The Case of the Double Initial Murders
Bondage and Ladies' Lingerie
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."