The sordid, horrifying tale of serial killer Joseph Naso may finally be finished as he was officially handed a death sentence in a Marin County court on Friday. Naturally, because he's a psychopath and in a deep and stubborn denial about his crimes, Naso still had some pissy last words for the judge and prosecutors, and made sure several times to flash his middle finger at the former jurors, victims' relatives, and members of the media who packed the court.
As the Marin Independent Journal reports, Naso said that his arrest and prosecution were "kind of like a hate crime against me," and he objected pointedly to having to pay restitution to his victims' families, saying that as a California taxpayer he'd already paid into victim restitution funds. Because in addition to being an abhorrent and perverted murderer of women, he's also cheap.
Claiming that he couldn't afford an attorney to defend him, despite having $1 million in assets at the time of his arrest, Naso served as his own defense attorney at trial. His defense strategy was characterized by long, rambling speeches in which he tried to cast doubt on the mountain of circumstantial evidence against him, not to mention the physical evidence connecting him to at least one of the crimes his ex-wife's DNA was found on pantyhose that were used to strangle one of the victims. In his last remarks yesterday, he still claims that the DNA evidence was "planted."
Naso was convicted and officially sentenced for the deaths of two women, Roxene Roggasch and Carmen Colon, but links to the deaths of four other women were considered in his sentencing. He may also have been responsible for other unsolved murders in California and elsewhere, and had a "list of 10" in his Reno home that suggested at least ten victims. Also, during the trial, we also learned of the "rape journal" investigators found that detailed sexual assaults dating back to the 1950s.
He will get an automatic appeal, if he lives that long. He turns 80 in January. And he'll be joining California's other 745 inmates on death row, none of whom has been executed since 2006.
Victims' families were somewhat split about the death sentence, with one victim's son, Shane Ashby (son of Roggasch), getting up to tell Naso, "I hope you live to be 110 years old." Rachael Smith, daughter of Colon, said to reporters, "I don't want him to die. I want him to sit there alone. I want him to feel what it's like to lose everything."
Judge Andrew Sweet also didn't mince words:
]Judge Sweet] said the evidence proved that Naso inflicted "abhorrent and repugnant levels of suffering and cruelty" on the victims, and humilitated them even more by meticulously documenting the crimes in his diaries and photographs."You being in this world, Mr. Naso, has made this world a worse place," Sweet said.
Naso was officially named a suspect last year in the Alphabet Murders in and around Rochester, New York in the early 1970s. Naso was a native of Rochester and frequently traveled between there and Northern California at the time, and the three victims there were all killed in very similar, sexualized circumstances. Also, like four of the victims here, the women all had the same first and last initial, and one of them, creepily, had the exact same name as one of the victims here: Carmen Colon. It's unclear whether New York prosecutors will be pursuing their own case against Naso.
[Marin IJ]
[ABC 7]
[UK Telegraph]
