Joseph Michael Nissensohn was convicted in Washington State in 1991 of the second-degree murder of Sally Jo Tsaggaris, a 46-year-old woman stabbed in a van in Tillicum, south of Tacoma, in 1989. He was also convicted of the attempted murder of his then wife. He served his sentence, and in early 2008, as he came to the end of it, prosecutors in two California counties moved to keep him in custody. El Dorado County charged him with the 1989 murder of Kathy Graves, a 15-year-old girl from South Lake Tahoe. Monterey County added the 1981 killings of two runaway girls from Seaside, Tammy Lynn Jarschke, 13, and Tanya Jones, 14.
The three California cases were tried together in South Lake Tahoe in 2013. Much of the evidence came from the earlier statements of his former wife, Cheryl Rose, who had died in 2010. On October 31, 2013, a jury convicted Nissensohn of three counts of first-degree murder. In December it voted for the death penalty, and in June 2014 a judge imposed it. His automatic appeal to the California Supreme Court is still in briefing. As of October 2026 he remains on California's list of condemned people.
Little about Nissensohn's early life appears in the court and news sources used for this account. He was 57 in February 2008, according to the Associated Press, and 62 at his California trial. California's condemned list, which records ages at the time of each offense, gives his age as 30 at the time of the 1981 killings and 38 at the time of the 1989 killing in South Lake Tahoe.
By the late 1980s he was living in Tacoma, Washington, with Cheryl Rose and her son. Rose later testified that both of them were using drugs heavily, that their relationship was an open one, and that she stayed with him because she feared he would hurt her son if she left. He often threatened that, she said. A woman named Theresa Robertson, who rented him a room in South Lake Tahoe in May 1989, remembered him as odd but charming and charismatic; she told CBS Sacramento in 2013 that she had needed a roommate because she was short on rent, and that she had thought the worst he could be was a good con man.
In 2008 a Washington psychologist who reviewed his history for the state Attorney General's Office concluded that he had five mental disorders and was, in the words quoted by the Associated Press, "committed to the exploitation of others for his personal pleasure." That assessment was made for a civil commitment case and was never tested at a hearing, because Nissensohn was taken to California first.
Tammy Lynn Jarschke was 13 and Tanya Jones was 14. Both were living in a foster home in Seaside, on Monterey Bay, in June 1981. They ran away together on June 24, 1981. KION, the Monterey television station, reported in 2013 that they were last seen with Nissensohn on the day they disappeared. The state's condemned list gives June 25, 1981, as the date of the offense.
Tammy was an only child. Her cousin Butch Jarschke, a year older than she was, told KION after the death verdict that not knowing what had happened to her had been heartbreaking for the family, and that the family had lost a great deal. Her mother, Penny Jarschke, told the court at sentencing in 2014 that the killing had destroyed her life. She said she had suffered a nervous breakdown and had been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.
Fewer details about Tanya's life appear in the sources. She and Tammy were both described in court as Seaside residents, and both were runaways from the same foster home when they died.
The girls' bodies were found on September 9, 1981, in a remote wooded area of Monterey County near Seaside, on a ridge in the Carmel Valley area, after about three months. The case went unsolved for more than 20 years.
Sally Jo Tsaggaris was 46. She died in Tillicum, a community south of Tacoma, in 1989, and her body was found in May 1989. The Associated Press, summarizing the Washington case in 2008, said prosecutors there had shown that Nissensohn stabbed her during a drug-fueled night in the back of a van, and that the woman who was soon to be his wife was present.
Rose later said that after Tsaggaris died, Nissensohn kept telling her that she had been there and was an accessory. The couple left Tacoma. Within days, according to CBS Sacramento, Nissensohn, Rose and her child had moved into a room in Theresa Robertson's South Lake Tahoe home. The arrangement lasted about six weeks. Robertson said he never paid rent, and that when she asked for her key back, he called the police.
The medical evidence about Tsaggaris's death was revisited at the 2013 California trial, because prosecutors there used the Washington killing as part of their case. A forensic pathologist called by the defense, Dr. Paul Herrmann, reviewed the autopsy by Dr. John Howard and told the jury he was impressed with it. Both doctors concluded that she had died at least two to three days before she was found, and both thought it unlikely that she had been killed where her body lay. Toxicology found methamphetamine in her system.
