Joseph Naso was 77 years old, a petty thief and a freelance photographer, when Marin County detectives arrested him in April 2011 and charged him with four murders. The killings had gone unsolved for decades. Roxene Roggasch, 18, was found near Fairfax in Marin County in January 1977. Carmen Colon, 22, was found near Port Costa in Contra Costa County in August 1978. Pamela Parsons, 38, was found in Yuba County in September 1993, and Tracy Tafoya, 31, was found beside a highway near the Marysville cemetery, also in Yuba County, in 1994. Prosecutors said all four had worked as sex workers, and all four had first and last names that began with the same letter, which led reporters to call the case the "double initial" or "alphabet" murders.
The case broke open because of a routine probation check. In April 2010 Nevada probation officers visited his home in Reno, where he was serving probation for a theft, and found ammunition. The searches that followed turned up hundreds of photographs, a journal and a handwritten list of ten women, each described by a place rather than a name. DNA tests then tied him to Roxene Roggasch. In August 2013, after a two-month trial in which he acted as his own lawyer, a Marin County jury convicted him of all four murders, and in November 2013 he was sentenced to death. He has always denied killing anyone. His automatic appeal is pending before the California Supreme Court, and police in several places have continued to examine him as a suspect in other deaths.
Naso was a native of New York and grew up in the Rochester area, ABC7 News reported in 2011. He served four years in the Air Force in the 1950s, according to the Associated Press. His criminal history went back to 1955, the Appeal-Democrat of Marysville reported, and consisted mostly of petty theft.
He was married from 1962 to 1980, the AP reported. After the divorce he and his former wife stayed in contact, and he visited her at least twice a year. They had a son. Court records described by the AP in 2011 showed that Naso lived for years in San Francisco, Oakland, Yuba City and Sacramento before settling in Reno. At the penalty phase he cited his care for his son in asking the jury to spare his life.
He moved west in 1969, ABC7 reported, and investigators believed he traveled back to the Rochester area from time to time during the early 1970s. Public records listed addresses in Minneapolis and in Northern California, including San Francisco, Oakland, Piedmont, Sacramento and Yuba City. Investigators believed he moved to Reno in the mid-1990s; the AP put the move in 1994.
He worked as a self-employed photographer. In 2025 he gave ABC7 a 1977 letter from the Academy of Art that described him as a photography instructor who was "totally dependable and extremely cooperative." At his trial he showed the jury wedding photographs, pictures from a sorority gathering, a nursing school graduation and a church group, as well as photographs of women in partial or full undress, which he called his art.
His record of small thefts continued for decades. In 1994, while living in Yuba City, he was convicted of petty theft and sentenced to two days in jail, court records showed. In 1999 an elderly woman sued him, saying he had taken $17,000 and a revolver from her with promises of marriage; he lost the case. In 2009 he was caught in a grocery store theft that led to a felony larceny conviction in El Dorado County and three years' probation, which was transferred to Nevada. That probation is what brought officers to his door.
Roxene Roggasch was 18 and lived in Oakland. Her body was found near Fairfax, in Marin County, in January 1977. Bay City News gave the date as January 10; ABC7 and CBS San Francisco gave January 11. She had been strangled. Prosecutors described her as a sex worker.
She had a son, who was two years old when she died. At the penalty phase in 2013 he told the jury to imagine life without a mother, and said there was no simple way to explain it. Her brother attended the trial as well. He told ABC7 he did not want a death sentence; he wanted Naso to serve life without parole among ordinary prisoners.
Carmen Colon was 22, according to most reports (ABC7 gave her age as 21). She lived in the East Bay. Her body was found near Port Costa, in Contra Costa County, on August 13, 1978. Material taken from under her fingernails later gave a partial DNA match to Naso, according to the prosecution.
She had two daughters. At the penalty phase they testified that they had no memories of their mother and described how her death had shaped their childhoods. After the jury's death verdict one of her daughters said her mother was at rest and that justice had finally been served.
Pamela Ruth Parsons was 38 (ABC7 gave 39). She lived in Linda, in Yuba County, and worked as a waitress, according to the Appeal-Democrat. Her body was found in rural Yuba County on September 19, 1993, after a missing person report had been filed. The sheriff's detective at the time said the evidence suggested foul play but gave no cause of death. Naso was then living in Yuba City with his son.
Naso admitted at trial that he knew her. He said he had picked her up as a hitchhiker and taken her home, and that he had photographed her. Investigators found hundreds of photographs of her in his Reno house, a Nevada investigator testified, and a laminated copy of her obituary. A ledger found there placed him in Marysville from September 12 to 19, 1993.
