Arizona 1992 Cold Case Solved — Killer Posed for Photos With the Police

January 2nd, 2015, Phoenix, Arizona. A detective named Clark Schwartzkopf is sitting in a Chili’s restaurant watching a man eat a hamburger. The man drove to the restaurant in a decommissioned police cruiser covered in fake blood. He is known to much of Phoenix as the zombie hunter, a local fixture at horror and science fiction conventions who wears a mask and a long trench coat and carries a fake Gatling gun.

He poses for photographs with fans, with children, and with police officers. A lot of police officers. Schwartzkopf is not there to talk to him. He is not there to arrest him. He is there for one reason. He needs the man to pick up his water glass. The man eats. He drinks. When he sets down the glass and steps away from the table, two plainclothes officers move in.

They bag the glass. They leave. The glass goes to a laboratory. 11 days later, the results come back. What those results revealed, and what it took to get to that particular table in that particular restaurant on January 2nd, 2015, is a story that begins in Phoenix in 1992, moves through 22 years of investigative failure, runs through a nuclear physicist who attended a conference and asked a question nobody in law enforcement had thought to ask, and ends on death row in Tucson, Arizona.

But before any of that, there were Angela and Melanie. Angela Brasso was born in Pennsylvania in November 1970. She was a shy girl who grew up in Camp Hill and moved to Phoenix as a young adult, finding an apartment near 25th Avenue and Cactus Road on the northwest side of the city. She worked. She built a life in the desert that was nothing like the Pennsylvania she had grown up in.

She liked evening bike rides. The Arizona Canal Path near her was flat and quiet, and she used it regularly. The kind of route that becomes habit, that a person stops thinking about because it has always been safe. On the evening of November 8th, 1992, the night before her 22nd birthday, Angela went out for one of those rides and did not come home.

 Her roommate reported her missing that evening. Police began searching immediately. The following morning, they found her near a field adjacent to her apartment complex. She had suffered catastrophic and fatal injuries. Her bicycle was missing. DNA evidence was recovered from the scene and entered into every available database.

No match came back. 11 days after her body was found, investigators discovered her head in the Arizona Canal, approximately 2 miles away. The condition of what they found told investigators something specific about the person they were looking for. This was not an impulsive act. This was organized and deliberate.

Angela Brosso was going to turn 22 the next morning. Her family in Pennsylvania was planning to call her. The week before she was killed, Melanie Berness turned 17. She had just started her junior year at Arcadia High School on the east side of Phoenix, signing up for accelerated classes. She played basketball and had enrolled in a basketball course at Scottsdale Community College.

 She lived with her mother, Marlene, and their dog near Osborn Road and 42nd Street. She was not allowed to ride her bike at night. That was the rule. On the evening of September 21st, 1993, 10 months after Angela Brosso disappeared, Marlene came home from work to find Melanie had stayed home from school unwell. Just past 7:00 in the evening, Marlene went out for dinner.

Melanie asked how long she would be gone. Marlene told her 2 hours. When she left, Melanie was sitting on the sofa in a large white t-shirt and white shorts she used as pajamas. Marlene told the court 30 years later, “I thought she was going to stay home. When I said goodbye to her, I kissed her, said I love you.

 I said I’ll see you in a little while.” When Marlene returned 2 and 1/2 hours later, the house was empty. She started calling hospitals. She called Melanie’s friends. She called emergency rooms. The police told her a missing person’s report could not be filed for 18 to 24 hours. The following morning, a woman named Charlotte Poddle was out early on the canal path with her sister and their children when she spotted a large dark stain on the ground and drag marks leading toward the water.

She went home and called 911. Police found Melanie Bernas in the Arizona canal beside the bike trail. She was wearing a turquoise bodysuit that her mother said she did not recognize. She had suffered injuries consistent with the first crime. The DNA from the scene matched the DNA from 1992. Phoenix understood immediately what that match meant.

 The same man, the same canal. A city that had spent 10 months trying to recover from the first murder was now looking at a second. Cyclists stopped using the canal paths at night. Parents drove their children everywhere. The shape of ordinary life in that part of Phoenix reorganized itself around the outline of a person nobody could name.

