KILLER INSTINCTS

William Noguera was sentenced to death after an act of rage as a teenager that he never stopped regretting. But his redemption arc while incarcerated brought him perilously close to some of the most violent criminals in America, including Joseph Naso, a convicted serial killer whose true body count—and culpability— became Noguera's mission to expose

RACHEL DODES

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 offlimits, 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 e mbe dde d with the m in the ir hab -itat 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.

"THE ONLY THING THAT I COULD RELATE IT TO WOULD BE THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS."

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 pantyhose "for a skin condition on his legs," according to a search warrant affidavit filed with the YubaCounty 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 pantyhose. In one bedroom, pairs of pantyhose 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 tookwas 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.

NASO'S TRIAL IN THE SUMMER OF 2013 WAS A RIZARRE SPECTACLE. HE ACTED AS HIS OWN ATTORNEY AND REFERRED TO HIMSELF IN THE THIRD PERSON.... HE FLIPPED THE RIRD AT THE JURY AND VICTIMS' FAMILIES.

" [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 Lautreamont, 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 ys and/s upon returning to his home: a four-and-a-halfby 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 ofwhomhad 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, dmg 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.

NASCS 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 co ffee 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.)

NASO FINALLY STARTED OPENING UP TO NOGUERA AROUT THE DETAILS OF HIS CRIMES. HE DRAGGED THAT "THE COPS GOT IT ALL WRONG." THE LIST OF 10 WAS MERELY HIS GREATEST HITS. HIS REAL "KILL NUMBER " HE TOLD NOGUERA, WAS 26.

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 a36-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 fewyears 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."

By the time Naso was transferred to San Quentin in November 2013, Noguera had become known by prison officials as a model inmate. The warden had just offered him a newly created role with the Inmate Disability Assistance Program (IDAP), for which he was paid $60 per month, that involved daily visits to the Medically Restricted Yard, where the inmates were either old, disabled, or required segregation from the general population for their own safety. Many in the third category happened to be serial killers. They largely kept to themselves, avoiding confrontation with inmates who were well-versed in the convict code. But Naso was different. He walked right up to Noguera and boldly asked what he was doing there. Noguera explained that he was in the yard to assist him and others with any physical issues they may have, like putting on clothes, exercising, and getting in and out of a wheelchair. Naso then tried to hustle Noguera, telling him he could really use a good cup of coffee and some candy bars.

The following day Noguera delivered. Naso was chatty. " I know a lot about you," Naso told Noguera. "You're a famous artist. Everybody knows who you are inhere. I'm an artist too."

Right off the bat, Noguera could tell that Naso was a narcissist. (In a 2009 psychological evaluation following a shoplifting arrest, a doctor noted that Naso believes he is "a 'celebrity' and special.") Naso continually bragged about his Hollywood connections and showed Noguera a photo of himself with the actor Jay Mohr on the set of a 1998 film called Jane Austen's Mafia! in which Naso was an uncredited extra. Naso told Noguera that he and Mohr were friends. (Mohr "says he doesn't know the guy," the actor's manager, Barry Katz, wrote in a text message.) Naso also showed off his collection of pictures of himselfwith stars like Anthony Hopkins, Glenn Close, and Michelle Pfeiffer.

One day Naso gave Noguera a piece of his own "art": a collage of 11 headshots of different women encircling Naso's blackand-white self-portrait. "Best wishes to Bill," Naso wrote at the bottom of the collage, "from me and friends, Joe Naso." The collage sent a chill down Noguera's spine. He asked Naso how many of the women pictured were still alive. Naso "took his index finger, hit his temple, and said, 'They're all alive right here,' " then erupted in laughter, Noguera recalls, "it was creepy as hell."

