It was the coronation chicken that gave him away. Early in the first episode of Imposter: The Man Who Came Back from the Dead (Channel 4, Monday), it is revealed that Scottish-based Anglo-Irish aristocrat Arthur Knight had never heard of the hallowed sandwich filling. This struck a pub landlord as odd: imagine living in the UK and not knowing about coronation chicken? His chicken knowledge gap wasn’t the only fishy thing about Knight, as Channel 4 reveals in this grippingly bizarre documentary.
Knight, it is claimed, was an alias for Rhode Island-born Nicholas Rossi, who faked his death and then moved across the Atlantic, where he persuaded future wife Miranda he was a well-to-do orphan from the old sod (his “Irish” accent is about as authentic as those of the demented hobbits in the Amazon Lord of the Rings show). Knight to this day insists he has nothing to do with Rossi. As does his wife.
“My husband is not American. He is not Nicholas Rossi,” she tells Channel 4. “We were such a normal couple before this all happened.
We love the National Trust.” Miranda may believe him but many do not and the life he had built for himself in Scotland unravelled during the pandemic. Knight woke from a Covid coma surrounded by police, who arrested him on foot of rape allegations in the United States made by Rossi’s former wife, who says he was a violent domestic abuser.
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