The investigation that followed was extensive. Hundreds of leads. A witness who had seen a suspicious man near the canal before one of the crimes, a composite sketch released, circulated, matched to nobody. A surgeon visiting from Europe was investigated seriously. A man with special forces training who had been in the area drew attention.

Every thread was pulled. Nothing held. Shortly after the murders, an anonymous caller gave police a name. A teenager named Brian Patrick Miller, whose roommate had allegedly seen him with a turquoise bodysuit resembling what Melanie Bernas was wearing when she was found. Investigators looked at Miller and moved on.

 The evidence at that point did not support a more focused investigation. His name went on to a list and stayed there. What investigators did not fully know then, and what would not become critical until 20 years later, was how deep Miller’s record already ran. In May 1989, 3 years before the canal murders, a 16-year-old Brian Patrick Miller had walked up behind a young woman named Celeste Bentley and stabbed her in the upper back.

He was caught, charged with aggravated assault, and sent to juvenile detention until he turned 18. While he was there, his mother, Ellen, was cleaning his room when she found a note. It was handwritten. The second page was headed with a single word, “Plan.” What that note contained in Miller’s own handwriting, in organized and specific language, was a description of what he intended to do to a woman.

Not a vague expression of anger. A structured document, a sequence. Ellen gave it to police. She refused to let him return home when he was released from detention. He moved into a halfway house and eventually into the city. The note went into a file. He was 18 years old. He had stabbed a woman and written a detailed plan for the next time.

Both pieces of information existed in the record. Neither stopped what came next. In 2002, 9 years after the canal murders, Miller was accused of attacking another woman, Melissa Ruiz Ramirez, who survived. He claimed self-defense. A jury acquitted him. He walked out of the courtroom and continued building the life he had constructed in Phoenix, working jobs, attending events, developing the persona that would eventually make him one of the more recognizable figures in the city’s horror and science fiction convention

scene. By 2014, Bryan Patrick Miller was 42 years old. He worked weekdays at an Amazon warehouse in Sunnyslope. On weekends, he became the Zombie Hunter, a character he had been developing for years. The mask, the long trench coat, the fake Gatling gun, the decommissioned police cruiser he had modified with fake blood and prop equipment, and driven through the streets of Phoenix to events where he posed for photographs.

He was not hiding in the shadows. He was standing in the center of convention floors with his arm around people who were smiling at cameras. Some of those people were police officers who were still listed as working on a double murder cold case from 1992 and 1993. Across Phoenix, two families were still waiting for an aim.

Marlene Burnas still thought about the sofa, the white t-shirt, the 2 hours she had said she would be gone. Angela Brasso’s family in Pennsylvania had been waiting 22 years for someone to tell them who had taken their daughter the night before her birthday. A teenager with a documented plan found by his own mother.

Two women murdered along a canal he knew. And then two decades of attending conventions in costume, posing for photographs with the officers investigating his crimes, living in the same city, working at a warehouse, building a public identity. In a moment, the woman who figured out his surname from a DNA sample before anyone had a name for what she was doing.

If this channel is for you, subscribe. Colleen Fitzpatrick trained as a nuclear physicist for years. That is what she was, a scientist working in a highly technical discipline. Then she began thinking about genealogy databases. In the early 2010s, commercial DNA testing was becoming mainstream. Companies like Ancestry and 23andMe were growing rapidly.

Hundreds of thousands of people were voluntarily uploading their genetic profiles to public databases to find distant relatives. Adopted adults were using the platforms to trace biological parents. Genealogy enthusiasts were posting their Y-DNA profiles, the genetic sequence that passes intact from father to son through generations and is typically associated with a family surname, to thousands of public websites in the hope of connecting with cousins they had never met.

Fitzpatrick looked at all of that publicly available data and asked a question. If an unidentified killer’s DNA is sitting in an evidence room, and if distant relatives of that killer have voluntarily uploaded their DNA to a public genealogy platform, why can’t investigators build a family tree from those partial matches and work backward to a name? The logic was clean.

