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Charlotte Pottle’s usual bike trek to the playground with her sister and their children took a grim turn in 1993 when the Phoenix mom spotted a large puddle of blood and “drag marks” leading off the path.
“You just have this eerie feeling about you like, yeah, you need to get out,” Pottle recalled in a chilling preview clip for the “On the Hunt for the Zombie Hunter” episode of Dateline: Secrets Uncovered.
Pottle’s harrowing discovery ultimately led police to the body of 17-year-old Melanie Bernas, the second body to be discovered along the bike path lining the city’s canal within a year.
What did witness Charlotte Pottle see along Phoenix canal?
For Pottle, the day began like many before it for her family. She and her sister took their children to a nearby park near the canal to spend the September 1993 morning.
“So that particular day, we came up here pretty fast and right as I got up here, there was a big puddle,” Pottle told Dateline correspondent Keith Morrison as they stood on the bike path.
The discovery seemed out of place on the hot, dry morning, but Pottle said the reflection made it difficult to see what color it was and initially she assumed it was “a puddle of water or something.”
The family members kept riding to the park, but Pottle couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something strange about the pool of liquid.
“I was very uneasy and so we hurried back on our bikes and started heading back home this way,” she said. “So once the sun was to my back, I could see right where the puddle was right up here, that it had a red tint to it and it was pretty big.”
Pottle stopped and got off her bike to take a closer look.
“I got down and looked at it really close to see, ‘Is it really what I think this is?’ But still in my mind, logically, trying to make excuses for it, like, ‘This isn’t blood,’” she said.
That’s when Pottle noticed drag marks leading from the trail, around a tree and then down toward the canal.”
Unnerved, Pottle said she and her family “quickly hopped on our bikes” and raced home, where she eventually called 911.
“And still, all the way home, trying to rationalize, ‘Did I really see what I saw? Is that really — what else could it be? And should I call the police?’” she told Morrison.
When police arrived on the scene a short time later, they discovered Bernas’ body floating in the canal.
“My heart just sank”
“Oh, my heart just sunk and just that sick feeling,” Pottle told Morrison of hearing about the grim discovery.
As police swarmed the area, crime reporter William Hermann heard about the body being found on a police scanner and made his way to the crime scene, where he found one of his police contacts.
“He said, ‘We found the body of a young woman in the canal, profound injuries to her chest,'” Hermann recalled. “And I said, ‘Was she riding a bike?’ And he said, ‘You guessed it buddy.'”
Less than a year earlier, the body of Angela Brosso was discovered on her 22nd birthday along the same canal, according to another preview of the two-hour episode. She’d vanished while out on an evening bike ride, leaving investigators baffled about who would have wanted to attack the young tech employee.
To discover the answer, it would take decades and a team of dedicated cold case detectives determined to find justice for both women. To find out how the case came together, watch the “On the Hunt for the Zombie Hunter” episode of Dateline: Secrets Uncovered, now available on .