On the evening of Sunday, November 8, 1992, Angela Brosso went out alone for a bike ride along the Arizona Canal near her apartment in north Phoenix. The next day would have been her 22nd birthday. Her boyfriend, Joseph Krakowiecki, stayed home and baked her a cake while she rode. He expected her back by eight. When she did not come, he went out along the trail looking for her, three separate times, and then called police. Her body was found the next morning in a field near the bike path close to her home. She had been knocked from her bicycle, stabbed and sexually assaulted, and she had been decapitated. Her head was found in the canal 11 days later, about two miles away. Her bike was never found.
About ten months later, on the evening of September 21, 1993, Melanie Bernas, 17, a high school junior, went for a ride along the same canal while her mother, Marlene, was out at dinner. Her mother reported her missing that night. The next morning a woman named Charlotte Pottle, riding the path with her sister and their small children, rolled through a puddle she slowly realized was blood, and on the way back she noticed drag marks running to the water's edge. Divers recovered Melanie's body from the canal later that morning. She had been stabbed in the back and sexually assaulted. Her bicycle, too, was never found.
The two killings went unsolved for more than twenty-two years. When an arrest finally came, in January 2015, it came through a family tree, a fake job interview and a glass of water at a Chili's restaurant. The man police arrested was a 42-year-old single father who worked at an Amazon warehouse and was known around Phoenix for dressing up as a character he called the Zombie Hunter.
Angela Brosso was 21 and at the start of a career in technology. Oxygen's reporting describes her as a young "tech whiz" who worked for a technology firm; on the Monday she was killed she was due to lead a training class that she had spent months preparing. Her supervisor, Deb Littlejohn, later recalled the customers sitting in the room waiting for a teacher who never arrived. William Hermann, the Arizona Republic crime reporter who covered the case from its first day, remembered her as a good employee with a kind boyfriend, a young woman hoping to build a new life in Phoenix.
She and Krakowiecki lived in an apartment in the Sunnyslope area and shared a love of mountain biking. That Sunday they had picked up their bikes from a shop where they had been serviced. Sunday nights were a ritual: they watched the television comedy In Living Color together. Early-evening rides were nothing unusual for her, he testified three decades later, which is why it took him a while to worry. He learned what had happened in a terrible way, by seeing crime-scene footage on television before police came to tell him.
Her mother, Linda Brosso, spoke to an Arizona Republic columnist within days of the murder and several times over the following decades. She never accepted the idea that a trial or a verdict would heal anything. "I don't want anyone to ever say anything to me about closure," she told him. "Never."
Melanie Bernas had turned 17 the week before she died. She had just begun her junior year at Arcadia High School, where she had signed up for accelerated classes. She played basketball and was taking a basketball course at Scottsdale Community College. She lived with her mother and their dog near Osborn Road and 42nd Street. She had an older sister, Jill. A close friend, Rachael Schepemaker, later said the way Melanie was killed left everyone who knew her scarred.
On September 21, 1993, Melanie stayed home from school feeling unwell. At about 7 p.m. her mother left for dinner, telling her she would be gone about two hours. Melanie was in the big white T-shirt and white shorts she wore as pajamas. Her mother kissed her goodbye and told her she loved her. Melanie had been riding the canal path for about a year, usually in daylight and with friends, and she was not allowed to ride after dark. She also kept faithfully to a 9 p.m. school-night curfew.
When Marlene came home about two and a half hours later, the house was empty and Melanie's bike was gone from the utility room. Neither Melanie's father nor a friend had seen her. Marlene called police at about 11 p.m. and was told a missing-person report could not be taken for 18 to 24 hours. She spent the night calling hospitals and emergency rooms. None had seen her daughter.
Retired Phoenix detective Mike Meislish, who worked both canal killings, arrived at the canal at about 11:30 the next morning and watched divers bring Melanie up. She was wearing sneakers and a turquoise bodysuit that her mother did not believe was hers. Some of her own clothing turned up in a trash bin behind a credit union; a cut T-shirt sleeve and a piece of a frayed headphone cord lay near the canal. Investigators concluded that the bodysuit had been put on her after she was taken.
