Anatomy of Murder - The Plan (Angela Brosso & Melanie Bernas)

Episode Date: May 14, 2024

A turquoise bodysuit and a notebook entry became key in finding the killer responsible for two brutal and bizarre murders from decades before. View source material and photos for this episode at: anatomyofmurder.com/the-plan/Can’t get enough AoM? Find us on social media!Instagram: @aom_podcast | @audiochuckTwitter: @AOM_podcast | @audiochuckFacebook: /listenAOMpod | /audiochuckllc

She was literally laid prone out with her feet up in the air. It appeared that he had tried to cut her in half. It was very brutal and probably one of the worst homicides in the Phoenix area. I'm Scott Weinberger, investigative journalist and former deputy sheriff. I'm Anasiga Nicolazzi, former New York City homicide prosecutor and host of Investigation Discovery's True Conviction. And this is Anatomy of Murder. I'm kicking it back to fall right now, even though we're officially in spring. Because this case is making me think Halloween.

And now I have costumes on my mind. The ghosts, the goblins, the Barbies. It got me thinking about the human attraction to fantasy. Taking at least one day of the year, more for some people to play dress-up, to become someone else. Acting out one's fantasy can be playful or romantic, an expression of extreme fandom, like the cosplayers at Comic-Con or on the sidewalks of Times Square. But it can also be dark, and in some extreme cases, deadly, as you will see in today's episode.

Today we're bringing you the story of not one, but two tragic and brutal murders that occurred in Phoenix, Arizona in 1992 and 1993. Two young women who fell victim to one man leading two lives. One as a family man, a father, and another as a killer. In November of 1992, 21-year-old Angela Brasso was living with her boyfriend Joe in an apartment complex in Phoenix, Arizona. Her mother described Angela as a quiet and shy girl growing up, but she had blossomed into an ambitious, independent young woman with dreams of a career in the burgeoning tech industry. She had graduated from the DeVry Institute of Technology.

Her boyfriend had lived in Phoenix, was going to the DeVry Institute in Phoenix. That's the voice of William Shira, who over the last 30 years has worked just about every detail there is at the Phoenix Police Department. And Angela's case has loomed large over his entire career. They decided that when she graduated, she got a job at a company called Centilect in Phoenix

and moved in with her boyfriend. Had only been working at that job for a short time. On the evening of November 8, 1992, Angela and Joe were together in their apartment with plans to stay in. She had a big day on Monday. She was starting a new assignment as a training instructor. And it also happened to be the night before her birthday. Her birthday was on the next day on that Monday. So Sunday night, she had gone for a bike ride. Normally, her boyfriend Joe would join her on these bike rides,

but this night he had to stay in and bake his girlfriend a birthday cake. So Angela put on her riding gear, shorts, sweatshirt, and a pair of headphones, hopped on her purple mountain bike, and headed out for a ride along the canal that crosses through this area of Phoenix. Along the overflow canal, there's bike paths along there. Those have been traditionally used for joggers, walkers, bikers. My dad used to run those canals when I was a kid. It was supposed to be a short ride, but as the sun set and the night got dark,

Angela still hadn't returned home. It was on a Sunday night, an old TV show called In Living Color was on, and they both enjoyed that show. It was their Sunday night ritual. They would watch the show together. And that started about 8 o'clock, and Angela hadn't returned from her bike ride. So Joe was getting a little nervous. He got on his bike a little bit later, rode in the area that they usually rode,

and did not find any sign of her. By 11 p.m., Joe was in a panic, understandably. Remember, this is before we all carried cell phones and were texting our every move and location, so there wasn't much Joe could do except worry and wait. Eventually, he called the police. Police came out, and the next morning, they continued searching for Angela. Some officers had worked in plainclothes detail. They had gotten on bicycles and were riding canals. Now, Angela was a healthy 21-year-old adult, and so from law enforcement point of view,

there was probably not an expectation of a crime, but there would be concern that maybe she had gotten hurt or she was in need of some type of emergency assistance. What they did not expect was to find themselves on the scene of one of the most brutal murders in Phoenix history. And right here, we do want to give you a warning that this homicide and the one that follows it are brutal, and there's some graphic content that may be too disturbing for some. A couple of the officers, as they were riding along that trail by the dirt field, one of the officers thought that he saw a mannequin. So he had gotten off his bike and

as he got closer to Angela's body, he realized that it was actually a human. The patrol officers followed what appeared to be a blood trail and drag marks to the woman's body located about 150 feet from the bike trail. What they discovered was unlike any crime scene they had ever encountered. She was literally laid prone out with her feet up in the air and her body. She had been laid down. She was completely naked except she had her socks and tennis shoes on. And she had also been beheaded. It was also clear that she had not just been stabbed multiple times, but her body had been mutilated, savagely and deliberately.

