Investigations have shown that Rossi passed through Dublin on his way to the UK in 2017. Around the same time that he was writing tributes to himself, he was getting married in Bristol under the alias Arthur Knight. A couple of weeks later, a grand and verbose obituary would appear, praising the now deceased Rossi for leading “a warrior’s life… a fighter in spirit, but a peacemaker in practice”. Rossi, who talked his way into a legislative page at the State House when he was 14, became known as a rent-a-quote by local press and his profile grew.īut in 2020, the campaigner announced the sorry news that he was suffering from terminal illness at the age of 32. Wheeling himself into court wearing three-piece suits and panama hats, he claims to require a wheelchair and an oxygen mask due to long-Covid. Rossi, who is accused of using 16 different aliases to evade capture, has since become a media sensation as he fights extradition from Scotland – all the while insisting that he is Knight, an innocent Irish orphan who is being framed. The man lying in that hospital bed on Ward 7A was actually Nicholas Rossi – an American fugitive who had tried to fake his own death and is wanted in four US states for fraud, sexual assault and rape.

Knight couldn’t have known, lying in his hospital bed one Monday, that the intricate cover he had fabricated was so close to collapsing, with each and every step the Scottish police officer took towards his ward.īecause Knight is a sham. He was known locally as a friendly eccentric who wore dapper clothes and drank expensive whiskey while he bantered with barmen about British politics. Since then, the survivor had managed to be the architect of a good and decent life for himself: marrying his wife Miranda in 2020, and now working as an academic at the University of Glasgow.

The orphan queen