If it weren’t for his sticky fingers, perhaps no one would know Joseph Naso’s name.
In 1995, Naso, a freelance photographer, strolled into an Oakland, Calif., department store and attempted to shoplift 30 pairs of women’s underwear. Later, it would become clear, he had already had an odd history of petty crimes. It seemed absurd that a man in his sixties—Naso was then nearly a senior citizen—would be arrested for shoplifting, a crime normally associated with juvenile delinquents. Indeed, just a year earlier, he’d been nabbed for a similar crime, in Yuba City, Calif. His sticky-fingered habit continued long after that incident: In 2003, he was arrested again for shoplifting at the local Food Co in Sacramento before he moved from California to Nevada.
In 2009, he was at it yet again, caught stealing at a Raley’s grocery store in South Lake Tahoe. He was put on probation.
He had an assigned parole office, Wes Jackson, and if it weren’t for an unannounced home visit, perhaps Joseph Naso’s alleged other life, one far more sordid and scary than shoplifting panties, may never have been discovered.
Police soon believed the Naso was not just an eccentric older man living in Reno, Nev., nor even one described variously as a bellicose drunk or a strange man with a temper. It is now believed that he was a serial killer, killing four women and, authorities suspect, maybe even more.
Joseph Naso never stayed in one place for long. Born in Rochester, N. Y., in 1934, Naso served in the Air Force in the 1950s. He met his first wife, Judith, and got married and had a son, Charles. His son developed schizophrenia, and Naso would spend his later years caring for him.
After 18 years of marriage, Naso and Judith divorced, but he frequently visited her afterwards in the east Bay Area where she lived, checking in on her from time-to-time.
After the divorce, Naso moved around the west coast, living in the Bay Area and San Francisco, as well as Nevada. When he lived in California, he took classes at community colleges in Oakland in the mid-1970s, and in the 1980s, he lived in San Francisco, in the Mission District. He was jailed on another petty theft in 1994, in Sutter County near Yuba City. He lived in Sacramento from 1999 to 2003. By 2003, he had moved to Yuba City. He moved to Reno in 2004.
Naso’s whereabouts would later prove to be important. It was discovered that he was in the general vicinity of his alleged victims.
On January 10, 1977, five-foot two-inch, Roxene Roggasch was found dead, dumped near Fairfax, Calif. After receiving an anonymous phone call, the police drove to the road where the tipster’s car had stalled and found the petite, freckled redhead buried facedown underneath some desert brush. Panty hose were wrapped around her neck, and her feet were bound. Police concluded she’d been dead for less than a day.
At first, the police looked to the most obvious solution. As Roggasch had been suspected of working as a prostitute, although her family denied any knowledge of that, police looked closely at a man who was alleged to have been a pimp in the area who was accused of assault by a woman who had claimed to have worked with Roggasch. But when that didn’t pan out, the trail and the case went cold. Roggasch was just 18 years old.
The next year, another young woman was found dead. In 1978, Carmen Colon was found in Port Costa, 30 miles away. She was only 22 years old.
Then there was a lull in the killings connected to Naso; it wasn’t until over 15 years later that another woman was murdered whom authorities later linked to Naso. Pamela Parsons, 38, a waitress who worked not very far from where Naso lived, was found dead in Yuba County; a year later, Tracy Tafoya, 31, was found dead, also in Yuba County. She had been drugged, raped, and tossed in a cemetery. It was estimated that she had been dead a week before her body was found. According to ABC News 10, Naso lived on Cooper Avenue in Yuba City during this time.
In all cases, the women were found strangled, and dumped naked in rural areas. They all reportedly either had problems with drugs and alcohol or they were prostitutes.
“His particular thing was possible prostitutes, strangulation and dumping the bodies in rural areas.” San Anselmo Detective Julie Gorwood told the Marysville, Calif., Appeal-Democrat.
