog. He found out, and

Speaker 8 not soon after, litigation came.

Speaker 7 And what happens this time?

Speaker 8 He loses the case, and I get all my lawyer fees paid back.

Speaker 7 It was then that Nicholas moved back to Rhode Island and returned to the statehouse, apparently without anyone there knowing he had a criminal record.

Speaker 7 Instead, at 23 years old, Nicholas had a new polished look and a new crusade to change the foster care system.

Speaker 7 And like a young Jekyll and Hyde, according to police reports, he was also terrorizing women. Nicholas has quite an alleged spree of assaults here in Rhode Island.

Speaker 57 He does.

Speaker 24 There are five or six women who alleged that he had assaulted them or threatened them or kept them sort of kidnapped.

Speaker 7 The incidents occurred between March of 2010 and May of 2011. One of them involved someone close to Nicholas, his new wife.

Speaker 7 Nicholas had gotten married, and soon after, police responded to a domestic disturbance call at their apartment.

Speaker 24 The police come in and they notice that Nick's wife has some abrasions on her face, a redness on her neck, and they decide to arrest him at that point.

Speaker 24 When he gets into the cruiser, he's banging his head against the bars that are protecting the glass. The police officers had to use pepper spray to get him to calm down.

Speaker 7 Nicholas pleaded no contest to domestic abuse and received probation. The couple later divorced.
As for several of his other alleged victims, they told Mooney they dropped their complaints.

Speaker 7 Do you think they were just scared of Nicholas?

Speaker 24 Oh, absolutely. Some of them have told me that was the reason they chose not to pursue any kind of criminal action against Nick is because they were terrified of him.

Speaker 7 His time in Rhode Island seemed to have run its course. He left the state again.
Another reinvention was in the making. By 2015, he was 28 years old.

Speaker 7 He had a new woman in his sights, and she had no idea what was coming.

Speaker 10 I didn't know how I could continue, honestly, to survive.

Speaker 7 After his legal troubles in Rhode Island, Nicholas moved back to Dayton, Ohio. And straight out of his playbook, he appeared to dazzle local lawmakers.
Here he is speaking at a city council meeting.

Speaker 15 I think the most important thing to remember here is that.

Speaker 7 He even started a nonprofit to help revitalize downtown Dayton.

Speaker 59 This nonprofit was called the Community Progress Institute.

Speaker 7 What was that about?

Speaker 10 Just to raise money to kind of bring back the life, the pizzazz, back to Dayton.

Speaker 7 Catherine Heckendorn had a front-row seat to the new Nicholas, who had gone back to using his birth name, Ala Verdean. She met him in 2015.
He was 28 and had joined her church.

Speaker 7 He immediately piqued her interest.

Speaker 61 And I said, perfect. A church guy.
Yeah.

Speaker 10 This is pretty safe.

Speaker 58 He can't get any safer than this.

Speaker 7 She found him to be kind and caring. Catherine had just been through a traumatic experience with another man and was was feeling vulnerable.

Speaker 10 He seemed very sympathetic and

Speaker 62 reassuring that I should feel safe and comfortable and help take care of me.

Speaker 7 Did that make you feel good?

Speaker 61 It did.

Speaker 10 I think that's exactly what I was looking for.

Speaker 7 They started meeting for coffee and dinners. They talked about their lives.
He said he'd been married once before, but it didn't work out.

Speaker 7 He told her he was a Harvard grad and shared his dreams about his non-profit. She found herself falling for him.

Speaker 12 There was a mystery that I couldn't put my finger on, which kind of drew me to him.

Speaker 7 After dating for just a few months, to her surprise, he proposed.

Speaker 10 We're sitting on the couch watching some TV at his place, and he just turns to me and says, we should get married.

Speaker 7 I mean, were you shocked?

Speaker 10 I was very shocked.

Speaker 60 I knew everything in me was saying, no, no, no, no, too soon.

Speaker 10 Something's off about this.

Speaker 62 He doesn't even really know me.

Speaker 60 I don't know him.

Speaker 7 Catherine told him she wasn't ready, but Nicholas persisted.

Speaker 60 I started to get annoyed and frustrated.

Speaker 58 But at the same time, I always wanted to be a wife.

Speaker 10 I always wanted to be a mom. And I think that desire for those things outweighed.

Speaker 18 the fishiness and common sense.

Speaker 7 She finally gave in and they married the very next day at City Hall. For Catherine, it was far from the dream wedding she'd always hoped for.

Speaker 7 And the day after they were married, Nick showed a dark side she'd never seen before.

Speaker 62 I don't remember what the argument was about,

Speaker 10 but it was the very next day where he lays his hands on me for the first time.

Speaker 7 Hits you? Yeah.

Speaker 10 Yes.

Speaker 7 What do you do? Do you run? Do you say something to him? Do you call the police?

Speaker 62 Um,

Speaker 61 try to run, try to call the police.

Speaker 18 He would always manage to get to my phone and take it, so I could never call for help.

Speaker 7 There was one incident at their house early in their marriage when she was able to call the police.

Speaker 18 So they showed up and arrested him for domestic violence.

Speaker 7 She says a detective told her something frightening, that her husband was a registered sex offender.

Speaker 18 And he had warned me that he's dangerous, that he does daily rounds on the house, and that he's afraid next time he drives by, I will be either chained up in the basement or dead.

Speaker 7 Despite that, she bailed him out and withdrew her complaint. She kept hoping things would get better.

Speaker 10 That was rough because each time then I got this false hope that the stranger's gonna go away and Nick's gonna come back.

Speaker 7 But he became more and more controlling. Catherine says he wouldn't allow her to have a job and forced her to cook and clean and wear skirts with pantyhose.

Speaker 59 You know, take care of the house, make sure he had food when he got home.

Speaker 7 She said image was everything to Nicholas.

Speaker 58 He always preferred like a bow tie.

Speaker 10 I think he was looking for something very like sophisticated and strong enough to make him stand out.

Speaker 7 Everything seemed to be a show, even Nick's non-profit. He told her he desperately needed an infusion of cash to keep it going.

Speaker 7 Catherine says she made the mistake of telling him she had a savings account, money her parents had put away for her from the time she was little.

Speaker 10 And he said that if I don't give him money, his business is going to collapse and we won't be able to eat and that'll be my fault. So I gave him about $10,000

Speaker 60 and as time went on, he said, we need more.

Speaker 7 She says the nonprofit accomplished nothing. And she discovered his business wasn't the only thing that was fake.
So was his Harvard degree. He'd only taken a course at the extension school.

Speaker 7 So he lied. He did.
On top of that, he had a taste for the finer things. And Catherine says he was using her money to pay for his lifestyle.

Speaker 58 I see him spending it on lavish, expensive meals, clothes, like first-class flights,

Speaker 10 five-star hotels.

Speaker 7 How much did you end up giving him?

Speaker 10 Close to $55,000.

Speaker 7 The more he lived it up, the more she lived in constant fear of his his explosive temper. Sometimes, when they'd argue, she says he would lock her in the bathroom.

Speaker 27 How long would he leave you in there for?

Speaker 12 The longest time was about two days.

Speaker 58 He always made it my fault.

Speaker 12 And after a while, I

Speaker 58 think I started believing that.

Speaker 14 Yeah.

Speaker 7 She says the worst of it would come when she refused him in the bedroom.

Speaker 62 Even though we were married, he would rape me.

Speaker 7 Did you feel just like a prisoner?

Speaker 13 Yeah.

Speaker 62 Um,

Speaker 61 I'm sorry.

Speaker 10 I didn't know it was possible to be so alone.

Speaker 45 I didn't know how I could continue, honestly, to survive.