Although it was dangerous for Noguera to be seen hanging out with a serial killer, over the years he had cultivated a reputation as a man not to be messed with. At six feet one and 200 pounds, and trained in martial arts, he could hold his own. "I have a mask of a really not nice guy," Noguera admits to me. "I was feared by other killers because of my reputation of using violence as a tool, and I was extremely good at it." In his memoir, he describes a fight with a paranoid murderer nicknamed Hellhound who accused Noguera of bugging his cell and struck him in the head. In response, Noguera smashed Hellhound's nose, fractured his eye socket, and knocked out some of his teeth. Descriptions of incidents like this were "watered down" in the book, Noguera says, because he didn't want to glorify violence. Not mentioned was the fact that Hellhound's face was permanently disfigured after the beating, he spoke with a lisp, had one droopy eye, and never returned to the yard.

Noguera leveraged his tough reputation to get closer to Naso when he got into afight with another inmate. Naso bumped into "Rockhead," an Aryan Brotherhood member who had been separated from other gang members who were plotting to kill him for snitching. But instead of apologizing to Rockhead, who was bigger than Naso, "he said something like 'Watch where you're going, asshole,' " Noguera recalls. Rockhead left Naso so badly bruised and terrified that he begged Noguera to be his protector. Noguera was only too willing to get closer for his research. "I said, 'Joe, Rockhead's gonna rape you.' And Joe just completely panicked, which was kind of funny, because he's a rapist," recalls Noguera. He ultimately agreed to protect Naso, but only if he did exactly what Noguera asked. Naso nervously agreed. "We're friends, right?" Naso sheepishly asked Noguera, who smiled and assured him, "We're more than friends, Joe. We're crime partners."

By 2015 Naso felt more comfortable in the yard with his influential friend and "crime partner." He would fantasize aloud about hitting the road with Noguera and going on a raping spree in Los Angeles, or as Naso put it, "two artists at work getting whores," Noguera wrote in his notes. Naso started asking Noguera for more complicated favors, like whether he could procure women's underwear, lipstick, a bra, and bondage porn. Noguera assured him he had "friends in places high and low." He then would disappear for a few days to psychologically torment Naso. In a note to himself dated May 21, 2015, Noguera describes telling Naso that he got the underwear. "He nearly jumped out of his skin," Noguera wrote. The followingweek, Noguera says, Naso pulled down his pants right there in the yard to reveal that he was wearing it.

At times, pretending to be pals was emotionally exhausting for Noguera, not to mention dangerous. But Noguera persisted in his mission. "I'm sometimes relieved when Naso doesn't come out," Noguera wrote in his notes to himself. "He's a monster and wearing a mask to fool him is not easy. Must continue, there's a bigger purpose to think about— victim's family."

By the end of 2015, two years after they first met, Naso finally started opening up to Noguera about the details of his crimes. He bragged that "the cops got it all wrong," accordingto Noguera's journal. The List of 10 was merely his greatest hits, his favorites, he said. His real "kill number," he told Noguera, was 26. (Mains notes that investigators found a collection of 26gold coins inside Naso's house.) Naso described driving around on the hunt for victims while listening to the Doors' "Riders on the Storm" over and over because he liked the line "There's a killer onthe road / His brain is squirming like a toad." Noguera says that Naso revealed that one of his murders was incorrectly pinned on a fellow San Quentin inmate, Dating Game Killer Alcala, whom Naso despised because Alcala was identified as a "professional" photographer in media reports. "That really bothered him," recalls Noguera. "Sohe often talked about how ' they got him for one of mine.' "

Naso also told Noguera why he killed: He believed all women to be secret whores who used their sexuality to control men. Noguera says that Naso told him about the time when he was just a kid, 9 or 10 years old, and his mother caught him trying on her lingerie. Furious, she beat him with a belt and subsequently began calling him her "daughter" and gave him a nickname, "Miss Josey." Shortly thereafter, while peeping through the window of his mother's bedroom—Naso was a voyeur even as a child—he observed her wearing the lingerie while having sex with a neighbor, asking the neighbor to choke her. This confirmed Naso's beliefs about women in general and his mother in particular: She was a liar, a hypocrite, and a whore. To get her back, he strangled her beloved pet bird.