The most chilling similarity among the victims, though, was their unique names. All four women who were killed had alliterative initials: Their first and last name began with the same letter. This detail further piqued the interest of investigators because a few years earlier, another string of murders had occurred in Rochester, N. Y., where Naso was born, and those victims had also had the same first letters of the first and last name. Those murders had been dubbed the Double Initial killings or the Alphabet Murders.
In the mid-seventies in Rochester, N. Y., three pre-teens were killed. Like Naso’s alleged victims, the three girls had first and last names that started with the same letter. One of them, Carmen Colon, even had the same name as one of Naso’s alleged victims. When Naso’s arrest was made public, the cold case detectives in New York cracked open their old files to see if anything squared up. But it was determined that though there was a similarity in the names of the victims, little else was the same. For one thing, the women connected to the Naso case, were much older and were mostly prostitutes. The victims in the original “double initial killings,” were young. Colon, Michelle Maenza, Wanda Walcowicz were all between 10 and 12 years old. That they were from the same area where Naso had lived for a spell, and during that same time period he was back visiting relatives, seemed to be a coincidence. Police ruled Naso out when DNA from the California killings didn’t match the DNA left on Walcowicz.
Joseph Naso does not break from the roll of oddballs and loners who comprise the overwhelming majority of serial killer suspects. Neighbors painted a picture of a paranoid, hot-tempered man who kept to himself and never said hello. Whether Naso is found guilty or not, he was the picture-perfect cliché of a serial killer, a recluse who outdid other recluses.
“He was just a weirdo,” one neighbor told the Contra Costa Times. “We kept away from him. He made my hair stand on end.”
“I never really seen the guy,” a woman named Summer who lived near him in Nevada added. “He’d drive his pickup to his backyard and never would say hi. We know all the neighbors here, except him.”
Gwendolyn Friend was a neighbor of Naso’s ex-wife Judith. Even though he would frequently visit his ex-wife, the Contra Costa Times wrote, Friend “thought he was odd because he would never look her in the eye when they spoke.”
Still, being odd and weird doesn’t mean that someone is a murderer, she said. “That was strange, but never in my wildest dreams did I think he would pop up on TV as a serial killer,” Friend told the paper.
In San Francisco, he was remembered vividly by his neighbors. “It was in his eyes,” Sergio Rangel told the San Francisco Chronicle, who uncovered Naso’s alleged stalking of a couple in a building he lived in.
“He was older, his hair had turned white, but you can’t forget a guy like him. He was berserk,” said Rangel. “He was a very lonely man,” Rangel said. “When Joe drank, he became bellicose. I gave him a few dollars every now then, not because I liked him, but because I didn’t want him to get mad at me.”
His behavior earned him the nickname “Crazy Joe.”
During the early 1980s, Margaret Prisco and Thaddeus Iorizzo became all-too-familiar with their downstairs neighbor. Though they had limited contact with Naso, Iorizzo told the San Francisco Chronicle: “Each time I crossed paths with him, the hair on the back of my neck would stand up,” Iorizzo said. “You’d get a real creepy feeling. He was pure evil. I’d say to myself, ‘Stay away from this guy. He’s nuts.’”
Iorizzo told the paper about one of his limited encounters, an occurrence that would seem prescient and meaningful later on, as evidence in the case mounted. He’d come across Naso when he was taking out the trash. Naso’s trash caught his eye: pornographic magazines featuring women in bondage, being tied up or tortured. Naso, caught red-handed, denied they were his.
In fact, it was through Naso’s collection of photographs and diaries seized by the police during the pretrial phase that alerted Iorizzo and Prisco to Naso’s chilling alleged interest in Prisco. Naso had kept a list: on it were ten women. Four of those women were among the victims. One of the names was Margaret Prisco’s.
Prisco, now 53, told the AP: “It’s disconcerting. When you’re that age, living in San Francisco, you don’t have your guard up and thinking that someone is after you.” She was lucky; she might have avoided a violent fate.
In the course of their investigation, police found thousands of photographs of women in lingerie. The most creepy aspect of this discovery was that the women had been photographed to look dead. In the photos, it was not clear if the women were actually lifeless or unconscious. In some cases, they were photographed wearing bondage gear. Naso’s photos stemmed from shots in the sixties to more current years. In all, police said that there were over 4,000 images found in the freelance photographer’s home.
