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The more people that were moving to the area, the more that the trails along there were being used for walking, running, biking. There are not many crimes that are like this one. You had women riding bicycles along the canal on a typical Phoenix evening, ambushed, stabbed multiple times.
Police are looking for whoever killed 22-year-old Angela Brasso. Angela Brasso dismembered, decapitated. Police are looking at this scene and thinking, what on earth happened? And who did this? 10 months later, a 17-year-old junior at Arcadia High School, Melanie Burness. This is the high school that Steven Spielberg attended.
Melanie Burness's mother goes out to dinner and Melanie decides to go on a bike ride. And the following morning, a woman is riding her bike. Right here, there was just a big puddle. It looked different as I rode through it. And all of a sudden, I'm like, that is blood. So she called the police. The police saw a blood trail and they see Melanie Burness's body at the bottom of the canal.
My time and my life froze at that very moment, the day we found out. I made a promise to myself. I just never stopped talking about her. These murders became widely known as the Phoenix Canal Murders. My name is Clark Swartzkopf, and I was assigned to the cold case unit investigating the canal murders. I think there was over 600 persons of interest. I said, "Okay, give me the list."
In this mound of information of all these people and all these possible suspects, I believed our killer was listed. Eventually, Detective Schwarzkopf found his prime suspect on that list and discovered that the alleged canal killer had a second identity, a man who dressed up like a comic book superhero and cruised the valley in a decorated car dripping with fake blood.
the public knew this man as the zombie hunter. What was his life as the zombie hunter like? What did he do? He would go to parades and festivals and show off this car and kind of be a part of the excitement, if you will.
Your assignment was to find this guy, and you have found him. He is accused of being a killer, but here he is posing with police officers before they discovered what he'd done. It was almost like a slap in the face, like, I'm here, but you don't know it. It was like he was hiding in plain sight. Peter Van Sant reports on Masking the Zombie Hunter.
It's one of those cases that you just don't forget. You can't unsee what happened to those girls. You just can't. Long before the man known as the Zombie Hunter became the prime suspect in the Canal murders, Clark Schwarzkopf was a detective with the Phoenix Police Department's Cold Case Squad.
His mission was simple but pointed: find the killer responsible for those vicious murders of two young women from the early 1990s. To this day, I'm still not exactly sure about what happened on those bike paths. The case began on November 8, 1992.
Angela Brasso, a tech worker who had recently moved to Phoenix, was taking advantage of beautiful weather to get in a little exercise, says Brianna Whitney, the true crime reporter for the CBS affiliate KPHO in Phoenix. Each night she would go out for her evening bike ride just at golden hour at sunset. The best time to be riding out here.
Angela was only hours away from turning 22 years old. And like a lot of locals, she liked to bike on the paths that ran alongside the city's distinctive canals, says Schwarzkopf, a 48 Hours consultant. Are there places that are sort of natural ambush sites if somebody wants to attack someone? Yeah, they are. There's a lot of tunnels that go underneath the interstate.
That November evening in 1992, Angela left her apartment around 7 p.m. Her boyfriend Joe later told police. He said he stayed home to bake Angela a birthday cake and didn't expect her to be gone long. Hours go by and Joe grows concerned. Angela hasn't come home and that's not like her.
Joe told police he took his bike out three times that night, frantically searching for Angela on the canal paths. He spoke to her friends, even her mother back in Pennsylvania. Finally, he reported Angela missing to police. The next morning, searchers came upon a horrific scene. Angela Brasso's torso was found in a field next to the trail that she had been riding her bike on.
Angela had been stabbed to death. Some ten days after Angela's headless body was discovered, a man fishing along this section of the canal spotted her head stuck on a grate. And from what we have heard from witnesses, the head was in amazingly good condition, especially considering this was days after the murder.
I'm Morgan Lowe and I'll take you... Morgan Lowe, an investigative reporter who also works at KPHO and is a consultant for 48 Hours, has been working on the Canal Killer case for more than a decade. We've heard that the head looked like it had been preserved, like it was a memento for the killer. Angela's purple mountain bike was also missing.