She had a daughter, who was two when her mother died. At the penalty phase the daughter told the jury that her first memories were of foster homes in Kentucky and that her mother's death still affected her relationships.
Tracy Tafoya was 31. She was reported missing on August 6, 1994, in the Yuba City area; prosecutors said August 5 was the last day she was known to be alive. Her body was found near Marysville. A ledger entry in Naso's handwriting dated August 5, 1994, recorded meeting a woman named Tracy; the lead Nevada investigator testified that he read the entry as a reference to a sexual assault. The last entry on the list of ten, "girl Mrsv (cemetery)," was among those prosecutors matched to the four women. She was married; her husband identified her in one of the photographs prosecutors showed at trial.
By 2010 Naso lived alone in a run-down single-story house in a working-class part of Reno. He was on probation, and the terms barred him from having weapons.
On April 13, 2010, probation officers Roger Jacobs and Wesley Jackson of the Nevada Department of Public Safety visited the house to check for violations, according to testimony at his preliminary hearing. Jackson found food rotting on the kitchen counter and debris throughout the house, and Naso at first resisted opening the locked bedrooms. The officers found ammunition, and an advertisement offering two guns for sale; they later learned that Naso had answered the advertisement and handled a gun when he met the seller. He was arrested for violating his probation. In the garage, behind a refrigerator, officers found a box of knives and guns.
Inside the house they found photographs of women, some of whom appeared to one officer to be unconscious or dead, and other items later shown at trial. On an aluminum clipboard on the dining room table, probation officer David LeBaker found a journal. He testified that it described sexual assaults on girls and women in several states, and that after reading a few paragraphs he told his supervisor he should see it.
In a connected bedroom lay the list. It was handwritten and described ten women, each called "girl" or "lady" and followed by a place. The places included Port Costa, "Loganitas," Mount Tamalpais, Berkeley, "heldsburg," Mendocino County, a location in San Francisco and a location in Yuba County. Prosecutors came to believe that four of the entries described the four women in the charges. The other entries were still unidentified when he was tried.
Further searches took place on April 23 and May 7, 2010, according to the Marin County prosecutor's presentation at the preliminary hearing. The lead investigator for the Nevada Department of Public Safety, Richard Brown, testified that it took five detectives eight weeks to process everything found. The material included ledgers and calendars, drawings, photographs and crime magazines. Naso also kept a safe deposit box at a bank. In it investigators found photographs, newspaper material, the obituaries of two of the women, and the passport and driver's license of a woman named Sara Dylan.
Some news reports later dated the probation search to 2009. The court testimony, the AP and the Appeal-Democrat all put it in April 2010; 2009 was the year of the theft that put him on probation.
The list and the photographs pointed investigators to old cases in three California counties. Washoe County Sheriff Mike Haley helped set up a Nevada task force that contacted agencies across the country, and detectives in Marin, Contra Costa and Yuba counties reopened their files. A San Anselmo police detective told the AP that investigators were looking for cases in which women had been strangled and left in rural areas.
The strongest physical evidence was in the Roggasch case. A Contra Costa County criminalist, Tuan Nguyen, testified at the preliminary hearing that clothing items found in the case carried the DNA of Naso's former wife and genetic material from two men, one of whom was likely Naso. ABC7 later reported that there was no indication his wife had played any part in the crime. In the Colon case, material from under her fingernails gave a partial DNA match.
Naso spent about a year in custody in El Dorado County on the probation violation. On a Monday in April 2011, as he was released from the El Dorado County Jail, Marin County sheriff's detectives arrested him in South Lake Tahoe and booked him on four counts of murder, each with a special circumstance that made him eligible for the death penalty. Marin County District Attorney Ed Berberian announced the charges the next day. The three counties agreed that all four cases would be tried in Marin. "During that arrest, investigators found items by Mr. Naso that implicated him in multiple murders of young women," Berberian said of the Reno search. The acting director of the Nevada Department of Public Safety, Chris Perry, said investigators thought there were other victims they had not yet found.
Naso's former wife told the AP she was upset, and then declined to say more. A longtime neighbor of hers described him as a strange, quiet man who had sounded caring.
Prosecutors told the court Naso had up to $1 million in assets, enough to hire a lawyer. He chose to represent himself. A Marin County judge allowed it, and Deputy Public Defender Pedro Oliveros was assigned as advisory counsel.
