9 | The End is Nigh

You are listening to, I am not Nicholas, an audible original.

Episode 9, The End is 9.

“It's August 2021, and the delivery van has just pulled out side to the Victorian apartment”

in Glasgow, where Arthur Knight lives. The driver on loads have very large box, up at the size of a traditional British telephone booth, onto the pavement. Arthur asks his landlord, Mr. Sude, to help him move it into the flat. "No way, I can't take this out, it was huge!"

This is before Arthur Knight started using a wheelchair, and he tried pushing it as well. The box is too heavy, it weighs about 400 kilos. They have to list the help of passersby. "There were other people there, walking about the street and a desktop, pushing it, you needed minimum of 10 people to really pick it up."

And even then, it's a struggle to get this box up the stairs into the hallway, and eventually

“they do get it into Arthur and Miranda's apartment.”

Inside the packaging is a professional recording booth. It's a six foot high, soundproof, green colored, metal-clad box, and it was off-smashed off. Which is a shame, because it was a really good booth, great for a single person narration. Apparently, it was made by a company called Stancolt of Bristol.

"It actually looks a bit like a butcher's fridge, if you have a miniature butcher's fridge." "John, John." "Sorry, I'm going off-script." "Do you want to explain?" "Would you mind Jane, I know it's really your show."

"Dark, you're all right, go on ahead." "Okay, well, my name is John Davis, and I'm not just a voice-over artist, well, I am just a voice-over artist, but I'm also the man who sold Arthur Knight, that voice-poof. Arthur bought it off me on eBay, for a few hundred pounds. He gave me a call, so I could arrange for it to be transported from my home in South Wales,

to his place in Glasgow. He explained, he wanted to use it for a narration work. My immediate thought was, "What's at a narration work is this person going to do because not being unkind, but his voice didn't fit in my mind to any of the genres for voice-over work."

Richard Hayes squeaky sort of voice like that, you know, my wife Miranda bless her, she's she's the salt of the earth. "And other than perhaps a character in a child's book, I don't see what genre is voice would fit in in the voice-over world. He just seemed to me to be a bit of a Walter-Mitchie character."

Arthur is charming at first, but then he blames John for the fact that the voice-poof

has been damaged in transit, the career company compensates Arthur, but this isn't the end of it for John, and it's where the story gets all too familiar. "I just ended up blocking his text because he was getting a little bit of abusive threatens to expose me to the Welsh press, and good luck in any voice-over work in the future after I've created a website about you because you're deceiving and you're this, that and the other.

It sort of like totally went from one gentle summed in character to somebody that was quite mean and just couldn't accept that the predicament he was in was not my fault, you know? It really was weird.

“"You have to say to you, explain to you why you wanted it.”

What was his plan for the studio?" "I believe he was making documentaries. "Yeah, yeah, broadcasting." Good morning, this is sunrise from Zeus News and said 24. This is Arthur's very old news channel, broadcasting from his Glasgow flat.

Today is Tuesday, the 31st of May, 2022.

Airports around the world are seeing chaos, like never before.

Families are sleeping on floors, flights are being canceled in waves, and holiday makers are standing in endless queues. The UK has no shortage of professional news channels. Why does Arthur think it needs an amateur version from him?

The answer to that I suspect will be key to understanding the man at the very heart of this

story. I am not Nicholas Losey. How are you feeling? I weaved apprehensive.

“It's 7 o'clock on a cold damp morning, and I'm back to where I started this story.”

I've just arrived with my producer Helen at Arthur and Miranda's flat in Glasgow. Nine months ago, I turned up here, bearing gifts from Ireland. So there it's your small debate on Christmas, and your Paris tea bags and some chocolates. And I was welcomed into the warmth of their flat with champagne and dinner. What's the noise?

What's the check-in? Yeah. This time, I'm parked outside with Helen. Arthur is not in prison, awaiting his extradition hearing. And Miranda won't answer my calls, or emails.

“You know, if she doesn't come out with her dogs, I mean, she won't be, I'd like a rocket.”

We are here to do what journalists call at doorstep. We've written to Miranda to give her the chance to respond to our discovery that someone who signs remarkably like her was recorded posing as the widow of Nicholas Rossi.