They're still hard to fathom. But there was evidence that at the very least, the victim had been killed almost instantly. She had a stab wound on her back on the lower left side. It probably would have been about 10 inches from the shoulder blade area that ended up cutting into her aorta and her lung, which is probably what killed her. All the other stab wounds and cuttings appeared to be post-mortem. From her physical description and her clothes strewn about the scene, police were able to identify the body as that of 21-year-old Angela Brasso.

So at first glance at this crime scene, it appeared that someone must have surprised Angela on that path, knocked her off of her bike, and then dragged her off the trail where she was so violently brutalized. But clearly, the level of violence spoke to a motive beyond your typical crime. Her head was gone and missing, so one could assume that whoever did this took it with them. The medical examiner was also able to find evidence of sexual assault, which likely occurred post-mortem. They do what they call the rape kit, where they do the combings and swabs of a person's body. And then on some of the clothing that had been cut off of her that was in the area, they saw some stains that later were found to be cement. So I think we really have to talk about what the officers were facing here. I mean, for me, the first thing I was thinking about

when I was trying to picture the location where the crime scene is, it just didn't appear to be a very desolate area to commit this type of crime. So a sexual assault practically on the side of the road, Anastasia, and then to decapitate your victim, I mean, this appears to be like a psychopathic predator to me. And while it can be someone that knows her, it just seems more like the cases we see where it is strangers. And yes, I have seen cases with this level of violence, including decapitation, and they're always the most horrendous, not just physically, but everything it tells you about the person who committed the crime. But again, it's on a bike path, which even though people travel it, it's Arizona. So there's these huge areas of land. I

mean, this goes for miles and miles, and it almost just strikes me as someone at least potentially just waiting and watching for the right moment, the right victim. Obviously, in working this crime scene, it's important to find the rest of her remains. And for days, investigators found out over the area, searching for critical clues. But there was still no sign of a murder weapon, which may have been discarded nearby. And Angela's bicycle, of course, which she was knocked off of, and the rest of Angela's remains. There's a person that they call the Fisher King.

He was a person that lived in the area and frequented the canal to fish all the time. There's a drainage grate on one part of the side of the canal. And one morning he was fishing, and as he was fishing, he saw a head. Police were able to identify it as Angela Brasso, but they were also able to draw some significant and disturbing conclusions from its condition. It did not appear like it had been in the water for the 10 days. It was actually a very good condition for what happened.

So the thought was that it was preserved. Part of the theory was, is it a serial type killer that kept the head for a while to continue living out his fantasy about what happened? A predator with motives that were still unknowable. So investigators did what they do best, carefully and methodically assembled the known facts about Angela's timeline, possible witnesses, forensic evidence, and of course, potential suspects. Police knocked on doors, talked to neighbors, to Angela's timeline, possible witnesses, forensic evidence, and of course, potential suspects. Police knocked on doors, talked to neighbors, to Angela's friends.

They didn't want to just assume that her murder was a random attack, because the fact is, is that the majority of murders are committed by someone who knows the victim, often by someone they love. One of the concerns is, at first, maybe because of the brutality of how brutal her murder was, a lot of times that's somebody who knows the person and is very angry with them for whatever reason. So the boyfriend was looked at quite extensively. Angela's boyfriend, Joe, was the person who first reported her missing. But by his own account, he was also likely the last person to see her alive.