From the start, detectives suspected one man had killed both women. Both were young, both were alone on evening rides along the same stretch of canal, both were stabbed in the back and sexually assaulted, and in both cases the killer took the bicycle. Police put plainclothes officers on the trails. One detective warned the press, "Count on it. This guy is going to do something like this again." They compared the killings with cases across the country and, for a time, even looked at a French surgeon. Lead after lead was ruled out.
DNA testing was not used in the early stages. In 1999, while building a DNA database, the Phoenix crime lab developed a profile from semen left at both scenes. It did not match anyone in the database, but it proved what detectives had long believed: the same man had killed Angela Brosso and Melanie Bernas. Around 2000 the profile was uploaded to CODIS, the national DNA index. There was no hit.
One early lead pointed straight at the right man, though no one saw it at the time. In 1994 an anonymous tipster said that a young man named Bryan Miller, whose roommate had seen him with a teal bodysuit like the one found on Melanie, might be worth a look. According to CBS News, investigators apparently never pursued him; Oxygen's account says he was dismissed because of his youth. His name stayed on the department's list of leads.
In 2011, after a local television station asked for an update, the Phoenix Police Department's cold case unit reopened the files. Sergeant Troy Hillman, who ran the unit, said that reading them felt "almost as if I was reading about something truly evil." About 800 people had been interviewed over the years. Detective Clark Schwartzkopf began working through more than 600 persons of interest, checking backgrounds one by one. The team collected new DNA samples to clear old suspects, at times flying across the country to get them. The Vidocq Society, a volunteer group of forensic specialists in Philadelphia, helped detectives build a profile of the killer as a Phoenix local who was acting out fantasies.
In 2014 the forensic genealogist Colleen Fitzpatrick, a trained nuclear physicist and founder of Identifinders International, approached Phoenix police at a conference. Her proposal was then untried in a criminal case of this kind. Detectives would give her the Y-chromosome profile from the crime scenes, the genetic signature passed nearly unchanged from father to son, and she would search it against public genealogy databases built from commercial home DNA tests. Men who share a Y profile often share a surname. Hillman later said it took him three months to persuade police leadership to pay for the experiment. A few weeks after she began, Fitzpatrick had an answer: the killer's surname was probably Miller. "Exactly one word cracked that case," she said later. "And that word was 'Miller.'"
Six men named Miller were on Schwartzkopf's list. One was Bryan Patrick Miller, who had a juvenile record for stabbing a woman in Phoenix in 1989. When Schwartzkopf looked at his social media, he found a man who had adopted a costumed persona. Hillman said, "That really caught our attention. The fact that Bryan lived in this fantasy world."
In December 2014 Schwartzkopf watched Miller during breaks from his job at an Amazon warehouse. Detectives then approached him posing as security consultants with a job to offer, and set up an interview. On January 2, 2015, Miller met them at a Chili's in Phoenix, bringing along his 15-year-old daughter. Detectives had arranged with the restaurant to move his dishes and glassware to a separate booth. When he left, they collected the glass he had drunk from and sent it to the crime lab. Schwartzkopf admitted that, judging by Miller's manner that day, he doubted he was their man.
On January 13 the lab director called. "It's him," Schwartzkopf remembered being told. "Bryan Miller, it's him." Police spokesman Sergeant Trent Crump later said, "Within literally hours, we had a hit from those two murders." Miller was arrested that day.
Told about the DNA, Miller said, "I don't see how that's possible. I didn't kill anyone." He acknowledged that he had lived near the canal at the time and had ridden his bike on the paths there. He was booked into jail on two counts of first-degree murder, two counts of kidnapping and a count of sexual assault, and denied bail. He has denied the killings ever since.
Detectives spent days combing through the house he shared with his daughter, which was so cluttered with garbage that the search stretched on for more than a week. They found many violent images and videos, according to Oxygen, including a picture of a severed head and limbs on his refrigerator. They did not find either woman's bicycle, and they never found a weapon.