There were no solid leads and the case went quiet until September of 1993, some 10 months after Angela's murder, when the mother of 17-year-old Melanie Bernis returned from a dinner date to find her daughter had broken her curfew and was not home. She then noticed that Melanie's bicycle was missing.
Melanie decides to go on a bike ride. By around 10:30, when Melanie did not return, her mother started calling her friends. "Is Melanie there?" Well, my mom took the phone call, said that Melanie's mom was frantic and, like, nervous. Rachel Shepmaker was one of Melanie's close friends in high school. So initially, when you hear that her mother's looking for her, you're not thinking something terrible has happened to your friend? Definitely not.
I thought she was with a friend and just forgot to communicate with her mom where she was. Early the next morning, Charlotte Pottle, a local resident, happened to be riding along the canal with her young daughter in a bicycle seat. Just as they came out of one of those tunnels that ran under the interstate, she spotted a puddle.
There was just a big puddle of something. Ended up riding right through it and having it splash over me. Charlotte says something about the puddle bothered her. So a few minutes later, she doubled back. That's when she made that horrible realization. I could tell that it was a puddle of red, that it was a puddle of blood. And all of a sudden, as I'm looking at it, I notice that there are some drag marks that went along over here.
Toward that tree? Towards that tree, yes. And then went around the tree and was drugged back. You could see the drag marks right here to the canal. Charlotte went home and called police. Later that night, the local news reported that a woman's body had been found in the canal, close to where Angela Brasso's head had been located. They found the body in a teal bodysuit. I was told...
by some other friends that Melanie did not own that. It can't be her. Rachel went to sleep convinced the body in the canal was not Melanie. But the next day... I'm at school. My friends just come up to me crying and saying it was Melanie. Detectives strongly suspected Melanie had been targeted and stabbed in the back by the same person who had killed Angela.
Police believe that somehow the killer got her off of her bike, whether he knocked her off of her bike or whether he asked her a question. Clark says the evidence indicates the killer approached the women from behind. Both the knife wounds were the exact same position.
Investigators say the killer dragged Melanie's body off the canal path, removed her clothes, and dressed her in that teal bodysuit, similar to this one obtained by police. Along with the stabbing and the dismemberment, there was another component to these murders, wasn't there? Yeah, both women were sexually assaulted. And that meant investigators had a crucial piece of evidence, DNA.
When the DNA from Melanie's scene was finally tested later, it matched to Angela's scene, so we knew for sure that we were dealing with the same perpetrator.
Investigators noted that the initial stab wounds to the backs of each woman were fatal and so precise that detectives suspected the killer might be a surgeon. The details about what happened were the kinds of things that kept parents from letting their kids out when the sun went down.
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They watched the news and read the newspaper every day, hoping that police would make an arrest. And it just kept going on, and nothing, and nothing, and nothing. Investigators had collected matching male DNA from both the victims. But more than two decades passed, and the canal murder cases went cold. Then science finally caught up with the calendar. It's in 2014.
Phoenix police detectives are at a DNA conference, and a forensic genealogist from California is also at the conference. Colleen Fitzpatrick, founder of Identifinders International, was there to meet with law enforcement. And she goes up to these detectives and says, "Hey, I can take Y chromosomes and create these DNA profiles and try to match with genealogy to help solve criminal cases."
Fitzpatrick's company had developed software that could mine public genealogy databases, searching for matches to crime scene DNA. The detectives heard her out. And then several weeks later, they sent me the Y DNA profile from the crime scene for the Phoenix Canal murders. Fitzpatrick's company started crunching the data, hoping to provide Phoenix detectives with a name.
We entered the numbers from the forensic profile into our software, and that's where I came up with six matches to the name Miller. While the genetic genealogy search produced the name Miller, it is also one of the most common last names. Detective Schwarzkopf started digging. You check your files, and what do you find? I think there were a total of six Millers that were on what I called my master list. And I went down through the list, got to Brian Patrick Miller.
But who was Brian Patrick Miller? Records show he was 42 years old with a Phoenix address. That name was just one of more than 600 persons of interest who had lived in those case files for years. Police at the time seemingly never pursued Miller. We discovered his file downstairs.