Basically, the priest was explained in that he had done his search for him all on Monday.

I want to play Miranda this recording, which we think she made one week after she married Arthur. The man, the US authorities, say, is Nicholas Rossi. I want to ask her if she was part of a scheme by Nicholas Rossi to fake his own death. Miranda hasn't responded to my matter, so we've turned up in person, without an appointment. To try to get her side of the story.

We're waiting for her to step out of the front door of her tenement building in the hope that if we approach her, she'll agree to do an interview.

“I mean, I think it's highly, highly, unlikely, she'll agree.”

Helen has the recording on her phone, and she's ready to play it to Miranda as soon as she appears. I mean, I just want this to happen, though. As Helen and I sit in the car, I imagine Miranda inside the flat noise with only her two dogs for company. What might have driven her to make that phone call had to help Nicholas Rossi in his pretence that he is Arthur Knight?

We talk about the other women we've spoken to who have said they were abused by Rossi. There's a pattern there of serious coercive and controlling behavior. It could well be that Miranda is a victim of this. As we settle in for what might be along with, I stare at Arthur and Miranda's apartment building and smile, as I think about the story of that day just over a year ago when several men

heave that 400 kilogram foysmith up the stairs to the main door. It strikes me that the story of the professional foysmith bought on eBay isn't just quirky anecdote. It tells us something about Arthur.

When I first interviewed him, he decided he wanted to record me, and then one time outside

court, as he made his way past the press pack. He pointed his mic at us. It also remembered his landlord, Mr. Sud, telling me about the day he found a camera crew in the flat, and Arthur sitting in a director's chair, calling the shots. It is if he's living in the kind of fantasy world where he sees himself as a journalist,

a producer, and author of his own story. World where he is both creator and star of the tale of Arthur Knight, the innocent Irishman, and happily married academic. It chimes with something that the Boston Globe journalist Dan McGuyon said to me, and Dan knew his necklace Rossi, off-old.

for much longer. Helen and I have been waiting for nearly four hours from Miranda to walk out of her front door, and then all of a sudden, she appears. I don't think she spotted us, so we're just coming up to Miranda, she just walked out. She turns and walks down the street away from our car, I call out to her.

Miranda sees us, but doesn't rush away. Helen has a recording off the phone call, we think Miranda made, when she was pretending to be necklace Rossi's widow. She holds it up so it's within the shot of Miranda, and presses play. I walk alongside and ask these questions.

“She appears to be listening, that's a good sign, I think.”

She glances briefly at us, but carries on walking in an unhurried way towards her car. It's impossible to tell what she's thinking, well, she's saying anything, there's a split

second, when I think she's about to talk.

She's got into her car, she didn't respond, and she's just putting on her seatbelt, and she's pulling off. Well, there she gone, she's gone. She said nothing, that's it, she's just cursoring corner, that's it, she's away. She just got back in the car, and I'm shaking.

She did not expect us, she looked concerned, when she saw she was shocked, and then when you played the audio, I mean, I mean, you were more along the side of her, I was sort of more behind her, I mean, she was clearly listening attentively as I would you thought. She was really listening properly to it, so I feel confident that she got proper opportunity to hear her.

She chose not to comment, and that's her right. And I don't think she'll ever want to talk, Helen, certainly not us. You look very well, you have three pieces, you're all tired.

Our third night is our third night.

He is not Nicholas Rossian, and he's a very nice man, there was absolutely no to have to, everything he did was from manipulation. He thinks he's smarter than everyone.

“Do you have a gap between your two upper front teeth?”

Take your mask off. I am not Nicholas Rossian. You're not manipulating me anymore, you're absolutely not manipulating me any more. The increase was explained in that he had done his surgery or on Monday. It just wouldn't happen to the venue that was making those calls.

That's laughable. Oh my god, it's Miranda. He wanted to be in print.

He wanted to be on television, he wanted to be on radio, always with always about you.

I turn up for one of his interim hearings at the court in Edinburgh. There's loads of press there. And then he appears from prison via video link. And it was just a big close-up, his whole face filled the screen. A prisoner on Ramande in Edinburgh jail.