Kathy Graves was 15 and lived with her father, Barry Graves, in a trailer park in South Lake Tahoe. Her mother, Carla, had been a teenage mother and had lost custody of her. Kathy's aunt and uncle, Sherry and Ivan Parsley, became the adults she turned to. She called her aunt two or three times a day, often ate dinner with the family and sometimes stayed the night. When her father locked her out of the trailer, she went to the Parsleys. They offered to adopt her, and her father refused.
The Parsleys described Barry Graves to the 2013 jury in harsh terms. Ivan Parsley said he had neglected his daughter completely and treated her like a servant, and he believed Kathy had run away because of it. In the summer of 1989, when she was about 15, Kathy's calls to her aunt stopped. After two weeks of silence the Parsleys went to the trailer and confronted her father, who then reported her missing. The family searched without success. Sherry Parsley said she sensed that something bad had happened. The Tahoe Daily Tribune later described the Parsleys as the aunt and uncle who raised her.
The condemned list gives August 9, 1989, as the date of her death.
Most of what is known about Kathy's last day comes from Cheryl Rose, whose testimony at a 2010 preliminary hearing was read aloud to the jury in 2013 after her death. Rose said that she and Nissensohn picked up Kathy, a teenager from the neighborhood, in South Lake Tahoe, and that Kathy smoked marijuana with them. A psychologist's report in the Washington Attorney General's file said that Nissensohn had befriended a girl named Kathy in South Lake Tahoe in 1989 and introduced her to LSD.
According to Rose, Nissensohn drove the van to a secluded wooded area. He and Kathy walked off together, with him carrying a blanket, and he came back alone within five to ten minutes, hurrying and upset. Rose said he became emotional when he did not get what he wanted, and that he later called what had happened with Kathy "messy." She said she worried about how Kathy would get home. Nissensohn then went to a casino and stayed away for a time. Asked why she had not gone to the police, Rose said: "I'd seen him kill someone, I knew what he was capable of." She also said he had tried to kill her.
Rose and Nissensohn married on August 22, 1989. She testified that she had hoped the marriage would be a way out, and that once they were married her threat to tell what she knew no longer mattered, because she believed she could not testify against him. They traveled south and ended up in Florida, where, she said, the drug use grew worse, they took in other people, and he beat her. She sent her son to his father.
Rose eventually stayed at a shelter, away from Nissensohn. When a new man in her life began to beat her, police opened an investigation, and an officer showed her a photograph of Sally Jo Tsaggaris. That was when, she said, she understood that Sally was dead.
In 1990, Brian Jarvis, then an investigator with the Marion County Sheriff's Office in Florida, interviewed Rose in sessions recorded on audio and video. The recordings were so poor that jurors in 2013 were given a transcript. Jarvis testified that he felt she was not telling him everything, that she told different versions over time and added details, that she had lied to him, and that she was afraid of going to jail.
Washington authorities charged Nissensohn with the Tsaggaris killing. Rose was the main prosecution witness at the trial. In 1991 he was convicted of second-degree murder in Tsaggaris's death and of the attempted murder of Rose. He appealed, and on October 21, 1993, Division Two of the Washington Court of Appeals affirmed the judgment in an unpublished opinion, State v. Nissensohn, 71 Wn. App. 1041.
Several later reports state that he served 15 years for the Washington murder. He was due to be released in early February 2008.
After his Washington conviction, Nissensohn himself asked to speak to investigators about the Graves case. In 1991 he was interviewed by Sergeant Rich McGuffin of the South Lake Tahoe Police Department and Sergeant Fred Kollar of the El Dorado County Sheriff's Office. Kollar later became sheriff of El Dorado County and testified at hearings in the case.
In the interview, according to the transcript described by the Record-Courier in 2010, Nissensohn admitted that he had been in the woods with Rose and Kathy Graves on the day she died, but said that Rose had stabbed Kathy and hit her with a piece of wood. He said he wanted to give information about Rose's role and hoped to make a deal to testify against her. "I want to take her down, OK," he said. He also admitted helping to dispose of Tsaggaris's body, but said Rose had killed both women while he was out getting drugs.
The El Dorado County District Attorney's Office filed a murder charge in the Graves case in 1991, then dropped it for lack of evidence. A later district attorney, Gary Lacy, reviewed the case in 1995 and did not refile.
On August 22, 1990, hikers near the Mount Tallac trailhead at Camp Concord, on the south shore of Lake Tahoe, found a human skull. James Pullen, then a detective with the South Lake Tahoe Police Department, responded. More bone fragments were found scattered nearby, and cadaver dogs, including Pullen's own dachshund, helped find them. Pullen filmed a walk from the parking lot to the site, and the video was shown to the 2013 jury.