By taking photos of victims after he had allegedly raped and strangled them to death—sometimes engaging in necrophilia—Naso told Noguera, he was showing women who was really the boss and making them "clean" and "perfect" again. He then used his photographs to relive the crimes. "I am called to kill. It

truly calls to me and I answer its call, he told Noguera, according to his notes. Naso, well-versed in the biographies of other famous serial killers and rapists, frequently expressed his admiration of and lifelong devotion to the "Red Light Bandit, Caryl Chessman, a serial rapist in the 1940s. Police had found correspondence between Naso and Chessman, along with an invitation to Chessman's execution, which took place at San Quentin in i960. By targeting women with first and last names that began with the same letter—like Carmen Colon and Charlotte Cook—investigatorsbelieve Naso was paying tribute to his "mentor."

Even as he joked about his crimes, Naso was desperate to get off death row, whining to Noguera that he was just a tired old man and no longer a threat to anyone. This suddenly gave Noguera an idea. He told Naso that he had a friend, Walt Pavlo Jr., who played golf with Gavin Newsom. If Naso could offer "a good faith token"—by admitting to an unsolved murder—maybe his pal Walt could put in a good word with the governor, the only man with the power to get Naso moved out of San Quentin and into a more comfortable facility.

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.

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Pavlo, a former executive at MCI Worldcom who served two years in a federal prison for wire fraud and obstruction of justice, had been introduced to Noguera through a mutual friend. The author of a book, Stolen Without a Gun: Confessions From Inside History's Biggest Accounting Fraud, Pavlo has covered Noguera's case for Forbes magazine, where he's now a contributor, and invited Noguera to guest lecture at Endicott College, where he was an adjunct professor. He and Noguera really are friends; Pavlo wrote the foreword to Noguera's memoir, comparing him to Pablo Picasso. But he does not play golf with Newsom—Noguera fabricated that detail in the heat of the moment to appeal to Naso, who had reminisced in a note to Noguera about his time as a "champion caddy at a prominent prestigious NY country club," where he observed that "big people make big deals, not in the office, but on the golf course."

AS NOGUERA WAS scamming Naso to confess to more murders, he was simultaneously working to get off death row himself. In 2017, following years of appeals, stays of execution, hearings and delays, a federal judge reversed Noguera's conviction on the grounds that his lawyer had prevented him from getting a fair trial and ordered him either released from prison or retried within 120 days. Unfortunately for Noguera, the decision was appealed to the Ninth Circuit by the attorney general of California, tossing him once again into legal purgatory.

At the time, Noguera had been making steady progress with Naso but hadn't yet extracted enough information to tie him to a specific murder. Depending on what the Ninth Circuit would decide, his time with Naso could be running out, rendering all those years he spent befriending him worthless. Plus, Naso's health was rapidly deteriorating. His hygiene was abysmal, his teeth were brown and falling out, and he smelled so bad that Noguera often had to hold his breath around him, even when they were outdoors. At one point, Naso collapsed in the yard and had to be rushed to the hospital for heart surgery, an irony not lost on Noguera, who saw it as an absurdist exercise in wasting taxpayer money to save a man's life just so that the state could later waste more taxpayer money to kill him.

"Must hurry...[Naso] may not be here much longer," Noguera wrote in his notes. To persuade Naso that he had connections inside the judicial system, he decided to bring to the yard the court order stating that his conviction had been reversed (not mentioning, of course, that the order had since been appealed and might soon be reinstated). According to Noguera, Naso was so impressed with the document that, a few days after seeing it, he presented Noguera with a handwritten confession to a murder, matching number 6 on his List of 10, the "Girl from Berkeley."

"Naso did what I never thought he'd do," Noguera wrote in an April 2019 journal entry. "He admitted on paper (confessed) to killing Girl from Berkeley.... Wants me to give [this letter] to my friend, to begin 'talks' with governor. I'll play this out as long as I can." Over the next year, Noguera strung Naso along, pressing him to add more details to bolster his confession because, he said, his buddy Pavlo needed a real sign of "good faith" if he was going to take Naso's case up with Newsom. Noguera made Naso promise not to tell anyone about their secret plan because he was aware that anyone who heard about it would not only know it was total bullshit, but would come after Noguera for being a snitch.

