48 Hours - Post Mortem | Unmasking the Zombie Hunter

Episode Date: October 24, 2023

Bryan Miller seemed like a real-life comic book character as his persona of the “Zombie Hunter.” But was this man behind two murders that terrorized an Arizona community? Correspondent Peter Van Sant and Producer Paul La Rosa discuss what actually went into how investigators recovered the smoking gun evidence from a Chili’s and how Bryan’s defense team’s “dissociative amnesia” argument held up at trial.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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to a remote base near Joshua Tree National Park. They have to alert the military. And when they do, the NCIS gets involved. From CBS Studios and CBS News, this is 48 Hours NCIS. Listen to 48 Hours NCIS ad-free starting October 29th on Amazon Music. Listen to Postmortem from 48 Hours ad-free with 48 Hours Plus on Apple Podcasts. Subscribe today. Welcome to 48 Hours Postmortem. I'm CBS News correspondent Anne-Marie Green, and today we are talking about an episode

that truly sent shivers down my spine, Unmasking the Zombie Hunter. So joining me now are 48 Hours correspondent Peter Van Sant and producer Paula Rosa, who reported on and produced this episode. Welcome, gentlemen. Hi, thanks for having us. Hey, Anne-Marie, happy Halloween. It's a perfect episode for Halloween. It says it in the name, right? The Zombie Hunter. But before we get into the episode, let's play a clip from the show. 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. Brianna Whitney, the true crime reporter for the CBS affiliate KPHO in Phoenix, says the first victim was 21-year-old Angela Brasso, whose body was found in November 1992. Police are looking at this scene and thinking, what on earth happened and who did this? in 1992. Police are looking at this scene and thinking, what on earth happened and who did this?

Ten months later, the body of 17-year-old Melanie Bernice was found in one of the city's canals. Investigators found the same DNA at both scenes, says Detective Clark Schwarzkopf. I think there was over 600 persons of interest. After some 20 years, investigators zeroed in on 42-year-old Brian Patrick Miller, a divorced father raising his teenage daughter. As Schwarzkopf soon learned, Miller had a unique alter ego.

Everybody in the Phoenix area knew Brian Patrick Miller as this character called the zombie hunter. Schwarzkopf secured Miller's DNA. Days later, the head of the forensic lab had some news. She leans down to me, she goes, it's him. I go, what? She goes, Brian Miller, it's him. I go, what? She goes, Brian Miller. It's him. Peter, what stood out to you about this case that made you want to do it? Well, first, the zombie killer. I looked it up.

You know, a zombie is relentlessly aggressive, reanimated human corpse, right? So you have that component, which I found fascinating. And then for me, personally, I lived in Phoenix for four years. I worked in local news there. This was just before these canal murders I left, but my home was about three miles from where these murders occurred. I used to jog along the Arizona Canal. And back then, it was a hub of people on the canal. When we went and shot this it's amazing there's no one on these anymore that's how lifestyles were changed in this i also have this never-ending curiosity about why do people kill it's one of the reasons why i do this job it's one of the reasons

why i love to try to talk to the accused to get inside their head and look at the head of this man in this costume like a comic book character instead of going off and hiding under a rock somewhere this alleged killer uh was was out in the public posing with photographs with police officers for goodness sakes going to these sci-fi conventions and he sounds like such a psychologically complicated person where you hear these stories of him being a sweet loving father to his daughter friends who thought he was engaging they never sensed danger with this man sometimes he was a bit odd but he had this Jekyll and Hyde personality like Peter said that's what's fascinating about murder. It's these two sides. And in this case, you know, Brian's lawyers said he had two sides, that he had a trauma side and he had a normal side.

He was not the zombie hunter when he committed the murders of Angela and Melanie back in the early 90s. And they were vicious. I mean, these are women who went out for nighttime bike rides along this busy canal path in Phoenix in good weather. And, you know, Angela was the first victim, and her head was cut off. She was beheaded, and the head was not found until 10 days later. And she was eviscerated. I mean, these are horrible, horrible crimes. And Melanie, you know, she was found stabbed to death.

