How a Death Row Murderer Exposed One of America’s Most Prolific Serial Killers (Part 1)

The last time anybody saw Charlotte Cook was January 3, 1974. That afternoon, the college student and community organizer, a young mother and widow, left her home in Oakland to visit her sister in San Francisco, decked out in disco-era style: knee-high boots, a blue sleeveless blouse, and a camel hair coat. When her body was discovered the following day at the bottom of a bluff overlooking Thornton Beach in Daly City, California, a brown belt wrapped around her neck, it was the description of her “expensive camel’s hair coat” in local press reports that led her father to identify her. She was 19.

Cook’s daughter, now 52, says that when she was growing up in her great-grandparents’ home, nobody in their close-knit family, not her great-grandparents, not her aunts or uncles, would ever talk about her mother. Any time the name Charlotte Cook came up, a hush would descend over the room, indicating the topic was off-limits, too painful. “I never knew what to think,” says Freedom Cook, a massage therapist, activist, and preschool teacher in Vallejo, California. “I just thought I had a mom and she was just out in the world somewhere, and I don’t know what happened.” Freedom was 12 when one of her aunts finally informed her that her mother was dead.

For decades, nobody knew who was responsible for Charlotte Cook’s death. Then, in January, Freedom was shocked to learn that the man who murdered her mother was almost certainly Joseph Naso, a 91-year-old convicted serial killer, a death row inmate at California’s San Quentin prison. Even more surprising was that Charlotte’s murder—Daly City’s oldest “active” cold case—was solved not by the local police but by William A. Noguera, another convicted murderer at San Quentin. Noguera, who served 36 years on death row, calls himself “the Jane Goodall of serial killers” because he’s spent more time embedded with them in their habitat than practically anyone, including FBI profilers and forensic psychologists. One of the killers he closely observed on death row was Naso.

In spite of overwhelming evidence, Naso has never publicly admitted to killing anyone. But during the 10 years that Noguera overlapped with him at San Quentin, Noguera says he got him to reveal his secrets by pretending to be his friend and protector. Armed with 300 pages of notes about his interactions with Naso, containing descriptions of alleged victims and the timing and circumstances of their deaths, Noguera then wrote to Kenneth Mains, a cold-case detective he saw on TV, and persuaded him to collaborate with him to identify more victims. Thus far, the convict-cop duo has linked Naso to four unsolved murders, and they are working on solving several more.

Mains, a compact man with a -closely cropped gray beard, arms covered in sleeves of tattoos and a large cross dangling from his neck, admits “it’s an unlikely friendship, convict and cop,” adding that without Noguera, “none of this would be happening.” Although he’s based in rural Lycoming County, Pennsylvania, Mains is currently in contact with the San Francisco office of the FBI and is providing intelligence to six police departments across the country, including Northern California, Las Vegas, and Rochester, New York. Mains and detectives involved with investigating the cold cases believe that Naso, convicted in 2013 of four murders, is possibly responsible for as many as 22 more. That would make Naso among the most “prolific” serial killers in American history, perhaps more deadly than better-known murderers like Ted Bundy (20 victims), Jeffrey Dahmer (17 victims), and Richard Ramirez (13 victims).

Naso currently resides at a medical facility for inmates in Stockton, California—he was moved from San Quentin in 2023 amid California governor Gavin Newsom’s efforts at prison reform. When I wrote him a letter seeking a comment on the new allegations, he wrote back “FIRST SEND ME A BOOK OF STAMP’S [sic].” The following day, I mailed him a book of Forever US flag stamps, a few pieces of extra stationery, and another letter requesting an interview. A couple weeks later the envelope was returned to the post office box I had set up for the purposes of communicating with Naso. I heard back a few weeks later via GTL GettingOut, an app used by inmates to communicate: “Send me your phone number right now,” he texted. I replied with a burner phone number, but he didn’t call. The following weekend, I received another letter from him, in all caps, advising me not to ever send him text messages, writing “DO NOT TALK TO ANYONE, EXCEPT ME.” I wrote back with a series of questions and asked him to answer via mail or to call me, explaining that my deadline was rapidly approaching, and that if he wanted to comment, he would have to respond quickly. But instead of answering the questions, he asked me to “SEND ME A PHOTO OF YOUR FACE AND YOUR AGE” in exchange for “A RARE PHOTO OF ME. NOT SEEN BY THE MEDIA NOR THE D.A.” I did not respond.

