© Dep/The Associated Press
Joseph Naso appears in court during his arraignment on murder charges Wednesday.
Joseph Naso appears in court during his arraignment on murder charges Wednesday.
New York State Police are eyeing Joseph Naso, 77, as a person of interest in Rochester's cold-case "Double Initial" murders because the four women he's accused of killing in California fit a similar pattern of alliterative initials - RR, CC, PP and TT.
In one striking similarity, a 22-year-old woman he allegedly dumped near a Port Costa, Calif., highway in 1978 has the same exact name as the 10-year-old girl abducted, sexually assaulted and strangled in the first murder of the Rochester-area spree - Carmen Colon.
Naso also once lived in the Rochester area and traveled between there and the West in the early 1970s, authorities said.
Still, there's no hard evidence tying Naso to the Rochester case, and an attempt to match him with DNA taken from one of the New York victims didn't work, the Associated Press reported.
"You have no idea the man hours that have gone into this," a New York State Police source told the Daily News.
Naso, a freelance photographer most recently living in Reno, Nev., did not enter a plea Wednesday.