The preliminary hearing opened in Marin County Superior Court on January 11, 2012, which Bay City News noted was 35 years to the day after Roxene Roggasch's body was found. Naso, 78, appeared in leg shackles. Judge Andrew Sweet repeatedly warned him to ask questions instead of commenting on the evidence. When the prosecution offered the photographs and collages from his home, Naso objected, asked what their significance was, said none of the people pictured was dead, and called the material disgusting. Cross-examining the probation officer who found the list, he asked how owning a list could be a crime.
At the hearing a detective, Ryan Petersen, testified about Naso's explanation for the photographs in his safe deposit box, and Naso said he had made very few visits to Marin County. He also said the women in his pictures were dates and girlfriends who had posed willingly. "This has nothing to do with power but with rapport," he said.
Around the same time, Healdsburg police reopened the case of an unidentified woman found in 1983. One entry on the list read "girl near Healdsburg." Police said they hoped DNA from a new autopsy would lead to her family.
The AP reported in January 2012 that authorities in New York had also examined Naso in connection with three killings of girls in the Rochester area in the early 1970s, and that the New York investigation had ended. Naso pleaded not guilty to all four California counts, and the case went to trial.
Jury selection began at the end of April 2013. The prosecutors, Deputy District Attorneys Rosemary Slote and Dori Ahana, argued that Naso had picked up young women who worked as sex workers, drugged them, photographed them while they were unconscious, strangled them and left their bodies in remote places. They also argued that the killings had been committed in the course of sexual battery and false imprisonment, and that his photographs showed a drive to dominate and control women. Pathologists testified that all four women had died of asphyxiation, due or likely due to strangulation. In her opening statement Slote called him a serial rapist and murderer, and read entries from the journal, including one about an assault in the Berkeley Hills in 1961 for which he had been arrested at the time. Prosecutors said that woman would testify. Prosecutors showed jurors photographs of the women as they were found.
Naso opened his defense in a blue suit and tie. He told the jurors he had waited two years and two months to tell his side, called the prosecution's case theories and opinions, and denied killing anyone. "I dated, I danced, I took pictures, but I don't kill people, and there's no evidence of that," he said. He told them that not one picture of a dead person had been found in his home, called the clothing evidence inconclusive, and dismissed a journal entry as "loose talk." His opening statement lasted about two hours and ten minutes, and he showed about 50 of his photographs. He asked the jury to acquit him so he could go home and see his children.
He did not testify. Reports differ on how many witnesses he called: the AP gave seven in August 2013 and five in November 2013.
In closing, Slote linked each of the women to him through the list, the photographs and the mementos from the safe deposit box, and reminded the jury that his DNA had been found in connection with two of the victims. Naso's closing argument took all of one Friday and half of the following Monday. He portrayed himself as a confused, cantankerous grandfather and said he was being prosecuted for unusual sexual tastes he had never acted on. He said his DNA showed at most that he may have had sex with Roxene Roggasch, not that he had killed her, that the obituaries meant nothing, and that no witness had seen him with any of the women on the last day of their lives. The judge repeatedly told him to stop discussing evidence that was not in the record and warned that he could end the argument and have a public defender finish it.
During the closing week the judge halted proceedings because jurors might have seen a sign on a pickup truck in the courthouse parking lot. Roxene Roggasch's brother had written on it that Naso had killed his sister and asked for money; he said he was out of money and wanted to stay for the end of the trial. The judge found that no juror had seen it, and the trial went on.
The jury of six men and six women deliberated about eight hours over two days. On Tuesday, August 20, 2013, it found Naso guilty of four counts of first-degree murder and found true the special circumstance of multiple murder, which made him eligible for the death penalty. A lawyer who had watched the trial told KQED that the prosecution had argued the DNA evidence very effectively. A former prosecutor told the AP that the age of the case had made it a hard one to bring.
The penalty phase began on September 4, 2013. Before it opened, Judge Sweet ruled on what the jury could hear. He allowed testimony from women who said Naso had assaulted them, including a former girlfriend who said he had choked her until she lost consciousness and later sent her threatening letters. He excluded two photographs from the safe deposit box that showed a woman who appeared to be dead, saying he was uncomfortable admitting them without more information about who she was. Naso, at the same hearing, told the court it had not been proved that he committed the murders.
