Joseph Naso was born in 1934 in New York state and worked for decades as a commercial photographer, travelling constantly between New York and California. He lived in Rochester in the 1970s and later in Yuba City and Reno.
Four killings were eventually proved against him. Roxene Roggasch, eighteen, was found in Marin County in 1977, near White's Hill outside Fairfax. Carmen Colon, twenty-two, was found near Port Costa in Contra Costa County in 1978. Pamela Parsons, thirty-eight, was found in Yuba County in 1993, and Tracy Tafoya, thirty-one, in the same county in 1994. All four were strangled and left beside rural roads, and all four had first and last names beginning with the same letter, which is where the name the Double Initial Killer comes from. Prosecutors described the victims as sex workers.
The cases stayed cold for decades. In 2009 probation officers in Reno went to his house to carry out a routine firearms check and found what the reporting describes as photographs of women who appeared drugged or dead, a journal of detailed accounts of rape, and a handwritten list of ten entries identifying locations rather than names. Item three read girl from Loganitas, which prosecutors matched to Roggasch, found near Lagunitas in Marin County. Item two read girl near Port Costa. DNA taken from beneath Carmen Colon's fingernails tied him to her death, and he had photographed Pamela Parsons.
He was arrested on April 11, 2011, taken into custody by Marin County deputies as he was released from a jail in El Dorado County, where he had been held over a probation violation following a theft conviction.
He represented himself at trial in Marin County Superior Court with advisory counsel, and was convicted on all four counts on August 20, 2013. The jury recommended death after about four hours. On November 22, 2013 Judge Andrew Sweet passed sentence: death for Colon, Parsons and Tafoya, and life without parole for Roggasch, because California had no operative death penalty in 1977 when she was killed. Naso told the court he felt sorry for the victims and their families but was not guilty of the crimes.
Two further deaths have been attached to him without charge. Sharileea Patton, fifty-six, was found strangled in Marin County in 1981, her body in two rubbish bags; prosecutors said new evidence tied him to it during the penalty phase. He is also a suspect in a killing in Nevada County in 1992.
He has long been named a person of interest in the Alphabet Murders, the killings of three girls in the Rochester area of upstate New York in the early 1970s whose names followed the same double initial pattern. One of those victims was also called Carmen Colon, a different woman from his California victim of that name. He has never been charged in New York.