In an interview with police, he stated that his relationship with Angela was great and that they were very happy and there was no history of fighting, infidelity, or any other violence whatsoever. But according to some of Angela's friends, that wasn't the whole story. According to them, the relationship was going as well. She had actually talked about leaving her. Her friends painted a picture of a relationship that was on thin ice and characterized Joe as jealous and not trustworthy. In fact, there was evidence that Joe had actually called another woman on the very night that

Angela had disappeared. So was her boyfriend capable of cheating? Maybe. But was he capable of the extreme violence on display in Angela's murder? Only the evidence would say for sure. It's always, you know, the boyfriend, the husband, the friend. So the boyfriend was looked at quite extensively. You never know if he knows the relationship is going bad. He does know that, and he is happy with it,

and maybe he's the one that's going to take her out of the equation. In the brutal 1992 murder of Angela Brasso, investigators were starting with the most obvious suspect, her boyfriend. They searched his apartment and subjected him to multiple rounds of interviews. And while he didn't have anyone who could corroborate his alibi, he stood by his version of events, that while Angela was riding her bike, he was at home baking her a cake and waiting for her to return. Still, Joe found himself under intense scrutiny by the police, as well as the public who was following the investigation in the news.

But there was another man in Angela's life that soon found himself on police radar, one of Angela's former college professors, who some said had been harboring a secret crush on her since she'd been his student back in L.A. Angela was his teacher's assistant, and he was very close with her. And right before she had been murdered, she had gone back to L.A. to attend a class. And while she was back there visiting, she had had dinner with this professor. And so law enforcement from Phoenix traveled to California to interview this new person of interest. And to their surprise, the professor admits to having feelings for Angela. And it

even goes on to add that during her most recent departure, they had shared a romantic moment. From his interview, there was an awkward hug at the end. So the thought was, you know, maybe he had feelings for her and had come out to Phoenix afterwards. But an awkward hug was not the only thing fueling their suspicion. Investigators had already thought that the way Angela was killed would have required a very particular skill set. The way the knife went wasn't to her back, that it might be somebody that was in the military, in the medical field, or something like that, and this professor had been in special forces in the army. So the professor had a history, but he also had an alibi, one which police were able to

verify thus eliminating him as her killer. The frightening possibility that Angela was targeted and killed by a stranger was gaining traction both in law enforcement and, of course, in the public. As an investigator, you try and look at everything. You can't close the door on anything until you know. Part of the FBI profile was saying that it was a loner type person, a white male, 20s to 30s. When you start hearing stuff like that, you think that maybe it can be a predator. And again, Scott, you know, we talked a little bit about it at the beginning,

but this type of violence, you know, the brutality, the viciousness of it, like it really does point to deviance, right? It's not your typical violent homicide. And that really goes to a psychological profile that police were undoubtedly starting to look at if this was going to end up being a stranger case. I agree with that. But one of the first things I would look at at a SIG is why that location? I mean, it would make sense that it's the type of place that a random encounter could happen where the victim and the killer didn't know each other. And the victim may have been followed there, potentially from home. And that's a place where the killer felt like he or she could strike. But the overkill in this case, to me, suggests something kind of different.

And another thing, if it's not Joe, if it's not the college professor, and it's not pointing to anyone else that Angela knows, if they're accepting at least the possibility that this was a stranger, now everybody's a suspect. A lot of people were afraid to even go out there and do their normal activities of walking or running. You know, November is a very nice time of year out here. When we rode along, at least for me, there was hardly anybody at all. Despite the countless man hours and the increasingly terrifying possibility that there is a true psychopathic killer at large, the investigators in Angela's murder were hitting a wall.

They continued working, but the sad part of any investigation, especially in larger agencies, is that's not the only murder that you have to work. You still have other murderers that come in responsible to investigate those just as much as you are any ones you've had in the past. The investigation had been going at full speed for nearly a year with no new leads. But that was about to change. About 10 months later, another body was found actually in the canal. September 22, 1993. The Phoenix Police Department received a distressing 911 call. A local woman and her family had been enjoying a bike ride along the Phoenix Police Department received a distressing 911 call.

A local woman and her family had been enjoying a bike ride along the Phoenix Canal when they saw what appeared to be a lot of blood. And this may sound familiar to you. There was what appeared to be drag marks from the puddle to the canal's edge. When officers responded to the scene, they made another grim discovery. A young woman's body partially submerged in the water. They recover the body. They bring the body up. This person was dressed in a body suit, like a one-piece bathing suit. Appeared not the right size for the person that had it on. And again, shoes and socks were left on. And there was some mutilation done to her body.