Prosecutors then presented evidence that he had killed two other women. Sharieea Patton, 56, was found in Tiburon, Marin County, in January 1981. A pathologist testified that she had been strangled. She had lived in a San Francisco building that Naso managed, and his writings listed her twice: as the seventh entry on the list of ten, and on a longer list of 40. Her daughter identified a white rabbit fur coat worn by a woman in one of his photographs as her mother's. He had not been charged with her death, because investigators had not finished their inquiry before the trial began.
Sara Dylan, whom ABC7 described as a follower of the singer Bob Dylan, died in 1992; her remains were identified in Nevada County. Naso had her passport and driver's license in his safe deposit box, along with a handwritten note bearing a date that prosecutors said might be the date of her death, and prosecutors said she too was on the list of ten. He was never charged with her death.
Naso's statement to the jury was brief and mixed. "All of these victims, their families, their daughters, my heart goes out to them, but I am not responsible," he said. He told the jurors he did not deserve to die, that he had a reverence for life and cared for others, and that he had been an advocate for people with mental illness through the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, visiting hospitals and other facilities. He said he had made mistakes, but that his good days and good relationships outweighed what a few people were saying. His courtroom manner grew sharper as the hearing went on; at one point the judge nearly removed him after he compared lawyers to prostitutes, and later warned him to act his age.
Roxene Roggasch's son, Carmen Colon's two daughters and Pamela Parsons's daughter gave their statements. Before deliberations Naso was allowed ten extra minutes to reopen his argument, and told the jury he had regrets and should be given life, not death. On September 17, 2013, after less than five hours of deliberation, the jury recommended death. District Attorney Berberian said the verdict showed that an elderly defendant who was a serial killer could not expect only life without parole. Dori Ahana called it justice for the victims.
On November 22, 2013, Judge Sweet followed the jury's recommendation. He sentenced Naso to death for the murders of Carmen Colon, Pamela Parsons and Tracy Tafoya, and to life in prison without parole for the murder of Roxene Roggasch. Naso said again that he was not guilty and called the evidence inflammatory and political.
Three days later, in the Marin County jail, he gave his first interview, more than 90 minutes long, to Dan Noyes of the ABC7 I-Team. He said he was angry about his arrest, that the state had not proved its case, and that he had no regrets. Asked who the unidentified women on the list were, he said to ask the prosecution or the judge. In a second part of the interview he denied ever killing anyone and said he was saving the meaning of the list for his appeal. He blamed his conviction on what he called a corrupt prosecution and a biased judge, and said he would spend his life in prison writing stories and making appeals.
In December 2013 Judge James T. Chou ordered him to repay Marin County $170,949.70 for the cost of his defense, including the public defender's office, defense investigators and copies of the prosecution's documents. A court inquiry had found that between July 2011 and July 2012 Naso transferred $295,000 to his disabled son, including gold coins, and that he owned two properties in Reno. The county said it would seek a lien on them.
A California death sentence brings an automatic appeal to the state Supreme Court. Naso's appeal, People v. Naso, case S214917, was still at the briefing stage a decade after the trial: in June 2023 the court extended the time to file his opening brief to August 21, 2023, and in February 2024 it extended it again to April 22, 2024. No ruling on the appeal had been reported by September 2025. In September 2025 ABC7 reported that he was appealing on the ground that the trial judge had made errors, including a motion arguing that the judge should not have let him represent himself because he was a naive defendant. "This trial should be reversed. And my sentence should be reversed," he told Noyes.
Naso was taken to San Quentin State Prison after sentencing. He was later moved from San Quentin's death row to the California Men's Colony in San Luis Obispo. In September 2025, at 91, he called Noyes from the California Health Care Facility in Stockton, a prison hospital. He said he had broken his hip after another prisoner pushed over his wheelchair, that he could not walk or stand, and that he spent most of his time in bed. He said he had written to a celebrity in May 2025 asking for help with a compassionate release.
The four convictions are the only killings for which Naso has been tried. The other cases tied to him rest on prosecutors' penalty-phase evidence, on investigators' theories, or on what a fellow prisoner says he was told. None has been charged, and he denies them all.
Sharieea Patton and Sara Dylan were presented as additional victims at the penalty phase. The jury heard the evidence; no court has convicted him of either death.
In September 2025 ABC7 reported that Daly City police had linked him to their oldest cold case, the death of Charlotte Cook, 19, who left Oakland in January 1974 to visit her sister in San Francisco and was found strangled in Daly City. The link was circumstantial. A retired investigator, Ken Mains, pointed to her double initials and to the list entry "girl from Miami near down peninsula," which a former death row prisoner, William Noguera, said Naso had discussed with him and which Mains tied to Naso's years in Oakland. A former Daly City detective told ABC7 he believed there was probable cause for an arrest. Naso declined to answer the police's questions. Her daughters told ABC7 that her death still hurt the family. Daly City police also suspected him in a 1987 killing.