For more than 60 years, Naso hid in plain sight. He was once a Little League coach and Cub Scout leader, a husband, and a father of two. He worked as a -family photographer and even briefly taught a photography course at the Academy of Art College in San Francisco. But he lived a second reality, the life of a serial killer, raping and murdering young women allegedly beginning in 1965 through at least 1994. He had also been arrested for lesser crimes such as battery, disturbing the peace, unemployment insurance fraud, shoplifting women’s undergarments, and petty theft and grand larceny, which is how he was busted in 2008. Following a routine probation check in April 2010, he was arrested in Reno, where he was living at the time. The cops were horrified by what they saw: a home bursting with clutter, dirty dishes piled on kitchen counters, and food lying all over, including rotting meat.

“The only thing that I could relate it to would be The Silence of the Lambs,” says Wendell Anderson, the detective who executed a search warrant on Naso’s house after probation officers found laminated articles from Yuba County’s hometown newspaper, The Appeal Democrat, about two murders that took place there in the early ’90s. Affixed to the articles were photographs of the victims, posed and wearing lingerie, believed to have been taken by Naso after he had strangled them.

Anderson, now the sheriff of Yuba County, remembers being struck by the photography equipment and thousands of pictures of women, mostly in stockings with seams up the back, hanging on the walls and stacked on every surface. (Naso told the police that he wore -women’s panty-hose “for a skin condition on his legs,” according to a search warrant affidavit filed with the Yuba County Sheriff’s Office and seen by Vanity Fair.) In the garage, 10 mannequins wearing makeup and lingerie dangled by their necks from the ceiling, the nooses made of sheer panty-hose. In one bedroom, pairs of panty-hose were tied around each post of Naso’s four-poster bed. Two other bedrooms were padlocked from the outside. There was a “rape journal,” as police called it, detailing more than 100 alleged sex crimes dating back to the 1950s. “I would pose as the professional glamor [sic] photog. Always looking for new models + talent. What a great scam,” Naso wrote in the journal, recounting a sexual encounter in Rochester in the late 1950s. (Naso was charged twice with sexual assault, in 1958 and 1961, but the victims refused to testify and he walked free.) But the most alarming piece of evidence was a ripped-out sheet of notebook paper in Naso’s kitchen. A handwritten “List of 10” described unnamed women in various locations: “Girl near Heldsburg [sic] Mendocino Co.” or “Girl on Mt. Tam.”

“I knew without a doubt that those 10 on that list were homicide victims,” says Anderson, who has kept the Naso file on his desk for the past 15 years. “We just didn’t know where they were or who they were.”

Even though prosecutors in Marin County suspected Naso had committed at least 10 murders, they only had enough evidence to charge him with four in a 17-year period beginning in 1977. Each woman had an alliterative name: Carmen Colon, Roxene Roggasch, Pamela Parsons, and Tracy Tafoya, who matched the descriptions of numbers 2, 3, 9, and 10 on Naso’s list, respectively. (He was dubbed the “Alphabet Killer” in media reports when he was caught.) Additional evidence collected by police from Naso’s home and safe deposit box allegedly linked him to two more dead women—Sharieea Patton and Sara Dylan, matching the descriptions of numbers 7 and 8—though Naso has never been charged with their murders. The identities of the remaining four women on the list—numbers 1, 4, 5, and 6—remained a mystery to law enforcement. Now police believe number 5, “Girl from Miami Near Down Peninsula,” was Charlotte Cook. All it took was a collision of fate and the desire of another man to repay his debt to society in the wake of a different murder.

Noguera has been incarcerated since December 1983, when he was arrested for killing his then girlfriend’s mother in a steroid-fueled fit of rage after learning of his girlfriend’s abortion. An Orange County jury sentenced him to death, making him one of the youngest people in California history at the time of his crime to receive such a harsh punishment. The reason the death penalty was even on the table was the so-called “special circumstances” surrounding the murder: Prosecutors believed, owing to testimony from a witness who was later determined to be lying, that Noguera and his girlfriend had conspired to benefit from a $13,000 life insurance policy held by the victim. Noguera’s ex-girlfriend declined to testify at his trial, for which she was held in contempt, but she later wrote a declaration supporting his appeal, stating that her mother was abusive and had coerced her to terminate her pregnancy.

