Joseph Naso


Joseph Naso is an American serial killer, sentenced to death for the murder of six women.

Biography

Joseph Naso was born on January 7, 1934 in Rochester, New York. After serving in the U.S. Air Force in the 1950s, he met his first wife Judith. Their marriage lasted for 18 years, but after the divorce Naso continued visiting his ex-wife who lived in the Bay Area. The couple had a son named Charles who later developed schizophrenia, and Naso spent his later years caring for him.
Naso took classes in various San Francisco colleges in the 1970s and lived in the Mission District of San Francisco and then in Piedmont, California in the 1980s. He lived in Sacramento between 1999 and 2003, and finally settled in Reno, Nevada in 2004, where he was arrested in 2011. He worked as a freelance photographer and had a long history of petty crimes such as shoplifting, which he committed even in his mid-seventies. His acquaintances nicknamed him "Crazy Joe" for his behavior.

Victims

Nevada parole and probation authorities arrested Naso in April 2010. During a search of his home, authorities discovered a handwritten diary in which Naso listed ten unnamed women with geographical locations. On April 11, 2011, he was charged with the murders of Roggasch, Colon, Parsons and Tafoya. All four victims were listed by the police as sex workers. The other six women mentioned in the diary remained unidentified.
Later, prosecutors Dori Ahana and Rosemary Sloat introduced evidence identifying Patton and Dylan. On August 20, 2013, Naso was convicted by a Marin County jury of the murders. On November 22, 2013, a Marin County judge sentenced him to death for the murders.
Naso was also a person of interest in the Rochester Alphabet murders of 1971–73 case, since four of his victims bore double initials, just as the Rochester murder victims, and Naso had lived there for a long time. Naso, however, was ruled out of that case when DNA found on Californian victims was not matched to the DNA found on a Rochester victim's body.