Despite the risks, the scheme worked. In June 2020 Naso handed Noguera an expanded two-page confession letter about the "Girl from Berkeley." Noguera says his "stomach clenched" as he read Naso's all-caps handwriting, recalling how, sometime in the late 1960s or early 1970s, Naso responded to an ad in the countercultural newspaper the Berkeley Barb from a young woman seeking nude modeling gigs. The woman rode her bike to meet Naso and chained it up at the meeting place, after which he brought her back to his home in Oakland for a photo shoot—he knew his wife and kids would be out at that time. "She was nice looking with long brown hair and seemed to have a good figure, I'd guess about 5 '4" and 120 lb," he wrote. He couldn't recall her name, noting that he had no intention to "date" her. "I had her lay on her back on my sofa for some topless shots. During this session I choked her to death. No violence. No sex. Just a quick death," he wrote, before de scribing matter-of-factly how he put her body in a trash bag in the trunk of his car and drove to the San Rafael bridge, where he tossed it into the bay, boasting that "it wasn't easy, but back then I had the vigor."

Now that he had a confession and 300 pages of his own meticulous notes about Naso, Noguera started writing letters to more than a dozen private investigators who he hoped could identify the "Girl from Berkeley" while keeping Noguera's own identity confidential for the time being. If his name got out while he was still at San Quentin, "it will be all over death row. I'll be killed," he wrote.

Almost none of the investigators responded, and the few who did required retainers. Two years later Noguera was still stuck at San Quentin awaiting a ruling from the Ninth Circuit, taking more notes and polishing up a manuscript he'd decided to write about his time with Naso—his new plan. Then one day, in his cell on the fourth tier of East Block, he was watching The Hunt for the Zodiac Killer on the History Channel, featuring an expert in cold cases. That expert was Kenneth Mains. "The way he spoke, it made me interested in him as a person with integrity as well as credibility as a profiler and investigator," recalls Noguera. He sent Mains a letter pleading for his help: "I need you to put the puzzle together, which I cannot do from prison."

Mains didn't know what to think about the letter from a convicted murderer on death row. "I always feel that there's an angle, some way that I'm going to get played," he says now. But there was something about Noguera's story that made Mains feel he deserved at least to be heard. "I do not and will not ever judge someone as I haven't walked in their shoes," Mains wrote back to Noguera. "Your accomplishments inside those walls are honorable and you should be commended for that. Your art work isn't too shabby either...haha!" Mains says that like Noguera and the families of victims he's trying to help, he could also relate to the pain of losing a child: On his left arm, amid a full sleeve of tattoos, he has one that says, "come sit beside me, my only son." It's a lyric from the Lynyrd Skynyrd song "Simple Man," a tribute to his son, Erick, who died in 2013 at age 21 after struggling with drug addiction.

Unlike the other investigators Noguera had reached out to, Mains offered to work pro bono because, he tells me, "it's in my DNA to be a cold-case detective. It's just what I do. And money isn't everything." To familiarize Mains with everything he knew, Noguera had his lawyer send over the unfinished manuscript he had been writing about Naso. Riveted, Mains devoured it in a single evening.

[ went back to Bill and I said, 'All right, you got my attention now. What else you got?' " Mains recalls. Noguera then sent him a copy of Naso's two-page letter about "Girl from Berkeley." The next day Mains was "99 percent sure" he had identified the victim. The detailed information in Naso's confession made it easy: Mains simply queried the NamUs missing-persons database for disappearances of young women in the 1960s or '70s involving a bicycle that was left chained at a restaurant in Berkeley. His search turned up the case of Lynn Ruth Connes, a 20-year-old woman who had disappeared in 1976 after going to meet a photographer who responded to an ad she had placed in the Berkeley Barb. Police reports described her as five feet four and no pounds, and mentioned that her bike was found chained outside the Bateau Ivre restaurant on Telegraph Avenue. Her body was never found.