Alison Galloway, a professor of anthropology and campus provost at the University of California, Santa Cruz, testified that the bones were those of a teenager of European descent, consistent with Kathy Graves. Using a method based on accumulated temperature over time, she estimated that the remains had been there one to two years. She said that all of the damage to the bones had happened after death and was caused by scavenging animals, which had also scattered them. The remains were believed to be Kathy's. Her aunt and uncle said in 2014 that they were still waiting to receive them so that they could hold a memorial.
In 2005 Rose told Detective Marty Opseth that she and Nissensohn had once left her mother's home after her mother found him playing with knives.
By early 2008 the Monterey County District Attorney's Office was publicly confirming that Nissensohn was under investigation for the 1981 killings. Deputy District Attorney Ann C. Hill told the Associated Press that the FBI was analyzing DNA evidence from the case.
In El Dorado County, cold-case investigators from the Sheriff's Office and the District Attorney's Office reopened the Graves file. District Attorney Vern Pierson said the new charge came from their intensive work. The office's chief assistant, Bill Clark, was candid about the timing: "Were we aware we were on a time crunch and afraid he was going to get out? Certainly." The chief public defender, Rick Meyer, said in court papers that no new evidence had emerged since the 1995 review; the prosecutor who took over the case, Deputy District Attorney Dale Gomes, said he had not been with the office then and could not speak to the earlier decisions, but was confident of a conviction.
On January 29, 2008, days before Nissensohn was due to walk out of a Washington prison, El Dorado County filed a criminal complaint charging him with Kathy Graves's murder. The Washington Attorney General's Office had already petitioned to have him civilly committed as a sexually violent predator, and he was held in the Pierce County Jail. "The No. 1 priority right now is to keep him confined," Assistant Attorney General Joshua Choate told the Sacramento Bee.
In March 2008 Pierce County Superior Court Judge Katherine Stolz ruled that the commitment case could go forward. His lawyer, David LaCross, had argued that the 1991 conviction included no special finding that would allow indefinite commitment; the judge rejected that argument after reviewing a report by Richard Packard, a psychologist who specializes in sex offender treatment. She set a trial for October.
The commitment trial did not take place in Washington. By June 2008 Nissensohn was in the El Dorado County jail in South Lake Tahoe, and he stayed in that county's custody until his California trial.
On June 13, 2008, Judge Douglas Phimister ruled that the case should be heard in South Lake Tahoe rather than at the county seat in Placerville. Gomes asked to move it, arguing that winter weather at the lake could disrupt travel and that most witnesses were closer to Placerville; he estimated that a trial could last up to six months. Meyer said cases were customarily heard at the courthouse nearest the crime. In July 2008 Judge Suzanne Kingsbury agreed with the defense. "I think the case should be tried here," she said.
At the same hearing Kingsbury barred both sides from releasing information from about 3,000 pages of case documents, to protect the jury pool, and limited Nissensohn's access to crime-scene photographs to times when a defense lawyer was present. She refused his request for a summary dismissal on the ground that the court had not proved its jurisdiction, telling him its authority came from the California Constitution. He had also written to the court saying he had fired Meyer, then written again two days later offering to keep him if he could act as co-counsel.
In October 2008 Kingsbury granted the prosecution's motion to add the 1981 Monterey County killings to the Graves case, finding that the crimes were "connected together in their commission." The Monterey County and El Dorado County district attorneys agreed to try all three murders together. With multiple murders charged, Nissensohn became eligible for the death penalty.
The preliminary hearing began in February 2010 before Judge Kingsbury in South Lake Tahoe and was expected to last several weeks. Cheryl Rose testified. Nissensohn's lawyer, Mark Millard, moved to exclude the 1991 interview, arguing that the officers had kept questioning Nissensohn after he repeatedly asked for a lawyer. "He wanted representation, he made that clear, and the questioning should have immediately stopped. It didn't," Millard said. Prosecutors told the court they believed Nissensohn had taken Kathy into the forest near the Tallac trailhead while Rose waited in the van, and that he had lured the two Seaside girls to a secluded part of Monterey County more than eight years earlier.
