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Phoenix Police Arrest Bryan Patrick Miller in the 1990s Canal Murders of Two Young Women

A glass of water taken from a Chili's table linked Miller, 42, to the killings of Angela Brosso, 22, and Melanie Bernas, 17, who vanished while bicycling along the Arizona Canal.

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An empty police booking corridor with a grey epoxy floor, white cinderblock walls, a steel bench and a heavy door at the end, under harsh fluorescent light. Not the actual jail.

Bryan Patrick Miller drove to dinner in a retired Crown Victoria police car painted with fake blood and the words Zombie Hunter. On January 2, 2015, he sat down across from a Phoenix cold-case detective at a Chili's restaurant, ordered a burger and a glass of water, and finished the burger in a few bites without touching the water. Detective Clark Schwartzkopf kept asking whether he wanted something else to drink. Finally Miller took a sip. When he left, undercover officers took the glass.

Eleven days later the head of the police forensic lab leaned down to Schwartzkopf's desk with the result. "It's him," she told him. "Bryan Miller, it's him." Miller was arrested at once, and the city learned that its police believed they had solved two of the most frightening killings in its recent history.

Angela Brosso, 22, was killed in November 1992. Melanie Bernas, 17, died in September 1993. Each had gone out on a bicycle ride along the paths of the Arizona Canal and never come home. Brosso's body, decapitated, was found near an apartment complex; Bernas was found about a mile and a half away, floating in the water. Male DNA had been recovered from both bodies, and for more than two decades it had matched no one.

Miller, 42, a divorced father raising a teenage daughter and working at an Amazon warehouse, was held on two counts of first-degree murder and kidnapping and one count of sexual assault. He appeared in court on Wednesday without a lawyer. In a police interview, officers said, he denied the killings, though he acknowledged living in the area at the time and riding the bike paths. Phoenix police Sgt. Trent Crump said there was no evidence he had known either victim. Investigators spent days going through his house; a bicycle turned up in a backyard shed, and it was not yet clear whether it had belonged to either young woman.

What came out next was how close he had come to being caught before. In high school, Crump said, Miller had stabbed a woman at random at a Phoenix mall and been held only until he turned 18. In May 2002, in Everett, Washington, he gave a ride to a woman he knew by sight, drove her to his workplace and stabbed her in the back with a 12-inch serrated knife. He was arrested, claimed she had tried to rob him, and was acquitted, so he was never made to give a DNA sample. A former co-worker remembered him as quiet and "pretty square," and said he collected his things after the trial and went back to Arizona. Schwartzkopf had reached him through a genetic genealogist, who linked the surname Miller to the crime-scene DNA.

The case took almost eight years to reach trial. A jury convicted Miller of murdering Brosso and Bernas, and in June 2023 he was sentenced to death.

What this story covers. The charges, the court appearance, the victims and how they were found, Crump's statements, the bicycle in the shed, the mall stabbing, the Everett case and the former co-worker's words come from the Associated Press report of January 15, 2015, as published by The Washington Times. The dinner at Chili's, the detective's quotations, the lab result 11 days later, the genealogist's lead and the 2023 conviction and death sentence come from Paul LaRosa's report for CBS News "48 Hours." Miller was later convicted only of the murders of Angela Brosso and Melanie Bernas. The image is an illustration of a police booking corridor, not the Phoenix jail.

Sources