Through the Lens, Joseph Naso, the Camera, and a Fifty-Year Campaign of Serial Murder

Through the Lens, Joseph Naso, the Camera, and a Fifty-Year Campaign of Serial Murder 

In April 2010, a routine probation check at a modest Reno, Nevada, residence uncovered a room sealed with a heavy industrial padlock. What lay behind that door would expose one of the most prolific and methodical serial killers in American criminal history.

Joseph Naso, a self-employed commercial photographer from Rochester, New York, had spent five decades committing rape, torture, and murder across California and Nevada, preying on transient women and sex workers whose social marginality ensured their deaths would receive diminished official attention. He photographed his victims, kept handwritten diaries of his assaults spanning fifty years and multiple continents, and maintained a mnemonic list of his murder victims' burial locations. His "List of Ten" became the cold case investigation's most haunting document.

Through the Lens is the definitive account of the Naso case: the thirty-five years of institutional failure that allowed a mobile serial killer to operate undetected, the forensic breakthroughs of the cold case era that eventually connected him to twelve confirmed victims, the 2013 trial at which he represented himself with catastrophic narcissistic grandiosity, and the extraordinary post-conviction intelligence operation in which fellow death row inmate William Noguera spent a decade extracting confessions that revealed a true victim count exceeding twenty.

A landmark work of true crime narrative, Through the Lens is ultimately about the women Naso killed, and about the society that failed to protect them.