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The Alphabet Murders
In the early 1970s, a series of brutal killings shook the area around Rochester, New York. The victims were all young girls—but that wasn’t all they had in common. Carmen Colon, Wanda Walkowicz, and Michelle Maenza also happened to have alliterative initials, leading the press to initially refer to the incidents as the “Double Initial Killings,” later revising this to the much punchier “Alphabet Murders.”
Many people were questioned in relation to these crimes, and one suspect who killed himself shortly after the final murder was for a long time thought to be the most likely culprit—that is, until he was posthumously cleared in 2007 by DNA testing.
Likewise, an uncle of one of the victims was thought to be a prime suspect; he was never charged, and was subsequently cleared when DNA testing became available. Rochester native Kenneth Bianchi has long been under suspicion, too. After moving to Los Angeles, he and his cousin committed the murders attributed to the “Hillside Strangler”—and while Bianchi has never officially been cleared of the Rochester killings, he has also never been charged, and still maintains his innocence.
Additionally, in 2011, seventy-seven-year-old New Yorker Joseph Naso was charged with murdering four women in California in the late 1970s. He probably wouldn’t have been considered in relation to the Rochester case, but for the names of his victims: Roxene Roggash, Pamela Parsons, Tracy Tofoya and—incredibly—another Carmen Colon. But at the time of writing, Naso’s trial has been repeatedly postponed in the California cases; nor has he been charged with the Rochester Alphabet Murders.
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