JOSEPH NASO

Due to his proximity to the Z murders, and other points & locations of interest, I have started a section for this guy as a Z suspect. He has ties to Lake Tahoe (Lass). Also, he is a suspect in the Rochester, NY Alphabet murders which happened during a 3 year stretch when Z was not writing letters in the bay area. As soon as the Alphabet murders stopped in NY, Z wrote again in the bay area. And also, the age-enhanced sketch of Z, doesnt look too far off of this guy's mugshot.

Hope some people will post the PROS & CONS of this guy as a valid Z suspect.

A Nevada Detective called me, and talked with me for a bit regarding Naso. He told me that Naso was back and forth from CA & NY as early as 1960, NOT 1969 as has been reported. Also, Seagull found records for Naso, that seem to place him in the bay area in the 1960's. This first Detective told me that police are looking at Naso regarding any Zodiac links. He also stated that they knew of Naso's wherabouts in 1968-1969, but when I asked if he was in the Vallejo or San Fran area those two years, he stated that he could not release that info to me....that sucks!

Last night, I spoke with a different Nevada Detective that had a couple questions regarding the list of double initial victims that I sent them. (many of which I was not overly familiar with). They also asked me about the 1963 lovers lane double murder in Rochester, NY of Shari Smoyer & Jack King. I think they were interested in her initials. I told them about what I had read, and they asked if I could email them the articles, which I did. They said that Rochester NY police may contact me. These are those articles:









BY THE WAY FOREIGNER, this doube murder happened very close to the MONROE GOLF CLUB... I figured that this fact may be of interest to you. http://www.monroegolfclub.com/Default.aspx?p=DynamicModule&pageid=297059&ssid=179569&vnf=1

I read that a suspect was arrested in this case, but was released, but I didnt find anymore articles about it.

EDIT: FOUND IT-

Thanks Morf, for finding an posting those articles for us to ponder. It's amazing just how many double initials victims are out there. They can't all be works of the same man?

Getting inside criminal minds, I wonder what Naso is thinking right now? Is he relived he got caught? Does he feel any remorse? I hope they go through his home, car, belongings with a fine tooth comb and look at everything! Wonder if he used a computer and saved pictures or files on that?
Saw his ex wife on TV. She was advised not to talk as people could twist what she says. Could she really be married to some one and not know his dark side. So much to ponder in this case. Very interesting indeed.

Zamantha wrote:

Thanks Morf, for finding an posting those articles for us to ponder. It's amazing just how many double initials victims are out there. They can't all be works of the same man?

Getting inside criminal minds, I wonder what Naso is thinking right now? Is he relived he got caught? Does he feel any remorse? I hope they go through his home, car, belongings with a fine tooth comb and look at everything! Wonder if he used a computer and saved pictures or files on that?
Saw his ex wife on TV. She was advised not to talk as people could twist what she says. Could she really be married to some one and not know his dark side. So much to ponder in this case. Very interesting indeed.

Good questions! I had stashed away those Rochester double murder articles for a rainy day,that day being if a viable Z suspect ever was tied to Rochester. That day may be here with Naso. The double initials just make it more interesting.

I hope they did not completely rule out the suspect in the murders of King and Smoyer just because of one gun that he had which did not match the bullets.

Double initials? Mike Mageau anyone?!

Quagmire wrote:

Double initials? Mike Mageau anyone?!

Hmm...

Also, Richard Radetich...

Although I've always felt that the Z victims were random there were a lot of names beginning B, C and D among them. Betty-Lou, Cecelia, Darlene and possibly Cheri-Jo and Donna. We also have David and Bryan. All probably coincidence of course.

Another weird fact is that the murders that most of LE attribute to Z began with Domingos/Edwards and ended with Paul Stine - Z's letters usually began with Dear Editor and ended with PS.

Until something more concrete comes to light, I'm not even considering a Zodiac link. Sorry, but there it is.

Nachtsider wrote:

Until something more concrete comes to light, I'm not even considering a Zodiac link. Sorry, but there it is.

Nach, I really dont blame you. But the police are looking into it, and should be able to rule him out as Z pretty fast. Still, they have to consider him as Z since he is likely a confirmed serial kilelr in the right area at the right time. And if you add the Rochester 'alphabet murders" that happened during the 1971-1974 Zodiac letter hiatus, its worth looking at. As soon as the Alphabet murders stopped, the next Z letters came in again. Maybe just more zyncronicity.

And we also have the possible Zodiac letter sent from Albany, NY in 1973

Quagmire wrote:

And we also have the possible Zodiac letter sent from Albany, NY in 1973

Good point

Nachtsider wrote:

Until something more concrete comes to light, I'm not even considering a Zodiac link. Sorry, but there it is.