The victim was identified as a local teen, Melanie Bernis, a high school junior who had been reported missing by her mom the previous evening after she failed to return from a bike ride. To Phoenix police, the scenario sounded eerily familiar. The location where Melanie's body was found and Angela's body was found, they were within close proximity. They both had dark hair, facial features were similar. They both rode their bikes. They both wore headphones. Both sets of headphones on both bikes were missing and never found. Melanie Burness was only 17 years old.

She was bright, athletic, outspoken, and brave. According to her dad, she seemed to possess wisdom beyond her years. And the fact that her life was taken at such a young age makes her death feel doubly cruel. Being only 17, it should go without saying that Melanie had no enemies, no history of at-risk behavior, and no contact with anyone that would have a reason to hurt her. Investigators at the time went back through and talked to Melanie's friends, family, and people at the high school that she went to. And as far as they knew, she wasn't having any problems or issues with anybody. I don't think she had a boyfriend at the time, so there wasn't really any specific person to say, hey, we need to look at this person. With the similarities to the Angela Brasso crime scene,

police are immediately concerned that these murders were connected. She also had a knife wound on her left back area that was very similar and almost the same location as the one that Melanie had that also went into the aorta and lung. It appeared to be the same type of knife that would have been used in both murders. There's also evidence that Melanie was sexually assaulted post-mortem. But just as intriguing as the similarities between the murders

are some of the glaring differences as well. As an investigator, that's where I would be looking for that evidentiary value. There was some mutilation done to her body. There was a small cross in the area of her breast with the letters WSC carved into her chest, not like deep carvings, but almost like maybe somebody took an exacto knife and carved the letters in there. There were some striation marks that went from one side of her neck to the other. Her head had not been cut off, but the striation marks, was he getting ready to? Or was he just doing something else to throw the piece off to where the scene isn't exactly the same and there was the fact that melanie appeared to have been stripped

and then redressed in a turquoise bodysuit she would ride her bike she would wear you know shorts and a sweatshirt a t-shirt and he knew that she didn't wear that type of clothing to ride her body so you may be asking why this redressing could Could it be a ritual? And you know, staging a crime scene or like in this case, potentially staging your victim within the crime scene, redressing them, you're likely dealing with a suspect who kills not for money, not for love, but for deviant pleasure. And right on the surface, Adesiga, does it sound like the same person as the original Angela Brasso murder? Unfortunately, I think it does because they are upping their brutality.

And it really goes to when we see cases like this, it's beyond the ritualistic, right? This is murderous fantasy in the cruelest of ways. You have the bizarre dressing in this bodysuit, which again is going to some twisted fantasy of this person most likely because again, it clearly didn't fit her. It was multiple sizes too small. But then you also have this carving, which is clearly committed on her as a recent injury. Scott, these initials, WSC, is it to throw police off? Is it initials? Or is it something that no one is going to be able to figure out? We certainly can't sidestep the issue. Investigators must examine the carvings. What could it suggest? It may be two different interpretations. For the perpetrator, these markings could be either symbolic, possibly linking it to a gang, or initials that hold some significance to them. They might be a deliberate attempt, as you said, Adesiga, to mislead investigators by

introducing false leads. The killer could manipulate the direction from the investigation in its infancy, influencing where they may go first. And there is a gang out here in Phoenix, one of the many, but it's West Side City. Part of the theory was, you know, was it one of the gang initiations or something like that for somebody to get into the gang? Or the person who did this, was he using a play on words, you know, hoping to throw people off of who it really was that committed the crime? As you can imagine, these cases were impossible to keep out of the news. And that means tips coming from the public. And while any information coming does have the potential to be helpful,

just imagine the sheer volume of tips and how they also can pose major challenges for the police. The negatives are always the vast amount of tips that can come in. It takes a lot of manpower to go through those. As people know from watching different crime shows, there's a lot of people that call in to try and get themselves looked at that aren't even involved at all. So, you know, you have to screen everything out, go through every call. It just takes a lot of time. The pluses are that you might get lucky and something in one of those tips will