Naso, who had been arrested for stealing women’s lingerie, seemed to have a long-standing fixation on lingerie and bondage. After Naso’s arrest was announced, another woman, Royce Talkington, came forward and told Fox Reno News that she had worked beside him at a swap meet. There, she said, he had arrived with a brown van, and sold women’s lingerie out of the back of the van. He had invited her to model some of the lingerie. She told the TV station: “And I said no way; stay away from me. I don’t want anything to do with you anymore because it really triggered something inside that said danger danger stay away from this guy.”
In 1998, Naso began dating Mildred Gardner. She was eleven years older than he was, and wealthy. But even though they seemed to have a great relationship in some ways, Gardner said in court documents that Naso “was sneaky.”
In the court documents in which Gardner successfully requested a restraining order against Naso, Gardner revealed that Naso had lied to her about money she had lent him. She had given him $10,000 to purchase a van to be used by both of them but later learned he put the title in his name only. And later, when his son was ill, he had wanted to buy a house near the hospital where his son was staying and convinced Gardner to pay $7,000 toward a house they were supposed to share together. Again, she told the court, Naso had duped her and put the title in his name only.
“I gave Mr. Naso $17,000 because I thought he was going to marry me and the house and the van would belong to both of us. He did not tell me that he had been arrested for many crimes, including swindling. He did not tell me he was putting the house and van in his own name. I would not have given him any of this money if I had known the truth.”
And Naso’s temper began to be revealed. She said that she had become afraid of him. “Mr. Naso started demanding, very angrily, that I get back everything I ever gave anyone. He would not let up. He forced me to give him a .38 caliber snub-nose revolver which he still has.”
After becoming more suspicious, she and her family paid for a private investigator to research him and discovered that he had a criminal history. After that, all bets were off. “I am not going to Sacramento to live with him. I’m afraid he will become violent when he finds out.”
Embarrassingly, Gardner had been convinced to take part in one of Naso’s bondage photo shoots. One of the employees at the senior center where Naso and Gardner had met told the Marin Independent Journal that Naso had shown him a picture of Gardner in bondage gear.
“It didn’t seem like something she’d do every day. She was not like that,” the worker said. “I was speechless.”
Naso was asked not to come back to the center.
For every nefarious action in Naso’s life, though, he demonstrated that he could be fiercely protective. For years, he had struggled to take care of his son, but this relationship was complicated by his son’s illness. In 1996 Naso himself had to get a restraining order because of his son’s violent tendencies brought on by schizophrenia. Later, he dropped the order and became the legal guardian of Charles. Naso had a long running feud over the guardianship of Charles with Northern Nevada Adult Mental Health Services. The state argued that Charles should be living in a group home, and they alleged that the elder Naso gave his son alcohol and wasn’t giving him his meds on time.
The fight over guardianship also led to a feud with the Social Security Administration when his son was placed under the jurisdiction of the state. He argued on keeping his son under his watch: The Associated Press reported that he wrote: “I’ve no social life. I do not indulge myself or seek pleasures. My mission in life, my time, and much of my expense revolves around trying to provide care and welfare for my son. (24/7).”
The San Jose Mercury News reported that in 2005 Naso countersued the Social Security Administration, alleging that they had defamed and slandered him by implying that he had drugged and given alcohol to his mentally ill son. He lost that case when it was thrown out, but while he didn’t have the money from Social Security, he still had custody of his son, who was living with him when he was captured.
The AP report noted that a woman who had attended several group sessions with Naso in Yuba City said that Naso cared for his son very much. Roberta Fletcher, the president of the Yuba City chapter of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill said: “He was very, very concerned about his son; that’s what so strange about this.”
If it weren’t for his petty thefts, Naso might have never been found out. A chance visit on April 13, 2010, from his parole officer, Wes Jackson, turned his life upside down. On parole from his most recent shoplifting charge, Naso was subject to unannounced home-visits from his parole officer. What should have been routine turned into something else. Jackson noticed an ad for a gun and several rounds of ammunition tucked not-so-carefully away in an ashtray.