Crump told reporters it was hard to believe the canal killings stood alone. "To think that someone who has killed in that fashion, that there weren't other crimes related this, is unlikely," he said. On January 23, 2015, a judge unsealed Miller's juvenile records, and the public learned what had happened in 1989.
Miller grew up in Phoenix. Defense experts would later describe a childhood shaped by his mother, Ellen Miller, who died in 2010. According to testimony at his trial, she withheld food, cut him off from friends, beat him, abused his pets and terrorized him with threats. Miller himself has said that his mother later admitted the abuse and apologized. A former teacher, Victoria Fong, testified at his trial about possible signs of physical abuse she had noticed when he was a boy.
He was in trouble early. His juvenile records showed an arson charge involving an occupied building before he turned 15. At 15 he was convicted of criminal damage after damaging a wall at a Phoenix treatment center for troubled teenagers. He was on probation when he committed the act that would follow him for the next 25 years.
In 1989 he stabbed a 24-year-old woman in the back as she walked to work near the Paradise Valley Mall. CBS News names her as Celeste Bentley and says she had just stepped off a bus; she remembered feeling a blow and then seeing blood. A doctor said a slightly different angle could have severed her spine. Miller was caught at a nearby apartment complex. He told police he did not know her. Asked by a detective whether he had done it to see what it felt like, he answered, "Yes, I guess that's why I did it," and said it had sent chills up his spine. He also told officers he had "a sexual behavior problem," and after doctors evaluated him, a judge strongly recommended him for the state's juvenile sex offender program.
Accounts of the details differ. Fox 10's report on the unsealed records and NBC News say he pleaded guilty to attempted murder; CBS News says he was charged with aggravated assault, and Phoenix New Times reported a conviction for aggravated assault. His age is given as 15 (NBC), 16 (CBS, Fox 10) or 17 (Arizona's Family), and the place as a mall parking lot, a bus stop or near a Mervyn's store. All agree that he was held in juvenile custody until about the time he turned 18 and was released in 1990.
While he was in custody, according to CBS News, his mother found a handwritten note in his room headed "Plan." It laid out, step by step, how to abduct and kill a young woman. Ellen Miller gave it to police, told them she was afraid of her son and refused to let him come home. He moved into a halfway house. In 1992 he was living in an apartment in Sunnyslope run by a Mennonite outreach program, a short walk from the Arizona Canal. He was 20 when Angela Brosso was killed.
Not long after the canal killings he left Arizona. He married a woman named Amy in 1997; the couple had met in Phoenix and moved to Everett, Washington, and Oxygen reported that he also lived in Hawaii. They had a daughter, Sarah. In 2002 Miller was charged in Everett after a woman said he had stabbed her in the back several times at his workplace with a 12-inch serrated knife, injuries that took 30 stitches to close. He said she had tried to rob him at knifepoint. He was acquitted at trial. Because he was acquitted, he was never required to give a DNA sample, and his profile never reached the national database where it would have matched the canal killer. The couple separated in 2005 or 2006, and they later divorced.
Miller moved back to Phoenix and raised his daughter there. Friends and detectives said he seemed to treat her well. He became a familiar figure in the city's cosplay, steampunk, science fiction and horror circles as the Zombie Hunter, appearing at zombie walks and at Phoenix Comic-Con in a trench coat, hard hat, menacing mask and homemade prop Gatling gun. He drove a retired police cruiser with green lights, fake blood on the doors, "Zombie Hunter" lettered on the trunk and a zombie mannequin in the back seat, and he happily posed for photographs with anyone who asked, police officers included. A friend, Keen Azariah, later said Miller had seemed bitter toward women. A defense psychologist would testify that the costume was a way of avoiding real contact with people.
The following cases have never resulted in a conviction against Miller, and he denies all of them.