Speaker 7 Catherine knew she had to get out of the marriage, but she also knew Nicholas wouldn't make it easy. She needed proof he was abusing her.
This is your big moment. You've got your phone ready to go.

Speaker 7 You're going to secretly record him.

Speaker 14 Yeah.

Speaker 14 What are you hiding from me? Give me your phone.

Speaker 14 Stop ignoring me!

Speaker 7 After five months of marriage, Catherine Heckendorn made a decision. She had to leave her husband.
The polished church-going man was all in act, and she was going to prove it.

Speaker 7 You're gonna secretly record him

Speaker 7 to try to show the world the hell that you've been living through.

Speaker 14 Yeah.

Speaker 7 Can you play some of that for us today? Yeah.

Speaker 7 Give me your phone.

Speaker 7 Give me your phone.

Speaker 20 Stop ignoring me!

Speaker 7 What are you doing?

Speaker 44 I'm getting out of this negative atmosphere.

Speaker 7 No!

Speaker 22 Stop it!

Speaker 21 No! No!

Speaker 21 No!

Speaker 21 Stop!

Speaker 7 I see you shaking right now.

Speaker 7 Did that take you back to that place?

Speaker 61 Yeah, very much so.

Speaker 7 She immediately sent the recording to her father for safekeeping. It would take two more months before she finally had the courage to walk out the door.
She got on her knees and she prayed.

Speaker 12 Lord, let me know in a clear, distinct manner that I may act upon it.

Speaker 62 And immediately,

Speaker 14 get out.

Speaker 18 Go.

Speaker 61 So I grabbed my purse.

Speaker 7 She left everything else behind, even her beloved dogs. Catherine needed to move quickly.

Speaker 58 So I get in my car and start driving.

Speaker 10 And through his GPS tracking, he discovers that and proceeds to pursue me.

Speaker 7 He catches up to you and is chasing you. Yeah.

Speaker 10 And so are you terrified?

Speaker 40 Yeah.

Speaker 12 I had

Speaker 62 run through a red light and kind of like head-on kind of T-bone another car.

Speaker 7 He's there. He sees this happen?

Speaker 10 Yeah, so as soon as he sees that I get in a car crash, he leaves.

Speaker 62 He doesn't want to be around when the police show up.

Speaker 7 Luckily, no one was hurt. She went to her parents' house and the next day called a lawyer and filed for divorce.
How was Nicholas handling all this?

Speaker 59 Not good. You know, making threats, being irate with either me or my parents.

Speaker 7 Getting a divorce finalized would be a challenge. Nicholas wouldn't show up to court.
And when the court officers tried to serve him the divorce papers, it appeared he was playing tricks.

Speaker 10 One of the officers said, I'm pretty sure that was him wearing a disguise, you know, with the hat, head down low.

Speaker 18 He just kind of disappeared.

Speaker 12 They couldn't find him.

Speaker 7 They eventually tracked him down. The judge ordered Nicholas to hand over the dogs and leave their house so Catherine could get her stuff.

Speaker 62 I opened the door and there's a gun sitting on the sofa.

Speaker 7 A gun.

Speaker 20 Just

Speaker 10 as if Nick put it there to say, I may not physically be here, but I will still make you miserable.

Speaker 7 Catherine says despite her claims that Nicholas abused and sexually assaulted her, she was too afraid of him to take legal action.

Speaker 7 But she soon learned powerful law enforcement agencies were investigating him for a different different kind of crime.

Speaker 59 Less than a month after I had left him,

Speaker 62 the treasury or the FBI, or I think it was both, came knocking on my door wanting any information I could give them on Nick.

Speaker 7 Did they explain why they were there?

Speaker 58 For fraud, and they did not go in details, just for fraud.

Speaker 7 Catherine found out later the feds were accusing Nicholas of stealing from his Ohio foster parents, that couple who had taken him in when he was about to age out of the system.

Speaker 7 Catherine remembers them fondly.

Speaker 60 We attended the same church here in Dayton, Ohio.

Speaker 47 They were lovely people, great people.

Speaker 58 And they seemed, you know, so caring towards Nick.

Speaker 7 Nicholas's foster father told Dateline he reported the fraud to local authorities.

Speaker 7 According to one police report, 10 credit card accounts were opened fraudulently with an estimated $200,000 in charges.

Speaker 10 I do believe he was starting to swindle them and take from them while we were still together.

Speaker 7 As the FBI was looking into Nicholas for fraud, his name popped up somewhere else.

Speaker 7 Turns out, after his failed marriage in Ohio, Nicholas had moved back to Rhode Island, which is where Detective Connor O'Donnell was doing a routine check on registered sex offenders.

Speaker 16 Nick's name came across my desk, just a regular compliance check.

Speaker 7 Nicholas was in the national system for that attack on Mary in the college basement. Something in Nicholas's file caught the detective's attention.

Speaker 16 Nick had a warrant for his arrest, a technical violation on a domestic violence charge.

Speaker 7 That was the incident involving his first wife.

Speaker 16 We went to his last known residence to ensure that he lived at that address, and we're going to arrest him on his outstanding warrant.

Speaker 7 Was he there?

Speaker 16 No.

Speaker 7 He had moved, but the detective didn't know where, and that was a problem. Because he was a registered sex offender, he was required to notify the state that he had a new address.

Speaker 7 He hadn't done that, so a Rhode Island judge issued a new warrant for his arrest.

Speaker 16 We put his picture and his warrant up on what Allen's Most Wanted.

Speaker 7 Did you get any leads once you put it up there?

Speaker 16 It didn't take too long. We got a phone call from Nick.

Speaker 7 From Nick?

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 40 Some stories never make national headlines, but stories from small towns and coastal communities deserve recognition too.

Speaker 41 I'm Kylie Lowe, host of Dark Down East, a true crime podcast that gives voice to victims through investigative journalism and powerful storytelling.

Speaker 46 Set in my home state of Maine and the greater New England area, it's my goal to dig through the archives to bring the stories of the people at the heart of these cases to light.

Speaker 48 Listen to Dark Down East, wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 50 If you're a smoker or dipper ready to make a change, you really only need one good reason.

Speaker 52 But with Zen nicotine pouches, you'll discover many good reasons.

Speaker 23 Zinn is America's number one nicotine pouch brand.

Speaker 55 Plus, Zen offers a robust rewards program.

Speaker 23 There are lots of options when it comes to nicotine satisfaction, but there's only one Zen.

Speaker 54 Check out Zen.com/slash find to find Zen at a store near you.

Speaker 56 Warning, this product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical.

Speaker 56 Clorox, toilet wand, it's all in one.

Speaker 56 Clorox toilet wand, it's all in one.

Speaker 56 Hey, what does all in one mean?

Speaker 56 The caddy, the wand, the preloaded pad.

Speaker 56 There's a cleaner in there,

Speaker 56 inside the pad.

Speaker 7 So, Clorox toilet wand is all I need to clean a toilet?

Speaker 21 You don't need a bottle of solution

Speaker 21 to get into the storage revolution.

Speaker 14 Clorox, clean feels good.

Speaker 7 Use as directed.

Speaker 7 Detective Connor O'Donnell says when Nicholas Rossi found out he was on Rhode Island's most wanted list for not alerting police that he'd moved, he was furious.

Speaker 16 Claimed he had moved out of the country and then proceeded to lecture me about how I didn't know the general laws in the state of Rhode Island and that by moving out of this country, he didn't have to notify of a change of address.

Speaker 7 What did you think of his tone that it seems like he knew better than you?

Speaker 16 He was arrogant, egotistical.