“At 18 years of age, I took a human life, and I take full responsibility for what I did,” says Noguera, who called me from Corcoran State Prison in Corcoran, California, about 50 miles south of Fresno. “It would be very special for me to be able to give back in some way and allow these families to at least have some finalization.” He doesn’t believe in closure, not in situations like this.

Noguera turned his life around in prison. His mixed-media paintings, using acrylic paint, newspaper clippings, and ground-up prison yard concrete, have earned him awards and gallery representation. His work is currently exhibited at the Elder Gallery of Contemporary Art in Charlotte, North Carolina, owned by attorney Sonya Pfeiffer, the wife of David Rudolf, the criminal defense lawyer who represented Michael Peterson in the murder trial dramatized in Netflix’s The Staircase. In 2021 Noguera launched Death Row Diaries, billed as “the only podcast hosted live from death row.” In 2018 he published a memoir, Escape Artist: Memoir of a Visionary Artist on Death Row (Seven Stories Press), and he’s also written another book based on his relationship with Naso, Through the Lens of a Monster, slated to be published in September by Sandra Jonas Publishing. Since partnering with Mains, he has also appeared via phone on about 20 episodes of Mains’s YouTube show, Unsolved No More, where they discuss murder cases in the news.

“[Noguera] is not lying about who he is. He is a respected convict who is not a trouble maker,” Dan Long, a San Quentin corrections officer on Noguera’s cell block, wrote to Mains in an email in January 2023 after seeing Noguera featured on Unsolved No More.

Well-read and direct, with a white Vandyke-style beard, Noguera sounds more like a professor than a convicted murderer. In some ways, that’s what he is. Even though he’s been behind bars for most of his life, he’s spent decades reading and seeing the world “through the lens of those who have experienced it from a unique perspective,” he tells me—people like the poet Lautréamont, the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, and artists like Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell. Inspired by such thinkers, he made a decision to use his experiences inside the walls of San Quentin to turn his life sentence into his life’s mission: studying serial killers as if he were a cultural anthropologist in an effort to get them to spill their secrets. “I lived for 40 years with serial killers,” says Noguera. “There’s not an expert in the field who has the thesis, the research, and the one-on-one time with serial killers that I have.”

Noguera methodically observed serial killers’ behavior by talking with them and earning their trust. He then took detailed notes in neat, tiny handwriting with loopy y’s and j’s upon returning to his home: a four-and-a-half- by nine-and-a-half-foot cell on the fourth tier of San Quentin’s East Block, nicknamed the Pigeon Cage to describe this cavernous five-story concrete hive of 528 cells. (Noguera, inmate number D77200, was in cell 77.) Like any researcher conducting a longitudinal study, Noguera would ask the killers the same questions after a year, 5 years, then 10 years, cross-checking his notes to see which responses remained the same. “I really believe in consistency of behavior,” says Noguera. For example, he noticed that serial killers often boast about events that turn out to be untrue, but since they remember their crimes so vividly, if their story changes—even slight details, such as what they were wearing—he knows they are lying.

Noguera first became interested in serial killers while he was awaiting trial at the Orange County Jail. He found himself in a cell adjacent to “Dating Game Killer” Rodney Alcala and Randy Kraft, the “Scorecard Killer,” both of whom had been charged with murdering children. As he sees it, the killing of a child—which is how he views his former girlfriend’s abortion—is what precipitated his own crime. “The loss of a child is something that resonates with me because I lost my child,” Noguera told me.

Growing up in La Puente, California, a gang-ridden suburban city in Los Angeles County, with an abusive, alcoholic father whom he simultaneously “worshipped and feared,” Noguera became a quick study of human behavior. In his memoir—dedicated to his father, who died in 2022—he writes that, out of necessity, he honed an “ability to read body language and nonverbal cues as a survival mechanism.” As a teenage middleweight champion in hapkido, a Korean martial art, he became adept at predicting how opponents would move, a skill he credits with saving his life on multiple occasions, both before and during his incarceration. By the time he was charged with murder, Noguera felt he understood many types of criminals—gang members, drug kingpins, car thieves. But his serial-killer cellmates at the Orange County Jail baffled him. Figuring out what could possibly compel these men to kill innocent strangers, and furthermore to derive pleasure from the act of killing, became “a hobby, if you want to call it that,” he says.