Brandy Lynn Myers, 13, was a sixth grader at Sunnyslope Elementary School. She was born March 13, 1979, wore pink and yellow eyeglasses and was developmentally delayed, with the understanding of a much younger child. On the evening of May 26, 1992, she was going door to door near 10th Street and Hatcher Road, selling for a school read-a-thon fundraiser. She was last seen less than 70 feet from Miller's apartment, walking in its direction. Her mother described her as trusting and naive. Her sister, Kristin, who has given her surname in interviews as both Thelen and Dennis, remembered a slow learner with a childlike innocence. "We never had any services or anything for my sister," she said in 2023. "It was just like she disappeared, and that was it."
After Miller's arrest, his former wife told an FBI agent and a Phoenix detective that years earlier he had described killing a girl who appeared to be in her mid-teens and intellectually disabled, a girl who had come to his door selling something. He did not give a name. Investigators said parts of the account fit Brandy's disappearance. His former wife told The Arizona Republic in 2015 that she was not sure he was telling the truth, and that she believed he said such things to intimidate her. Forensic searches of the old apartment in 2015 found blood in a bathroom, but it did not match Miller or anyone connected to the case.
Retired missing-persons detective Stuart Somershoe sent the case to the Maricopa County Attorney's Office in late 2015, recommending a first-degree murder charge. Prosecutors declined, citing "no reasonable likelihood of conviction." Deputy County Attorney Vince Imbordino said the evidence was not enough, pointing out that Miller "didn't give a name." Troy Hillman has said, "We all strongly believe that Bryan Patrick Miller killed Brandy Myers." Phoenix police say the missing-person case remains open, that Miller remains a suspect and that others have not been ruled out. Over the years two other men drew attention: Scott Alan Lehr, a convicted killer and rapist on Arizona's death row who lived less than a mile from Brandy's home, has been named as a possible suspect, and another man convicted of three Phoenix-area killings offered to confess to her murder in exchange for leniency, which authorities did not believe and refused. "Her case is considered solved, but not resolved," her sister said in 2022.
Some investigators have also wondered about Shannon Aumock, 16, whose body was found in a desert area near a canal in north Phoenix on May 28, 1992, two days after Brandy vanished. Aumock went unidentified for nearly two decades. She was strangled, not stabbed, and Arizona's Family reported that no concrete evidence links Miller to her death. That case is unsolved.
Police came to believe Miller was also the man who stabbed 14-year-old Victoria Mikelsen, a high school freshman, as she walked a trail on her way to school on October 9, 2000. NBC News places the attack in Everett, where Miller lived less than half a mile away. More than 15 years later police showed her his photograph. Asked if she had any doubt, she said, "Not a single doubt." Washington's statute of limitations had expired, and he has never been charged. According to a police report in the Myers investigation, Miller had also described to his wife an attack on a teenager in Everett.
The case moved slowly. Trial dates came and went for years. In June 2020 the COVID-19 pandemic forced another postponement. In February 2021 the defense argued that detectives had illegally taken Miller's DNA from the restaurant. Judge Suzanne Cohen of Maricopa County Superior Court disagreed, writing that diners who leave items behind when they walk out of a restaurant have implicitly abandoned them, and that Miller had no expectation of privacy in the glass.
In the summer of 2021, with trial set for September 21, the defense announced that it would argue insanity and asked for a mental evaluation, saying Miller was not fit to help with his own defense. Imbordino called it another stall. "This defendant has been in custody for six years," he said, adding that several defense experts had examined Miller without ever raising insanity. On January 4, 2022, Cohen found Miller competent to stand trial, agreeing with two court-appointed experts that he had a rational understanding of the charges and the proceedings. In one evaluation, she noted, Miller had denied having amnesia and seemed irritated by the suggestion, and a defense expert could not rule out that he was faking a mental disorder.
Miller waived a jury. His bench trial began on Monday, October 3, 2022, almost eight years after his arrest and nearly thirty years after the first murder. Prosecutors sought the death penalty.
His lawyers, among them R.J. Parker and Denise Dees, did not dispute the DNA. In effect they conceded that Miller had killed both women and argued that he was not guilty by reason of insanity: that autism, dissociative disorders and years of abuse at his mother's hands meant he did not know what he was doing was wrong and could not remember doing it. Miller himself later said he never agreed with that defense.