He'd lost wit, and he no longer had access to the props he used to disguise himself. There was no mask, no mask. He was clean-shaven, which was a big change. He was still very pale, his hair looked like it'd been cut. I was actually fixated with how he looked.

At one stage, he even cried. I'd heard that he was angry and isolated in prison and that he'd once shided in an American accent. As I look at his image on the various big screens, it was as if he had transformed from Arthur Knight back into necklace Rossi.

It was just necklace Rossi, then I was just looking at necklace Rossi from his days in Rhode Island. I just felt that.

“And I said that to journalists outside the court and they also felt the same, I think.”

As Arthur begins his inevitable journey, back to life was necklace Rossi.

I'd heard that Arthur was planning to call her as a witness in his extradition kiss.

“I hoped I just hoped that night she realized that I had evidence to suggest she had”

played a role in the faking of necklace Rossi's death, and that she might come forward and tell the truth. Or just back away." After 11 months of hearings and adjournments in November 2022, the court in Edinburgh sits to determine whether the man in front of it is necklace Rossi.

He comes in person this time, brought to the court house in a prison van, and he's still in his wheelchair.

And his evidence is incredible.

A man who denies being a fugitive on the run from the US authorities has told an extradition request. But he woke up from a coma in a Glasgow hospital, so discover his arms had been tattooed. And then, it's Miranda's turn. "I was in the front row.

She knew I was there.

“She knows I know that she's Louise making these calls.”

"I wondered what would happen when it was her turn to give evidence. Two more charges are added to the extradition request, the second rape allegation, and another

sexual assault allegation.

Miranda takes the stand. She swears by Almighty God to tell the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth." And then, she said she had no indication whatsoever that he was necklace Rossi. She'd taken an oath, hearing what she was saying and that for me sort of hits me hard, you know, "I can't help wondering whether her husband had some sort of hold over her."

Whatever the truth, it wasn't enough to save him. Tonight on the 14th Scotland, a man arrested in a Scottish hospital last year is a U.S. fugitive. "Mr. Rossi, do you accept your life? Do you accept your life?"

Sheriff rules that the man who calls himself Arthur Knight is Nicholas Rossi, wanted for rape in the state of Utah. Of all the pointless phone calls I've had with Nicholas, Strogarther, there is one that sticks on my mind because of what he asked me. He turned crying and he asked the question, "Where I saw this podcast concluding?"

"Well, this podcast is called, "I am not Nicholas."

“"But John, I think we can finally say it, my."”

"I am not Nicholas Rossi." "Oh, yes, you are." And by the way, it's pronounced Rossi. I wrote to both Nicholas Rossi and Miranda given them a chance to respond to the allegations raised in this series, neither of them replied.

You have been listening to, "I am not Nicholas," an audible original. "I'm afraid we've got some sad news." "I'm down the back open there, your back watch, your security back watch."

Pete Carson, the security specialist who kept watch outside the van when I did those first

to interviews with Arthur Knight, "Well, he died, thank you, Pete." I am not Nicholas, presented by Jane Maxwellie. For BBC Studios, the series producers were Emma Weatherall and Ines Bowen. The producers were Helen Clifton and Barney Roundtree, sound design by Barney Roundtree. The executive producer was Ines Bowen.

The story consultants were Chad Abumrad and John York. A original music by Bankie Ojo mixed by John Scott. Production manager Elena Bowtang, production coordinator Julia Harvey. The development executive was Ania Sonders. Production executive Laura Jordan Raoul, the creative director, is Georgia Mosley, editorial

standard advisor Michael Fada. Biglet Fise from Hashing Mude and Andrew Downey. The archive in this series is from WPRI, WPRO Radio and BBC Scotland. Thanks to a voiceover artist John Davis, Unvoice Actors Mark Shavis, Zach Surker, Ryan Ford Iasco and Jared Seuss.

For audible, the executive producers were Kent Depento and Claire Chadburn. The production executive was Haley Nathan and the commissioning editors were Kent Depento

This is a BBC studio's production for audible. I am not Nicholas, an audible original.