Noguera, who spent years in conversation with Naso at San Quentin and wrote a book about him, has said Naso admitted killing more than two dozen women. He also said Naso wrote a letter describing a woman who answered a modeling advertisement in the Berkeley Barb; Mains identified her as Lynn Ruth Connes and matched her to the "girl from Berkeley" entry on the list. Noguera has admitted that he obtained the letter by inventing a story about a friend who knew the governor. Naso told Noyes he would need to see the letter before commenting. The claims of 26 victims were promoted in a 2025 television documentary. They have not been reported as confirmed by any court or law enforcement agency.
The FBI also approached Naso about one woman on the list of ten, he told Noyes in 2025; he said he asked what he would get in return and proposed that his convictions be reversed, and the agent refused.
Before his trial Naso was examined by Rochester-area investigators in connection with the killings of three girls in the early 1970s, whose names also shared initials; one of them was also named Carmen Colon. "It's safe to say that we're looking hard at him right now," a Wayne County chief deputy said in April 2011. A DNA sample from one of the New York victims did not match him, the AP reported, and authorities had no other physical evidence connecting him to those deaths. By January 2012 the AP reported that the New York investigation had ended.
The number of victims. He was convicted of four murders. Prosecutors presented two more at the penalty phase, and ABC7 reports in 2013 and 2025 spoke of him as having been sentenced for six; that is not what the verdict covered. The figure of 26 comes from a fellow prisoner's account and has not been confirmed.
The list of ten. Prosecutors matched four entries to the women in the charges and two more to Sharieea Patton and Sara Dylan. The remaining entries, including the women near Healdsburg, on Mount Tamalpais, from Berkeley and from "Miami," were unidentified when he was sentenced. The later identifications of Lynn Ruth Connes and Charlotte Cook are investigators' theories, not court findings.
The double initials. Investigators did not say publicly whether the matching initials were a pattern or a coincidence.
The date of the search. Some reports dated the probation search to 2009; court testimony puts the searches in April and May 2010.
Ages and dates. Reports differ on Carmen Colon's age (22 or 21), Pamela Parsons's age (38 or 39) and the day Roxene Roggasch was found (January 10 or 11, 1977).
1950s: Naso serves four years in the Air Force.
1955: First entry in his criminal record, according to the Appeal-Democrat (2011).
1962: He marries; the marriage lasts until 1980.
1969: He moves west from the Rochester area.
January 10 or 11, 1977: Roxene Roggasch, 18, is found near Fairfax, Marin County.
August 13, 1978: Carmen Colon, 22, is found near Port Costa, Contra Costa County.
January 1981: Sharieea Patton, 56, is found in Tiburon.
1983: An unidentified woman is found near Healdsburg.
1992: Sara Dylan dies; her remains are later identified in Nevada County.
September 19, 1993: Pamela Parsons, 38, is found in rural Yuba County.
August 5, 1994: Tracy Tafoya, 31, is last known to be alive; she is reported missing the next day and later found near Marysville.
1994: Naso is convicted of petty theft in Yuba City; around this time he moves to Reno.
2009: A grocery store theft leads to a felony larceny conviction and probation.
April 13, 2010: Nevada probation officers search his Reno home and arrest him for having ammunition.
April 23 and May 7, 2010: Further searches of the house.
April 2011: Marin County detectives arrest him in South Lake Tahoe as he leaves El Dorado County Jail; he is charged with four murders.
January 11, 2012: The preliminary hearing opens in Marin County Superior Court.
January 2012: Healdsburg police exhume the 1983 victim for DNA testing.
April 29, 2013: Jury selection begins.
August 20, 2013: The jury finds him guilty of four first-degree murders with a multiple-murder special circumstance.
September 17, 2013: The jury recommends death.
November 22, 2013: Judge Andrew Sweet sentences him to death for three murders and life without parole for the Roggasch murder.
December 13, 2013: He is ordered to repay $170,949.70 in defense costs.
June 22, 2023, and February 13, 2024: The California Supreme Court extends the time for his opening brief on automatic appeal.
September 2025: ABC7 reports him held at the California Health Care Facility in Stockton, aged 91, and reports new investigations by Daly City police and the FBI.