So because of the nature of the crimes, the cops always felt that it had to be a surgeon who did them or someone with special forces training. And there's a military base in Phoenix. with special forces training, and there's a military base in Phoenix, and they just didn't believe it could be Brian Patrick Miller, who was around 21 or 22 years old at the time of these murders. And when you meet him, he's like a marshmallow. People describe him as a marshmallow. He couldn't do one push-up, his friends said. He doesn't seem like the kind of guy who could commit these horrible crimes. Can we talk about how Melanie was discovered? This was a story that Paul managed to find a woman by the name of Charlotte Pottle. And this was literally as we were finishing up our hour.

We'd already written the show and most of our editing was done, but Charlotte Pottle was worth the effort. Back in 1993, she was riding along the canal. When she drove through a dark puddle, she instantly felt like, something's not quite right here. That was really bizarre. She rode for just a few minutes and decided to double back and realize that it was a pool of blood. And she got off of her bicycle and Charlotte noticed that there were drag marks in the dirt. The first drag marks went off away from the canal to a single tree. She said the body had been moved around that little tree and there was a small pool of blood there.

The body is then dragged back across the path to the edge of the canal where it apparently was thrown in. And so Charlotte Pottle, she later called police, and she called them on an emergency tip line that was not supposed to reveal the identity of the caller. And she described her experience and told cops, you should go out there and check it out for yourself. Well, sometime later, she gets an unexpected call from a homicide detective and the homicide detective said in a very demanding way where are you right now and she goes well i'm i'm at my

house stay put i'm on my way over to talk to you do not move so she waits at home she said the detective shows up and he immediately accuses her char Charlotte Pottle, of being the killer. And why? Because her footprints were on both sides now of these drag marks out at the canal. And he says, I know you did this. She said, I had nothing. I just discovered it. She thought she was going to be arrested. He leaves and she's convinced any moment she's going to be arrested as the canal killer, she said they never call again and they never showed up. And she lived with this fear for months. But Charlotte did the right thing. Yeah. And luckily she wasn't charged. That's an incredible story, Peter. You know, you talked about the surgical precision almost. Her head was pretty well preserved. What do police believe happened? the killer had kept the head in a refrigerator.

It was a head that he may have considered a trophy. And in the plan, this handwritten document that Brian Miller had produced, that his mother had discovered and turned over to authorities, one of the items on his list was to decapitate a victim and to keep the head. And Detective Clark Schwarzkopf believes that's exactly what happened here and that he wanted it discovered because Detective Schwarzkopf believes he wanted to get some shock value from these murders. So, Paul, how did you get to know him? Well, I started writing him emails and, you know, I couldn't reach him during the trial because his lawyers are in the way and they obviously won't let him speak to a journalist

during the trial. But after the trial, I took a chance and there, even though he's on death row, but even on death row, inmates have access to email, which a lot of people out there may not know. And I didn't know if he'd write back or not. And the first time he wrote back, he said he didn't like CBS News. I said, well, I've been doing this a long time. I've worked at the show for 30 years. So I've been doing this a long time, and you can Google me, and you can check me out. And I think I'm an upstanding journalist, and I'm not going to lie to you or anything. And he started writing. So we went back and forth. And I started asking him simple questions at first,

like, what do you miss? Do you miss being the zombie hunter? And he said, you asked me simple questions, so I'm going to answer you. And we just kept going on and on until eventually he started talking about the case more and more. And he said he didn't commit these murders. And I said, well, Brian, that leads to the big question. How is it that your DNA was found on both women?

And he said, that's the million dollar question. If I knew I wouldn't be sitting here, would I? Wow. So let's talk about that because then there's these two murders. There's a stabbing earlier, but two murders and then nothing.rian seemed to have cleaned up a little bit in the late 90s he married amy he got married and she by the way described him as the perfect gentleman on their first date which was at an amusement park uh by the side of the canal where they found one body and angela's head so he married her and uh in phoenix and, and then they moved to Washington State, where his mother lived.