 An unknown assailant was the same genealogical problem as an adopted person who did not know their biological parents. You did not know their name, but you could find their family. Y-DNA was the key. If the crime scene Y-DNA matched the Y-DNA of several men sharing a surname in a public database, then the killer almost certainly carried that surname.

From a surname, you could build a list of individuals who fit the age, geography, and circumstance. From that list, you could narrow to a person. Fitzpatrick had founded a company called Identifinders International specifically to develop software for this kind of genealogical search. In late 2014, she attended a conference in Phoenix and approached the Phoenix Police Department with her idea.

The cold case detectives who met with her, including Dave Schwartz Kopp, were immediately interested. Their leadership was not. It took 3 months to convince the Phoenix Police Department to fund what Fitzpatrick was proposing. The technique had no official name, no established legal framework, no precedent in American law enforcement.

The Golden State Killer case that would eventually make forensic genealogy famous was 4 years away. This was before any of that. Phoenix Police sent Fitzpatrick the Y-DNA profile extracted from the 1992 and 1993 crime scenes. Her software ran it against thousands of public genealogy databases simultaneously, which she described as a bingo game, searching for a match that would light up the board.

Within a few weeks, she called back with a result. The Canal Killer carried the surname Miller. Six men with that surname had uploaded Y-DNA profiles to commercial genealogy platforms that matched the crime scene profile. The killer was related to one of them. Schwartz Kopp pulled the case files. Six men named Miller.

The anonymous tip from 1992, a teenager named Bryan Patrick Miller, was already there. He cross-referenced the list against the tip. One name matched both, Bryan Patrick Miller. Now 42 years old, living in Sunnyslope, working at an Amazon warehouse, known across Phoenix as the Zombie Hunter. Schwartz Kopp began surveillance.

He watched Miller during his breaks at the warehouse. He needed Miller’s DNA without alerting him. A direct approach carried the risk of spooking him or triggering a legal challenge to the evidence collection. Schwartz Kopp devised a ruse. He approached Miller’s car during a work break, introduced himself under a false cover, and told Miller he was looking for security contractors for a private job.

He asked for a phone number. Miller gave him one. A few weeks later Schwartzkopf called and invited Miller to meet at a Chili’s restaurant on January 2nd to discuss the supposed work opportunity. Miller arrived in his decommissioned police cruiser covered in fake blood. He ordered He picked up his water glass.

When he set it down and stepped away from the table, officers moved in and bagged it. The same scene the viewer watched in silence at the beginning of this video now carries its full weight. A detective watching a man eat a hamburger was the end of a 22-year investigation. A water glass in a Chili’s was the instrument.

11 days later, the same interval that had separated Angela Brosso’s body from the discovery of her head in the canal in 1992, the DNA results came back. The water glass matched both crime scenes. Brian Patrick Miller was arrested at his Phoenix home on January 13th, 2015. During the search of Miller’s home following his arrest, investigators found something taped to the outside of his refrigerator door.

A photograph of a decapitated head and dismembered limbs. Not stored, not hidden. Displayed on the refrigerator, the thing in a kitchen that you stand in front of every day. It was the first thing evidence technicians photographed. Miller denied everything from the moment of his arrest.

 He has continued to deny it. He elected a bench trial, waving his right to a jury and leaving his fate to a single judge, and pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. His defense team made a calculated decision. They did not contest the DNA evidence. They did not argue that someone else had committed the murders. They admitted that Brian Patrick Miller had killed Angela Brosso and Melanie Bernas.

Their argument was that childhood trauma had caused a condition called complex dissociative disorder, a form of dissociative amnesia that they argued meant he could not form the intent required for first-degree murder because he had no conscious memory of committing the crimes. The prosecution presented the DNA match, the surveillance evidence, the juvenile record, the plan note, the attack on Celeste Bentley, the 2002 assault on Melissa Ruiz Ramirez, and the photograph on the refrigerator.

Marlene Bernas testified virtually from her home about the evening of September 21st, 1993, about saying goodbye to her daughter on the sofa, about returning 2 and 1/2 hours later to an empty house, about calling hospitals and friends and emergency rooms through the night. Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Suzanne Cohen presided over the trial for 6 months.