The early weeks belonged to the people who were there in 1992 and 1993. Joseph Krakowiecki described the birthday cake and his three trips along the trail in the dark. "Where is she?" he remembered thinking. "I was concerned where she was." Medical examiner Phillip Keen testified that a single stab wound to Angela's back had killed her quickly. Detective Mike Meislish and retired detective Robert Wamsley described the scenes. Charlotte Pottle told the court about the puddle on the path. Melanie's mother testified by video link about the last kiss goodbye, the empty utility room and the night of phone calls. Melanie's family, living outside Arizona, followed the trial through a secure internet connection.
Colleen Fitzpatrick explained the genealogy. Detective David Hadad, a digital forensics examiner, testified about what he had found on Miller's phone and laptop.
In March 2023 Miller's former wife, now Amy Loving, testified with her face shielded from cameras. It was the first time she had been heard publicly. She said his sexual aggression grew after his 2002 acquittal in Everett, that he collected violent pornography, including images of women being killed, and that he hurt her during sex and made her bleed. He once told her that if he did not love her so much, he would like to kill her. "Would he love me enough not to kill me?" she remembered asking herself. She said she went along with what he wanted in the hope of staying alive. After she left him she feared for her safety, and she felt she needed another man in her life before leaving, because she did not believe Miller would stand up to another man to hurt her. Under cross-examination by Dees, she agreed that she had never told the family court during the divorce or custody hearings that she was afraid of him. Asked why, she said, "I felt Sarah needed both of her parents."
The defense case rested on the experts. The forensic psychologist Mark Cunningham testified that Miller met the criteria for autism spectrum disorder and showed signs of dissociative identity disorder, and that his autism had magnified the damage done by his mother. Clinical psychologist Bethany Brand and psychology expert John Maag also testified for the defense. The prosecution challenged the relevance and reliability of the childhood evidence and disputed the diagnoses of autism and dissociative amnesia. Psychologist Tina Garby testified that Miller was likely a sexual sadist.
Closing arguments began on April 5, 2023. The prosecution argued that Miller had planned the crimes and tried to hide them, proof that he understood they were wrong. Of the DNA, the prosecutor said simply, "The reality of this is they found sperm on the oral swab," and argued that nothing suggested anyone else could be responsible. The defense took the judge through Miller's life year by year, describing a man in a "trauma state" who could not remember what he had done. Judge Cohen told the court she would deliberate alone in the jury room, "because then the evidence is closer to me."
On April 11, 2023, Cohen found Miller guilty on all counts: two counts of first-degree murder, two of kidnapping and two of attempted sexual assault. She rejected the insanity defense. Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell said the verdict "took decades of work by law enforcement and prosecutors." On April 13 Cohen found aggravating factors that made Miller eligible for death; prosecutors argued the killings were especially cruel and driven by sexual sadism.
The penalty phase opened on April 18. Linda Brosso told the court her family no longer celebrated anything. "We don't celebrate holidays anymore. Not Christmas. Not Thanksgiving. Not birthdays," she said. "The defendant took my reason to live, my reason to laugh, my reason to love." She called herself "the saddest, loneliest person that I know." Jill, Melanie's sister, said the family's relief at the arrest had been followed by a fresh trauma, seeing the face of her sister's killer, and by hearing in court about his marriage, his child, his travels and his social life, twenty years of living that Melanie never had. Neither woman spoke Miller's name. They called him "the defendant."
On May 22 Miller spoke in court for the first time. "I am not looking for sympathy today," he said, adding that the time belonged to the victims' families and friends. Linda Brosso said she would never plan her daughter's wedding or hold her grandchildren. "With his actions on that night, he murdered my angel, he ripped my heart, and I will never, ever be the same." Jill, now Jill Canetta, said that September would mark thirty years since the family lost "our beloved little sister, Melanie," and spoke of the daily pain of living without her smile and her love. The defense called witnesses in mitigation and asked for life in prison.
