Four California women who investigators believe were murdered by the same man all had alliterative names: Carmen Colon, Roxene Roggasch, Pamela Parsons and Tracy Tafoya.

The suspect, a 77-year-old petty thief and freelance photographer, was arrested this week, and now detectives are looking deeper into the deaths and whether the man had anything to do with New York's "Double Initial Murders" -- the killings in the early 1970s of three girls, each with matching initials.

For decades, Joseph Naso was known only for small-time thefts -- until a routine probation search of his Reno, Nev., home led to the unsolved slayings dating back to the 1970s.

On Wednesday, he was charged in a California court with four counts of murder, plus special circumstances that make him eligible for the death penalty. He was scheduled to be arraigned on the charges at an afternoon hearing.

Authorities have released few details about the cases, which all involve women whose bodies were found in Northern California with little trace of their assailant. But their names alone already bear an eerie resemblance to the notorious slayings in the Rochester, N.Y., area in the early 1970s. The victims there were three young girls with alliterative names. And one of them also was named Carmen Colon.

Naso, a New York native, traveled frequently between the Rochester area and the West during that time and has claimed at least a half-dozen addresses around the country, authorities said.

His name, however, never surfaced in the investigation until he came under suspicion in California, said Bob Hetzke, chief deputy at the Wayne County Sheriff's Department in New York.

"It's safe to say that we're looking hard at him right now. There's some overlapping information that would apply to us -- the fact that he was in the area at the time, the double initials," Hetzke said.

Authorities did note that a DNA sample taken from one of the New York victims didn't match Naso, and they have no other physical proof that he was involved in those killings.

Still, they're not ready to eliminate Naso as a suspect and hope area residents who might know him will be able to help with their investigation.

"Of course, if anybody has any information on this fellow, we would love to talk to them," said New York State Police senior investigator Allan Dombroski, who declined to discuss the probe in detail because of concerns it could jeopardize the California cases.

Nevada authorities formed a task force to investigate Naso immediately after last year's search stemming from a 2009 grocery store theft. They have been tight-lipped, too, but said they believe there are more cold cases out there connected to him.

"The person has traveled around the country, has been engaged with law enforcement across the country, so we suspect -- and have to suspect -- that any cases that may emerge in the future have a rather long potential list of states that may been impacted," said Mike Haley, sheriff of Washoe County, Nev., who helped launch the task force.