 On April 11th, 2023, 30 years and 5 months after Melanie Bernas was killed, she found Brian Patrick Miller guilty on all six counts. Two counts of first-degree murder, two counts of kidnapping, one count of criminal assault, one count of attempted criminal assault. During the penalty phase, Miller addressed the court.

 He said he accepted the verdict and hoped it brought some relief to the families of the victims. Two months later, from a cell in Tucson, he gave an interview through email correspondence with a TV producer in which he maintained he had not committed the murders and that the DNA evidence was wrong. He has sustained both positions simultaneously, acceptance in the courtroom, denial from death row.

 Judge Cohen sentenced him to death on June 7th, 2023. He is currently housed at the Rincon unit of the Arizona State Prison Complex in Tucson. Under Arizona law, his death sentence triggers an automatic appeals process. That process is ongoing and will take years. Angela Brosso’s family had waited 30 years for the verdict.

 Melanie Bernas’ mother Marlene had waited 30 years. Both families have spoken about a form of relief that does not resolve into peace. Because justice, when it finally arrives decades after a crime, cannot restore what was taken. It can only confirm what happened and name who did it. There is a third name. In 1992, the same year Angela Brosso was murdered, a 13-year-old girl named Brandi Myers disappeared from Phoenix.

The geography matches, the time frame matches. If investigators have listed Brian Patrick Miller as a person of interest in her disappearance, she has never been found. He has never been charged in connection with her case. The Phoenix Police Department has not closed that investigation. While Miller maintains his innocence from Tucson and his automatic appeal moves through the courts, a family is still waiting for an answer that the conviction in 2023 did not provide.

 Brian Patrick Miller is on death row in Tucson. His appeal is ongoing. The DNA from two crime scenes and a Chili’s water glass put him there. The woman who identified his surname from a genealogy database before anyone had a name for the technique is a former nuclear physicist named Colleen Fitzpatrick. And Brandi Myers has been missing since 1992.

 If you want to stay with cases like this one, subscribe. What Colleen Fitzpatrick did in a Phoenix conference room in late 2014 is now a formal investigative discipline taught in law enforcement training programs across the United States and internationally. Forensic genetic genealogy has since been used to identify suspects in hundreds of cold cases.

The Golden State Killer arrest in 2018 made it globally famous. The Arizona Canal murders case established the proof of concept 4 years earlier quietly without headlines with 3 months of persuasion and a few weeks of database searching. Fitzpatrick described her approach as a bingo game running the forensic profile through database after database until a match lit up the board.

What she did not say but what the full story makes visible is that the board had been sitting on the table for 22 years. The Y-DNA profiles of Miller’s relatives were publicly accessible. The databases existed in fragmented form even in the mid-2010s. The conceptual move treating an unknown killer’s DNA the way a genealogist treats an unknown ancestor had simply not been made.

 She made it at a conference in Phoenix and spent 3 months persuading a police department to let her try. 3 months to convince leadership, a few weeks of searching, six names on a list, one match to a tip that had been sitting in a case file since 1992. A fake job offer, a water glass, that is the distance between 22 years of nothing and a death sentence.

Bryan Patrick Miller drove a fake blood-covered police car through the streets of Phoenix for years while two families waited for his name. He stood in convention halls and smiled for cameras next to officers who were still listed as working his case. He attended events and signed autographs. He was not hiding.

He was performing. The costume and the car and the persona were not a disguise. They were a declaration. The same psychological need that drove the note with the word plan at the top when he was 16 years old. He needed to be seen. He needed to be close to the thing he had done and the people trying to solve it.

Someone in Phoenix saw that car. Someone stood next to him at an event and took a photograph. Someone worked a shift at the warehouse with him or lived in the same neighborhood, or attended the same convention and felt something they could not name. Here’s what I want to know, and I am genuinely asking. If you had seen that car in your city, if you had stood next to someone at a convention and something felt wrong, but you could not say what it was.

What would you have done with that feeling? What should any of us do with it? Leave your answer below. I read every comment.