Before Mains would tell Berkeley Police that he’d solved their case, there was one more thing Mains wanted Noguera to do. He printed out a couple of photos of Connes, a freckle-faced young woman with dark blond hair parted in the middle and a small scar on her lower lip, and sent them to Noguera, asking him to “observe [Naso’s] reaction” to seeing them.
By that time Noguera’s job in the Medically Restricted Yard had ended, so he wasn’t in contact with Naso as much as he had been before. He was awaiting transfer to another prison, which could happen any day without warning. But the day after the Las Vegas Raiders defeated the Jacksonville Jaguars in an NFL Hall of Fame game in August 2022, he knew Naso would be in the yard wanting to recap the game—he was a huge sports fanatic. Noguera kept the photos of Connes on him and wasn’t surprised when he was called over from the adjacent yard by Naso, asking what he thought about the game. Noguera slipped the pictures of Connes through the fence without saying a word and noticed how Naso began to excitedly stroke one of the photographs, asking how on earth Noguera managed to find her. Noguera repeated his refrain: “You know, Joe, I got a lot of friends in low places as well as high places.”
“She’s one of my special ones,” Naso said, according to Noguera, “the mami from Berkeley.”
As Noguera tells me immediately, “Everything in that one moment felt like it was all completely worth it.”
The last time Celeste Connes heard her daughter Lynn’s voice was on Mother’s Day in 1976. Had she known that Lynn was going to model nude for an unknown photographer, “I would have come all the way to California from N.C. to stop you,” she wrote in an open letter that was published in a local newspaper the following year. Celeste died in 1988. Lynn’s gravestone, located right below her mother’s in the Thomasville City Cemetery outside of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, still says “Missing.”
Lynn’s younger brother, Lee Connes, 64, who oversees maintenance for the cemetery where those gravestones lie, met with Mains in May. After Mains showed him the letter Naso wrote about the “mami from Berkeley,” Lee told Vanity Fair he’s “99.9 percent sure” that Naso was responsible for Lynn’s death. “It’s a lot to process,” he said. “It’s amazing that after so long there was anybody that had an interest in trying to solve it. We are lucky that [Noguera] tried to get the ball rolling and was concerned enough to find out what happened.”
He is immediately considering updating his sister’s memorial to reflect that she’s no longer missing. “We were very close,” he said. “It’s been so hard to ever say she was deceased. It takes a bit to settle in.”
In 2023 Noguera was loaded onto a bus and driven 250 miles south of San Quentin to Corcoran State Prison, carsick the entire way because he hadn’t been in a vehicle in more than 30 years. The Ninth Circuit had reversed the overturning of Noguera’s conviction and resentenced him to life with no possibility of parole. This was not what Noguera had hoped for, but it was a “crack in the armor that allowed us to stick our foot in,” says his lawyer, Andrew Nechaev. He asked the court to invoke California’s penal code 1385, which gives judges the authority to dismiss punishments deemed frivolous. In his brief, Nechaev described how much criminal law has evolved in the past 40 years and urged the court to consider that the brain of an 18-year-old—the age at which Noguera committed murder—is immediately understood to be undeveloped. He also wanted the court to consider the trauma of his client’s upbringing, the poor legal representation he received at his trial, and the fact that the testimony backing the claims of “special circumstances”—that the motive for the murder was financial gain—was shown to have been coerced. “This case was so botched,” Nechaev told me. “Having reviewed the appellate history, it’s just astounding, the level of incompetence.”
To Noguera’s amazement, a conservative Superior Court judge in Orange County took interest in his case and ultimately agreed with his lawyer that the special circumstances were invalid. Over the summer of 2024, Noguera was resentenced again to 25 years to life, but because he had already served more than 40 years, he was immediately eligible for parole. He didn’t want to get too excited, because even if the parole board decided to release him, the governor had the right to reverse the decision. Nechaev told me that he and Noguera made a “judgment call” early on to stick to the merits of his case when dealing with the parole board and not to mention any of Noguera’s freelance detective work. “We didn’t think it would help,” says Nechaev, adding that securing his own freedom had never been Noguera’s primary motivator in working with Mains to solve cold cases. Indeed, Noguera began working with Mains while he was still on death row, before he knew that parole would ever be a possibility.
While Noguera was waiting for his first parole hearing to be scheduled, he and Mains continued to focus on solving the remaining three murders on the List of 10: “mami near Heldsburg” (number 1), “mami on Mt. Tam” (number 4), and “mami from Miami Near Down Peninsula” (number 5).
They had reason to believe that “mami on Mt. Tam”—short for Mount Tamalpais, a Marin County landmark—was the one that Naso bragged was incorrectly pinned on the Dating Game Killer, Alcala. In 2011 the Marin County Sheriff’s Office held a press conference to announce they were “confident” that Alcala killed 19-year-old Pamela Jean Lambson 34 years earlier. Alcala was already incarcerated at San Quentin and was never charged with Lambson’s murder. He always denied it, even as he admitted to other murders. Noguera, referring to his “consistency of behavior” thesis, found this interesting.
Also interesting were the circumstances of Lambson’s disappearance. An aspiring singer and actor, Lambson vanished after meeting a photographer who had singled her out at an Oakland A’s game, told her she was beautiful, and offered to help her with her headshots. She later went to meet the photographer at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco and never returned. The police found her battered body posed in front of a trail leading to Mount Tam the next day. Based on what Naso told -Noguera, including how he hunted for victims at A’s games—he went so far as to create fake press credentials and business cards—Mains was convinced that Naso was the real killer. Alcala didn’t pose his victims, nor was he known to be in Oakland at the time of Lambson’s disappearance, according to Mains. Naso was.
The Lambson family had always questioned whether long-haired Alcala really fit the description of Pamela’s killer. Her brother, Michael Lambson, immediately a 71-year-old plumbing contractor in Englewood, California, says he will never forget what Pamela said before she left to meet the photographer at Fisherman’s Wharf, when Michael expressed concern about who this random man was. “She said, ‘He could be my dad, Mike,’ ” he recalls. At the time of Pamela’s disappearance, Alcala would have only been in his early 30s, a decade younger than Naso, who was approximately the same age as Pamela’s father. Michael told me that he and his brothers are immediately convinced that Naso is the real murderer.
In 2024 Mains sent all of his notes on the Lambson case to the Marin County Sheriff’s Office but says he didn’t hear back. While reporting this story, I left two messages there. I eventually received a call from Deputy Chief Adam Schermerhorn, the department’s public information officer, who said that, based on new information, Marin County’s cold-case team is currently trying to determine if Naso had “any potential involvement” with Lambson’s murder. Given that the murder was pinned on Alcala, is the sheriff’s office going to make an announcement that the case is being reopened? “We do not have any announcements scheduled at this time,” he told me.
Using facial recognition, Mains says he was also able to match one of the photographs from Naso’s collage that he gave to Noguera to another potential victim who was not on the List of 10: Rebecca Jean Dunn, a Las Vegas sex worker who went missing in 1979. At the time, Naso was spending a lot of time there after separating from his wife. He set up a photography studio near the Strip, where he would hunt for victims, according to Noguera. After receiving Mains’s report about Dunn, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department reopened the case, according to a person close to the matter, though the department’s public information office wrote in an email to Vanity Fair that “[t] here are currently no new leads in this investigation.”
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