Speaker 7 The detective was now determined to find him. He contacted the U.S.
Marshals who began a search. They checked his passport and confirmed Nicholas had left the country on a one-way ticket.

Speaker 16 He had, in fact,

Speaker 16 left on an outbound flight out of an airport in New York to Ireland.

Speaker 7 By 2018, Nicholas was 31 years old.

Speaker 7 He had two ex-wives with restraining orders against him, was a convicted sex offender, wanted by Rhode Island State Police, and the feds were apparently looking for him too.

Speaker 7 Even though he'd left the country, his past had followed him. While overseas, he hired attorney Jeff Pine to handle the failure to register as a sex offender charge.

Speaker 64 Which is a serious case, obviously. It's a felony.

Speaker 7 Nicholas had been right. He didn't have to register since he'd left the country.
So Pine was able to get the case dismissed. But still, he was careful when dealing with his client.

Speaker 64 With Nicholas, you always have a shade of doubt about what he's telling you, so I had to be careful that I wasn't being manipulated.

Speaker 7 Nicholas asked him to do one more thing to see if there were any federal warrants with his name on them. The attorney checked, found one, and called the FBI.

Speaker 64 I asked what's the nature of the charge, and they told me it was a significant credit card fraud, misappropriation of funds, obtaining money under false pretenses, that kind of thing.

Speaker 7 It was the case involving Nicholas's foster parents.

Speaker 64 The agent did confirm that there was a warrant for him.

Speaker 5 A federal warrant. Yeah.

Speaker 7 But Nicholas was not about to turn himself in. This has become a game of cat and mouse between the alleged con man and federal law enforcement.

Speaker 64 Yeah, they're going to have to expend a lot of resources and man hours to bring him to justice.

Speaker 7 And Nicholas had no idea yet another law enforcement agency was joining the chase.

Speaker 33 He is someone that needs to be put on trial for rape.

Speaker 7 In Utah, a county attorney named David Levitt was looking into old rape cases that had never been investigated.

Speaker 33 We had sexual assault kits that had been sitting on police shelves for years.

Speaker 7 It infuriated him that women had filed complaints, subjected themselves to rape exams, but police never followed up. When he took office in 2018, Levitt vowed to change that.

Speaker 33 So we engaged in a partnership between the United States Department of Justice Justice and the state of Utah to test all of these old rape kits.

Speaker 7 Did you start getting hits?

Speaker 33 We got a hit,

Speaker 33 and that hit was a hit for a registered sex offender in the state of Ohio.

Speaker 7 That sex offender was none other than Nicholas Rossi. His DNA was in the system from that assault on fellow college student, Mary Grabinski.

Speaker 8 A detective from Utah reached out to Mary and he just said, you know, we could potentially use your input on a case. I said, by all means, you know, anything I can do to help.

Speaker 7 Mary was frustrated to learn the rape case in Utah happened just months after Nicholas attacked her. But that case was never investigated.

Speaker 33 In 2008,

Speaker 33 the victim in this case said that she had been raped and she voluntarily went through the rape exam and the police were called.

Speaker 33 The case died at the police station and was never sent to the county attorney's office.

Speaker 7 So 11 years later, in 2019, an investigator reached out to the woman. Her story was eerily familiar.
She said she met Nicholas Rossi on MySpace.

Speaker 33 And that two weeks later, they met in person and they began a sexual relationship that lasted for a brief period of time.

Speaker 33 At the same time, Nicholas Rossi was taking money from her with the promise that he would pay it back and never did.

Speaker 7 So she said she went over to his apartment. She wanted her money back and she wanted to end the relationship.

Speaker 33 He shut the door and began to just kind of put pressure on her to have sex. He took her clothes off and raped her.

Speaker 7 David Levitt had heard enough. He charged Nicholas with rape.
Now his investigators had to find him. But arresting Nicholas Rossi wouldn't be so easy.

Speaker 4 No, it wouldn't be easy at all.

Speaker 7 While trying to track him down, one of his investigators found Nicholas's obituary, announcing he died of cancer. Is that the end of the case?

Speaker 3 Well, we didn't believe he was dead.

Speaker 7 But how would investigators prove that?

Speaker 7 That's when we began following Rossi's trail, which would lead us to a hotel in Scotland, and that bizarre interview with the man who insisted he wasn't Nicholas.

Speaker 7 What do you say to people who say this is all an act?

Speaker 42 Oh, Ika.

Speaker 22 Andrea, that's a right blue. That's a right, no blue.

Speaker 7 Detectives from Utah and Rhode Island, along with the FBI, were closing in on Nicholas Rossi. And then came the stunning news: he was dead at the age of 32.

Speaker 35 House Resolution, expressing condolences in the passing of Nicholas Ali Verdian.

Speaker 33 If you look at the timeline, Nicholas Rossi or Nicholas Aliverdian's death occurred while we were in the midst of this investigation.

Speaker 7 To prosecutor David Levitt, that was no coincidence. So his team started digging.
They subpoenaed Nicholas's financial records and notice transactions after the day Nick had supposedly died.

Speaker 7 And they discovered activity on his social media accounts.

Speaker 33 Our investigators knew that he was not dead.

Speaker 7 When Detective Connor O'Donnell heard of Nicholas's untimely death, his BS radar also went off. He'd been searching for Nicholas for two years.
O'Donnell immediately started making calls.

Speaker 16 We made numerous attempts through Interpol, numerous countries for any proof of death. All were negative.
Nothing came back.

Speaker 7 Then a Utah investigator reached out and told him Nicholas was still alive. That was when the detective contacted Father Healy and told him to stop planning the memorial mass.
Nicholas wasn't dead.

Speaker 19 That he's a fugitive wanted on financial and violent crimes.

Speaker 7 Detective O'Donnell asked Father Healy to cancel the service, but keep the reason a secret.

Speaker 19 I said, okay, I'll come up with some convenient excuse, which I did.

Speaker 7 You had to be a little untruthful to her.

Speaker 19 Correct. I had to go to confession after all that, yes.

Speaker 7 He said when Louise, the woman claiming to be Nicholas's widow, heard the mass was off, she did not take it well.

Speaker 19 I've got a lot of emails that were kind of full of rage, upset, and anger at me. It was clear it was somebody who was very angry.

Speaker 7 You were bamboozled, father.

Speaker 19 In a sense, yes. It's the first time in my life, in my priesthood, that somebody has tried to have a funeral for somebody who's not dead.

Speaker 7 The detective says he contacted other churches and learned Louise had been fishing for funerals all over town, asking priests to hold a memorial mass for Nicholas.

Speaker 7 You had managed to shut them all down.

Speaker 16 Yes, wasn't easy, but yes.

Speaker 7 Remarkably, O'Donnell says Louise was also reaching out to the Rhode Island State Police, trying to get Nick off their most wanted list.

Speaker 7 You would think that the communication with Nicholas or, you know, his world would stop once he died, but that wasn't the case.

Speaker 16 It was not. We received numerous emails from the same email address that Nick had corresponded with me prior to his death.
from that same email address, but this time the signature was his widow.

Speaker 7 Did you feel like these emails might actually be coming from Nick?

Speaker 16 100%.

Speaker 7 Based on the language, the tone, what you'd experienced before?

Speaker 16 The way that he wrote, the way that he spoke, the use of big words was 100% Nick. The only thing that was different was instead of Nicholas Aliverdian, it was Luis.

Speaker 7 Meanwhile, the FBI was apparently reaching out to anyone who might know Nicholas's whereabouts. Brian Coogan was in his truck when his phone rang.

Speaker 28 It says, FBI, Utah. I was rattled.
I pulled over in the parking lot and he said, this is special agent so-and-so from Utah FBI. He says, do you know Nicholas Aliverdian, Nicholas Rossi?