help bring the investigation to an end. And one way law enforcement can help filter those tips is by withholding certain critical information from the public. A piece of physical evidence is an example, or details surrounding the manner of death. But they also have to release just enough to generate worthwhile leads. So investigators in this case focused on the turquoise bodysuit that Melanie was wearing. It's a distinctive detail, enough so that would hopefully trigger the memory of any potential witness. It was one tip that came in right after Melanie's body had been found about a person who sounded like they probably knew the person, that they

had seen a bodysuit that resembled the bodysuit that was found on Melanie in the house of their roommate. That tip, like so many others, was followed up by investigators. They came to the conclusion that the person was a little bit young to set the profile. That person wasn't really looked at anymore after that piece of information at the time. The most significant breakthrough in the investigation occurred when DNA collected from both autopsies, specifically from semen found on the victim's clothing, was determined to belong to the same person, proving what they had always suspected, that both women were killed by the same man.

So this is 1994, and DNA technology is really in its infancy. And CODIS, the National Database of DNA Profiles, was really only in the testing phase, so it was little surprise when the DNA profile pulled from both crime scenes could not be identified. The DNA samples from both scenes were a match, so we knew that they were the same person, but we didn't know who that person was. And with no other leads, no new witnesses, and thankfully no more similar murders, Angela and Melanie's murder cases began to go cold. Months turned to years, and years turned to decades. A lot of the detectives back then, you know, after we've been so many years, were thinking,

hey, this guy probably died. He's in prison. We're never going to find him. Nothing ever hit with CODIS. So as time wore on, the belief was that the guy's not out there anymore. But that gave little comfort to the families of Angela Brasso and Melanie Bernis, whose murders remained unsolved, their killer unpunished. But for law enforcement, cold did not mean closed. But the case itself was never closed. Once that other detective retired, then it went to the cold case squad. And after years in patrol, narcotics, and homicide, Detective Shira was one of the veterans assigned to that cold case squad. And he was determined to bring Melanie and Angela's killer to justice.

A killer that the detective believed was not only still alive, but possibly poised to strike again. One of the weird things for me was, I'm sure you've heard of the serial killer BTK. He, for years, didn't do anything. Then all of a sudden, he contacted the media to get himself back involved. I just thought to myself, well, if that guy could be like that, why couldn't this guy be like that? It had been nearly 20 years since Angela and Melanie were killed, and almost that long since the Laskett lead.

But the newly formed Colt K squad had a new weapon in their investigative arsenal, and it was about to break both cases wide open. I think what really brought the investigation back to the forefront was my sergeant in the cold case. He got the public records request, and as he was going through that case, it just really struck a nerve with him. So instead of having just one person assigned to the case, he decided that our whole squad, at the time we had 10 people on the squad, and he basically said, we are all going to read this report. We're all going to take notes and then we're going to brainstorm and see what we can come up with. So that meant getting fresh eyes on every piece of evidence, every crime scene photo, every witness interview and every tip from the public.

Not an easy task, even for a big city cold case squad. So Phoenix detectives took this interesting approach. They reached out to an organization called VDoc. And we've referenced them before, but it's this amazing society, if you will. It's made up of volunteers, forensic experts, investigators, confidential consultants, profiles, criminologists, prosecutors, you name it. But it's this independent group. They're based in Philadelphia, and they offer pro-bonus assistance to law enforcement agencies across the United States in solving cold case homicides. It honestly is an amazing group of unbelievable resources. I had learned about the VDOC through one of my other investigations.

And so I went to my boss and I explained it to him. And we ended up sending them just a summary of the report. And they picked us to come and give a presentation on it. One of the psychologists, psychiatrists that my boss got to be friends with because he stayed the extra night, he had told my boss that there's a 95% chance the person who did this is in your tip line. 95 percent. And that figure lit a fire under Detective Shearer, who had always been convinced that Melanie and Angela's killer was still out there hiding in plain sight. We went back and we looked at some of the people that had been talked, you know, interviewed during the investigation, not necessarily even suspects, but friends or whoever that had some

type of relationship with one or both of the girls. And with the advent of DNA, we just went out and started getting samples from other people that we thought might be involved. The professor we talked about earlier, he was one that we got a sample from and of course came back negative. There's a couple other people that were in there that we got samples from that looked good on paper. And just something kind of in the back of your head, suppose, you know, this guy could be the one that did it. And we went and got several samples and we always came up with negative results. Undeterred, investigators used DNA to methodically eliminate as many potential suspects as they could, clearing hundreds of tips and potential persons of interest. And then they struck on a novel idea after meeting with a renowned forensic

scientist by the name of Colleen Fitzpatrick. Colleen Fitzpatrick is a genealogist person. She was in town for a conference and she had called our office, ended up talking to my boss. She came over to the office, gave us her presentation, and in a nutshell, she said she could get us a surname for software that she uses with the DNA. Dr. Fitzpatrick's innovative technique utilized a specific type of DNA profile extracted from the suspect's male Y chromosome, known as YSTR. The profiles then compared against publicly available genealogy databases.

