When Nevada probation officers searched Joseph Naso's house in Reno in 2010, on what began as a routine check after a theft conviction, they found photographs of women who appeared drugged, unconscious or dead, some posed with mannequin parts; a diary describing how he stalked and sexually assaulted women; and a handwritten list of ten women identified not by name but by place. Item two read girl near Port Costa. Item three read girl from Loganitas, which investigators matched to a body found near Lagunitas in Marin County. Other entries included a lady from 839 Leavenworth and a girl in woodland near Nevada County. Accounts date the search to 2009 and to April 2010.
He was born on January 7, 1934, in Rochester, New York, served in the Air Force in the 1950s, and married. The marriage lasted eighteen years, and after the divorce he kept visiting his former wife in the San Francisco Bay Area. Their son developed schizophrenia, and Naso spent his later years caring for him. He took classes at San Francisco colleges in the 1970s, lived in the Mission District and then in Piedmont, and later in Yuba City, Sacramento and, from 2004, Reno. He worked as a freelance photographer and had a long record of petty crimes such as shoplifting, which he was still committing in his seventies. People who knew him called him Crazy Joe.
Four killings were charged. Roxene Roggasch, eighteen, was found strangled near Fairfax in Marin County on January 10, 1977, dead less than a day; the police thought she had worked as a sex worker, which her family denied. His DNA was found on the pantyhose she wore. Carmen Lorraine Colon, twenty-two, was found on August 13, 1978, beside the Carquinez Scenic Highway between Crockett and Port Costa, by a Highway Patrol officer answering a report of a cattle shooting; DNA from beneath her fingernails tied him to her. Pamela Ruth Parsons, thirty-eight, a waitress who worked near Cooper Avenue in Yuba City, where he then lived, was found in Yuba County on September 19, 1993; he had photographed her. Tracy Lynn Tafoya, thirty-one, was found near Marysville Cemetery on August 14, 1994, drugged, raped and strangled, about a week after her death. All four had first and last names beginning with the same letter, which gave the case its name, the double initial killings.
On April 11, 2011, Marin County deputies took him into custody as he was released from jail in El Dorado County, and he was charged with the four murders. He represented himself at trial in Marin County Superior Court with advisory counsel. The prosecutors, Dori Ahana and Rosemary Slote, told the jury he had lured sex workers with alcohol and drugs, drugged them unconscious, bound and gagged them, photographed them and strangled them, and that he kept newspaper articles about the killings with the photographs in a safe deposit box. "I'm not the monster that killed these women," he told the jury. "I dated, I danced, I took pictures, but I don't kill people."
On August 20, 2013, after about eight hours over two days, the jury convicted him on all four counts, and on September 17 it recommended death after about four hours. On November 22, 2013, Judge Andrew Sweet refused his motions for a new trial and to reduce the penalty, told him he was "a pathological predator and cold-blooded killer" who had shown no remorse, and sentenced him to death for Colon, Parsons and Tafoya and to life without parole for Roggasch, because California had no operative death penalty in 1977. Naso insisted someone else had committed the murders, that evidence had been planted and that the case was political. Carmen Colon's daughter Rachel Smith told the court she did not want him to die but to sit alone with everything taken from him. Roxene Roggasch's son, Shane Ashby, said Naso had robbed him of his childhood and his mother, and told him, "I want you to live to be 110 years old."
At the penalty phase prosecutors introduced evidence that he had also killed Sharileea Patton, fifty-six, whose body washed ashore near the Naval Net Depot at Tiburon in January 1981, and who had lived in a residence he managed and been photographed by him; and Sara Dylan, thirty-eight, born Renee Shapiro, last seen heading to a Bob Dylan concert at the Warfield in San Francisco in May 1992 and believed killed in or near Nevada County. He was not charged with either. Investigators have linked other deaths to him, including Charlotte Cook, nineteen, in 1974, Lynn Ruth Connes, twenty, last seen in Berkeley in 1976, Pamela Lambson, nineteen, who went to Fisherman's Wharf in 1977 to meet a man who had offered to photograph her, and Rebecca Jean Dunn, twenty-one, missing in 1979, and his diary's mention of a girl in Healdsburg led investigators to an unidentified woman found in 1983. None of those has been tried.
He was long named a person of interest in the Alphabet murders of three girls in the Rochester area in the early 1970s, whose names followed the same pattern and one of whom was also named Carmen Colon. DNA testing showed he did not match the semen recovered from one of those victims, Wanda Walkowicz. He remains under sentence of death in California.