Speaker 28 I said, yeah, I actually know him very well. He goes, well, we're looking for him.
Do you know where he is?

Speaker 28 I said, well, didn't you know he died? And he said,

Speaker 28 he's not dead. And I sent him all the emails that I had, all the phone numbers, the pictures before I hung up.
I said, you know, agent,

Speaker 24 you're the FBI.

Speaker 4 How come you can't catch him?

Speaker 7 The agent said they'd been trying to locate Nicholas through the internet with no luck.

Speaker 28 He says, we would track him through an email to his IP address.

Speaker 7 But he says the agent told him Nicholas the computer whiz sent them in circles, never in the location that matched the IP address.

Speaker 28 He says, let me tell you, this kid is so good. One of the best I've ever seen.

Speaker 7 But in December 2021, about two two years after Nicholas supposedly died, they finally caught a break.

Speaker 7 Law enforcement sources say the computer genius had made a mistake. He'd given up his overseas address while online.
The trail led authorities to the intensive care unit at this Glasgow hospital.

Speaker 7 If they had the right man, of all things, it was a severe case of COVID that now had him trapped.

Speaker 33 And that resulted in the Scottish authorities arresting him.

Speaker 7 That is a crazy twist.

Speaker 33 It is.

Speaker 64 It's fortunate.

Speaker 7 Interpool shared mugshots,

Speaker 7 photos of his tattoos and fingerprints with local police so they could make an on-the-spot ID.

Speaker 33 When the Scottish authorities looked at him in a hospital room in Scotland, they were satisfied that Nicholas Rossi was, in fact, the same.

Speaker 33 person that is wanted in the state of Utah.

Speaker 7 But not so fast.

Speaker 7 The man in the hospital insisted he was not Nicholas. He said his name was Arthur Knight, a law-abiding British businessman.

Speaker 22 I am not a fugitive, nor am I a cornman.

Speaker 7 Could it be? Was he actually telling the truth?

Speaker 65 I thought this man in front of me was Arthur Knight, and the authorities had made a mistake.

Speaker 66 And I was like, good God.

Speaker 40 Some stories never make national headlines, but stories from small towns and coastal communities deserve recognition too.

Speaker 41 I'm Kylie Lowe, host of Dark Down East, a true crime podcast that gives voice to victims through investigative journalism and powerful storytelling.

Speaker 46 Set in my home state of Maine and the greater New England area, it's my goal to dig through the archives to bring the stories of the people at the heart of these cases to light.

Speaker 48 Listen to Dark Down East, wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 50 If you're a smoker or dipper ready to make a change, you really only need one good reason.

Speaker 52 But with Zen nicotine pouches, you'll discover many good reasons.

Speaker 23 Zen is America's number one nicotine pouch brand.

Speaker 55 Plus, Zen offers a robust rewards program.

Speaker 23 There are lots of options when it comes to nicotine satisfaction, but there's only one Zen.

Speaker 54 Check out Zen.com/slash find to find Zen at a store near you.

Speaker 56 Warning, this product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical.
Clorox, toilet

Speaker 56 Hey, what does all in one mean? The catty, the wand, the preloaded pad.

Speaker 56 There's a cleaner in there,

Speaker 56 inside the pad.

Speaker 7 So, Clorox toilet wand is all I need to clean a toilet.

Speaker 21 You don't need a bottle of solution

Speaker 21 to get into the stiletto revolution. Clorox clean feels good.

Speaker 7 Use as directed.

Speaker 7 The man calling himself Arthur Knight was determined to prove he was not American fugitive Nicholas Rossi. He insisted he was an Irish orphan and claimed to have an Irish driver's license.

Speaker 20 To be accused of rape, it could happen to anyone.

Speaker 7 While out on bail, Arthur, with his wife Miranda by his side, organized a press tour from his flat in Glasgow. He used a wheelchair and wore an oxygen mask, he said, because of the effects of COVID.

Speaker 5 Are you that man?

Speaker 37 Are you Nicholas Rossell?

Speaker 66 I can veritably say that I have not ever once done any of the acts that we just described.

Speaker 7 We came to Scotland to get to the bottom of this mystery. Was Arthur Knight the victim of a colossal case of mistaken identity? Or was he trying to pull off his biggest con yet?

Speaker 7 We caught up with investigative reporter Jane McSorley.

Speaker 65 I've been a journalist over 30 years, and I have never met a man like him.

Speaker 7 For her Audible podcast called I Am Not Nicholas, she got up close and personal with Arthur when he and his wife Miranda invited her over for dinner. What is it like walking into their flat?

Speaker 65 It's a fairly small flat. I was welcomed very, very warmly by Miranda.
Arthur is there in a wheelchair, you know, with the mask and the oxygen tank and everything, but he's dressed up to the nines.

Speaker 7 Are you the whole time looking at him, her, scanning the room for clues?

Speaker 65 I was just engrossed by him really, because, I mean, everybody's talking about this man. And here I am, as close as I am now to you.
You know, he was such a nice guy.

Speaker 65 I thought, how can he potentially be this Nicholas Rossi that alleged to be, you know, a rapist?

Speaker 7 Jane knew there was one sure way to find out. After dining on Miranda's champagne chicken dinner, she asked Arthur to roll up his sleeves to see if he had the same tattoos as Nicholas Rossi.

Speaker 65 And it was after I'd been there at least a couple of hours. And straight away he agreed.
So I said, will you pull back your sleeves?

Speaker 7 Not only that, he pulled up mugshots that had Nicholas Rossi's tattooed arms on his big screen TV. Is your heart kind of just pounding? You know, as you're waiting for this

Speaker 18 moment?

Speaker 65 It felt like it was... It just felt like it was slow-moving.

Speaker 7 slow-moving. He rolled up his left sleeve as far as his elbow.
She couldn't believe what she was seeing or not seeing.

Speaker 65 I had my glasses on as well.

Speaker 65 I mean, I was completely in awe of this left forearm that up on the screen was like completely tattooed and now with in front of me had no tattoos and no scarring whatsoever of tattoo removal.

Speaker 7 She even checked to make sure he hadn't covered them with makeup.

Speaker 65 It was quite a moment. So I thought this man in front of me was Arthur Knight and the authorities had made a mistake.
And I was like, good God.

Speaker 7 You know, because he's so adamant. That was just the beginning of Jane's reporting.
There was so much more to uncover.

Speaker 45 This was a roller coaster for you.

Speaker 7 It was.

Speaker 65 The story's stranger than fiction, but that's what's great about it.

Speaker 7 It was a roller coaster for us, too. Our reporting led us to a TV personality named Nafsika Antipas.
She'd done business with Arthur Knight.

Speaker 31 I was in shock and actually I was kind of embarrassed that I went through that.

Speaker 7 Although he used the name Nicholas Brown, he said his full name was Timothy Arthur Nicholas Knight Brown.

Speaker 7 In 2020, Nafsika was looking for help marketing her vegan cheese company called Nafsika's Garden. Oh, wow, this is so good.

Speaker 7 and promoting the fourth season of her A ⁇ E television show, Plant-Based, by Nafsika. She scanned through resumes on Upwork, an online marketplace for freelancers, and found Nicholas Brown.

Speaker 7 She says he was highly rated on the site. Tell us about his resume.
What was on it?

Speaker 31 Harvard graduate, experience with PR, marketing, everything I was looking for. He had it on there, and he was an international lawyer, apparently.
I kind of thought he was the whole package.

Speaker 31 And I spoke to him, and I hired him the same day.

Speaker 7 Now Sika agreed to pay him a fee of around $7,000 a month. She was based in Montreal.
He claimed to be in Ireland, so they never met in person.