The lab supervisor of DNA was able to send a profile to Colleen. Sure enough, she came back and gave us the last name of Miller. So we went in and there was five or six Millers in the file. The boss was looking through them. He came across the one with Brian Patrick Miller and the hairs on the back of his neck really stood up. And he's like, you know, we need to be able to put this around. But what was it about that name, Brian Patrick Miller, that made the hairs on their neck stand up?

Well, for one thing, the file said that Miller was a bike enthusiast, ding, ding, ding, which would have likely made him at least familiar with the bike paths along the Phoenix Canal and possibly in contact with both of our victims. But that's not all. Remember the tip that had come in from someone claiming he had seen a turquoise bodysuit in the possession of his roommate? Well, that roommate, the one referenced to, the roommate had actually gone out for a bike ride. Miller had been dismissed in the original investigation because at just 20 years old in 1993, he struck detectives as too young to fit their profile of a killer. And the circumstantial evidence against him was thin. But with the

new DNA evidence helping to identify the killer's last name, Miller now shot up to the top of the suspect list. And a deep dive into his disturbing background only solidified their suspicion. Had stabbed a lady in 1989 in the back, in a very similar fashion where Angela and Melanie had been stabbed. Fortunately, this lady survived. Ryan was actually found guilty and put into juvenile detention back then, but he was released when he was 18. So Miller actually had a violent history as a juvenile. And according to his own mother, there was evidence that his impulses were rooted in some very disturbing, violent fantasies. The day he was getting out of what they call an Adobe correctional facility, his mom had went to one of the police precincts and gave one of the officers this handwritten document that was called the plan. It named a name of, you know, this girl that he was going to do all these brutal things to.

It's a very sexually graphic, kidnap the girl, tie her up, cut her clothes off, do all kinds of sexual things to her, cut her up, eat her, grill her, use a hacksaw. Very similar to some of the things that happened to Angela and Melanie. Including decapitating his victim. The similarity between Miller's disturbing teenage fantasies and the tragic reality of what had happened to both Angela and Melanie was too much for investigators to ignore. So let's just pause for a second because you're thinking something that we're definitely thinking about, is how did they miss this in the first place? You know, in hindsight, I think it's a very fair question. Given the extreme violence of both of these incidents, we are dealing with a decapitation

in Angela's case, which is shocking enough. And then the grisly details in Melanie's case, where initials are carved into her chest with a sharp instrument post-mortem, you know, it is really incomprehensible. And if you think about it, again, like you're like, how did they not follow up more in the bodysuit? But they did follow up, right? And they're like, this doesn't fit the profile of anything they had. They had none of this background on him. So it's only when all these things come to light that it's like, boom, of course now would have, should have. But again, unfortunately, they just didn't know. Well, they did have him on the initial suspects list, and it certainly unfolds into a troubling scenario where they may have been able to

dive deeper into that situation. And it was taking the finding of his last name that was that missing piece that unlocked all of this disturbing criminal history. But perhaps the most important piece of information regarding Brian Patrick Miller was where he was still living in the Phoenix area, still a bike ride's distance to where Angela and Melanie were killed. So once we got that information and we looked at that specific tip of Brian Miller, we ended up as a squad doing surveillance on him for several days. And what they learned about the suspect only added to a criminal profile that was already dark and very disturbing. We learned that he drove a car that was an old police car. On the back, he had letters that were taped on the back that said zombie hunter. He had like blood spattered on it, not real blood, fake blood. Like, so there's blood dripping from the car.