On June 7, 2023, Cohen sentenced Miller to death for each murder, plus 24 years for the kidnapping and attempted sexual assault counts. She accepted that he had been abused as a child, but asked whether the mitigation was substantial enough to call for leniency, she said, "The answer is no." "There is no question that what the defendant did deserves the death penalty," she said. "The defendant did not just murder them. He brutalized them and he evaded capture for over 20 years." Miller, 50, thanked the judge for listening and for giving his side the chance to try to persuade her otherwise.
Miller joined more than 100 people on Arizona's death row. At the time of his sentencing, executions in Arizona were on hold while the Department of Corrections carried out a review ordered by Governor Katie Hobbs. He is held in a special management unit at the Eyman Prison Complex in Florence. Under Arizona law, every death sentence is appealed automatically to the Arizona Supreme Court; no ruling on his appeal had been reported as of October 2026.
In emails to a CBS 48 Hours producer, Miller said death row was safer than other parts of the prison and better than county jail, that the food was "not great" and his cell was growing cold, and that the isolation from his daughter, his friends and his legal team was the hardest part. He said he misses car shows. He maintains that he did not kill either woman, that he did not get a fair trial and that no one can mount a real defense to crimes from three decades earlier. He opposes the death penalty. Asked how his DNA came to be on both women, he called it "the million-dollar question." "If I had a provable answer for that," he wrote, "I wouldn't be in this situation now, would I."
The canal case was an early example of police using public genealogy databases to put a name to crime-scene DNA, years before the technique became routine. It also showed what the gaps in the system cost. Miller's 1989 stabbing was a juvenile matter, his records were sealed, a 1994 tip went nowhere, and his 2002 acquittal in Washington meant his DNA never entered the national index. Each of those turns left him free for another twenty years.
For the families, the verdict did not end anything. Linda Brosso had said from the start that she wanted nobody to speak to her of closure, and she said the same thirty years later. Brandy Myers's family has no grave to visit.
Several questions remain open. Phoenix police believe Miller killed Brandy Myers, but no charge has been filed and her body has never been found. Victoria Mikelsen identified him as her attacker, but he can never be tried for it. Neither woman's bicycle, nor the knife, was ever found. Investigators never learned what the letters "WSC," cut into Melanie Bernas's body, were meant to signify. And Miller has never explained, or admitted, how his DNA came to be at the scenes of two murders he says he did not commit.
1989: Miller, a juvenile, stabs a 24-year-old woman in the back near Paradise Valley Mall in Phoenix and is held in juvenile custody.
1990: His mother gives police a note headed "Plan"; Miller is released and moves to a halfway house.
May 26, 1992: Brandy Myers, 13, disappears in Sunnyslope near Miller's apartment.
November 8, 1992: Angela Brosso goes on an evening bike ride and does not return; her body is found the next morning.
About November 20, 1992: Her head is found in the Arizona Canal.
September 21 and 22, 1993: Melanie Bernas, 17, disappears on a bike ride; divers recover her body from the canal the next morning.
1994: An anonymous tip mentions Miller and a bodysuit; it is apparently not pursued.
1997: Miller marries; the couple live in Everett, Washington.
1999: DNA links the two canal murders.
October 9, 2000: Victoria Mikelsen, 14, is stabbed on a trail; police later name Miller as the attacker.
2002: Miller is charged with a stabbing in Everett and acquitted.
2011: Phoenix's cold case unit reopens the canal murders.
2014: Colleen Fitzpatrick's genealogy search points to the surname Miller.
January 2, 2015: Detectives collect Miller's glass at a Chili's restaurant.
January 13, 2015: The DNA matches; Miller is arrested.
Late 2015: Prosecutors decline to charge Miller in Brandy Myers's case.
February 2021: Judge Cohen rules the DNA evidence admissible.
January 4, 2022: Miller is found competent to stand trial.
October 3, 2022: Bench trial begins.
April 11, 2023: Miller is found guilty on all counts.
June 7, 2023: Miller is sentenced to death.