Charlotte Cook was murdered by Joseph Naso, a man who posed as a freelance photographer to approach young women. He was identified as her killer more than fifty years after her death.
Just twenty-four hours before her body was found, Cook testified as a witness in a robbery trial. This led local investigators to suspect her criminal acquaintances were responsible.
Naso was arrested in April 2011 during a routine probation compliance search for shoplifting. Inside his Reno home, police found a handwritten ledger of attacks, staged photographs of incapacitated women, and the personal effects of missing and murdered women.
The victims forensically tied to Naso all had alliterative first and last names, such as Roxene Roggasch and Pamela Parsons. The media also connected him to a series of unsolved murders in New York known as the "Alphabet Murders," though DNA testing later cleared him of those crimes.
No. Although Naso was from Rochester and killed a woman in California with the exact same name as one of the New York victims, DNA testing excluded him from the Rochester crime scenes.