He would put a zombie in the backseat. Not only was Miller not into hiding, he maintained this public profile in the steampunk community. And I have to admit, I had no idea what steampunk was until I was reading about this. And I had to look it up. And it's basically, it's described as an artistic movement that melds elements of the Victoria era and fashion with modern technology in this very fantastical form. Those that are into steampunk, they attend cosplay events in full costume. And this guy, he called himself the zombie hunter. So he would dress up in this costume that he made, drive that zombie car around,

and he would go to Comic-Con events and have his picture taken with different uniformed police officers standing next to him by the car. Okay, this is cool. Look at me. Some people described it as hiding in plain sight. Little did those investigators or his fellow cosplayers know that Miller's double life was more than just fantasy. His dark impulses to kill were more than just make-believe. As a squad, we started following him. He would sit on his house until he left. 90% of the time, he would drive straight to work,

do his work shift. He worked at an Amazon warehouse, and then he would return home. Despite their growing confidence that Miller was the killer, investigators still needed a plausible reason to approach him and question him about the murders that had occurred over 20 years ago. So they came up with the ruse. We noticed like on his lunch break and breaks, he would come out and sit in his car. We ended up telling him, hey, we noticed you're doing this. Would you be interested in working for us and watching the warehouse and what we're having some problems? He ended up agreeing to do that.

So a job interview was set up for him to apply and do this job that we wanted him to do. So cold case detectives set up a fake job interview and Miller took the bait. And Anastasia, I mean, this is such a dark story. So perhaps there's room for a little levity here. And it really comes in the form of investigators realizing the weaknesses of their target. He drives around in a vehicle like a Ghostbusters type car. He dresses in a Comic-Con outfit, calling himself the zombie hunter. Knowing that type of mindset, he has investigators figured that he's a shoo-in to be looking for some type

of job that requires some authority over people. So the plan is in order to get the job, you have to have an interview. And the interview is being held at a restaurant where he's being offered food and drink and that is the setting for investigators to collect as we know anisega an abandoned sample in other words if he drinks a drink you get the cup if he eats you grab the wrapper from the food and that's how an abandoned sample in a dna world is collected He showed up in his zombie hunter car with his 14-year-old daughter. We ended up doing the interview. He ended up drinking and eating. Didn't drink very much out of the cup. He used a straw. But we collected that evidence. And quite honestly, the most horrifying part to me was that he showed up with a child. He has a daughter who's 14 years old. But back to the

investigation here, they collected that evidence, they sent it to the lab and waited. And 13 days later, they had their answer. One of the guys on the squad, there was a young officer, I called him the kid. He called me on the phone as I was driving home. And he's like, William, we got him. I'm not in a good mood today. Don't mess with me. I don't want to be, you know, you yanking my chain. He goes, no, he goes, sir. He goes, it's him.

We got him. He goes, hold on a minute. So I waited and he put the lab supervisor on the phone. She's like, William, it's the zombie. Brian Patrick Miller was taken into custody and transported to the Phoenix PD for questioning. He was very mild-mannered. He wanted to know what was going on. We talked about his background, where he was from, what he did. I'd ask him if he had ever heard these girls or heard anything media about it. He denied. He did admit that he rode his bike along the canals, but

asked him if he knew what DNA was. And then when I got to Flint, I asked him, how do you explain that your DNA is involved with these two women? He said, I can't explain it. In the meantime, other investigators were also interviewing his ex-wife, and information she provided the police further convinced investigators that despite his mild-mannered appearance, Miller had been leading a dark double life. And during that interview, she had brought up that while they lived in Washington, he had told her about, he called it a girl scout, that he killed. She just, one thought he was just yanking her chain, and there's no way she could really find out what happened because they're in Washington. That was one of the reasons she never came to the police.

According to his ex-wife, Miller also demonstrated disturbing behavior in their own home. She talked about some of the sex that they had in bed. He would use like a knife and pens to poke the pen through different body parts and a knife to kind of like put little i call it a blooding to poker so she bleeds a little bit when i had talked to him about some of the sexual stuff earlier he just said he had normal sex me putting pens for somebody and using an instrument to cut them during sex, that's not normal. Confronted with this new information, Miller had little more to say. We eventually go back in and I get to the point where A, B, and C are coming about. How do you explain this? And that's when he said, I need an attorney.

