Visit To Death Row
I first met William Noguera in June 2013 when he was on San Quentin’s Death Row in San Quentin, California. I was led into a cage where there was a small table and two chairs among other cages with the same arrangement. The door behind me was locked after I entered and I sat alone for what seemed like an eternity but was more like 5-10 minutes. Soon I saw a shackled and handcuffed Noguera approaching my cage with a corrections officer behind him. The door was opened and Noguera entered then turned around and put his handcuffed hands through a slot and the officer released the handcuffs. If I have to be honest, it was one of the most unsettling moments in my life. I was in the cage with a man on death row.
Noguera extended his hand, had big smile on his face and said, “I’m William Noguera and I really appreciate you coming to see me.” It was the start of a friendship that has lasted 12 years. We spoke all day about life, his art, books he has written and his hope of one day being free. While I did not share my doubts about his freedom ever being a reality, I was confident when I left Noguera that day that I may never see him again in the free world.
Noguera was no Boy Scout in his early days. By the time he was 18 he was stealing cars and fighting on the streets of Los Angeles. In a heated argument with his girlfriend’s mother, he snapped, hitting her repeatedly until she died. A conservative, mostly white Orange County California jury found Noguera, a poor hispanic teen, guilty and sentenced him to death. He was the youngest person to ever receive such a sentence in California.
Noguera On Death Row
While many viewed him simply as a death-row inmate, Noguera used his time to embrace personal transformation, education, creativity, and advocacy. He developed discipline through self-imposed rehabilitation, earned a law degree, and became a model inmate known for mentoring and helping others. He founded the East Block Advisory Committee at San Quentin, where he reported on conditions and helped reduce violence and tension between inmates and staff. He also cared for elderly and disabled inmates through the Prison’s Disability Assistance Program. Even killers grow old and feeble in prison.
Art has been one of his most powerful forms of expression. Noguera is an award-winning artist whose work ranges from hyper-realistic black-and-white ink drawings to mixed media, abstraction, and neo-constructivist sculpture. He has exhibited in galleries nationally and internationally and has used his art to help raise funds for non-profits, including breast cancer research.
He is the author of Escape Artist: Memoir of a Visionary Artist on Death Row, a deeply introspective work that describes the horrors of prison life, his own mission of personal accountability, and how art gave him a way to transcend the walls of his cell. Through his writings, lectures via prison-telephone programs, podcast hosting, and public speaking (often focusing on ethics, prevention, gangs, and the meaning of redemption), he has become a figure of significant moral and creative influence.
Life Among Serial Killers
San Quentin’s Death Row has held some of the most prolific serial killers in the United States. Noguera lived among them for almost four decades.
Vanity Fair did a feature article on Noguera’s work with a criminal profiler of murderers in order to solve decades-old cases. The feature chronicles how Noguera transformed himself into an informal investigator of serial killers while at San Quentin. He spent years cultivating relationships with inmates labelled “apex predators,” including Joseph Naso, using a disability-assistant role in the prison to gain access and build trust. Through meticulous, handwritten notes, repeated interviews and cross-checks, Noguera unearthed chilling new details about Naso’s crimes—details that suggested far more victims than Naso was officially convicted of. Naso had even reached out directly to me at the direction of Noguera thinking that I had a connection with California Governor Gavin Newsom and could get him some sort of release from prison. I had no idea that this was something Noguera had told him. Full disclosure, I don’t know Governor Newsom. I played along with Naso, writing him in prison and vouched that I knew Noguera. The letters from Naso to me kept coming. Raising his trust level more, Naso began speaking openly to Noguera about his past murders, many unsolved.
Noguera’s efforts took a more direct turn when he reached out to cold-case detective/profiler Kenneth Mains, who recalled in the Vanity Fair article: “It’s an unlikely friendship, convict and cop … without Bill [Noguera] none of this would be happening.” According to Noguera, who I interviewed for this article, he helped link Naso to as many as 26 murders — far more than the four for which Naso was convicted of that led him to Death Row.
The Book and Television Series
Noguera’s 300 plus pages of notes he penned over a decade he spent questioning Naso became the foundation for the book he wrote entitled, “Through the Lens of a Monster,” which led to a television series on Oxygen and Peacock called “Death Row Confidential; Secrets of a Serial Killer.”
The book is much more than Noguera’s notes. It’s a memoir of how Noguera got Naso to trust him and reveal the shocking details of his murders, all of them. Those secrets would have gone to the grave with Naso had it not been for Noguera who told me, “I felt an obligation to do something that I knew was right and would bring closure to families of these women. I could not bring them back, but I could point to the monster that took them away from the world.”
A Second Chance
In 2017, a federal judge ruled that William Noguera must either be released or retried, calling the original trial that condemned him to death a travesty of justice. But by 2022, Noguera was still on death row. Rather than seize the opportunity to fight for his own freedom, he made an extraordinary decision: he told his attorney to postpone his resentencing. He had work to do.
That work had nothing to do with appeals or exoneration—it was about extracting more information from Joseph Naso, the convicted serial killer whose cryptic writings hinted at dozens of unknown victims. Noguera was determined to help bring closure to families who had waited decades for answers.
When his resentencing finally came, neither the judge nor his attorneys had any idea that, from a death row cell, he had been quietly helping to solve cold-case murders. In fact, almost no one knew—except for his unlikely partner, Detective Kenneth Mains. Together, the convict and the cop were closing in on the mystery behind Naso’s so-called “Portrait Killer” list. Despite standing on opposite sides of justice, both men shared a rare conviction: that integrity means doing the right thing, even when no one is watching.
Life After Death Row
There are few people who can tell a story of how they survived 40 years on death row. In fact, there is only one, William Noguera. Nobody was sentenced to death row who was younger than him, nobody spent as long there and nobody has ever walked out. Noguera was released on July 1, 2025 and he never revealed to anyone his role in solving these murders until now. “If this information would have come out while I was in San Quentin, I would not be alive today,” Noguera said, “I did not let anyone know what I was doing and even reaching out to Mains was a risk.”
But that risk, Noguera said, was worth it. “I have a lot of regrets in life and I have worked hard to be not only a better person but I to look for ways to give back to others. I may never meet the family members who now know what happened to their loved ones, but I know that giving them answers brought them some peace. That was important to me.”
Noguera is now a free man. His partnership with Ken Mains has evolved. They are now partners who work cold case murders together.
The Cop & Convict… making America Safe.