Charlotte Cook

Do you know who killed 19 year old Charlotte Cook in 1974?
Charlotte Cook was a 19-year-old college student, community organizer, and devoted young mother looking forward to her future. A widow, she was raising her two young daughters with the help of a close-knit family. Those who loved her remember a vibrant young Black woman with a distinct disco-era style, often seen in knee-high boots and a favorite camel hair coat. In early 1974, she was living in Oakland, California, and balancing her studies and activism with motherhood.

On the afternoon of January 3, 1974, Charlotte left her home in Oakland to visit her sister in San Francisco. She was last seen wearing a blue sleeveless blouse and her camel hair coat. The next day, her body was discovered at the bottom of a bluff near Thornton Beach in Daly City. She had been strangled, and a brown belt was found wrapped around her neck. The discovery shocked her family, and it was the press description of her "expensive camel's hair coat" that led her father to the heartbreaking task of identifying her body. For her daughters, Oleta and Freedom Cook, their mother’s sudden death left a painful void. Freedom later recalled growing up in her great-grandparents' home where the topic of her mother was too painful for anyone to discuss, leaving her to wonder for years what had happened.

The initial investigation by Daly City police noted that just one day before her murder, Charlotte had testified as a witness in a robbery case in Alameda County, leading to early suspicions that her death might have been a retaliation. However, no suspects were ever named, and no arrests were made. For nearly five decades, the murder of Charlotte Cook became Daly City's oldest active cold case, a source of lingering pain for her family and a puzzle for law enforcement. Her life had been cut short, and with no answers, her family was left to grieve without closure.

A stunning breakthrough came decades later, shifting the focus of the investigation entirely. The case was re-examined through the work of cold-case detective Kenneth Mains and William Noguera, an inmate on death row at San Quentin State Prison. Noguera had spent years befriending and documenting the confessions of fellow inmate Joseph Naso, a convicted serial killer. In 2010, a search of Naso's Reno home had uncovered a chilling handwritten document that became known as his "List of 10," which described his victims. One entry read, "Girl from Miami Near Down Peninsula." For years, investigators could not decipher the reference.

Working with Noguera's extensive notes from his conversations with Naso, Mains began to piece together the clues. Naso, sometimes called the "Alphabet Killer" because several of his known victims had matching first and last initials, had cryptically told Noguera that the victim was not from the East Coast. Mains discovered that Charlotte Cook, with her double initials, had been found in an area of Daly City once referred to as the "down peninsula." He also found a "Miami Court" just blocks from where Naso kept an apartment on MacArthur Boulevard in Oakland, the same city where Charlotte lived. The final detail that connected the puzzle was Noguera’s recollection that Naso had mentioned the victim was visiting her sister and wore a "kick-ass jacket," which aligned with Charlotte's camel hair coat.

These revelations provided Daly City police with probable cause to pursue Naso for Charlotte's murder. Detectives visited the now 91-year-old killer in a prison hospital in Stockton, but he refused to answer their questions. For Charlotte’s daughters, the news was overwhelming. "Her life, just a puff. Just went away, and that's that," Oleta Cook said. "That still hurts our family today." Freedom Cook expressed her sorrow for the life her mother never got to live, a young woman who was married and had two children before she was even 20. Learning that a serial killer was responsible finally gave a name and face to their family's decades of pain.

As of September 2025, while Joseph Naso has been publicly identified as the prime suspect in the murder of Charlotte Cook, he has not been formally charged in her death. Daly City police also suspect him in another 1987 killing with a similar modus operandi and hope to close both cases. The work of Mains and Noguera has provided a measure of clarity to a case that had been cold for nearly 50 years, bringing Charlotte's family closer to the truth, though official justice remains pending.