The jury in San Rafael that convicted Joseph Naso on August 20, 2013, was asked to decide four deaths. The most recent was from 1994. The earliest had come to light near Fairfax, in Marin County, in January 1977, when the woman at the center of it, Roxene Roggasch, was 18. Naso had been arrested at 77. Between the first of the four deaths and the verdict lay 36 years and seven months.
The usual shorthand is "decades." Each gap is measured from the date of the crime to the date of a guilty plea or a verdict, and where the day is not in the record it is given as a range. Most of these cases were opened by DNA, a technology that did not exist when the first officers arrived. Not all. One turned on the arithmetic of a prison release date, one on a probation officer’s routine visit, and one on a patrol officer who sent old evidence back to a laboratory twenty-five years after the fact. What the wait did to evidence, witnesses and families runs through all of them.
Naso, a freelance photographer with a record of petty theft that went back to 1955, was living in Reno, Nevada, on probation for a grocery store theft when two Nevada probation officers visited his house on April 13, 2010. The officers' testimony at his preliminary hearing was that they checked for violations and came across ammunition. Searches that followed turned up hundreds of photographs, a journal, and a handwritten list of ten women, each described by a place and not a name. Prosecutors came to believe that four of the entries described women who had died in Northern California between 1977 and 1994, and DNA tests connected him to at least two of them. Detectives from Marin County arrested him in April 2011.
The four cases were Roxene Roggasch, 18, in January 1977; Carmen Colon, 22, whose death came to light near Port Costa, in Contra Costa County, on August 13, 1978; Pamela Parsons, 38, in Yuba County in September 1993; and Tracy Tafoya, 31, in Yuba County in 1994. Material from under Colon’s fingernails had retained enough DNA to yield a partial match to Naso, the prosecution said. In 1993 and 1994, Naso was living in Yuba City.
He defended himself during a two-month trial. On August 20, 2013, KQED reported, the jury convicted him on all four counts. On September 17 the jury recommended death. On November 22, 2013, Judge Andrew Sweet sentenced him to death for the murders of Colon, Parsons and Tafoya and to life in prison without parole for the murder of Roggasch. The gap between crime and verdict was 36 years and seven months in the Roggasch case, counting from January 1977, and about 35 years in the Colon case, counting from August 1978. The gaps for the Parsons and Tafoya cases were about 20 and 19 years.
The penalty phase put the years on display. Roggasch’s son had been two years old when she died; he told the jury to imagine life without a mother. Colon’s two daughters testified that they had no memory of her at all. Parsons’s daughter, also two when her mother died, said her first memories were of foster care in Kentucky. Roggasch’s brother told ABC7 that he did not want a death sentence for Naso but life without parole among ordinary prisoners. Investigators and a fellow prisoner’s account have linked Naso to other deaths without producing charges; in September 2025 ABC7 reported that he had been linked to the oldest cold case in Daly City, from 1974. He has denied every killing.
The wait in the Canaday case was spent almost entirely in a prison cell. John Dwight Canaday, a 24-year-old Seattle Water Department worker and Navy veteran, was arrested on February 22, 1969, in a kidnapping case. In March 1969 he confessed to the deaths of two young women, Mary Annabelle Bjornson, 21, and Lynne Carol Tuski, 20, both killed in January of that year. A King County jury convicted him of two counts of first-degree murder, with attempted rape and rape, and sentenced him to death; judgment was entered on September 26, 1969. The Washington Supreme Court affirmed the verdict on September 23, 1971, and a ruling of the United States Supreme Court in 1972 spared him the death sentence.
A third death was never charged to him in those years. Sandra Bowman, 16, newly married and pregnant, died in Seattle on December 17, 1968. Her husband was suspected at first, as Seattle police later acknowledged, and was eventually cleared. No one was charged. A cold-case team matched DNA evidence from 1968 to Canaday’s profile in the state database, and in 2004, in prison, he was interviewed by detectives. He blamed a bitter divorce, the Associated Press reported, and spoke of "a lot of anger at myself and immaturity." He pleaded guilty to first-degree murder in 2004.
The gap, December 17, 1968 to 2004, is between 35 and 36 years; the day of the plea has not been reported. The King County prosecutor’s office called it the oldest cold case solved in Washington state. The answer arrived 35 years after Canaday had been sentenced for two other killings, and he had spent those years in prison. Canaday died at Clallam Bay Corrections Center in December 2012, aged 68, still serving three life sentences.
David Fuller was arrested on December 3, 2020, 33 years after the deaths of two women in Tunbridge Wells, Kent. Wendy Knell, 25, was killed in June 1987, and Caroline Pierce, 20, in November. Pierce’s death came to light on Romney Marsh, in Kent, on December 15, 1987. In 1987 DNA profiling was in its infancy. Forensic samples were taken in both cases and from many local men, and nothing matched. Prowler reports from the period, including one from a woman who later said she recognized Fuller, did not lead police to him.