Police learned Brian Miller had a record dating back to before the canal murders. In May of 1989, when he was just 16 years old, Miller crossed paths with Celeste Bentley. I was 24 and I was going to work. I had just noticed a young boy on the bus.
Celeste says she and the boy got off at the same stop. Moments later, she felt something in her back. He had ran by me. I thought he had just hit me. I just yelled at him. I was like, why'd you do that, you know? And then I reached back and touched my back and realized that it was blood. I had been stabbed. With a single knife wound to her upper back, Celeste screamed and managed to make it to the store where she worked.
A co-worker called for help. About 30 minutes later, when Celeste was in the back of an ambulance... The police came and said they found him, and they wanted to bring him to the ambulance to show him to me.
Celeste identified her assailant. Brian Miller was charged with aggravated assault. They said that if he had held the blade the other way, he would have gone straight through my ribs and I could have died. Miller pleaded guilty and was sentenced to juvenile detention until he turned 18. It was a far cry from where Miller's life had begun.
He was living in Hawaii for a while as a kid with his mom and his dad, but his dad died early on in a motorcycle accident.
Years later, Miller and his mother Ellen moved to Phoenix. So for most of his life and early years, it was Brian Miller and his mom. While Miller was in juvie, his mother made a disturbing discovery. Brian Miller's mom was looking through his stuff, and she found a note that he wrote. The pages detailed a sinister plan. Kidnap the girl, tie her up in the truck,
and cut her clothes off. This note spelled out how he wanted to find, abduct, rape, murder, and dismember a young woman.
And Brian's mom was so disturbed by this piece of paper that she took it to Phoenix police. It was Miller's 18th birthday, and he had just been released as an adult. She flat out told the police at the time that she was really scared for her safety and that she was not going to allow him to come home.
So after his release, Miller ended up at this Phoenix halfway house. When Schwarzkopf read that note in 2014, he was struck by something. There was a lot of things in there that were close or similar to what happened specifically to Angela. Including a description of decapitating a victim and preserving the head.
Phoenix police wanted to locate Miller. Luckily, he was very easy to find.
In December 2014, Phoenix police continued digging into potential suspect Brian Miller, who they discovered was actually a local celebrity. Everybody at the time in the Phoenix area knew Brian Patrick Miller as this character called the Zombie Hunter. The Zombie Hunter, like a comic book character? Yeah, like a comic book character, like a good guy fighting the bad guys.
Miller's alter ego was a costume figure who participated in parades and festivals around town. Thousands of zombies taking over the streets of downtown Phoenix. He wore this long trench coat with these goggles and helmet and had this large Gatling gun. And if you're going to hunt zombies, you need a way to get around. He bought an old police car and tricked it out
wrote the zombie hunter on it and it had a full-size zombie mannequin in the back and blood on the side friend Eric Braverman says Miller's zombie hunter persona attracted a big fan base including law enforcement officers who lined up to pose with him collected pictures of himself with the cops like trophies they're all smiling big with him leaning on the car
Eric says Miller's superhero character was the opposite of what Brian was like when he wasn't in costume. He seemed like a harmless marshmallow that was immersed in this goofy lifestyle. He's just that unassuming guy. But could Miller be the canal killer? The only way to find out was to get his DNA. Investigators began to surveil Miller, who worked at an Amazon warehouse.
Every day when he got there, Miller parked the zombie mobile in the same spot. He would come out for his 15-minute break, blast his music really loud. Lunchtime, came out to the car, same thing, blast this god-awful music. Schwarzkopf came up with an elaborate plan to get his DNA. I went up and introduced myself to Miller. He was in his car. What did you introduce yourself as? I introduced myself as a security consultant.
Schwarzkopf told Miller that thieves had been stealing goods from a warehouse across the way. I said, "Would you be interested in working for me as a security officer watching the building while you're outside?" Did his eyes light up? Yeah, because it was a good paying job. I said, "Look, I'll pay you 20 bucks an hour." On January 2nd, 2015, Schwarzkopf met Miller at this Chili's restaurant to fill out a job application.
The cold case unit was behind the scenes, ready to bag anything that had Miller's DNA on it, such as utensils or a glass. They set a table for me and Mr. Miller away from everybody else in a part of the restaurant where nobody else is at. Miller arrived with a surprise guest, his 15-year-old daughter, Sarah.
