SAN RAFAEL, Calif. -- A Marin County jury recommended a death sentence Tuesday for serial killer Joseph Naso, one month after finding the former San Francisco resident guilty of raping and strangling four Northern California women whose bodies were dumped along rural roads in the late 1970s and early 1990s.
The jury heard two weeks of testimony on whether Naso -- sometimes referred to as the "alphabet killer" -- deserved capital punishment for his crimes or should be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. The panel chose death after deliberating for less than five hours in San Rafael.
The same jurors had convicted Naso, 79, of four counts of first-degree murder with the special circumstance of committing multiple killings. In a lurid trial, prosecutors revealed a "rape journal" and other obsessive writings by Naso, which were found in a 2010 search of his home near Reno and helped crack the long-cold murder cases.
The search also turned up photos of women who appeared to have been posed as if they were dead.
Naso, acting as his own attorney, said he wasn't the "monster" he was made out to be. He countered that he hired prostitutes and photographed them in sexual positions, but never killed anyone. He admitted that he wrote in journals that he "raped" women, but said the word, to him, actually referred to "making out or having great sex."
He was dubbed the Alphabet Killer because of a pattern among the victims -- their first and last names started with the same letter. Naso was convicted of killing Roxene Roggasch, 18, in 1977; Carmen Colon, 22, in 1978; Pamela Parsons, 38, in 1993; and Tracy Tafoya, 31, in 1994.
Roggasch's body was found near Lagunitas (Marin County) and Colon was found near Port Costa (Contra Costa County), while Parsons and Tafoya were both found in Yuba County.
While prosecutors convicted Naso of four killings, they argued during the death penalty hearing that there was evidence he had slain two other women.
One victim, Sharileea Patton, was a 56-year-old security guard from the North Lake Tahoe area whose body washed ashore in Tiburon in January 1981. Police reported she was strangled and stuffed into two garbage bags. Authorities said they received evidence of another victim -- a woman named Sara Dylan who disappeared while following a Bob Dylan tour, and whose remains were found in 1992 in Nevada County -- too late to include in the criminal trial.
Marin County District Attorney Edward Berberian Jr. said he thought that the jury's decision was appropriate, and that he hoped the end of a decades-long ordeal would bring closure to the victims' families.
"If you commit offenses as horrendous as this, you are going to be facing what the law permits to be the maximum penalty," he said.
Deputy Public Defender Pedro Oliveros, who served as Naso's advisory counsel during the trial, described Naso as unemotional during Tuesday's decision by the jury.
"I told him to brace for the worst and prepare for the best," he said. "The worst happened and he was ready for it."
Naso is scheduled to return to court Friday to determine when he will be formally sentenced by Superior Court Judge Andrew Sweet. If executed, Naso would be the oldest person ever put to death in California.
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McClatchy-Tribune News Service