Before Mains would tell Berkeley Police that he'd solved their case, there was one more thing Mains wanted Noguera to do. He printed out a couple of photos of Connes, a freckle-faced young woman with dark blond hair parted in the middle and a small scar on her lower lip, and sent them to Noguera, asking him to "observe [Naso's] reaction" to seeing them.

By that time Noguera's job in the Medically Restricted Yard had ended, so he wasn't in contact with Naso as much as he had been before. He was awaiting transfer to another prison, which could happen any day without warning. But the day after the Las Vegas Raiders defeated the Jacksonville Jaguars in an NFL Hall of Fame game in August 2022, he knew Naso would be in the yard wanting to recap the game—he was a huge sports fanatic. Noguera kept the photos of Connes on him and wasn't surprised when he was called over from the adjacent yard by Naso, asking what he thought about the game. Noguera slipped the pictures of Connes through the fence without saying a word and noticed how Naso began to excitedly stroke one of the photographs, asking how on earth Noguera managed to find her. Noguera repeated his refrain: "You know, Joe, I got a lot of friends in low places as well as high places."

"She's one of my special ones," Naso said, according to Noguera, "the Girl from Berkeley."

As Noguera tells me now, "Everything in that one moment felt like it was all completely worth it."

THE LAST TIME Celeste Connes heard her daughter Lynn's voice was on Mother's Day in 1976. Had she known that Lynn was going to model nude for an unknown photographer, " I would have come all the way to California from N.C. to stop you," she wrote in an open letter that was published in a local newspaper the following year. Celeste died in 1988. Lynn's gravestone, located right below her mother's in the Thomasville City Cemetery outside of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, still says "Missing."

Lynn's younger brother, Lee Connes, 64, who oversees maintenance for the cemetery where those gravestones lie, met with Mains in May. After Mains showed him the letter Naso wrote about the "Girl from Berkeley," Lee told Vanity Fair he's "99.9 percent sure" that Naso was responsible for Lynn's death, "it's a lot to process," he said, "it's amazing that after so long there was anybody that had an interest in trying to solve it. We are lucky that [Noguera] tried to get the ball rolling and was concerned enough to find out what happened."

He is now considering updating his sister's memorial to reflect that she's no longer missing. "We were very close," he said, "it's been so hard to ever say she was deceased. It takes a bit to settle in."

IN 2023 NOGUERA was loaded onto a bus and driven 250 miles south of San Quentin to Corcoran State Prison, carsick the entire way because he hadn't been in a vehicle in more than 30 years. The Ninth Circuit had reversed the overturning of Noguera's conviction and resentenced him to life with no possibility of parole. This was not what Noguera had hoped for, but it was a "crack in the armor that allowed us to stick our foot in," says his lawyer, Andrew Nechaev. He asked the court to invoke California's penal code 1385, which gives judges the authority to dismiss punishments deemed frivolous. In his brief, Nechaev described how much criminal law has evolved in the past 40 years and urged the court to consider that the brain of an 18-year-old—the age at which Noguera committed murder—is now understood to be undeveloped. He also wanted the court to consider the trauma of his client's upbringing, the poor legal representation he received at his trial, and the fact that the testimony backing the claims of "special circumstances"—that the motive for the murder was financial gain—was shown to have been coerced. "This case was so botched," Nechaev told me. "Having reviewed the appellate history, it's just astounding, the level of incompetence."

To Noguera's amazement, a conservative Superior Court judge in Orange County took interest in his case and ultimately agreed with his lawyer that the special circumstances were invalid. Over the summer of 2024, Noguera was resentenced again to 25 years to life, but because he had already served more than 40 years, he was immediately eligible for parole. He didn't want to get too excited, because even if the parole board decided to release him, the governor had the right to reverse the decision. Nechaev told me that he and Noguera made a "judgment call" early on to stick to the merits of his case when dealing with the parole board and not to mention any of Noguera's freelance detective work. "We didn't think it would help," says Nechaev, adding that securing his own freedom had never been Noguera's primary motivator in working with Mains to solve cold cases. Indeed, Noguera began working with Mains while he was still on death row, before he knew that parole would ever be a possibility.