The ammunition was in clear violation of Naso’s parole, which gave officers carte blanche to scour his home. He was arrested, jailed for probation violations and spent the next year incarcerated in a Nevada jail.
The police spent the year conducting interviews with neighbors and other people in the area. In the course of a multi-agency, multi-state investigation, police found a treasure trove of information, which led to his indictment for the murder of the four California women.
The day he was to be released from the Nevada jail in South Lake Tahoe, police arrested him on the murder charges, nearly a year to the date. He was transferred to Marin County, the site of the first victim, Roxene Roggasch.
In addition to the 4,000 photographs of women wearing bondage gear and lingerie, posed to look dead or unconscious, police also found diaries and safe deposit boxes. A list Naso wrote by hand is the key to their entire case.
In the statement of probable cause for arrests made without a warrant, Officer Ryan Petersen made several allegations against Naso.
“During a probation search of Joe Naso’s residence in Reno, Nevada, he was found in possession of a handwritten list which had the reference to ten different women and ten different locations. The last entry on the list made reference to a girl from Marysville, with (cemetery) written next to it.” Tracy Tafoya had been dumped next to the Marysville Cemetery, near Naso’s home.
The statement of probable cause also notes that another woman, Carmen Colon, was dumped off Carquinez Scenic Drive, outside of Port Costa, Calif. Here, the evidence was possibly more damaging. “A partial, foreign DNA profile was obtained from Colon’s fingernail clippings.” Naso was included in the DNA profile as a possible match.
In the case of Pamela Parsons, who was found dead in Yuba County near Naso’s workplace and home, the police cited photos of Parsons found in one of the safe deposit boxes and newspaper clippings regarding her death. “In addition to the photos, numerous writings, logs and a calendar from 1993 detailing his daily activity related to Parsons were found inside his residence.” He sold photos he’d taken of Parsons at a flea market, only 1.5 miles from where her body was found. On the list, Parsons is listed as number #9: “Girl from Linda (Yuba County).”
Finally, the first victim, Roxene Roggasch was listed as #3 on his alleged hit list. She had been found in an area known as “White’s Hill.” A DNA test on the pantyhose left around her neck found DNA that matched Naso’s ex-wife, Judith Naso.
On April 13, 2011, the white-haired Naso made his first court appearance and was charged with four counts of murder. Due to the special circumstances of the crimes, Naso may be eligible for the death penalty.
In subsequent appearances, Naso declined to hire an attorney, in part, because he didn’t want to pay for one. He was denied a right to a court-appointed attorney when an accounting of his monetary worth showed that he had over $1 million in assets. He stated in court: “I’ve given this case a lot of thought, and I’ve been alone with myself for weeks. I’ve decided, looking at the big picture and everything I’m facing, that now I will represent myself.” He added: “I want to be the first one and the only one to have discovery.”
Besides, he argued, “I have represented myself in the past many times, mostly in civil proceedings and I’ve done well. I’ve prevailed.”
Despite the judge’s advice that he should get a lawyer since it could be a capital case, Naso continued ahead.
When the prosecution introduced the bondage images into evidence, Naso protested and made a strange statement in court during a routine plea hearing: “Nowhere in any of the four statements do they depict the names, descriptions, or intended fate. None of the photographs found depict the women shown in forced posing, forced bondage, or being deceased. All photographs of the women were posed under free will.”
Since his initial appearances, Naso changed his mind and requested an attorney. Because his assets have been frozen by the state, though, he said he can’t pay. $150,000 was then released, but the judge is ruling on whether or not he can get a publicly funded legal adviser. It probably didn’t help that the information regarding the safe deposit boxes had been introduced into the record.
After weeks of not entering a plea, on May 27, 2011, Naso finally entered one: “Not guilty.” With even the best lawyer on staff, it may prove hard work to convince the jury that Naso didn’t kill the four women with the alliterative names.