Speaker 31 Every time I would tell him, Nicholas, where is the work? Show me what you've done so far. He would either come up with an excuse or he would like send me a picture of

Speaker 31 something like

Speaker 7 his dog.

Speaker 7 It quickly became obvious the man she hired from Upwork was more like no work.

Speaker 7 She says he always had an excuse for why nothing was getting done.

Speaker 31 So one time he was in the hospital and then another month his wife was in the hospital. I think she had ampositis.

Speaker 31 um then his dog was in the hospital at one point he pitched an idea about creating a new company with nefseca he and his wife miranda would be on the board so i asked him i said are you trying to take over all my companies what's happening here he goes no no no no no i just i just want to oversee what's happening

Speaker 7 so she agreed but she never gave him access to her bank accounts or credit cards She did, however, give him a copy of her passport. He said he needed it for the paperwork.

Speaker 31 At first, I was going along with it because i said okay i'm going to see what he does see if he'll actually start working but again nothing so after paying him nearly thirty thousand dollars over four months with no work completed nafsika cut him off i terminated his access to my website to my uh his emails and his wife emails you didn't give him any warning that's it no warning and he didn't take this well he got very aggressive started sending a lot of messages

Speaker 31 phoning.

Speaker 31 I wasn't answering my phone.

Speaker 7 When she didn't respond, she says he sent threatening texts about a contract that she says never existed.

Speaker 7 If she didn't pay him about $40,000 or a reasonable counteroffer, he would ruin her reputation.

Speaker 7 He had created a fraud alert website using her passport photo like a mugshot. and was planning to tell the world her company was a sham.

Speaker 31 I was very, very nervous because I didn't know how this would affect my brand that I was just

Speaker 31 recently launched at the time and my family and, you know,

Speaker 31 how crazy is he?

Speaker 62 He's going to go after my kids.

Speaker 7 The threatening texts kept coming and coming. Nafsika didn't give in to his scare tactics and told him he was officially fired.

Speaker 31 As soon as I told him he's terminated, that's when everything went live.

Speaker 7 All of his smear tactics went live.

Speaker 7 Yes, he had fake social media accounts where he was tweeting about me that my vegan cheese is fake that it's not really vegan i started calling the police uh in every country i uh filed all those fraud reports uh i hired um a private investigator in dublin to track him down but the private investigator found nothing two years later nafsika found out why She learned the man she'd been dealing with wasn't in Ireland and he wasn't Nicholas Brown, the name she knew him by.

Speaker 7 He was living in Scotland, claiming to be Arthur Knight.

Speaker 31 He's finally been arrested.

Speaker 7 Then she got another call. It said Utah FBI on her caller ID.
The agent asked for her help finding Nicholas.

Speaker 31 They tell me, tell me what you got,

Speaker 31 and I'll tell you what I have. And we swapped, you know, information.

Speaker 7 How badly do you want to bring this man down?

Speaker 31 I want him behind bars. Big time, because not only of what he's done to me, but what he's done to so many people.

Speaker 7 But justice was a long way off. After his arrest in the hospital, he appeared before a judge and continued to insist he was Arthur Knight, not Nicholas Rossi, the American fugitive.

Speaker 7 So now, the judge had to rule first on his identity before deciding if he should be extradited.

Speaker 57 Are you losing confidence, sir?

Speaker 7 Months went by with hearing after hearing, but no ruling from the judge.

Speaker 37 How can you possibly claim not to be Nicholas Rossi now?

Speaker 57 Are you Arthur Knight or Nicholas Rossi?

Speaker 7 That's when Dateline got the chance to sit down with him. Did you sexually assault anyone? Did you kidnap anyone? Did you defraud anyone? In one of our most memorable interviews.

Speaker 22 I can't work.

Speaker 22 People say that's an act. Let me try to stand up.
Let me try to stand up.

Speaker 7 More than four months had passed since Arthur Knight's arrest in a Scottish hospital. He was still out on bail, waiting for a judge to decide if he was telling the truth about his identity.

Speaker 7 It was April 2022. Arthur, along with his wife Miranda, agreed to speak to us remotely.
I know you have a lot to say, which is great.

Speaker 22 I want to be as honest and truthful as possible.

Speaker 63 It's very important that our story is heard.

Speaker 7 Arthur told us he began life as an orphan in Ireland. He said he was adopted.

Speaker 37 I grew up all over.

Speaker 7 Dublin, Belfast. He said he later moved to London and through grit and determination worked his way up the corporate ladder in communications.

Speaker 7 He and Miranda said they met at a London art museum in 2011.

Speaker 63 We just struck up a conversation, you know, exchanged kind of contact detail, but I was not, you know, good friends at the time.

Speaker 7 They said they were friends at first. She was in a relationship and busy with her career.

Speaker 63 So previously I was, you know, an executive and I've worked in account management.

Speaker 7 But several years later, they said they met up again. Romance blossomed.

Speaker 63 We fell in love. We love each other very much, deeply in love.

Speaker 7 And in February of 2020, the same month that Nicholas Aliverdian supposedly died, Arthur and Miranda got married.

Speaker 63 Nicholas Rosie or Aliverdian or whatever had died.

Speaker 41 We were on our honeymoon.

Speaker 7 Less than two years later, their world fell apart. It was December of 2021 when Arthur was hospitalized with COVID.
Miranda said a nurse told her he probably wouldn't make it.

Speaker 63 And I was literally in tears. I was in shock.
And the world just caving in for me.

Speaker 7 She said Arthur was in a medically induced coma and put on a ventilator. After three months, though, he woke up.
So Arthur makes it through this, but your whole world has been turned upside down.

Speaker 63 I was with him in his room and two police constables came into the room and I looked up and I thought they had walked into the wrong room.

Speaker 7 What'd they tell you?

Speaker 63 They said that it would be sensible for me to actually leave the room because of what was going to be said. And Arthur said, no.
You know, my wife knows everything. There's no secrets between us.

Speaker 22 Secrets.

Speaker 7 Can you also tell us what happened in that room and why they told you they were there?

Speaker 63 I just, you know, remember words of 2008, Utah, rape, America, and it all didn't make sense.

Speaker 7 She heard police calling Arthur Nicholas Rossi. They said that international law enforcement agencies were trying to bring him back to the United States.

Speaker 22 I made it clear I'm not Nicholas Rossi, but people choose to believe what they want.

Speaker 7 Were you read your rights? Were you handcuffed?

Speaker 22 I was told I was under arrest for rape in Utah and that's all I was told.

Speaker 7 To try to clear up the question of his identity, is he Arthur or is he Nicholas? I asked if I could get a better look at him. Would you take your mask off for one second just to show us your face?

Speaker 11 I can.

Speaker 22 When I get to my bed, yes.

Speaker 7 But can you just show us now?

Speaker 22 Well, I'm hypoxic, so I can't tell you, yes, I will, but must I do it now.

Speaker 7 He never took it off. And he didn't have answers to a lot of our questions either.
Did you say you were adopted?

Speaker 22 I was, yes.

Speaker 7 At what age?

Speaker 22 I am not certain.

Speaker 7 He was also evasive when we asked him if we could see his birth certificate.

Speaker 7 I'm just looking for ways, you know, that you can back up some of what you're saying, just to put people's minds at ease.

Speaker 22 Well, which minds?

Speaker 7 We moved on to more pressing matters. The FBI is investigating you.
You're being looked at for kidnapping, sexual assault, fraud in multiple states.

Speaker 22 Incorrect. David Levitt has said those things.
The FBI have said nothing.

Speaker 7 The FBI is investigating you, though.

Speaker 11 Me?