In July 2010 Rose, then 52, was found dead in her home in Ocala, Florida. She had worked for five years as an investigator for the Florida Department of Children and Families in Daytona Beach until she was dismissed in April 2009. She had several medical conditions, and the Marion County Sheriff's Office was awaiting toxicology results; the cause of death had not been determined when the Daytona Beach News Journal reported it. The trial, then set for January 2011, was delayed.
Jury selection began in May 2013 in El Dorado County Superior Court at South Lake Tahoe. The court summoned hundreds of prospective jurors, and so many arrived on May 21 after a phone system failure that court staff learned of the problem only when they saw the line outside. The trial ran into the autumn. Judge Kingsbury presided. Gomes prosecuted with Deputy District Attorney Trish Kelliher; Hayes Gable III and Peter Kmeto represented Nissensohn.
Because Rose was dead, the prosecution read her 2010 testimony to the jury, with Kelliher reading Rose's answers, Kmeto reading Millard's questions and Gomes reading his own. The jury heard from Kathy's aunt and uncle, from Pullen and Galloway, and from Detective Marty Opseth. Other witnesses, according to the Mountain Democrat, included another former wife, who described Nissensohn's way of life; a woman who said he had kidnapped her after a dispute over drugs; and women who testified that he had abused them. One witness said he had been obsessed with Kathy Graves. Prosecutors told the jury that a book about the Canadian killer Paul Bernardo had been found in his jail cell.
The defense attacked Rose's credibility. Through Jarvis, the Florida investigator, Gable showed that her account had changed. In 1990 she had said she last saw Kathy leaving to hitchhike to a job; by 2007 she said she last saw her being led into the forest by Nissensohn. She first said he carried a quilt into the woods, and later described a bag containing a kitchen knife, which she said he had used on both Kathy and Tsaggaris. The defense argued that Rose, not Nissensohn, had committed at least one of the killings. Gable and Kmeto also told the jury that no DNA evidence positively linked Nissensohn to the murders, that the crime-scene work had been botched, and that witnesses' memories might have been filled in over the years.
In closing, Gomes told the jury that Nissensohn saw himself as a serial killer.
The jury of six women and six men deliberated for three days. On Thursday, October 31, 2013, the clerk read verdicts of guilty on all three counts of first-degree murder. Nissensohn, his gray hair pulled back in a ponytail, watched the clerk and the judge as the verdicts were read and did not look at his lawyers. "A very bad person is finally being held for his actions as a direct result of the efforts of a dedicated team," District Attorney Vern Pierson said.
The penalty phase, first set for November 12, was moved to December 2, 2013. The prior Washington conviction for the murder of Sally Jo Tsaggaris was part of the case for death. On Tuesday, December 10, 2013, after about 90 minutes of deliberation, the jury recommended the death penalty. Nissensohn was handcuffed at once and stared ahead toward the judge.
A juror, Bob Grant, told Lake Tahoe News that jurors felt the weight of the responsibility and worked hard to reach the right decision. Lieutenant Pete Van Arnum of the El Dorado County Sheriff's Office, who had attended the trial, called Nissensohn dangerous and the verdict appropriate, and wondered aloud whether these were his only crimes.
Judge Kingsbury formally sentenced Nissensohn to death on Thursday, June 5, 2014, upholding the jury's recommendation and ordering the sentence carried out at San Quentin unless his automatic appeal to the California Supreme Court succeeded. She said she took no pleasure in it and that no judge wanted to impose such a sentence, but that it was California law and she had sworn to uphold it. She said he had preyed on vulnerable runaways.
Family members of the girls spoke. Penny Jarschke described what her daughter's death had done to her. Sherry and Ivan Parsley said the sentence was too lenient. Relatives said they doubted he would ever be executed and took comfort that he could no longer harm anyone. Gomes said the sentence now depended on officials being willing to carry it out, and called them "gutless bureaucrats." California had not carried out an execution since 2006. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation received Nissensohn on June 12, 2014.
The case became a local example in the argument over capital punishment. Ron Briggs, a former El Dorado County supervisor who in 2017 challenged Proposition 66, said the prosecution had cost the county 3.1 million dollars from its general fund, equal in 2013 to two-thirds of its contingency reserve. He estimated that a sentence of life without parole would have cost about 750,000 dollars. Pierson, for his part, credited the county's cold-case task force, formed by the District Attorney's Office, the Sheriff's Office and the South Lake Tahoe police, with helping to win the conviction.