Miller was a divorced single dad. He was very gentle and caring about his daughter. He often brought his daughter where he would be going. The trio sat down and ordered hamburgers. When the food arrived... He swallows his hamburger in like five bites, won't take a drink of his water. And I'm sitting there going, "Are you sure you don't want something else to drink? You just got water?" "No, no, I'm good. I'm good. I'm good." Schwarzkopf started to worry this operation would be a bust.
What does he finally do that makes this mission accomplished? We finally took a drink from the water glass. That's when I knew that, okay, now we've at least got his DNA. Despite knowing about Miller's juvenile record, as their meal ended, the veteran detective's gut told him Miller was not their man. Seeing him with his daughter, I just don't see this guy as being the monster in 1992 and 93 that would do this to these women.
Miller gave Schwarzkopf a quick tour of his zombie hunter mobile and the two parted ways, with the detective saying he'd be in touch. The cold case unit sent Miller's water glass off to the crime lab. Eleven days later... We got a call from the lab and we're sitting there and we're like, what is this all about? And in this meeting, these Phoenix detectives say as a joke, they must have solved the canal murders.
But Detective Schwarzkopf says it was no joke when the head of the lab arrived. She leans down to me, she goes, "It's him." I go, "What?" She goes, "Brian Miller. It's him." Well, the blood rushed from my head. I kind of sat back and I went, "You've got to be kidding."
Brian Miller's DNA from that water glass matched the DNA recovered from Angela Brasso and Melanie Burness more than 20 years before. Miller was arrested within hours. During a police interview shortly after, Miller was told why he'd been taken into custody in connection with the canal murders. We have DNA that links you to those two ladies.
He just kind of went through it in his dopey, kind of, I don't know what you're kind of talking about. Investigators got a search warrant for Miller's house, the home he shared with his teenage daughter. And...
just about everything he'd ever collected in his life. I can remember like it was yesterday, walking up to the front door and everybody going, "You can't get in that way." It's full of crap.
Brian Miller's house was like it came from the show Hoarders. There was a little path where you could get to a bathroom and a kitchen and where the TV was and that's it. Everything else is just stacked to the roof with garbage. Did you look around and go, "This is madness." Not only madness, I go, "This is a nightmare."
Schwarzkopf and his investigators would have to sift through all of it, looking for other possible evidence. Detective Schwarzkopf also focused on a new source, someone Miller himself had ominously singled out in his interview. It's the one person on the face of the earth that I could probably honestly say I hate.
Miller's ex-wife, Amy, who would end up revealing gruesome details from Miller's violent past. He had told her about the murder of a young girl who had come to his door accidentally. What do you think motivated Brian Miller to dress up as the zombie hunter? See more of the case on Facebook at 48 Hours.
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Stop wasting money on things you don't use. Cancel your unwanted subscriptions by going to rocketmoney.com slash wondery. That's rocketmoney.com slash wondery. rocketmoney.com slash wondery. In January 2015, more than 21 years after the canal murders, Brian Miller was charged with first degree murder in both Angela Brasso and Melanie Bernis's deaths.
Melanie's friend, Rachel Shepmaker, says she felt a wave of relief. A very joyous moment of, oh my gosh, this is what we've been waiting for, for decades upon decades. Detective Schwarzkopf wanted to talk to the one person who probably knew Miller best, his ex-wife, Amy. ♪
They had been married for eight years. There was a divorce. Amy told Schwarzkopf that she was just 19 when she met Miller in 1996. They married less than a year later and moved to Everett, Washington. Amy had a shocking revelation for the detective. She told Schwarzkopf Miller had revealed a gruesome secret to her, that he had killed a young girl in Phoenix years earlier, before he'd ever met Amy.