Ditto brutha.

I'm not considering Naso the Z. But I do understand why LE would
have to look at all possibles.
Quagmire posted Mike Mageau & Richard Radetich's names.
I'm thinking that's another coincidence.

Zamantha wrote:

I'm not considering Naso the Z. But I do understand why LE would
have to look at all possibles.
Quagmire posted Mike Mageau & Richard Radetich's names.
I'm thinking that's another coincidence.

Just having LE look into the Z case, for ANY reason, is good IMO. It may spur some further efforts. Who knows.

Seems that Naso, like Zodiac, had a "little list"!

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/04/16/MNAM1J1OJM.DTL

"The detective said the man they had known as "Crazy Joe" had filled three notebooks with descriptions of how he wished to torment Prisco, then 23 years old."

"Iorizzo said the Nevada detective then told him investigators were sifting through stacks of boxes filled with composition notebooks, and that three notebooks were dedicated to Prisco. The details of her intended torture were so horrific, Iorizzo said, that the detective declined to repeat them over the phone"

"According to Iorizzo, Thurston told him the author's name was Joseph Naso and that among his writings was a "to-do" list of women he wanted to kill - and Prisco's name was No. 10 on the list"

Another view of Naso with glasses on.

Seagull wrote:

Another view of Naso with glasses on.

Pics compared with Z;

I am still interested in the fact that Naso lived at 883 Geary St at some point. That is VERY CLOSE to the area of Geary & Mason where it is believed that Z was picked up by Stine. If I am not mistaken, it would be about a 2.5 mile walk from the Stine murder scene back to 883 Geary st.

Anyone able to get their hands on old San Fran phonebooks or directories to see if Naso lived on Geary in 1969?

There is only one Naso in the 1970 San Francisco telephone book.

TF Naso 2324 Bay St.

It doesn't answer for 1969 but it did take a few months to put a telephone book together back in those days. The listings might well have been compiled towards the end of 1969.

I C Sales Company was at 883 Geary Street in San Francisco circa 1969.

Ricardo wrote:

I C Sales Company was at 883 Geary Street in San Francisco circa 1969.

Hmm wonder if he worked there? or if he lived there? Definitely lists that address as being tied to him, got it from Anestry.com...maybe he owned it? Not sure how to look further.

A five part article from the Reno newspaper with a little more information about Naso and information about serial killers in general.

http://www.rgj.com/article/20110417/NEWS0102/104170339/Understanding-an-alleged-serial-killer?odyssey=tab%7Ctopnews%7Ctext%7CLocal%20News

The Piedmont CA address was apparently a business address where he had a photography studio. The article also says he had addresses across the country. There is a tiny bit about his disabled son, too.

Two more possible victims:

Pamela Jean Lambson(no double initials)
"Nearly 34 years ago, Lambson, an aspiring singer and actress, was found dead by a jogger on a lonely Mount Tamalpais trail. She was 19 and a secretary at a Sunnyvale computer company, and the only lead investigators had was that she had met a handsome photographer at Fisherman's Wharf for a photo shoot the day before. A sketch of the mysterious photographer was compiled from witnesses. But it led nowhere. So without an identification of the photographer, and no other leads, the case went cold"

Police have thought that Lambson was a victim of Rodeny Alcala, but since this is a Marin County crime, and Naso was charged in Marin County, I hope they consider Naso.

This is a sketch of the suspect compared with Alcala:


Still waiting to see photos of Naso from the late 60's.


Here is a news article of interest, and brought to mind the case of Leona Roberts and mentions an alleged Victim of Naso's.

During a 35-year career with the Marin County Sheriff's Office, Rich Keaton investigated dozens of homicides. Pamela Lambson's slaying haunts him the most.
Lambson, a San Jose clerical worker, was only 19 when she was strangled and dumped on Mount Tamalpais in 1979.

Lambson, an aspiring actress and model, was lured to her death by a man claiming to be a professional photographer. He offered Lambson a photo shoot, which she saw as a career opportunity.

"This may be my big chance," she told a friend shortly before heading off to meet the killer in San Francisco.

Keaton was responsible for keeping Lambson's grieving family informed about the murder inquiry. And even as the years passed with no arrest, Keaton stayed in touch - and kept Lambson's picture on his desk.

"She was such a popular and pretty young woman with such a vibrance of life," said Keaton, 63, now a private investigator based in Novato. "Next thing you know, we found her naked and dead and violated on Mount Tamalpais. It just felt so wasted and empty. She was stripped naked and thrown off the side of Mount Tamalpais as if she were so much trash to be discarded."

Of 59 unsolved murders in Marin since 1947, more than half are so-called "body dumps" in which the victim is killed and dropped off in the county. Often they were murdered outside Marin.

