Joseph Naso, the scary-looking man who stands accused of multiple murders of young women with double-initials in Northern California from the 1970s to the 1990s, returns to a Marin courtroom today for a preliminary hearing in which prosecutors will lay out their case. This will be the first the public has heard details of the evidence against the 78-year-old Naso in this death-penalty case, and it's sure to be pretty gruesome.

As you may recall, Naso was too rich to qualify for a public defender, but too cheap (and/or crazy?) to hire an attorney, and he will be defending himself.

Naso was arrested last April after evidence was found in his South Lake Tahoe home connecting him to four unsolved murders around the Bay Area. He stands accused of the murders of prostitutes Roxene Roggasch, 18, of Oakland (whose body was found on Jan. 10, 1977, near Fairfax); Carmen Colon, 22, who was found near Port Costa in Contra Costa County in 1978; and Pamela Parsons, 38, and Tracey Tafoya, 31, who were killed in Yuba County in the early 1990s. It remains possible that Naso could be connected to the similarly patterned Alphabet Murders in New York State, never solved, which took place in the early 1970s. A woman also named Carmen Colon was killed there as well.

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