By Gary Klein, Marin Independent Journal

Calling him “an evil and disturbed man,” a Marin County judge sentenced convicted serial killer Joseph Naso to death Friday for the murders of six women, including one from the North Lake Tahoe area.

Judge Andrew Sweet said the evidence proved that Naso inflicted “abhorrent and repugnant levels of suffering and cruelty” on the victims, and humilitated them even more by meticulously documenting the crimes in his diaries and photographs for more than two decades.

“You being in this world, Mr. Naso, has made this world a worse place,” Sweet said.

Naso, who turns 80 in January, insisted that the prosecution had not proved its case, that the DNA evidence was “planted,” that he was the victim of media bias, and that District Attorney Edward Berberian took the case to score political points in Marin.

The case broke open in 2010, when authorities conducted a routine probation search at Naso’s home in Reno. Naso retired there after spending much of his career as a nomadic photographer and property manager in Oakland, San Francisco and rural Northern California.

The probation check revealed piles of incriminating writings and photographs, including a diary that documented a half century of rapes and sex crimes.

In April 2011, Naso was arrested in South Lake Tahoe following his release from the El Dorado County Jail in an unrelated case.

To support their case for the death penalty, prosecutors Dori Ahana and Rosemary Sloat introduced evidence that Naso also killed two other women: Sharileea Patton, whose body washed up in Tiburon in 1981. Patton, 56, was  security guard from the North Lake Tahoe area. Police reported she was strangled and stuffed into two garbage bags. Sara Dylan, a nomadic Bob Dylan groupie who was killed in 1992 in or near Nevada County. The prosecution did not have all the evidence in place to charge Naso with those two murders in time for his trial.

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