With its miles of open space, dense forests, cliffs and backwaters, Marin County has long attracted killers looking for a place to dump a body.

Most of the dumps occurred in West Marin, with some victims thrown off roads, others buried in shallow graves, others plunged down embankments inside cars.

In a 1967 case, William Thomas, a flamboyant San Francisco drug dealer known as "Superspade," was shot in the head, stabbed in the heart, stuffed into a sleeping bag and thrown off a 300-foot cliff near the Point Reyes Lighthouse.

"Marin County was known as the body dump location," Keaton said. "We didn't have 'CSI' in those days. When they're left as a body dump with no ID we didn't have the availability of forensic banks of evidence. We'd drive it up to the (Department of Justice) in Sacramento and say, 'Here's the prints. Can you do anything for us?'"

Ron Spurrell, a retired sheriff's detective, said body dumps pose several challenges. Bodies dumped in remote areas can decompose for months before they are found, making identification difficult, if not impossible.

"Sometimes animals take away some of the body parts, and you can't make identification," Spurrell said. "And even if you do, you can't determine cause of death. We have a lot of wildlife in the rural areas. A decomposing body is a meal."

Many victims dumped in Marin were killed elsewhere, forcing police to expand their investigations to other jurisdictions.

"We would have to travel and solicit the assistance of other agencies and expect them to put in as much effort as we were," Spurrell said.

Sometimes simple incompetence comes into play. In 1977, an 18-year-old Oakland woman named Roxene Roggasch was murdered and dumped along Sir Francis Drake Boulevard just west of Fairfax. The investigation led police to a prostitute who claimed Roggasch was kidnapped and tortured by their East Bay pimp, then placed in the trunk of his car to be transported to Salinas as a sex slave. The pimp later killed Roggasch, she said.

Police found the suspect's car in Salinas, and fingerprints were visible inside the trunk lid, where someone had evidently tried to claw to freedom. Marin investigators, unwilling to take chances with a local crime lab, shipped the car directly to Sacramento for analysis by the state's experts.

Investigators thought they had the suspect nailed. But the state's lab technicians accidentally brushed the fingerprints off while removing the trunk lid - and they had forgotten to take pictures of the prints beforehand, a breach of rudimentary police procedure, Keaton said.

The case was ruined, and the suspect, smugly demanding the return of his car, was released. Roggasch's murder remains in the unsolved column.

"My God, we were devastated and shocked beyond belief and felt like we had gotten punched in the stomach," Keaton said. "We had the suspect cold. It made you want to vomit. We had no other evidence to tie him to her."

Most of Marin's unsolved body dumps occurred before DNA technology became a factor in investigations. Now, when police review old murder cases hoping to find new leads, they often find potential DNA evidence has already been destroyed.

In 2001, based on a tip from a prison inmate, sheriff's Sgt. Fred Marziano reopened the cases of Denise Franz, a Santa Venetia woman killed in 1984, and Barbara Jane Robinson, a Sausalito woman killed in 1985. Marziano was investigating whether Franz and Robinson might have been killed by Roger Kibbe, the so-called "I-5 Strangler," who is serving 25 years to life for a 1986 strangling murder in El Dorado County.

Both Franz and Robinson were last seen getting into a man's car, and both were strangled and dumped within the same three-mile stretch of Shoreline Highway near Muir Beach. Their shoes and purses were missing.

But DNA comparison was impossible because the women's DNA evidence was not preserved, Marziano said. And Kibbe refused to talk to investigators when they visited him in prison. The cases remain unsolved.

"The (killer's methods) matched to a 'T,' but unfortunately there were no evidentiary leads," Marziano said. "Back then, DNA was nonexistent, the theory of DNA evidence. People wouldn't know to preserve things for DNA."

Keaton hit a similar wall in the Pamela Lambson case.

In 1996, a photographer named Charles Rathbun was convicted in Los Angeles of raping and murdering Linda Sobek, a model and former cheerleader for the Los Angeles Raiders. Authorities said Rathbun took Sobek on a photo shoot, raped her and buried her in the San Gabriel Mountains.

For Keaton, the similarities between the Sobek and Lambson murders were stunning. Investigators in Los Angeles called the Marin sheriff's office seeking DNA samples from the Lambson case. But Marin had none to offer because none had been preserved.

"The swabs that they had taken from the coroner were dried up and not conducive for DNA," Keaton said.

No link could be established between Lambson and Rathbun, who refused to talk to investigators.

But Keaton was so sure Rathbun was his suspect, he took Lambson's photo off his desk for the first time in 15 years. In Keaton's mind, the case is solved.

"As far as I'm concerned, when it was all over and done with, they had the guy who murdered Pam," the detective said.