In December 2015 reporters touring death row at San Quentin spoke to Nissensohn through his cell bars. He was 64, his appeals were only beginning, and the San Jose Mercury News estimated that they could take 25 to 30 years. "By the time they get to me, I'll be long gone," he said.
Every California death judgment is appealed automatically to the state Supreme Court. Nissensohn's case is People v. Nissensohn, S219152. The court's minutes show a long briefing process. In February 2020 his appointed counsel, Mark D. Greenberg, was still preparing the opening brief. From 2022 to 2025 the state, represented by Deputy Attorney General Matthew A. Kearney, received a series of extensions for its response; in July 2025 the court gave it until September 2, 2025, and said there would be no further extensions. In January 2026 Greenberg was granted time to file the reply brief, and on May 27, 2026, the court extended that deadline to July 27, 2026, noting counsel's estimate that the brief would be filed by September 23, 2026. No oral argument or decision in the case was found when this account was checked in October 2026.
The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation's condemned list, updated October 2, 2026, lists Nissensohn twice, once for each of the two offense dates in his judgment (June 25, 1981, and August 9, 1989). Both entries give his age as 75, his sentencing date as June 5, 2014, his reception date as June 12, 2014, and the trial county as El Dorado. The list does not show which prison holds him. He remains under sentence of death, with his appeal pending.
Proven and final: the 1991 Washington convictions for the second-degree murder of Sally Jo Tsaggaris and the attempted murder of Cheryl Rose, affirmed on appeal in 1993.
Convicted, appeal pending: the first-degree murders of Tammy Lynn Jarschke, Tanya Jones and Kathy Graves.
Denied by him: in 1991 Nissensohn told investigators that Rose had killed both Kathy Graves and Tsaggaris; his trial lawyers argued in 2013 that Rose committed at least one of the killings. The jury rejected that defense.
Never charged: Rose told investigators that he was involved in two killings in Oklahoma and one in Nevada. Court filings described in 2008 gave no details, and El Dorado County's chief assistant district attorney said at the time that he was unaware of those allegations. No charges were ever filed.
Details that vary between sources: the year of the Washington killing (1989 in most reports and in his own account, 1990 in a 2008 Associated Press summary); the year of the Washington conviction (1991 in most reports, 1990 in some Lake Tahoe News articles); where Kathy's skull was found (near the Mount Tallac trailhead in most reports, near Fallen Leaf Lake in one); and the spelling of Tanya Jones's first name.
June 24, 1981: Tammy Lynn Jarschke, 13, and Tanya Jones, 14, run away from a foster home in Seaside, California.
June 25, 1981: offense date for their murders on the CDCR condemned list.
September 9, 1981: the girls' bodies are found in a wooded area of Monterey County.
May 1989: Sally Jo Tsaggaris, 46, is found dead in Tillicum, Washington; days later Nissensohn, Rose and her son move into a room in South Lake Tahoe.
Summer 1989: Kathy Graves, 15, stops calling her aunt; she is reported missing two weeks later.
August 9, 1989: offense date for Kathy Graves's murder on the CDCR list.
August 22, 1989: Nissensohn marries Cheryl Rose.
1990: Rose is interviewed by the Marion County Sheriff's Office in Florida.
August 22, 1990: hikers find a skull near the Mount Tallac trailhead.
1991: Washington jury convicts Nissensohn of second-degree murder and attempted murder; he is interviewed by South Lake Tahoe and El Dorado County investigators; an El Dorado County murder charge is filed and dropped.
October 21, 1993: Washington Court of Appeals affirms the conviction.
1995: El Dorado County review; no charge refiled.
2005: Rose tells Detective Marty Opseth about Nissensohn and knives.
January 29, 2008: El Dorado County charges him with Kathy Graves's murder.
March 2008: Pierce County judge allows a sexually violent predator case to proceed.
June 2008: he is in the El Dorado County jail at South Lake Tahoe.
October 2008: the Monterey County murders are added to the case.
February 2010: preliminary hearing; Rose testifies.
July 2010: Rose is found dead in Ocala, Florida.
May 2013: jury selection begins.
October 31, 2013: convicted of three counts of first-degree murder.
December 10, 2013: jury recommends death.
June 5, 2014: sentenced to death.
June 12, 2014: received by CDCR.
December 2015: speaks to reporters on San Quentin's death row.
May 27, 2026: California Supreme Court extends the reply brief deadline to July 27, 2026.
October 2, 2026: still listed as condemned.