Speaker 7 Yes, they're looking into you and how you might fit into all of this.

Speaker 20 No, they are not.

Speaker 7 The FBI rarely comments on active investigations. But remember, several people we interviewed told us the FBI contacted and questioned them, including Nafsika Intipas.

Speaker 22 Nafsika, she was my client.

Speaker 7 When we asked Arthur about Nafsika, he seemed rattled and denied her claims that he stole from her and failed to do any work. Nafsika says that you scammed her out of tens of thousands of dollars.

Speaker 22 Correction. Nafsika paid me for work

Speaker 36 that was performed.

Speaker 22 I did not scam her out of money.

Speaker 7 Nafsika says that you are a con man.

Speaker 22 I'm sorry she feels that way. But her text messages...

Speaker 22 Say the opposite. She orders jewels.

Speaker 7 Despite his denials, our our questions seem to hit a nerve. What do you say to someone who believes that you are Nicholas Alaverdian?

Speaker 21 I am not Andrea.

Speaker 22 I am not Nicholas Aloverdian.

Speaker 11 And I do not know how to make this clear.

Speaker 7 What do you say to people who say these are crocodile tears? He's putting on a show. This is all an act.

Speaker 21 Oh, I can. Andrea.
No.

Speaker 22 That's a low blow. That's a right, low blow.
Crocodile Tears! Do you think I can...

Speaker 22 I don't believe that!

Speaker 7 Did you sexually assault anyone? Did you kidnap anyone? Did you defraud anyone?

Speaker 36 What?

Speaker 20 No, no, no.

Speaker 11 No.

Speaker 7 His wife, Miranda, said he was 100% telling the truth. And if he was a serial rapist, she would know.
What would you say to anyone who says you're naive or how do you know this? Are you not concerned?

Speaker 7 What do you say to those people?

Speaker 63 So what I would say that what I've read about Nicholas Rossi, allegedly he done all of these crimes, assaulted women, etc.

Speaker 63 But you can't change a tendency of a person that rapes, that consistently rapes or sexual assaults. My husband has never, ever done anything which has hurt me.
You know, he hasn't,

Speaker 63 you know, assaulted me. I do know the truth.
I know he's innocent. I know he's not a rapist, 100%.

Speaker 7 Where does this go from here? For Arthur, for the both of you, what's next?

Speaker 63 I believe that, you know, we will fight this together and there will be a time where we will crack open a bottle of champagne and we will go back to our normal lives as a normal couple with our beautiful dogs and restart our lives.

Speaker 7 What's the most important thing today that you want people to know, both of you?

Speaker 22 We were once a normal family, but thanks to the media, our lives have been interrupted. And we'd like privacy, and I would like to go back to being a normal husband.

Speaker 22 But I can't, because I can't breathe. I can't walk.
People say that's an act. Let me try to stand up.
Let me try to stand up.

Speaker 22 Exactly. Please.
Exactly.

Speaker 3 So let's.

Speaker 22 Let's.

Speaker 22 You're laughing now. This is what people do to me.

Speaker 11 They call me a liar.

Speaker 22 They say this oxygen is a prop.

Speaker 7 He told us this whole misunderstanding was the handiwork of David Levitt.

Speaker 22 David Levitt is a con man.

Speaker 22 David Levitt is a monster.

Speaker 7 And he was about to go after Levitt with a vengeance. You've never been attacked like this to this level.

Speaker 33 No, I'll give him that. He took it to a new level.

Speaker 40 Some stories never make national headlines, but stories from small towns and coastal communities deserve recognition too.

Speaker 41 I'm Kylie Lowe, host of Dark Down East, a true crime podcast that gives voice to victims through investigative journalism and powerful storytelling.

Speaker 46 Set in my home state of Maine and the greater New England area, it's my goal to dig through the archives to bring the stories of the people at the heart of these cases to light.

Speaker 48 Listen to Dark Down East, wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 50 If you're a smoker or dipper ready to make a change, you really only need one good reason.

Speaker 52 But with Zen nicotine pouches, you'll discover many good reasons.

Speaker 23 Zinn is America's number one nicotine pouch brand.

Speaker 55 Plus, Zen offers a robust rewards program.

Speaker 23 There are lots of options when it comes to nicotine satisfaction, but there's only one Zen.

Speaker 54 Check out Zen.com/slash find to find Zen at a store near you.

Speaker 56 Warning, this product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical.

Speaker 56 Clorox, toilet wand, it's all in one.

Speaker 56 Clorox toilet wand. it's all in one.

Speaker 56 Hey, what does all in one mean?

Speaker 56 The caddy, the wand, the preloaded pad.

Speaker 56 There's a cleaner in there,

Speaker 56 inside the pad.

Speaker 48 So, Clorox toilet wand is all I need to clean a toilet.

Speaker 21 You don't need a bottle of solution

Speaker 21 to get into the story revolution. Clorox, clean feels good.

Speaker 7 Use as directed.

Speaker 7 In the spring of 2022, Arthur continued to seek media attention.

Speaker 7 He called another press conference, this time to introduce his new defense attorney, Craig Johnson, who'd flown all the way from Utah to Scotland.

Speaker 7 Do you believe Arthur Knight is Arthur Knight and that he is innocent of all the allegations that are being leveled against him?

Speaker 26 I do, and I don't take that statement lightly. Again, I wouldn't have flown out here 24 hours ago for this purpose to stand up for him if I didn't.

Speaker 7 Johnson said Arthur reached out to him, probably not by coincidence, since Johnson once worked for Utah County Attorney David Levitt.

Speaker 7 Johnson told us he left the prosecutor's office after a dispute with Levitt, but said that had nothing to do with him taking on Arthur Knight as a client.

Speaker 7 Still, he was quick to criticize his former boss.

Speaker 26 There's been such a rush to judgment by Mr. Levitt in his office coordinating with other authorities.
That is our concern.

Speaker 7 Johnson said David Levitt crossed the line speaking so openly about the allegations of rape and fake identity against his client.

Speaker 26 It's very concerning to me when the head law enforcement official in Utah County, my former boss, David Levitt, has been making a lot of interviews and statements about my client, which frankly poisoned the jury pool.

Speaker 7 Levitt disagrees, saying he's been careful not to discuss specifics of the case. We pressed Johnson on why he was so sure Arthur Knight was telling the truth about his identity.

Speaker 7 Has he shown you his face?

Speaker 26 Yes, I've seen his face without his mask.

Speaker 7 He said he'd also seen what Nicholas Rossi looked like. And you believe when you see his face that that is not the same man?

Speaker 26 I don't believe it's the same man.

Speaker 7 We decided to check with someone who knows Nicholas well. We asked Mary Grabinski if she thought Arthur was Nicholas.
Have you watched the videos, the interviews with him?

Speaker 8 I've seen a couple. He's bloated and grotesque, but that's him.

Speaker 61 That's him. Yeah.

Speaker 7 Do you believe that there's any possibility that that man is Arthur, really Arthur Knight? No.

Speaker 7 And what is it when you look at it that you think, nope, that's Nicholas?

Speaker 8 The hair, the teeth, and especially like the fingers, the hands. I remember those hands.

Speaker 7 According to the British press, he wasn't fooling anyone. Nicholas, you've completely failed to peel the wheel over that eye.

Speaker 7 But he continued to make his case, and he even tried a new tactic, sabotaging the reputation of the man who was responsible for his arrest, Utah prosecutor David Levitt.

Speaker 7 We saw the press release. There's some breaking news.

Speaker 22 Yes, we learned is an ongoing federal investigation into David Levitt involving everything from money laundering to embezzlement to abuse to corruption.

Speaker 7 Miranda, do you have any comments on that?

