SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) — It turns out that a serial killer convicted in Marin County 12 years ago may be one of the nation’s most prolific. Joseph Naso now claims he killed 26 women, according to a new documentary coming out next month. The I-Team’s Dan Noyes will appear in that program as the only journalist ever to interview Naso. These new details are coming from another inmate who befriended Naso at San Quentin and, over the course of 10 years got him to spill information about his crimes. A word of caution — some of this is disturbing, as you might expect.
Just days after a jury sentenced him to death in 2013, Dan Noyes interviewed Joe Naso about the evidence against him. The father of two, a little league coach, and school photographer also took pictures of women who appeared to be dead – including some of his six confirmed victims.
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Joe Naso: “Looks are deceiving, that comes with direction, when I ask somebody, I say, ‘Hey, I’d like to take a picture of you looking deceased or unconscious, this is what you do, you lay back-‘”
Dan Noyes: “Why do that, though, I want to understand, why is that appealing?”
Naso: “I don’t do that every day, I do that very little and that’s a sensual thing, I’ve seen that, that’s been going on-“
Noyes: “A dead woman is sensual?”
Naso: “No, no, no.”
Noyes asked Naso about a piece of paper investigators recovered from his Reno home – the “list of 10.” During trial, investigators identified six of his victims from that list, and I grilled Naso about the other four. He wrote, “girl near Healdsburg Mendocino Co.,” “girl on Mt. Tam,” “girl from Miami near down Peninsula,” “girl from Berkeley.”
Noyes: “Who are those women?”
Naso: “You tell me.”
Noyes: “I don’t know, you know. You’re still playing games.”
Naso: “Ask the prosecution, ask the judge, I don’t know.”
We hoped to bring closure to the families of those unidentified victims, but Naso continued to profess his innocence, even when Noyes visited him on San Quentin’s death row three years later.
Noyes: “How many people did you kill, Joe, do you think?”
Naso: “How many did you?”
Noyes: “I killed none. That’s easy for me to say, I killed none. How about you?”
Noyes: “None.”
But Naso finally opened up about the “list of 10” to an inmate he met at San Quentin, Bill Noguera.
“When I told him, ‘Well, look, they got you because a list of 10,’ he started laughing,” Noguera told the I-Team. “He said, ‘They got it all wrong. Yeah, I killed them women, yes. But those aren’t my top — Those aren’t my list of 10. Those are my top 10.’ And that’s when he went on to tell me that he actually had killed 26 women.”
That Naso killed 26 women may be supported by something found in the search of Naso’s home. Noguera said, “They found a coin collection with 26 gold heads. Those represent his trophies, they represent the 26 women that he murdered.”
Noguera took notes of his conversations with Naso that continued for ten years, and he contacted cold case detective Ken Mains who agreed to work pro bono.
“Naso never gave Bill names,” Mains said. “He didn’t know names. So, Bill would just write down little clues, little things, places, and that’s what I had to figure out. That’s what he needed me for.”
At one point, Naso told Noguera he wanted to move to the prison near Sacramento so his sons could visit more often. Noguera convinced Naso he had a buddy who knew the governor, and that he should provide info about one of his cold cases – in effect, a confession letter.
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“It took some — a bit of time, but he wrote it,” Noguera told us.
Here it is. I recognize the handwriting from the many letters I’ve exchanged with Naso over the years. He describes seeing an ad for a model in the Berkeley Barb magazine, and they met at a cafe. Naso wrote, “After she chained her bike, I drove her to my home in Oakland.”
His wife and sons were gone at that time of day.
It reads, “I had her lay on her back for some topless shots. During this session, I choked her to death. No violence. No sex. Just a quick death.”
Late that night, Naso says he drove her body to the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge: “And in the low rail section, I stopped and quickly put the bag over into the bay.”
Ken Mains ran with that information. It quickly paid off.
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Mains said, “When I started researching, and I found missing person Lynn Ruth Connes. She went to a restaurant and chained her bike up, and she answered an ad for modeling. It was really, honestly fairly 101 basic investigations to figure that one out.”
There is very good reason to believe that Lynn Ruth Connes is number six on Naso’s “list of 10,” the “girl from Berkeley.”
Noyes on documentary trailer: “He never admitted anything – until now.”
As part of the series that starts September 13 on Oxygen, “Death Row Confidential: Secrets of a Serial Killer,” Ken Mains and Bill Noguera appear to have solved several of Naso’s cold cases. They were able to finally inform the families.
“But now they know what really happened to her,” Noguera said. “And that has been my goal the whole time, is to give the victim’s family just that closure, that finalization, that’s the whole motivating factor behind all of this.”
In addition to the killings, Naso was a serial rapist. He kept a diary that dates back to the 1950s of teenage girls and women he assaulted, more than a hundred of them. Law enforcement agencies around the bay and the FBI are working these new leads from the inmate’s conversations with Naso.
Take a look at more stories by the ABC7 News I-Team.
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