While Noguera was waiting for his first parole hearing to be scheduled, he and Mains continued to focus on solving the remaining three murders on the List of 10: "Girl near Heldsburg" (number 1), "Girl on Mt. Tam" (number 4), and "Girl from Miami Near Down Peninsula" (number 5). They had reason to believe that "Girl on Mt. Tam"—short for Mount Tamalpais, a Marin County landmark—was the one that Naso bragged was incorrectly pinned on the Dating Game Killer, Alcala. In 2011 the Marin County Sheriff's Office held a press conference to announce they were "confident" that Alcala killed 19-year-old Pamela Jean Lambson 34 years earlier. Alcala was already incarcerated at San Quentin and was never charged with Lambson's murder. He always denied it, even as he admitted to other murders. Noguera, referring to his "consistency of behavior" thesis, found this interesting.

Also interesting were the circumstances of Lambson's disappearance. An aspiring singer and actor, Lambson vanished after meeting a photographer who had singled her out at an Oakland A's game, told her she was beautiful, and offered to help her with her headshots. She later went to meet the photographer at Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco and never returned. The police found her battered body posed in front of a trail leading to Mount Tam the next day. Based on what Naso told Noguera, including how he hunted for victims at A's games—he went so far as to create fake press credentials and business cards—Mains was convinced that Naso was the real killer. Alcala didn't pose his victims, nor was he known to be in Oakland at the time of Lambson's disappearance, according to Mains. Naso was.

The Lambson family had always questioned whether long-haired Alcala really fit the description of Pamela's killer. Her brother, Michael Lambson, nowayi-yearold plumbing contractor in Englewood, California, says he will never forget what Pamela said before she left to meet the photographer at Fisherman's Wharf, when Michael expressed concern about who this random man was. "She said, 'He could be my dad, Mike,' " he recalls. At the time of Pamela's disappearance, Alcala would have only been in his early 30s, adecade younger than Naso, who was approximately the same age as Pamela's father. Michael told me that he and his brothers are now convinced that Naso is the real murderer.

In 2024 Mains sent all of his notes on the Lambson case to the Marin County Sheriff's Office but says he didn't hear back. While reporting this story, I left two messages there. I eventually received a call from Deputy Chief Adam Schermerhorn, the department's public information officer, who said that, based on new information, Marin County's cold-case team is currently trying to determine if Naso had "any potential involvement" with Lambson's murder. Given that the murder was pinned on Alcala, is the sheriff's office going to make an announcement that the case is being reopened? "We do not have any announcements scheduled at this time," he told me.

Using facial recognition, Mains says he was also able to match one of the photographs from Naso's collage that he gave to Noguera to another potential victim who was not on the List of 10: Rebecca Jean Dunn, a Las Vegas sex worker who went missing in 1979. At the time, Naso was spending a lot of time there after separating from his wife. He set up a photography studio near the Strip, where he would hunt for victims, according to Noguera. After receiving Mains's report about Dunn, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department reopened the case, according to a person close to the matter, though the department's public information office wrote in an email to Yanit)) Fair that " [t]here are currently no new leads in this investigation."

Last year Mains met with Mark Mariano, a retired Rochester detective who, in 2005, reopened an investigation into a series of three unsolved murders that took place there between 1971 and 1973. The victims, girls between the ages of 10 and 11, also had first and last names that started with the same letter. (In an eerie detail, one of them was named Carmen Colon, the exact same name as one of Naso's adult victims.) Although Naso has long denied any involvement in the Rochester "Double Initial" murders, he grew up there, rented an apartment there in the early 1970s, and recounted in his rape journal sex crimes in Rochester with girls he claimed were as young as 14. Naso lived "a stone's throw" from where one of the victims, Wanda Walkowicz, was last seen, says Mariano, who retired in 2008. He says that until he met with Mains, he hadn't seen the rape journal, but when he read it, he was shocked to discover Naso wrote about picking a girl up at Panorama Plaza, which was where one of the three victims, Michelle Maenza, was last seen alive. After reviewing the new evidence, Mariano contacted C.J. Zimmerman, deputy sheriff sergeant at the Monroe County Sheriff's Office, to suggest reopening the case yet again and revisiting Naso as a suspect.