Speaker 63 Yes, I think it will be interesting to see how things play out with that.

Speaker 7 Levitt says none of that is true.

Speaker 7 You've never been attacked like this, to this level.

Speaker 33 No, Nicholas Rossi, I'll give him that. He took it to a new level.

Speaker 7 Levitt was not only working to extradite Rossi, he was also running for re-election.

Speaker 7 And just days before the polls opened, he says his campaign was sabotaged by the man calling himself Arthur Knight.

Speaker 33 He accused my wife and I of being human traffickers, of being cannibals, of being murderers.

Speaker 7 Arthur posted this on his website. Breaking news, David Levitt is confirmed to be head of a criminal Utah cult.
This goes deep. This is like a thriller.

Speaker 33 We didn't think it was too thrilling for us.

Speaker 7 Levitt had had enough and called his own press conference.

Speaker 3 That this all occurs less than one week

Speaker 3 before ballots drop

Speaker 32 in an election in which I am participating

Speaker 17 causes me tremendous concern.

Speaker 7 Arthur cited the Utah County Sheriff's Office as the source of his allegations. The sheriff was a vocal critic of Levitt's and backed his opponent in the prosecutor's race.

Speaker 7 The sheriff denied that he had been Arthur's source. Regardless, the story was out there.

Speaker 7 How do you defend yourself against allegations like that when someone is, you know, putting them out there like they're fact?

Speaker 33 well there's no way to defend yourself in this culture levitt lost his election and believes nicholas rossi was partly to blame he did cost me my job but the reality is how many women will never be raped because of what we did

Speaker 7 although levitt was out of office the case against arthur knight slash nicholas rossi kept going and he would continue to grab headlines He said the tattoos were put on him when he was in a coma.

Speaker 7 This was a jawdropper, totally.

Speaker 7 And a Scottish judge would finally make a ruling on his identity.

Speaker 7 Arthur Knight was back in the headlines. Instead of going to a court hearing, he checked himself into the hospital again for COVID complications.
Not long after, police were called to his room.

Speaker 7 He assaulted a doctor and a nurse.

Speaker 24 Yeah, and they said at that point he actually got up off the gurney that he was on and came at them, which raised some questions about his physical capacity.

Speaker 7 Arthur had flown into a rage when he was told he would be discharged. Several articles quoted the female doctor who said, he was inches from our faces.
We were utterly terrified.

Speaker 7 We thought he was coming to harm us.

Speaker 7 And that was a good reason at that point to um restrict his bail he was sent to jail and after a quick trial he was convicted of assault but arthur's biggest day in court was right around the corner almost a year after he was first arrested a judge was hearing arguments about arthur's identity was he a british businessman or an american fugitive was a whole journey reporter jane mcsorley was in the courtroom the advocate deputy was asking him the questions and he asked him about the tattoos

Speaker 7 The Scottish prosecutor presented evidence showing that while Arthur's forearms were free of tattoos, his upper arms did have them and they were identical to Nicholas Rossi's.

Speaker 7 When Arthur took the stand, he had an explanation.

Speaker 48 Well, he said in court that

Speaker 65 the tattoos were put on him when he was in a coma in the hospital in Glasgow.

Speaker 7 Jaws dropped in the courtroom as he told the judge they were inked on his arms while he was unconscious.

Speaker 65 The advocate deputy was just like about three meters away. He turned round and his face was like, it was like an emoji with a big open mouth.

Speaker 7 It was like, he couldn't believe what he'd heard, and neither could all of us.

Speaker 7 In the old police photos, Nicholas Rossi had tattoos on his entire left arm. Remember, Jane didn't see the upper part of his arm when she interviewed him, only his forearm, and it was free of tattoos.

Speaker 7 Shortly after that visit, she learned why.

Speaker 65 One of his ex-wives had said that when they were together in 2015, that he was going through the process of getting his tattoos removed.

Speaker 7 And what about a more traditional way of making an ID? Fingerprints? They were also a match, but Arthur tried to explain that away, too.

Speaker 7 He said they were taken by a hospital worker without his knowledge and sent to Utah so Prosecutor Levitt could claim they were Rossi's.

Speaker 65 I mean, it was just, it was just some moment, you know.

Speaker 7 The judge wasn't buying any of it and announced his decision.

Speaker 67 I am ultimately satisfied on the balance of probabilities by the evidence of fingerprint, photographic, and tattoo evidence that Mr. Knight is indeed Nicholas Rossi.

Speaker 7 How did that feel when you heard that the judge had ruled that you are not Arthur Knight, you are Nicholas Rossi? That was a really good moment for me.

Speaker 8 We celebrated because

Speaker 8 Nick is really good at lying.

Speaker 8 So anytime that somebody sees through and them being able to call out the truth was a huge win for me because the gig was up, right?

Speaker 7 Is it the end of the road, sir? Finally, Nicholas Rossi could be extradited to the U.S.

Speaker 7 But he filed appeal after appeal, and despite the judge's ruling, he never stopped claiming they had the wrong man.

Speaker 57 Some suggesting Rossi has made a mockery of the justice system and created an international spectacle in the process. Thank you.

Speaker 7 All the while, Nicholas's wife Miranda stood by his side, even even after the judge's decision. Was she lying? Jane believes so and says she has proof.

Speaker 7 While reporting for her podcast, Jane uncovered a recording of Louise, the woman who claimed to be Nicholas' widow. Louise was the one trying to arrange his funeral.

Speaker 34 Basically, the priest was explaining that he had done his first funeral on Monday.

Speaker 65 It was just an automatic, oh my god, that's Miranda. I mean, you know, I know my British accents.

Speaker 7 No doubt in your mind.

Speaker 65 No doubt whatsoever.

Speaker 7 So you think Miranda's in on this?

Speaker 62 Oh yeah.

Speaker 65 She's in on it up to her neck.

Speaker 7 Miranda hasn't been charged with anything. She was a lot less chatty than during our interview

Speaker 7 when we caught up with her at one of Nicholas's extradition hearings in Edinburgh. Do you have anything to say today about the hearing?

Speaker 7 The legal battle to extradite Rossi continued for more than a year. It finally ended in December 2023 when he lost his last appeal.

Speaker 57 Now it's over. Removed from this prison and put in a plane back to the States.

Speaker 7 In the U.S., his legal troubles were just beginning, and his behavior would be no less dramatic.

Speaker 8 It feels like a circus almost at this point, because it's just weird drama turn after weird drama turn.

Speaker 7 And things were about to get even weirder. The con man had another revelation.

Speaker 7 Big, big twist in this case.

Speaker 33 Oh, huge. Yeah, I mean, it's a game changer.

Speaker 7 Nicholas Rossi is facing two rape charges in Utah, one here in Salt Lake County and one in Utah County.

Speaker 7 On January 5th, 2024, deputies booked Nicholas Rossi into a Utah County jail. The long saga to bring him to justice in the U.S.
seemed to be entering its final phase for everyone but him.

Speaker 7 From the moment Nicholas Rossi stepped foot here in Utah, he continued to insist he was Arthur Knight. He even asked a judge to require that all county jail staff address him by that name.

Speaker 7 The judge denied that request. Then, months later, In a stunning turn of events, Nicholas had a revelation.
It all went down in a Utah courtroom.

Speaker 11 All right.

Speaker 7 In a hearing about one of the 2008 rape charges, Rossi asked the judge to be let out on bail. The prosecutor argued that was a bad idea.

Speaker 15 That we were going to ask the court to hold him without bail.

Speaker 7 And read a letter from the alleged rape victim in the case.

Speaker 15 He has a history of harassing and threatening his victims in the past, so this would be a legitimate fear.

