A Glimpse of Accused Serial Killer's Life 30 Years Ago

When he lived in the East Bay three decades ago, Joe Naso was a photographer and sports fan who would organize family trips to beaches to add to his family’s collection of antique bottles.

Naso is now accused of the murders of four Northern California women from the 1970s through the 1990s, including that of Roxene Roggasch, whose body was found on Jan. 11 1977 on the east side of White's Hill off of Sir Francis Drake Boulevard.

But, one can get a sense of a different Naso family that lived in Piedmont back in the last 1970s and early 1980s — Judy and Joe Naso and their sons, David and Charlie — in an interview with a childhood friend of David’s. That friend asked for anonymity in granting interviews with Patch.

The childhood friend is troubled by the news he has heard this month about Joe Naso and troubled that he has fallen out of touch with the family over the years.

“I’m worried about the family,” said the source.

 on four counts of murder of women with alliterative names (the same letter beginning the first and last names). Besides Roggasch, an 18-year-old Oakland woman, the other women's bodies were found in Port Costa, Contra Costa County; and two in Yuba County. 

Marin County deputies as he was being released on a probation violation in South Lake Tahoe. 

Naso apparently had no criminal record when he lived in the East Bay. Piedmont Police Chief John Hunt III said police had no record of contact with Naso. Hunt said the city had no unsolved homicides from that time.

Police around the country are being asked to look for unsolved homicides that might match the M.O. of the accused serial killer. Possible related killings being investigated include the "Double Initial" in the 1970s of three Catholic schoolgirls in Rochester, New York, each with matching first and last names.

The descriptions and quotes below come from a telephone and email interview of the Patch source, who lives out of state.

The source moved to an East Bay house a couple of blocks away from the Nasos in the 1970s and was a classmate of David Naso at Beach Elementary School.

He said he never felt afraid of Joe Naso. “He was kind of passive … I never saw him lose his temper or yell at his kids … One thing that I remember that I thought was unusual is that David and Charlie would sometimes talk back to him and he would never discipline them.”

The source once accompanied the family on a trip to the beach (he thinks it was at Point Reyes) to dig for antique bottles for the family’s collection.

Joe Naso had a good sense of humor, the source remembers.

Naso was not very athletic and would not play ball with the boys in the yard. However, they all liked to watch Oakland Raider games in the Naso home, and the source accompanied Naso and the boys to baseball card shows.

The source remembers Joe Naso showing him pictures he had taken of 1970s Oakland Raider running back Pete Banaszak and his family. The source did not know where Naso had a photo studio.

Naso helped the boys film some scenes at Jack London Square in Oakland for a movie they were making.

Joe Naso had a bigger and stronger brother, Toby, who would come around occasionally and seemed to dominate Joe. The source thought Joe Naso had low self-esteem.

The source believed Joe and Judy got divorced around 1980. He remembers seeing Joe Naso in the parking lot of the Payless store in Rockridge around that time and Naso telling him that was working at Payless.

“I just can’t believe what I have been reading about him in the last week,” the source said.

Naso will have his preliminary hearing this Wednesday, April 27, at 9 a.m. at the Marin Superior Court.