"I said, 'I'm not saying he's the guy, but I don't know how you could say he's not the guy,' " Mariano told Yanit)) Fair. According to Mariano, Zimmerman said that Naso's DNA had already been tested against the one remaining sample—from Walkowicz—and was not a match. Mariano believes that owing to the amount of time that has elapsed since the samples were collected, DNA testing is probably unreliable. "But [Zimmerman] said, 'We're done with it.' " Reached over the phone, Zimmerman told me that he now believes that the three murders may have been committed by more than one person. Due to the DNA testing in the Walkowicz case, Naso has been ruled out. But he is still considered a suspect in the two other Rochester murders.

THE "GIRL FROM Miami Near Down Peninsula" (number 5) was always the most confounding of all the women on Naso's List of 10. First, Miami didn't seem to fit Naso's preferred geographic range, and second, Naso was always reluctant to discuss this particular victim. "He would only say, 'I don't want to talk about her right now. She's very personal,' " recalls Noguera. The only information he could get out of Naso about the girl from Miami was that she was going to visit her sister and that she had been wearing a "kick-ass j acket." At the time, Noguera didn't write down the detail about the jacket. "I would go to the yard, the whole day would pass, and then I would come home to my cell, and I would write these notes," he says. Certain details would inevitably be forgotten.

Mains had been combing through missing persons reports about young women from Miami who disappeared in the 1970s but kept coming up empty-handed. Then one day at the end of 2024, he was looking at the area in Oakland around MacArthur Boulevard, where Naso maintained an office—basically just a one-bedroom flophouse that he allegedly used to lure victims. He noticed that just to the north of MacArthur Boulevard is a tiny dead-end street called Miami Court. Mains crosschecked news reports about murders in that area and found several articles about Charlotte Cook, one of which appeared in a paper called the Peninsula News. "I was like, 'Oh shit, the Girl from Miami Near Down Peninsula—that's got to mean something!'" Mains recalls. Not only did Cook have the type of alliterative name seemingly favored by Naso, but news reports mentioned she was going to visit her sister in San Francisco at the time of her disappearance. Mains sent the articles to Noguera, and upon reading the detail about Cook's expensive camel hair coat, his mind flashed back to the moment Naso had told him about the "kick-ass jacket" that the girl from Miami was wearing.

Ultimately, it was Naso's reluctance to discuss the "Girl from Miami Near Down Peninsula" that told Noguera everything he needed to know. Looking at her picture in the newspaper, he could see she was different from Naso's other known victims insofar as she was Black. "On a level-four prisonyard, racism is everything," explains Noguera. "Whites hang out with whites. Blacks hang out with Blacks." Naso, he speculated, must have known that if word got out that he killed a Black woman, he would be marked for death.

When Mains called the Daly City police to tell them that he'd solved their oldest "active" cold case in December, Detective William Reininger couldn't believe it. Reininger, who has been working as a detective for two years, already knew who Naso was. In fact, he'd been looking at Naso as a suspect in yet another murder, a Jane Doe who'd been strangled in 1987 but whose body was only identified last year. "In reviewing both cases, I believe Charlotte Cook to be the victim in the List of 10, Girl from Miami Near Down Peninsula," Reininger told me in February, adding that he thinks there's a strong possibility that Naso also killed the other victim.