Schwarzkopf says Amy never reported it to police before for a number of reasons. She didn't know if it was true, she was afraid of Miller, and she said she wanted to be a good wife. You support your man no matter what. Detective Schwarzkopf says Amy told him what Miller had said. That a young girl had come to his door, that he had grabbed this young female, pulled her in, killed her immediately,
Amy said Miller told her he dismembered the girl and disposed of her remains in trash left on the curb. Although Amy claimed Miller never told her the child's name, investigators used the information Amy provided to piece together who Miller may have been talking about. - 13-year-old Brandy Myers was a little girl collecting money for a school book-a-thon in her North Phoenix neighborhood, going door to door,
I was a tomboy and she was a girly girl. Brandy's sister, Kristen Dennis. So she would try to learn how to climb trees or jump fences because she wanted to play with me. She was my best friend. It was May 26, 1992, six months prior to the murder of Angela Brasso. Miller was living in the halfway house following his time in juvenile detention for the aggravated assault of Celeste Bentley.
This is one block from our school, his home, and then three blocks is our house. So every single day, we walked right by here. Kristen says Brandy left home alone that evening, never to return. She was last seen two doors down from Brian's walking in the direction of his house.
Despite an extensive search, Brandy's body was never found. Schwarzkopf says even though Amy couldn't provide a name, the clues in her account add up to just one conclusion. I believe that person is in fact Brandy Myers. Her sister believes that as well. Brandy went to the landfill like something of no importance.
Even with Amy's account, investigators did not have enough evidence to charge Miller in Brandy's disappearance. So the fact that she was disposed of, there's just nothing physical, nothing forensically to grab onto. 48 Hours contacted Miller, who said he had no involvement in Brandy's disappearance and never confessed to Amy that he had killed a young girl. But there is another case in Miller's past.
In 2002, a woman named Melissa Ruiz Ramirez is walking down the street in Everett at night. Somebody pulls over. It was Brian Miller. Melissa would later tell police she'd seen him before talking to a friend of hers. Melissa said she got in Miller's car and told him she needed to make a call, and he drove her to his workplace so she could use the phone.
She tells police she's on the phone and from out of the clear blue, Brian Miller comes running out with a 12-inch serrated kitchen knife and stabs her in the back. They fight over the weapon. Melissa said she escaped and contacted police. They picked up Miller shortly after.
He didn't deny stabbing Melissa, but claimed it was self-defense. He said he was at work when Melissa walked in off the street and asked to make a call. He said, she goes to use the phone, and then all of a sudden out of the clear blue, she tries to rob him with a knife. Miller was arrested and charged with first-degree assault with a deadly weapon. He was jailed from May 2002 until his December trial. The jury just didn't buy anything.
It was a he said, she said, and they acquitted him of the charge. Amy says a chilling change followed Miller's return home. She said it began with the letters she'd received from her jailed husband while he awaited trial. They first started out as professing his innocence, and then it would turn into sexual deviance. Like, here's what I'm going to do when I get out.
Amy told Schwarzkopf that Miller followed up his words with action. She said he came back with an unbelievable, ugly, dark, sexual deviant side that she'd never seen before. There were times where there was sex between them where he held a knife to her throat.
Amy told Schwarzkopf that Miller claimed something happened to him as a child, something that would become the cornerstone of his defense for murdering Angela Brasso and Melanie Bernis. His unique defense? Call the first witness. His mother had created a monster.
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At the start of Brian Miller's trial for the murders of Angela Brasso and Melanie Bernis in October 2022, his attorneys opened with a startling defense. They admitted their client was the canal killer. They had to concede right off the bat that he is the actual killer, but that he was not guilty by reason of insanity.
His defense attorneys say Miller was tortured by his mother, Ellen, as a child, and that led to his violent sexual behavior. She died in 2010. If you imagine the making of a monster, this is kind of the household that story begins in. Miller told investigators after his arrest that the beatings began when he was just five years old.
She was a detention officer. Discipline in their house was mental as well as physical. She used her security belt, so it was like a law enforcement belt, and usually I had to buy the buckles. The defense opted for a bench trial, which meant there would be no jury. His lawyers told Judge Suzanne Cohen that Miller's mother also exposed her young son to violent sexual content.
He was exposed to her interests in pornography and extremely violent films.
Miller's lawyer said his mother's abuse caused Miller to develop severe mental health problems. He feels like there are different TVs playing in his head. Psychologist Bethany Brand testified that Miller developed a condition known as dissociative amnesia, an inability to remember some traumatic events. Morgan Lowe summed up the defense argument.