The 1970s through the 1990s—an era before ubiquitous security cameras, smartphones, GPS, DNA testing, and national databases—is often called the golden age of serial killers, a term first coined by author Harold Schechter, who has written more than two dozen true-crime books, including the A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers. One of them, William Bonin, the “Freeway Killer,” known for raping and torturing young men and boys, had even tried to kidnap Noguera at a California bus stop not once, but twice—when Noguera was 11 and again when he was 15. When he arrived at San Quentin, Noguera says that Bonin instantly recognized him and called him his “unicorn.” It was Bonin who paved the way for Noguera to get to know other serial killers. (Bonin was executed by lethal injection in 1996.)

Fewer than one percent of murders in any given year are due to serial killers. But their randomness and brutality are especially terrifying, which partly explains our enduring cultural fascination with them. Noguera calls them the “apex predators” of civil society, but on death row, they are considered pathetic vermin, the lowest form of life, more likely to be stabbed by a prison gang member with a makeshift shank than executed by the state. Because of this, at San Quentin, serial killers were kept isolated from the rest of the death row population.

“If you get around a serial killer, you are to kill him, because serial killers give convicts a bad name,” says Noguera, citing the convict code, unwritten guidelines that govern inmate behavior and are shared only with convicts deemed worthy to receive them.

Naso’s trial in the summer of 2013 was described in press reports as a bizarre spectacle. Naso acted as his own attorney and referred to himself in the third person, demanding that the judge “release Joseph Naso from jail immediately.” He flipped the bird at the jury and victims’ families, calling the female deputy district attorney a “whore,” and insisted the photographs he took of naked women, some of whom were believed to be deceased, was his “art.” He cross-examined the famous forensic psychiatrist Park Deitz as well as his own ex-wife, Judith, who testified that Naso had drugged her and invited strangers to rape her while he looked on, then gaslit her when she tried to confront him. (Judith Naso died in 2016.) Naso’s sons, Charles and David, now 62 and 59, respectively, did not attend the trial. Charles, who was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and has a long rap sheet of his own, was moved into a psychiatric facility in Nevada in the early 2000s. David reportedly lives in Hawaii and did not respond to Vanity Fair’s attempts to reach him. It is unclear if he still speaks to his father, but investigators discovered that Naso liquidated almost $300,000 in assets following his arrest and transferred that money to David, who, according to Marin County prosecutors, may have then been living in the Philippines.

Pedro Oliveros, who was appointed Naso’s advisory counsel, remembers the trial being “like a circus.” His client objected to the prosecution “snuggling” with a witness, because he—serving as the defense as well as the defendant—had to remain far away. There was also Naso’s motion demanding that nobody drink coffee in the courthouse because, since Naso wasn’t allowed to have coffee, it gave the prosecution “an unfair advantage.” Now retired, Oliveros says the case was “one of the most challenging assignments in my 34-year career as a public defender” because, as much as he advised his client, Naso was ultimately in control of everything. (Marin County sued Naso after his conviction to try to recoup the $170,000 spent on his case, including legal fees owed to Oliveros; Naso appealed the judgment, but the appeal was dismissed because it was filed in 2021, seven years after the initial 2014 ruling, far exceeding the 30-day deadline.)

Rachel Smith, the daughter of one of Naso’s victims, was at the trial and remembers it all too well. He was “a smug son of a bitch, very disrespectful,” says Smith, who was just four years old when Naso murdered her mother, Carmen Colon. By the time Naso was charged, Smith was a 36-year-old addict who had struggled her entire life to process her mother’s death. “I didn’t start healing until the trial,” says Smith, who is now 51, in recovery, and studying for a degree in social work.

The jury reached a verdict in less than four hours. At age 79, Naso became the oldest person in California history to be sentenced to death. (He’s currently the second-oldest death row inmate in the state; “Trailside Killer” David Carpenter is a few years older, at 95.) In the one interview Naso gave at the Marin County Jail after his conviction, he laughed as ABC San Francisco reporter Dan Noyes showed him a photograph of the mannequins hanging in his garage. Naso described the image as “my family picture.” When asked to explain why his ex-wife’s DNA was found on pantyhose wrapped around one victim’s neck, Naso told Noyes with a smirk, “You’ll have to ask my wife.”

Death Row Confidential: Secrets of a Serial Killer, a documentary produced by Wolf Entertainment, Fireside Pictures, Universal Television Alternative Studio, and Vanity Fair Studios, premieres at 9 p.m. ET September 13 on Oxygen. The documentary continues with two back-to-back episodes on September 20 at 9 p.m. ET.