They had a child. And there's some video of them from the time on a whale-watching trip, and they look like any young family. And so we don't think Brian really changed his ways. He stabbed a woman up there. He said it was self-defense. And that case went to trial and Brian Patrick Miller was acquitted. The jury believed him over the woman. Wow. So the murders of Angela Brasso and Melanie Bernis went unsolved for decades. And like so

many of these cases that are only now getting solved, the real smoking gun in this one is the DNA evidence that pinned Brian to these murders. But police almost didn't get it. Let's take a listen to investigator Clark Schwarzkopf describing just how they got the crucial evidence at a Chili's of all places. 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've said to him, are you sure you don't want something else to drink? Have you just got water? No, no, I'm good. I'm good. I'm good.

So good news is he's really hungry. Bad news is he's not thirsty. That's right. And it went on and on. And by the way, the other people that were in that section of the restaurant were undercover agents. I wondered about that. And the manager of the Chili's, a great citizen, this woman said, I'll be the waitress. So she played the waitress in this scenario. And finally, finally, he takes a sip from his water glass,

and that's when Schwarzkopf knew this was mission accomplished, as we said in the story, that he got the DNA sample. So Clark Schwarzkopf was a seasoned detective, right? This goes back to the duality of Brian Miller. He had approached him at his place of work. He posed as a security guy. He said, would you like to work for us keeping an eye on the back part of the factory here because there's been some theft?

I'll pay you $20 an hour. Well hour well anyway he got to talking with him back and forth right got a sense of the man then they have this lunch together brings in his daughter he seemed like a loving uh father he seemed normal and despite what what schwartzkopf knew of his past he felt as though this guy this nerdydy, soft-spoken man, he couldn't possibly be the canal killer. And so he gets the DNA sample and they send it off. But in his mind, he goes, it's going to come back. It's not going to be a match because there's no way, based on my experience, that this guy is a killer. He's just too nice a guy. It's kind of extraordinary, but it shows you the power of his personality. Wow.

So they get all the evidence they need. They've got this DNA match, and so they get a search warrant for his house. And it's like this guy has never thrown anything out. He's basically a hoarder. Let's listen to a clip from the show. 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 in the 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. Yeah, this was a nightmare. They have to look through this stuff. You know, it's a house filled, completely filled to the ceiling with stuff. And they are looking for women's bikes from back then. He had a lot of bikes when they arrested him, but none were Melanie or Angela's

bikes. They're looking for a murder weapon, a knife. They found a lot of knives, but not the murder weapon. But they did find a lot of pornography, some of it violent. Yeah. So that was just a nightmare. So still a lot more to talk about when we get back. I want to talk about Brian's ex-wife and his daughter, Brian's juvenile record, and of course, the trial. What will the zombie hunter with his larger-than-life persona, what will he use as his defense strategy? We're going to get into that after the break.

It was 1989 in Titusville, Florida. Kim Halleck said she and her ex-boyfriend Chip Flynn were kidnapped and attacked at gunpoint. Kim fled the scene, but Chip didn't make it out alive. Did you kill Chip Flynn? No, ma'am. Crosley Green has lived more than half his life behind bars for a crime he says he didn't commit. I'm Erin Moriarty of 48 Hours, and of all the cases I've covered, this is the one that troubles me most, involving an eyewitness account that doesn't quite make sense.

A sister testifying against a brother. They always say lies, you can't remember lies. A lack of physical evidence. And questions about whether Crosley Green was accused, arrested and convicted because he's black. Just because a white female says a black man has committed a crime, we take that as gospel. Listen to Murder in the Orange Grove, the troubled case against Crosley Green early and ad free on Wondery Plus in the Wondery app. Hot shot Australian attorney Nicola Gaba was born into legal royalty. Her specialty, representing some of the city's

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Welcome back. When I look at this case, I cannot help but to think about the people in Brian's life. Can you tell me anything more about the ex-wife? I was shocked that a man like this had custody of his teenage daughter. How did that happen? Well, at the time, I would say that his ex-wife, Amy, had lived a troubled life. As far as I've learned, she did not come to the final custody hearing, and the judge awarded Brian custody of his daughter. Brian always treated his daughter, Sarah, with respect and kindness from what we learned. She had a fairly normal upbringing, although she did live with him in the house, which was described as a hoarder house. So, you know, that comes with its own psychological underpinnings. But other than that, living in a hoarder house, they seem to have a really good loving relationship.