The next three decades were spent waiting for technology to catch up. In 1999 scientists obtained a full DNA profile of the killer from evidence in Knell’s case and loaded it onto the National DNA Database; it matched no one. From 2007 the National Crime Agency supported Kent Police with familial DNA searching, the method that looks for profiles close enough to indicate a relative. In 2019 a fresh examination of the Knell evidence recovered DNA that, for the first time, linked the two murders forensically. A new familial search produced about 1,000 names, from which about 90 people were identified. Voluntary samples were taken from the first 20, and one came from a man whose profile had not been on the database during earlier reviews. Through him, police identified a relative, David Fuller, an electrician who lived in Heathfield, East Sussex.
Prosecutors told the jury that the DNA from Knell’s case made him a billion times more likely to be the source than anyone else, and that cells from Pierce’s tights gave a match 160,000 times stronger for him than for any other person. Partway through his trial at Maidstone Crown Court on November 4, 2021, Fuller pleaded guilty to both murders. The gap from June 23, 1987, to that plea is 34 years and four months; from the November 1987 killing it is 33 years and 11 months. On December 15, 2021, Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb imposed a whole life order.
In those 33 years, Fuller had worked for the National Health Service. He took his first hospital job in 1989, less than two years after the murders, and was promoted to a supervisory post in 2002. When police searched his house in Heathfield they discovered recordings showing that over many years he had committed offenses against the dead in two hospital mortuaries. He pleaded guilty to 51 further offenses in 2021, 44 of them concerning 78 identified women and girls, and to 16 more in 2022. An independent inquiry chaired by Sir Jonathan Michael published its first report in November 2023.
Carl Eugene Watts, who used the name Coral, was never tried in Texas for any of the 13 killings he confessed to in 1982. He was 28. Prosecutors in Houston had no evidence tying him to a killing; in return for a full confession they granted him immunity for the deaths he described, and he pleaded guilty to burglary with intent to commit murder and received 60 years. Michigan, which had refused to join the agreement, kept its own files.
The deal carried its own clock. A deadly-weapon finding entered in 1982 was deleted by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals in 1989, and under Texas mandatory supervision law his release was scheduled for 2006. Michigan prosecutors went back to their own unsolved cases. Watts had been a suspect in Kalamazoo as early as December 1974. Gloria Steele, 19, a Western Michigan University student, died on October 30, 1974. No forensic evidence pointed to her killer. Two residents of the complex had seen an agitated young man at a door the day before, one of whom later picked Watts out of a photo array and a lineup, and a university parking ticket dated the day of the death turned up in his car. He told police he had been looking for a friend and denied any part in the death. He was not charged with it for 30 years.
In 2004 an Oakland County jury convicted him of the first-degree murder of Helen Dutcher, 36, who died in Ferndale on December 1, 1979, after a witness who had seen the man in 1979 called police again following a television appeal. He was sentenced to life without parole. That was a gap of about 25 years. In 2007 he was convicted in Kalamazoo of the murder of Gloria Steele, a little more than a week before he died of prostate cancer in a secure area of Foote Hospital in Jackson, Michigan, while held at the Ionia Maximum Correctional Facility. Between October 30, 1974, and September 2007, about 32 years and ten months had passed. Those two Michigan verdicts are the only murder convictions in Watts’s record.
The warnings had come early. A psychiatrist at the Center for Forensic Psychiatry in Ann Arbor wrote in June 1975 that Watts was "clearly quite dangerous." By 1982 he had confessed to 13 killings, and 24 years later the law would have released him.
Timothy Krajcir had entered the Illinois prison system in 1963 and was paroled in 1977. Over the next five years, in a window when he studied at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale and worked on an ambulance crew, he killed, by his own later account, nine women in four states. Police in the 1970s and 1980s did not connect the killings. The cases were spread across several states and police agencies, and the methods varied.
The break came from a police lieutenant, Paul Echols, who had been a rookie in Carbondale when a university student, Deborah Sheppard, 23, was killed in April 1982, sent the old evidence back to the state crime lab in 2007. The profile matched Krajcir in the Illinois offender database, and the Associated Press reported the match on August 31, 2007, calling it a 25-year-old murder. He pleaded guilty in Jackson County, Illinois, on December 10, 2007, and received 40 years; that was 25 years and eight months after the death. A Cape Girardeau detective, Jimmy Smith, then connected him to five unsolved Missouri cases, and after prosecutors and the families agreed not to seek the death penalty, Krajcir confessed to nine killings. He pleaded guilty to the Illinois death of Virginia Lee Witte, 51, on January 18, 2008; to five counts of first-degree murder in Cape Girardeau County, Missouri, on April 4, 2008; and, on March 25, 2010, to kidnapping resulting in death and first-degree burglary in the Kentucky case of Joyce Tharp, 29.