Speaker 15 I do have young children at home, and this would cause me and my husband to worry for their safety while causing our family unnecessary stress.

Speaker 7 The lead detective took the the stand and backed up the victim's fears. He testified about Nicholas Rossi's history of terrorizing women.

Speaker 32 One in particular is Mary Grubinski.

Speaker 7 And about Nicholas's attempt to evade the law by faking his death, escaping to England, and assuming a new identity.

Speaker 15 And to the best of your knowledge, when Mr. Rossi was returned to the United States, did additional DNA testing confirm that he was, in fact, Mr.
Nicholas Rossi?

Speaker 33 Yes, sir.

Speaker 7 Then, the moment we'd all been waiting for, the defense called Nicholas to the stand.

Speaker 15 Mr. Knight, can you please say your name for the record?

Speaker 66 Arthur Knight. Okay.

Speaker 15 Mr. Knight, can you also tell us other names that you've gone by previously?

Speaker 66 I was born with the name Nicholas Alverdian.

Speaker 66 In 1996,

Speaker 66 I had that surname changed by

Speaker 66 my stepfather when it became Rossi, and I reverted to using it in 2007.

Speaker 7 After more than three years of deceiving the world about his identity, he admitted it was a big lie. Not only that, he told the court he had a compelling reason.

Speaker 36 I was informed by two

Speaker 36 reliable sources that there were two credible threats against my life.

Speaker 7 He said the death threats were due to his work in Rhode Island trying to reform the Department of Children, Youth, and Families.

Speaker 7 But when asked the names of the people allegedly threatening him, I don't want to give a mouse cheese.

Speaker 57 What would giving their names,

Speaker 15 how would that give a mouse cheese?

Speaker 66 Meaning, it would stoke the fire that they've had to continue with their

Speaker 66 actions against me.

Speaker 7 The judge cleared the courtroom so Rossi could reveal in secret who was after him.

Speaker 7 When the proceedings reopened, the prosecutor countered, if Nicholas was so concerned about hiding his identity, why did he create a media circus?

Speaker 15 Did you think that going on public television was a good way to keep your identity quiet?

Speaker 17 Well, I objection.

Speaker 7 We asked former prosecutor Levitt to weigh in on Nicholas's revelation. Big,

Speaker 7 big twist in this case.

Speaker 33 Oh, huge. Yeah, I mean, it's a game changer.

Speaker 7 What do you make of this argument that he had to go by Arthur Knight because his life was in danger?

Speaker 11 Well, I mean,

Speaker 33 I give the same

Speaker 33 amount of credence to that story as I do the allegation that I hired someone to put a tattoo on his arm

Speaker 11 in Scotland.

Speaker 7 Levitt believes Rossi's admission is more legal strategy than change of heart. He says Nicholas had no chance of getting bail if he didn't admit his real identity.

Speaker 33 If I'm claiming not to be the person I am, then that paints me as a flight risk, so I'm not going to get bail.

Speaker 7 Regardless of his admission, the prosecutor argued Rossi should stay behind bars.

Speaker 15 For somebody who has faked their own death, who denied that they were who they were for three years in a foreign country, and then to have him come in here and say, well,

Speaker 15 yeah, I am that person, but I was hiding from two people who were threatened to kill me. He is a flight risk.

Speaker 15 And so the state would ask that the court move his bail to no von Duana.

Speaker 36 Thank you.

Speaker 7 The judge quickly made his ruling.

Speaker 24 The court finds that the state has met its burden of proof. I will order that Mr.
Rossi be held without bail.

Speaker 7 Rossi's legal proceedings continued. Two months later, he was back in a different Utah courtroom for the other rape charge.

Speaker 7 That's when Mary came to Salt Lake City to see her attacker right where she thinks he belongs.

Speaker 8 He's in custody. I've waited years to see him in custody, so it's going to be very sweet for me.

Speaker 7 And she knows she's the reason he's there. Because had you not pushed and then him ending up on the registry, that connection would not have been made to Utah.

Speaker 14 Right.

Speaker 7 It shows you how you have the power to change things.

Speaker 8 For me, it's heartbreaking because I should have been the last one. There shouldn't have been Utah women.

Speaker 7 It should have ended with me. She wanted the prosecution to know she was here to help.

Speaker 8 While we were waiting for the hearing to start, I made myself known to the prosecution who I was, my experience with Nick. They knew immediately who I was.

Speaker 8 But I let them know, if there's anything you need, character witness, any kind of statements, to please let me know because I know Nick. I know some of the worst parts of Nick.

Speaker 34 State of Utah versus Nicholas Rossi case ending.

Speaker 7 When it came time for the hearing to begin, instead of appearing in person, Rossi was on video from jail.

Speaker 7 Not what Mary expected, but an experience she calls a win.

Speaker 8 Seeing him behind bars with the Utah County emblem back behind was extremely satisfying, and it made me happy to see him there because he can't hurt anybody while he's there.

Speaker 7 Rossi pleaded not guilty to both rape charges. His attorney said Nicholas and his wife Miranda are still happily married.

Speaker 15 His wife lives in the United Kingdom. She is supporting and sending money when she can.

Speaker 7 On December 3rd, Nicholas was offered a plea deal that would have covered both rape charges. He decided not to accept it.

Speaker 7 He's expected to go to trial in 2025.

Speaker 7 As for David Levitt, even though the journey to prosecute Nicholas Rossi turned his life upside down, the former prosecutor says he has no regrets. And now he has something else to occupy his time.

Speaker 7 What did David Levitt do after leaving office? He bought this fixer-upper Scottish castle called Noctery, and it just happens to be 50 miles from where Nicholas Rossi was caught.

Speaker 7 Some people here in Scotland are calling this

Speaker 7 castle your FU castle.

Speaker 5 Did you know that? I didn't know that.

Speaker 33 I had a choice to make. The choice was simple.

Speaker 3 Do I save my political career?

Speaker 33 Or do I do my job and take the man down?

Speaker 7 Mary and Nick's ex-wife Catherine are relieved Rossi is behind bars and they hope he will stay locked up for a very long time.

Speaker 18 I've worked very hard to try and fight to feel safe and secure again.

Speaker 12 And remember not everybody is him.

Speaker 59 Not everybody is a monster.

Speaker 8 I mean we're all different but we all have a common thread between us, right? That Nick changed our lives. It's been years.
I still won't go to a restaurant with my back to the door.

Speaker 8 You know, I'm always just kind of vigilant. Who's around me? But at the end of the day, I am stronger than him.
I am better than him.

Speaker 7 Both Mary and Catherine are now married with children, working to put Nicholas in their rearview mirror. What do you want to get across? What's the most important

Speaker 7 part of all of this?

Speaker 62 I want

Speaker 10 the courts to know that If he ever gets out,

Speaker 60 he will do it again.

Speaker 62 He will find more victims.

Speaker 60 That is his way of life, and that's all he knows.

Speaker 61 And it's not okay for a person like that to be free.

Speaker 6 That's all for this edition of Dateline. We'll see you again next Friday at 9-8 Central.
And of course, I'll see you each weeknight for NBC Nightly News.

Speaker 3 I'm Lester Holt for all of us at NBC News.

Speaker 6 Good night.

Speaker 37 This time of year, many are checking off their holiday gift lists. But identity thieves have lists too, and your personal information might be on them.
Protect your identity with Life Lock.

Speaker 37 LifeLock monitors millions of data points every second and alerts you to threats you could miss. If your identity is stolen, LifeLock will fix it, guaranteed, or your money back.

Speaker 37 Save up to 40% your first year at lifelock.com

Speaker 37 dateline.

Speaker 17 Terms apply.