He was arrested for the murders of Angela and Melanie, kidnapping for both girls and attempt sexualism. Subsequent to his arrest, investigators did a thorough search of his residence, a home that bore all the markings of someone with deviant fetishes. Nothing that we could specifically link to the crime scene or the crime itself, but there was thousands of pages of violent internet porn, like, you know, barbecuing a person, a lady over a spit. Nothing that would specifically tie him to the two murders, but a collection of material that just, it indicated a profile of someone with deeply, deeply disturbing fantasies that just might be capable of extreme violence. Due to the enormous case files for both murders, the trove of evidence collected at Miller's residence, and delays due to the COVID pandemic, it would take seven years after his arrest for

Miller to finally go to trial. But when he did, the state prosecutor's case was straight and to the point. The state, in a nutshell, said that he was a sexual sadist. Now 50 years old, Miller pled not guilty to all six counts of murder, kidnapping, and sexual assault by reason of insanity or in other states of not being responsible due to mental disease or defect. His defense team argued that Miller suffered from a range of mental health and disassociative disorders that all stemmed from a childhood filled with emotional and physical abuse. One of the aunts and some other family members were saying that he was abused, a lot of verbal abuse. Some of the neighbors

from where he grew up in Hawaii were saying that he was treated like a dog. During the interview, he did mention that his mom would beat him with her utility belt. She was a corrections officer for the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office. He said one time at school, he tried to tell the nurse or somebody at school about it, but because his mom worked for the sheriff's department that he didn't believe him or that she would do something like that. Detective Shira was in the courtroom as one of the case agents for every single day

of the six-month bench trial, listening to a host of doctors making the case that Miller's dissociative disorder made it impossible for him to understand or be legally responsible for his actions. To narrow it down, they were saying that you have Brian Miller, who is in the normal state, and Brian Miller, who is in the trauma state, through all the trauma that he had gone through from his mother as a kid,

that when this event happened, he didn't believe it. But there was one major problem with his defense. Miller himself didn't believe it. He's saying not only does he not remember doing it, he goes, I did not do this. And his refusal to admit his culpability, it undermined that plea of not responsible by mental disease or defect. And because this was a bench trial, not a jury trial, it was up to just one person, an Arizona Superior Court judge, to decide his fate. Her verdict was guilty on all six counts. Murder, kidnapping, and attempt sexual assault. The final decision on life or death was she gave him the death penalty.

One thing that the lead prosecutor was like, the girls didn't get to pick the day that they died. The defendant, Brian Miller, should know the day and the time that he is going to do. As of 2023, as Miller sits on death row, detectives in Arizona are actively investigating Miller as a person of interest in several unsolved homicide cases. So justice in the case of Brian Patrick Miller may not yet be done. But in the cases of Angela Brasso and Melanie Bernis, their families can at least get some criminal justice finality.

And whatever comfort that they can glean from knowing that he will never be free to hurt anyone again. I've had this question asked again, you know, how did it really affect you? And I'm like, I didn't do it for me. Any of the cases I worked, I was hoping to get a result for the family. I always just figured that there's, you know, a brother, a mother, a father, a sister, somebody in the family loved that person that was killed. That's what I always kind of kept me going through the eight and a half years that I did cold cases, trying to rescue the family. Losing a loved one to murder is an inconceivable painful experience,

magnified to an unbearable degree when the act is followed by acts of desecration, such as decapitation. This kind of loss is not just about the absence of a person, it's an unhealable wound to the soul, a violation of what we hold most dearly in human dignity. For the families of both victims in this case, it's not only the brutality

of the acts that torments them, but also the haunting thoughts of their loved one's final moments, the violation of their physical being, and the utter disrespect shown to what once was a cherished life. It's a unique and profound sorrow laced with horror, anger, and a deep sense of helplessness. Melanie and Angela, two young lives taken by homicidal violence of the most extreme and cruel forms. We know you're both remembered, missed, and loved by your families. Now that we know you, this AOM community will remember you too. Tune in next week for another new episode of Anatomy of Murder. Anatomy of Murder is an AudioChuck original

produced and created by Weinberger Media and Frasetti Media. Ashley Flowers is executive producer. This episode was written and produced by Walker Lamond. Researched by Kate Cooper. Edited by Ali Sirwa, Megan Hayward, and Philjean Grande. So, what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?