In a way, that brings me back to the ex-wife too, because, you know, he was a good husband until he wasn't, according to her. She must have told the court about her experience. I mean, she was terrified of him. One thing about Amy is that, and she testified to this, is that she felt intense duty as a wife to do whatever her husband wanted her to do. She said that at trial, you know, it was her duty to do what he wanted. Coupled with that is that she was really afraid of him. And it's heartbreaking, but at one point in the trial, the prosecutor says, why didn't you object to all this stuff in the bedroom? And she said, well, I wanted to do it because it's my duty as a wife, and I wanted to be sure that he loved me enough not to kill me.

Jeez, that's heavy and heartbreaking. It is. So that sort of sums up where she's coming from. You've got to feel great sympathy for her. Completely. I want to ask about the juvenile record, too. How much access do investigators have to a juvenile record, typically? These juvenile records usually are kept under seal, but these investigators were able to get that information about him. He had stabbed a woman in the back and been arrested for that and served time in juvenile detention. So Celeste Bentley worked at a mall and she took public transportation to get to her job. She's on this bus and she notices this young man behind her a few rows.

She turned, she noticed he was looking at her. And when she got off the bus, she noticed that the young man got off as well. And this was very early in the morning and she's walking across an empty parking lot headed toward the department store where she works and then all of a sudden he sprints by and she feels this punch she thought on on her back and it hurt and she called out to him oh why'd you do that and she put her hand back and discovered it was blood. Then she runs to the department store. There was a single door. It was locked. She's pounding on it.

Luckily, one of her colleagues is there, lets her inside, and they call the police. But she said the police told her that if he had turned the knife just a little bit one way, it would have gone right through and it would have hit her A-order also. Right, it could have been a murder. Yeah, it could have been a murder. way it would have gone right through and it would hit our A order also. Right, it could have been a murder.

Yeah, it could have been a murder. So the police found him, found Brian dressed in different clothing. So he had planned this. He changed his clothes. They brought him over to Celeste and she identified him. And he eventually pled. And he admitted to the cops that he had stabbed her. You know, there's various stories about why he did. One was he said he just wanted to see what it felt like, and it sent chills down his spine. There were other reports later that he stabbed Celeste because she reminded him of his mother.

The thing about Celeste Bentley, you know, I interviewed her. This is a woman that has lived with this trauma, obviously, for her entire life. It so impacted her life. She was afraid to be in crowds. She's always had her head on a swivel, always looking around her and still does. Yeah. Part of his defense was to talk about his childhood. So looking at his childhood, the abuse that he alleges, what proof was provided? Well, it began the fact that when he was 16 years old and he committed that attack, it turned out that he had told social workers back during the juvenile detention that he had, he told these details of his mother's

abuse. And so the fact that he had told with such detail and very specific about the kinds of things exposing him to pornography, exposing him to violent movies, beating him, he tells this story of being beaten with a belt, experiencing violence, psychological trauma, physical trauma, and then exposed to these horrible images is something that he kept with the rest of his life. Mm-hmm. So that becomes kind of part of the defense, right? Let's just listen. that becomes kind of part of the defense, right? Let's just listen. 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. Keep in mind, the prosecutors disagreed. They believe that he seemed to have memory of other traumatic events that he could recall and say, I didn't do that. Events in which people were stabbed but survived. Somehow he still remembered that. So, I mean, does the skeptical part of me still wonder about that? Of course. It seemed just too convenient. Brian decided not to take the stand during the trial,

but he gave a statement. Let's just hear a little what he had to say. I'm not looking for sympathy today. This time is for the family and the friends of the victims. 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. These kinds of cases, the families involved, this man created, you know, torturous lives for so many people, caused such profound harm. Yeah. The horrors that he did. Yeah. To lose your child and to lose it under these circumstances, where there was mutilation and things, a family never gets over that, can't get past it.

Another fascinating case, another just incredibly baffling character. Paul, Peter, thank you so much. Thank you, Anne-Marie. You're welcome. Thank you. So be sure to join us next Tuesday for another Postmortem. Watch 48 Hours Saturdays at 10, 9 Central on CBS and streaming on Paramount Plus. And be sure to follow 48 Hours wherever you get your podcasts. You can also listen ad-free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app. If you like this podcast, you can listen ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a quick survey

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