Two years after Jackson knocked on his door, Joseph Naso is awaiting trial on charges of murdering four women – all prostitutes, all strangled to death. Those killings are unusual in their own right as they appear to follow the plot of an Agatha Christie novel, The ABC Murders, in which the initial letter of the victims' first and last names were the same.
But the authorities in several US states suspect that's not the half of it. The piles of photographs, notebooks and a string of other evidence discovered in Naso's house point to a serial rapist who attacked women across the United States for more than half a century – and who, in time, graduated to serial murder.
No one dares put a figure on the total number of victims, but Naso is under suspicion for a series of killings from California to New York and Florida as the police believe they have stumbled on a killer who operated so far and wide and over so many years that they didn't know he existed.
Naso's habit of diligently recording every attack has given detectives a bewilderingly large source of leads as they attempt to piece together the picture of his suspected crimes. Added to the diaries and notebooks, the search of his house also turned up driving licences, passports and work identification cards belonging to women – even a birth certificate for someone born in 1914.
