Full Name Joseph Naso Country United States | Victims 3 | |
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Other names The Double Initial Killer Span of killings November 16, 1971–November 26, 1973 State(s) New York, California (possible) | ||
The alphabet murders (also known as the "double initial murders") occurred in the 1970s in the Rochester, New York, area and possibly in Los Angeles, California.
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The alphabet murders true unsolved murders
New York alphabet murders
Three young girls were raped and strangled in the Rochester, New York area.
The case received its name from the fact that each of the girls' first and last names started with the same letter. Furthermore, each body was found in a town that had a name starting with the same letter as the victim's name:
Investigators have theorized that a series of murders with similar circumstances in California, in the late 1970s, is connected to these three murders.
Although hundreds of people were questioned, the killer was never caught. One man, considered to be a person of interest (he committed suicide six weeks after the last of the murders) was cleared in 2007 by DNA profiling.
In the case of Carmen Colon, her uncle was also considered a suspect until his suicide in 1991.
Another suspect was Kenneth Bianchi, who at the time was an ice cream vendor in Rochester, New York, vending from sites close to the first two murder scenes. He was a Rochester native who later moved to Los Angeles and, with his cousin Angelo Buono, Jr., committed the Hillside Strangler murders between 1977 and 1978.
Bianchi was never charged with the alphabet murders, and he has repeatedly tried to have investigators officially clear him of suspicion. However, there is circumstantial evidence that his car was seen at two of the murder scenes.
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California alphabet murders
On April 11, 2011, 77-year-old Joseph Naso, a New York native who lived in Rochester, New York, during the 1970s, was arrested in Reno, Nevada, for four murders in California (in 1977, 1978, 1993, and 1994). He was a professional photographer who had traveled between New York and California extensively for decades.
All four of the murdered women were described by authorities as prostitutes.
Naso was a person of interest in the Rochester, New York, alphabet murders, but his DNA did not match samples taken from those victims.
On January 12, 2012, in his preliminary hearing in Marin County, California, his alleged "rape diary" was entered into evidence. It mentioned the death of a girl in the "Buffalo woods," a possible allusion to Upstate New York.
On June 18, 2013, Naso was tried for the murder of the four California alphabet murder victims. On August 20, 2013, Naso was convicted by a Marin County jury of the murders. On November 22, 2013, Naso was sentenced to death for the murders.
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The California murder victims, like the New York victims, had double initials.