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In the early 1990s, the city of Phoenix, Arizona was gripped by fear as someone was brutally attacking young female bike riders along the city’s canal paths.
The bodies of two victims — a 21-year-old tech whiz just beginning her career, and a 17-year-old high school student — were found 10 months apart. Each had been viciously stabbed to death and showed signs of sexual assault.
The grisly details of the killings stunned even the most veteran detectives as the race to find the elusive killer began, according to the “On the Hunt for the Zombie Hunter” episode of Dateline: Secrets Uncovered. But it would take decades, and some creative police tactics, before detectives linked the crimes to a man whose alter-ego was “The Zombie Hunter.” (This case was also covered on ‘s Snapped.)
Who was the Zombie Hunter’s first victim?
Angela Brosso was the first to disappear after going out on a solo bike ride on November 9, 1992, on the eve of her 22nd birthday. Brosso’s boyfriend had stayed behind at their apartment to bake her a cake.
But as the hours ticked by, Brosso never returned. She was also a no-show the next morning at the tech firm where she worked, even though she was supposed to lead a training session she’d spent months preparing for.
“We were waiting for her to come in for this class to begin. We had customers sitting there and no Angela,” Brosso’s boss, Deb Littlejohn, told Dateline correspondent Keith Morrison.
By that afternoon, Brosso’s decapitated body was found along the canal path. She had been stabbed to death.
“It was an extremely horrific, gruesome murder,” said Kevin Robinson, a spokesperson for the Phoenix Police Department at the time.
Brosso’s head was found floating in the canal by a fisherman 11 days later, adding another disturbing detail to the crime.
Although police chased down every lead, they couldn’t identify Brosso’s killer at the time.
Then, just 10 months after Brosso was killed, Phoenix mom Charlotte Pottle was out on an early morning bike ride in September of 1993 with her sister and their children when she spotted a large pool of liquid in the path. Pottle couldn’t make out what it was until the small group was on their way back home and she noticed it had a distinctive red hue.
Next to the large blood stain, Pottle noticed what looked like drag marks that led off the trail toward the canal.
“You just have this eerie feeling about you like… you need to get out,” she said of the chilling discovery.
Who was the Zombie Hunter’s second victim?
Pottle rushed home to call 911 about what she found along the bike trail. Not long after, police discovered the body of 17-year-old Melanie Bernas floating in the canal beside the bike trail.
Like Brosso, the high school junior showed signs of sexual assault and had seemingly been incapacitated by a devastating knife wound to the back while out on a solo evening bike ride. This time, however, the killer had discarded Bernas’ clothes, dressed her in a distinctive turquoise bodysuit and used a knife to carve letters into her body.
“It was horrible,” Bernas’ close friend Rachael Schepemaker recalled of receiving the news. “The way she was killed just traumatizes you.”
DNA shows both victims killed by same man
For months, plain clothes police officers took to the trails in the hopes of unmasking the killer or killers, but after lead after lead was eliminated, the cases eventually went cold.
In 2000, advances in technology confirmed the investigators’ suspicions that the DNA left on both women’s bodies matched to the same killer. The unknown attacker’s DNA was uploaded to CODIS, a national DNA database, but there were no matches and the case cooled once again.
Then, in 2011, Sgt. Troy Hillman, the head of the Phoenix Police Department’s cold case unit, decided to take a new look at the case files.
“Something truly evil”
“I remember reading word for word and I was traumatized by what I read,” Hillman said. “It was almost as if I was reading about something truly evil.”
In the years that followed, Hillman admittedly became “obsessed” with the case. By then, approximately 800 people had been interviewed. Although DNA samples had been taken from some of those people, Hillman and his team set out to fly across the country collecting more samples to rule out others in the files.
He turned to forensic experts in the Vidocq Society in Philadelphia for help creating a profile of the killer and learned that their suspect was likely a Phoenix resident who liked to act out fantasies and could already be in the case files.
Then in 2014, years before the use of genetic genealogy would make headlines for its role bringing down California’s Golden State Killer, the Phoenix Police Department got a call from forensic genealogist Colleen Fitzpatrick, who believed she might be able to use the killer’s DNA profile to identify the suspect’s relatives through the use of public genealogy websites.
At the time, the science was just emerging and it took three months for Hillman to convince police leadership to fund the experimental tactic. The move paid off when just a few weeks later, Fitzpatrick called and told him that she believed the killer had the surname “Miller.”
A suspect emerges
The lead sent Hillman scrambling back to the case files to identify anyone with the last name Miller. One person clearly stood out.
Shortly after the murders, someone had called in an anonymous tip about a teenager named Bryan Patrick Miller. His roommate had allegedly seen the teen with a turquoise bodysuit much like the one found with Bernas’ body.
Although the tip was looked into at the time, Miller was originally dismissed because of his young age.
Police find another victim
As Hillman poured deeper into the case file, he learned that three years before the murders — when Miller was just 16 — he’d been arrested for stabbing a 24-year-old woman in the back after she got off the bus near Paradise Valley Mall.
He was apprehended a short time later and charged with attempted murder, but given his status as a juvenile, Miller only served one year in detention.
At the time, Miller’s mother told police that she was afraid of her young son and handed over a chilling handwritten document he’d created, labeled “Plan,” which described step-by-step how to kidnap and murder a woman.
By 2014, Miller was a single dad to a teenage daughter, working at an Amazon warehouse and living in Phoenix.
The Zombie Hunter
During his free time, Miller often immersed himself in the world of steam punk, a creative science-fiction subculture centered on role playing. Miller was known as “The Zombie Hunter” and often took to the Phoenix streets or Comic-Con conventions wearing a trench coat, mask, hard hat and large fabricated gun to complete the look.
He was perhaps best known for his “Zombie Hunter” vehicle, a former police cruiser converted into his own custom creation, complete with fake blood oozing down the doors, green sirens and a Zombie dummy made to fit in the backseat behind bars.
“That really caught our attention. The fact that Bryan lived in this fantasy world,” Hillman said.
Although Hillman believed authorities had likely found their killer, they still had to prove it, and created a sting in 2015 involving a fake job interview to collect Miller’s DNA.
It was a match and Miller was arrested for two counts of kidnapping, attempted sexual assault and first degree murder.
Who killed Angela Brosso and Melanie Bernas?
During a search of Miller’s home, investigators found scores of violent images and videos, including a picture taped to the outside of his refrigerator door showing a decapitated head and limbs.
Miller had a bench trial in 2022, leaving his fate up to the judge. His attorneys admitted that Miller killed Brosso and Bernas, but claimed he was not guilty by reason of insanity after suffering years of childhood abuse.
It wasn’t enough to convince the judge to let him free. He was convicted on all counts and sentenced to death.
From his place on death row, Miller continues to proclaim that he wasn’t involved in the killings and said he never agreed with his defense team’s strategy.
