Vanity Fair: How a Death Row Murderer Exposed One of America’s Most Prolific Serial Killers (Part 2)

Two years after they first met, Joseph Naso finally started opening up to William Noguera about the details of his crimes. He bragged that “the cops got it all wrong,” according to Noguera’s journal. The List of 10 was merely his greatest hits, his favorites, he said. His real “kill number,” he told Noguera, was 26. (Mains notes that investigators found a collection of 26 gold coins inside Naso’s house.) Naso described driving around on the hunt for victims while listening to the Doors’ “Riders on the Storm” over and over because he liked the line “There’s a killer on the road / His brain is squirming like a toad.”

WritingRachel Wortman