On the evening of 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, and her boyfriend had baked her a cake while she was out. When she did not come back, he called 911. Her body was found the next morning near a bike trail 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.
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 found a pool of blood and drag marks, and police recovered Melanie's body from the canal. She had been stabbed in the back and sexually assaulted. Her bicycle was never found.
DNA from semen left at both scenes showed that the same man had killed both women. In 1999 the cases were formally linked. Investigators worked through hundreds of tips and persons of interest over the years without an arrest. In 1994 a tip suggested that a young man named Bryan Miller might have owned a bodysuit like the one Bernas had been wearing; according to CBS News, it was apparently never pursued. Court records later showed Miller's name had been on a police 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, and Detective Clark Schwartzkopf began reviewing more than 600 persons of interest.
In 2014 the forensic genealogist Colleen Fitzpatrick, a trained nuclear physicist and founder of Identifinders International, approached Phoenix police at a conference. Detectives gave her the Y-DNA profile from the crime scenes, the DNA passed down intact from father to son. She searched it against databases built from commercial home DNA tests, and the matches pointed to men with the surname Miller. "Exactly one word cracked that case," she later said. "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. In December 2014 Schwartzkopf watched him during breaks from his job at an Amazon warehouse. Detectives then approached him posing as security consultants with a job to offer. On January 2, 2015, Miller met them at a Chili's in Phoenix, bringing his 15-year-old daughter. When he left, detectives collected the glass he had drunk from and sent it to the crime lab. On January 13 the lab reported that his DNA matched both scenes, and he 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. A search of his home found neither the women's bicycles nor a weapon.
Miller was a teenager in Phoenix in 1989 when he stabbed a woman in the back. Sources differ on the details: NBC News says he was 15, that it happened in a mall parking lot and that he pleaded guilty to attempted second-degree murder; CBS News says he was 16, names the woman as Celeste Bentley, and says it happened at a bus stop. He was held in juvenile detention until he turned 18 and was released in 1990. While he was in custody, according to CBS News, his mother, Ellen, found a note in his room headed "Plan" that described abducting and killing a young woman. She gave it to police and would not let him come home, and he moved into a halfway house.
He later married, had a daughter and moved to Everett, Washington. He married in 1997 and separated in 2005. In 2002 he was charged in Everett after a woman said he had stabbed her in an unprovoked attack; he said she had tried to rob him, and he was acquitted at trial. By the time of his arrest he was divorced, back in Phoenix and raising his teenage daughter. He was also known locally as the "Zombie Hunter," a persona he took to zombie walks and events in a homemade costume, driving an old police car with the name painted on it.
Phoenix police have long suspected Miller in the disappearance of Brandy Myers, 13, who vanished on May 26, 1992, while going door to door for a book drive in the Sunnyslope neighborhood. She was developmentally delayed. She was last seen less than 70 feet from the apartment where Miller was then living. His former wife told investigators that he had once described killing a teenage girl after his release from juvenile detention. He did not name Brandy, but investigators said parts of the account matched her case. Her body has never been found, and no physical evidence connects Miller to her. In late 2015 the Maricopa County Attorney's Office declined to charge him, citing "no reasonable likelihood of conviction." Miller denies knowing her. Troy Hillman, former head of the Phoenix cold case unit, said, "We all strongly believe that Bryan Patrick Miller killed Brandy Myers." The case remains an open missing persons investigation.
Police also came to believe he was the man who stabbed a 14-year-old girl, Victoria Mikelsen, on a trail in Everett on October 9, 2000; he lived less than half a mile away. She identified him in 2015, but the statute of limitations had run out, and he was never charged.
It took years before Miller was found competent to stand trial. He waived a jury, and his bench trial before Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Suzanne Cohen began on October 3, 2022, and ran about six months. His lawyers did not dispute the DNA. They argued he was not guilty by reason of insanity, citing severe abuse by his mother, who had died in 2010, and a psychologist testified that he had dissociative amnesia and no memory of the killings. Miller himself later said he disagreed with that defense.
On April 11, 2023, Cohen found him guilty on two counts each of first-degree murder, kidnapping and attempted sexual assault, and ruled that he was eligible for the death penalty.
On May 22, 2023, 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.
Angela Brosso's mother, Linda Brosso, told the court, "With his actions on that night, he murdered my angel, he ripped my heart, and I will never, ever be the same." She would never plan her daughter's wedding. Melanie Bernas's older sister, Jill Canetta, described a family living without her love and companionship.
Prosecutors argued that the killings were especially cruel and driven by sexual sadism; the defense asked for life in prison. Cohen agreed that Miller had been abused as a child but sentenced him to death on June 7, 2023. "The defendant did not just murder them," she said. "He brutalized them and he evaded capture for over 20 years."
Miller, who was 50 at sentencing, is held in a special management unit at the Eyman Prison Complex in Florence, Arizona. Under Arizona law his case is appealed automatically. In emails to a CBS 48 Hours producer he maintained that he did not kill either woman and said he had not received a fair trial. Asked how his DNA came to be on both of them, he called it "the million-dollar question."