The longest gaps in the group are the Missouri cases from 1977. Mary Parsh, 58, and her daughter Brenda, 27, died on August 12, 1977, according to the Southeast Missourian’s account; their case reached its plea on April 4, 2008, 30 years and seven months later. Joyce Tharp died on March 22, 1979, and the plea came on March 25, 2010, 31 years and three days later. Krajcir was 63 at the first plea. He had been paroled again in May 1981 after a prison psychiatrist wrote that he showed no homicidal tendencies, and eight months later, according to the paper, Margie Call was dead.
Time cost the families more than evidence. Sheila Cole, 21, had grown up in Crestwood, a suburb of St. Louis; a neighbor told the South County Times in 2007 that her father was so angry after her death that he drove to Carbondale to look for the killer himself. Both of her parents died before the case was solved. Tharp’s daughter was ten when her mother died.
One of Krajcir’s admissions undid an earlier verdict. A Black man named Grover Thompson had been convicted of a 1981 crime in Mount Vernon, Illinois, that Krajcir admitted. Thompson died in prison in 1996. In January 2019, 23 years after his death, he was granted executive clemency; the National Registry of Exonerations counted it as the first posthumous exoneration in Illinois.
Doreen Moorby, 34, died on May 6, 1970, and Helen Ferguson, 37, 13 days later, in two small communities north of Toronto. Both were married, both had children, and the two women did not know each other. An Ontario Provincial Police manhunt produced more than 3,000 interviews and no arrest. Helen Ferguson’s son, who was eight, had given police their first description of the man they wanted. Archie Ferguson, a retired OPP commissioner, told CBC News decades later that one of the two cases had stayed with him more than any other.
The man responsible was a Toronto police officer who was off duty on both days. He was not among the original suspects. The bullets from 1970 were too damaged to be matched to a particular gun. Don MacNeil, who had been a young officer on the original task force and was by the late 1990s a veteran officer with the force’s Criminal Investigation Bureau, turned instead to biological evidence that had been preserved since May 1970, long before DNA analysis became routine. Working with the Centre of Forensic Sciences in Toronto, investigators obtained Ronald Glenn West’s DNA from a letter he had sent from prison to his family. West had been in prison since 1995 for a string of violent armed robberies in the Sault Ste. Marie area, an eight-year term. The profile matched the evidence from both deaths.
West, then 52, was charged with two counts of first-degree murder 29 years after the killings, while he was serving time in Joyceville penitentiary. MacNeil told CBC News that he had spoken with the victims' families after the arrest and that they were satisfied: "They were satisfied and it was the start of their closure." In 2001 West pleaded guilty in the killings of Moorby and Ferguson and was given two life sentences. The gap from May 1970 to the pleas is about 31 years. The Canadian Press reported in February 2022 that the Parole Board of Canada had denied him full parole in a decision dated February 14, 2022, when he was 74.
The Russian case is the one where the word "conviction" cannot be used for the 1996 killings. Aleksandr Spesivtsev, born in Novokuznetsk, Siberia, in 1970, was arrested in October 1996. In 1999, a court ruled him not criminally responsible because of mental illness for the killing of four people in 1996, three of them children, and ordered compulsory treatment. On May 21, 2024, the Kemerovo Regional Court heard a second proceeding. The Investigative Committee of Russia announced that a resident of Kuzbass had been "sent for compulsory treatment for crimes committed 28 years ago." The court ruled that he had committed 15 further killings with particular cruelty in 1996, 11 of the victims minors, and one attempted killing, and again applied compulsory medical measures instead of a sentence.
That is a gap of 28 years between the 1996 crimes and a court ruling, but neither the 1999 nor the 2024 outcome is a conviction, and he does not belong in a ranking of convictions. He was reported held in a special-type psychiatric hospital at the age of 56 as of September 23, 2026.
Between September and December 1985, five young women and girls aged 13 to 24 were killed in the East Bay of the San Francisco Bay Area, in Oakland, Emeryville, Berkeley and Richmond. Police from four cities and the East Bay Regional Park District formed a task force. A Navy enlisted man, Anthony McKnight, was arrested in January 1986 in a separate case, and in August 1987 he was convicted of 11 felony counts, including attempted murder, mayhem and kidnapping, with other charges, in assaults on women, all of whom survived. He was sentenced to 63 years.