There were two Bryans. There's the one you see over there at the defense table who's a fairly normal person, who has friends, who had a job, who was a dad, who was a husband. And then there's the killer. There's bad Brian. And Miller claimed his attorneys had no memory, none, of the two murders he was charged with.
Prosecutors undermine the defense claim that Miller has no memory of the killings. They point out that he does remember details related to other stabbings. Remember, Miller admitted stabbing Celeste Bentley when he was 16 years old. And in 2002, he had also testified about the stabbing of Melissa Ruiz Ramirez in Washington.
To show Miller's deviant side, prosecutors called the only person in the world Miller said he despised, his ex-wife, Amy. The judge did not allow cameras to record her face. Under questioning by prosecutor Elizabeth Reamer, Amy testified that later in their marriage, Miller grew increasingly violent during sex. Did you ever say anything to him about...
wanting it to stop because it was scary? No. Why not? I was avoiding any confrontation with him at all at that point and wanted to be as compliant as possible so that I would say, will he love me enough not to kill me? Did he ask permission prior to using needles on you? No. Did he ask permission prior to tying you up? No.
What percentage of your sex life after he got out of jail in Washington included bondage, the pins or other things that were not the normal sex you'd been having early in your marriage? Probably at least 95%.
The trial continued, and after six months and 36 witnesses, the judge delivered her verdict. As to count one, first-degree murder, Angela Brasso, as follows, guilty. As to count two, first-degree murder, victim, Melanie Burness, as follows, guilty. How did Brian Miller react to the guilty verdict?
He didn't react. He didn't give any real emotion. But Angela's mother, who addressed the court remotely, was emotional. The defendant broke my heart to all hope and light from me and my family. The hole in my heart is so big and empty.
Melanie's older sister Jill also spoke remotely about how painful it was that Melanie's life ended violently at the age of 17. For 30 years now, we've had to live without Melanie because the defendant murdered her. Words cannot even begin to describe the level of excruciating pain we experienced with the news of her horrific death.
Miller, who didn't take the stand during his trial, was allowed to give a statement before he was sentenced. I am not looking for sympathy today. This time is for the family and the friends of the victims. I cannot imagine what pain they have endured for all these years. I know I am different. I thought I had to do with what my mother did to me.
Defense counsel R.J. Parker urged Judge Cohen to show mercy before she delivered her judgment on Miller's sentence, life in prison or death. You do not have to kill Brian in order to see justice done. Judge Cohen agreed with the centerpiece of the defense case. The defendant's abuse as a child was proven.
But eight months after the trial began, Miller's abuse at the hands of his mother did not dissuade Judge Cohen from handing down the ultimate sentence. There is no question that what the defendant did deserves the death penalty. Mr. Miller, anything you wish to say to the court? I guess thanks for listening to everything that was said and giving us at least the opportunity to try and convince you otherwise.
Justice was carried out in this case. Detective Schwarzkopf hopes family and friends of Angela and Melanie might finally find some peace. People like Rachel Shepmaker. Just knowing that justice was served, it doesn't make anything easier. How do you want your good friend to be remembered? Just that she's the all-American good kid. I want her family to know that we haven't forgotten her. She's changed us all for the better. She was a gift.
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American Scandal also tells marquee stories about American politics. In our latest season, we retrace the greatest corruption scheme in U.S. history as we bring to life the bribes and backroom deals that spawned the Teapot Dome scandal, resulting in the first presidential cabinet member going to prison. Follow American Scandal on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can binge this season, American Scandal Teapot Dome, early and ad-free right now on Wondery+. And after you listen to American Scandal, go deeper and get more to the story with Wondery's other top history podcasts, including American History Tellers, Legacy, and even The Royals. Was there a crime committed?
As far as I'm concerned, there wasn't. Guilty by Design dives into the wild story of Alexander and Frank, interior designers who in the 80s landed the jackpot of all clients. We went to bed one night and the next morning we woke up as one of the most wanted people in the United States. What are they guilty of? You can listen to Guilty by Design exclusively and ad-free on Wondery+. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.
Paramount Podcasts.