Reininger went to visit Naso in June with Martha Parker, an FBI agent in the San Francisco field office, who broached the subject of "pulling some strings" and moving Naso to a nicer prison if he agreed to provide them with some other information. Naso ignored the offer at first and changed the subject, but when Parker abruptly said they had to leave, he turned to them and asked, "When you said 'other information,' you meant cold cases, right?" recalls Reininger. They confirmed that they indeed were looking for information about cold cases. "Okay, I think I could do that," Naso told them, according to Reininger. Naso mentioned his desire to be moved to a prison in Vacaville, near the Sacramento airport, which would make it easier for his sons to visit him. He also told them he had received a letter from a Vanity Fair reporter, describing me as "so rude" for asking him about murders. (Even though I didn't mention Noguera's name in any communication with Naso, he speculated that "a guy from the other prison"—Noguera—had been talking to me and the cops about the "Girl from Berkeley" and called Noguera "a real snake," according to Reininger.)

Reininger says that he is speaking with the lead district attorney in San Mateo County soon to see if providing immunity in exchange for a confession would be an option. (At press time, he and Parker planned to return to Stockton to interview Naso.)

Parker has also been in touch with Mains. Toward the end of 2024, Mains says, she called him and said she had been looking into Naso for the past year on the Lynn Ruth Connes case alongside the Berkeley Police Department.

An FBI public information officer responded by email that, "per longstanding policy, the FBI cannot confirm or deny the existence of an investigation." Officer Jessica Perry of the Berkeley Police confirmed in an email to Vanity Fair that the department "is currently investigating this [Connes] case and cannot comment on ongoing investigations," adding that "we will issue a public statement with further details" once the investigation is complete.

Yuba County sheriff Wendell Anderson has been acting as an informal liaison between different police departments in Northern California: Berkeley, Marin County, and Daly City. In March detectives from each of the departments got together to "get on the same page and share information," he says.

"REHABILITATION is A word people like to throw around and they do not really know what it means," Mains wrote in a letter last November to the parole board. "Mr. Noguera had spent forty years on Death Row. A well-deserved punishment for his crime in myopinion. Yet, during that time...he chose to educate himself, help others, become a leader inside the prison and do more than most would ever dare to do in San Quentin or any other prison. That is rehabilitation."

Following a hearing in January, the board unanimously determined that Noguera was suitable for parole, meaning if the governor didn't block the decision, he would be released sometime in the next 150 days. In May, Newsom referred the case back to the full parole board for review, known as an en banc hearing. At issue was whether Noguera was psychologically fit to be able to transition to civilian life following 42 years behind bars. Just one day after his 61st birthday, on June 18, Noguera's parole was affirmed. But owing to an outstanding warrant from 1983, he was taken straight from Corcoran State Prison to the Los Angeles County Jail. Noguera was finally released on July 2 on $50,000 bail.

After he walked outside, Noguera, his sister, and his brother-in-law "got in the car as fast as we could and went right to In-N-Out Burger," Noguera told me the following day. His sister sent a video to friends and family ofher brother taking his first bite of a Double Double with cheese. "Winning," he said in the video, holding up the burger.

Noguera is living in transitional housing in Riverside, California, for six months, after which he plans to move in with his sister and continue writing, making art, and podcasting—and working with Mains to solve more cold cases.

Thanks to Noguera's work, Freedom Cook says she has been able to let go of decades of anger that had no place to go. There were times throughout her life when she blamed her father, Paul Cook, a Black Liberation activist who was shot and killed when she was just a few months old. Paul, 32 at the time of his death, had started a halfway house in Oakland called Alternative House, intending to help formerly incarcerated men like himself get back on their feet. Unbeknownst to him, the CIA had begun to use the home as a front for the notorious MK-Ultra mind-control program, Freedom says. Paul was allegedly killed by his business partner, Maalik al-Maalik, after Paul threatened to blow the whistle on the program. Al-Maalik was acquitted after a trial. Freedom had always wondered whether the man who killed her father had come back to kill her mother too.

She can see how her mother, young and vulnerable with two children to support, could have been conned by Naso and the promise of improving her circumstances.

"She was beautiful, always a sharp dresser. And so she was probably like, 'You want to take my picture? I want to make some money. I've got these two babies I got to take care of. I'm a widow. Where do I sign up?' " Freedom imagines her thinking.

Freedom has four kids ofher own now, but she's not going to tell them about Naso until and unless he is convicted. Then, she says, "that's when I will celebrate."