In the 1985 deaths the evidence collected at the time was not analyzed for DNA until the late 1990s. CBS San Francisco dated the tests that tied him to all five women to 1996. An Alameda County grand jury indicted him on June 24, 1999, while he was in prison. The case did not reach a jury until 2008, nine years later. In the interval, memory did what the evidence could not: defense lawyer Alex Selvin told the jury that witness testimony could be unreliable because the events were more than twenty years in the past, and the prosecutor, Jim Meehan, told the jury that blood testing in the mid-1980s was far less advanced than it had later become. McKnight testified that he had never met any of the five.
Meehan also told jurors that a prosecutor had decided in late 1984 not to charge McKnight over two assaults on women because the evidence was judged insufficient, one of several missed opportunities. On September 17, 2008, the jury convicted him of five counts of first-degree murder and returned five special circumstances as true, among them multiple murder. The gap from the last of the deaths, in December 1985, to the verdict is 22 years and nine months. Judge Jeffrey Horner sentenced him to death that year. McKnight died on San Quentin’s death row in October 2019, aged 65, and officials said there was no reason to suspect foul play.
By the dates in the record, the order runs as follows. Naso, 36 years and seven months (January 1977 to August 20, 2013). Canaday, between 35 and 36 years (December 1968 to a plea in 2004). Fuller, 34 years and four months. Watts, about 32 years and ten months in the Steele case. Krajcir, 31 years and three days in the Tharp case. West, 30 years and eight months to 31 years and seven months, depending on the month of the 2001 plea, so that he and Krajcir cannot be ordered. Spesivtsev, 28 years, but with no conviction. McKnight, 22 years and nine months.
Two cautions apply. The Naso gap runs from the month a woman’s death came to light, not from a proven date of killing. The Canaday gap depends on an unreported month. Neither changes the top of the list: Naso’s figure is longer than any Canaday figure the record allows, and Canaday’s shortest possible figure is longer than Fuller’s.
What the wait did is easier to see than what it ranks. In Canaday, West, Krajcir and McKnight the answer came while the man was already in prison for something else; the years were not time he spent free but time the evidence sat. Fuller and Naso were at liberty throughout, and Fuller held a hospital job for most of it. Watts spent much of it in Texas custody under the terms of a deal. Along the way a boy of eight gave police a description, two daughters grew up without a memory of their mother, a father drove to Carbondale looking for the man himself and died before the case was solved, and a police lieutenant who had been a rookie sent a box of evidence back to the lab. The verdicts closed the files. None of them returned the years.
• 1963: Timothy Krajcir enters the Illinois prison system.
• December 17, 1968: Sandra Bowman, 16, dies in Seattle; no one is charged.
• February 22, 1969: Canaday arrested in Seattle; September 26, 1969, judgment on two murder convictions.
• May 6, 1970: Doreen Moorby, 34, dies north of Toronto; Helen Ferguson, 37, 13 days later.
• October 30, 1974: Gloria Steele, 19, dies in Kalamazoo.
• January 1977: death of Roxene Roggasch, 18, comes to light near Fairfax, California.
• August 12, 1977: Mary and Brenda Parsh die in Cape Girardeau, Missouri.
• August 13, 1978: death of Carmen Colon, 22, comes to light near Port Costa, California.
• March 22, 1979: Joyce Tharp, 29, dies in Paducah, Kentucky.
• December 1, 1979: Helen Dutcher, 36, dies in Ferndale, Michigan.
• April 1982: Deborah Sheppard, 23, dies in Carbondale, Illinois.
• August 1982: Watts confesses under immunity to 13 killings.
• September to December 1985: five young women and girls die in the East Bay; McKnight arrested January 1986 in a separate case.
• June and November 1987: Wendy Knell and Caroline Pierce killed in Tunbridge Wells.
• 1993 and 1994: Pamela Parsons and Tracy Tafoya die in Yuba County, California.
• 1996: Spesivtsev’s killings in Novokuznetsk; he is arrested in October 1996.
• 1999: West charged with two counts of first-degree murder; McKnight indicted June 24, 1999; first full DNA profile in the Knell case.
• 2001: West pleads guilty to the killings of Moorby and Ferguson.
• 2004: Watts convicted in the Dutcher case; Canaday pleads guilty in the Bowman case.
• August 31, 2007: Carbondale police announce a DNA match to Krajcir; December 10, 2007, he pleads guilty; September 2007, Watts convicted in the Steele case and dies.
• April 4, 2008: Krajcir pleads guilty to five Missouri murders; September 17, 2008, McKnight convicted of five murders.
• March 25, 2010: Krajcir pleads guilty in the Tharp case.
• April 2011: Naso arrested; August 20, 2013, convicted of four murders; November 22, 2013, sentenced.
• December 3, 2020: Fuller arrested; November 4, 2021, pleads guilty to two murders; December 15, 2021, whole life order.
• May 21, 2024: Kemerovo Regional Court applies compulsory medical measures to Spesivtsev for the 1996 killings.