PHOENIX — For more than two decades, Brian Patrick Miller was a beloved local character, a man known as the “Zombie Hunter” who paraded through the streets of Phoenix in a custom costume, posed for photos with uniformed police officers, and signed autographs for adoring fans at comic conventions and car shows.
He drove a modified former police cruiser, complete with 𝒻𝒶𝓀𝑒 blood, green emergency lights, and a zombie mannequin strapped in the back seat. He was seen as a harmless eccentric, a gentle single father who brought his teenage daughter everywhere and seemed incapable of making anyone uncomfortable.
But behind the costume and the friendly smile was a monster. On January 2, 2015, after a carefully orchestrated lunch meeting at a Chili’s restaurant, detectives collected a water glass Miller had touched. Eleven days later, the DNA results came back.
It was a perfect match to evidence left at the scenes of two of the most brutal murders in Phoenix history.
Miller, now 55, is on death row. He was convicted in 2022 for the 1992 murder of 22-year-old Angela Brosso and the 1993 murder of 17-year-old Melanie Bernas. Both women were attacked while riding their bicycles along the Arizona Canal.
Both were stabbed, sexually assaulted, and in Brosso’s case, decapitated. The killer had kept her severed head refrigerated for nearly two weeks before dumping it in the canal.
The story of how Miller was caught is as disturbing as the crimes themselves. It began in 1989, when Miller was just 16 years old. He randomly stabbed a 24-year-old woman named Celeste Bentley in the back as she walked to work.
The blade missed her spine by an inch. He pleaded guilty and was sent to juvenile detention.
While he was locked up, his mother, Ellen, searched his room and found a handwritten document titled simply “Plan.” It was a detailed, step-by-step outline of how he intended to find a young woman, abduct her, restrain her, sexually assault her, 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 her, and then dismember her. The document described decapitation and specific post-mortem acts that would later match the exact details of Angela Brosso’s murder.
Miller’s mother was so terrified that when he was released at 18, she refused to let him come home. She told police, “I am scared of my own son.”
Miller moved into a halfway house run by the Mennonite Outreach Ministry in North Phoenix. In May 1992, 13-year-old Brandy Myers disappeared while going door-to-door collecting donations for a school book drive. She was last seen less than 70 feet from Miller’s building.
Her body has never been found. Around the same time, neighbors reported a terrible smell coming from Miller’s apartment. They organized an informal cleanup while he was gone, scrubbing surfaces and throwing things away without knowing what they had walked into.
Six months later, on her birthday, November 8, 1992, Angela Brosso went for an evening bike ride. She never returned. Her decapitated body was found in a field near the canal.
Her head was pulled from the water two miles away nearly two weeks later, showing almost no decomposition, indicating it had been refrigerated. Male DNA was recovered from the scene but matched nothing in any database.
Ten months later, on September 21, 1993, Melanie Bernas went for a bike ride while her mother was out to dinner. Her body was found face down in the canal the next morning. She had been stabbed and sexually assaulted.
Her own clothes had been removed, and she was dressed in a teal bodysuit that was not hers. The letters “WSC” had been carved into her chest. The killer had stayed and taken his time.
DNA from her scene matched the DNA from Angela’s murder.
The case went cold for more than two decades. Then, in 2011, Detective Troy Hillman took over the cold case unit. He became obsessed.
In 2014, he turned to a brand-new forensic technique: investigative genetic genealogy. Colleen Fitzpatrick, a forensic genealogist, had developed software that could mine public genealogy websites for partial DNA matches. The Phoenix police sent her the DNA profile from the canal murders.
The software returned a surname: Miller.
Hillman went back to his master list of more than 600 persons of interest and found six people named Miller. One of them was Brian Patrick Miller. An anonymous tip from the early 1990s had mentioned a teenager named Brian Miller who had access to a teal bodysuit similar to the one Melanie Bernas was found wearing.
The tip had been set aside because he was considered too young.
When Hillman pulled Miller’s full file, he found the 1989 stabbing, the “Plan” document, and the proximity to Brandy Myers’ disappearance. The hair on the back of his neck stood up.
Detective Clark Schwarzkopf began surveillance. He watched Miller on his breaks at an Amazon warehouse. Miller would sit in his car, a modified former police cruiser with 𝒻𝒶𝓀𝑒 blood and a zombie mannequin, and blast music.
He was known throughout Phoenix as the “Zombie Hunter.” He attended comic conventions, parades, and car shows in full costume: a long trench coat, goggles, a hard hat, and a fabricated Gatling gun. Fans lined up for his autograph.
Police officers posed for photos with him, smiling arm in arm, completely unaware.
When investigators searched Miller’s home, they found it packed floor to ceiling with belongings. Narrow paths were carved through the piles. On the outside of his refrigerator, in plain view, was a photograph of an actual decapitated human head.
His teenage daughter saw it every day.
To make an arrest, they needed his DNA. Schwarzkopf concocted a plan. He told Miller he was recruiting security personnel for a warehouse and arranged to meet at a Chili’s restaurant on January 2, 2015.
Undercover detectives were already inside. They had personally pulled a clean glass from the dishwasher and moved it to a specific booth. Miller showed up with his daughter.
He ordered a burger and a water. He ate the burger in five bites without using silverware. He did not touch his drink.
Schwarzkopf kept the conversation going, running through scenarios in his head about how the plan was about to fall apart. Finally, Miller picked up the glass and drank.
After the meal, Miller gave Schwarzkopf a tour of the “Zombie Hunter” car. The moment Miller was gone, the undercover detectives secured the glass. As Schwarzkopf drove away, he was not convinced they had their man.
He had just spent an hour watching Miller with his daughter, and he could not make that person fit the violence on the canal paths. His gut told him they were about to clear Miller and move on.
Eleven days later, the results came back. It was a match.
Miller was arrested. In the interrogation room, when detectives told him his DNA had been matched to both victims, he said he did not see how that was possible. He said he could not remember everything he had done back then but knew he had not killed anyone.
The trial did not begin until October 2022. Miller waived his right to a jury trial. His defense team conceded everything: the DNA, the murders, all of it.
Brian Miller killed those women, they said. But they argued he was not guilty by reason of insanity, claiming he had dissociative amnesia from a childhood of severe 𝓪𝓫𝓾𝓼𝓮 and did not know what he was doing was wrong. Miller himself rejected that defense, maintaining from prison that he had not committed the murders at all.
The prosecutors argued that Miller remembered stabbing Celeste Bentley in 1989 and remembered a 2002 stabbing in Washington state clearly enough to mount a self-defense case and get acquitted. His memory, they said, was selective in a way that mapped perfectly onto his legal exposure.
After six months of testimony and 36 witnesses, Miller was found guilty on all counts and sentenced to death.
From death row, Miller writes long letters about being misunderstood. He says the media took a costume he wore a few times a year and built a monster around it. He writes about his daughter, from whom he is largely estranged.
He does not write about Angela Brosso or Melanie Bernas. He does not write about Brandy Myers, whose case is still officially open and whose body has never been found.
The case left behind more than a conviction. It was the first cold case in history solved through investigative genetic genealogy. The method that nobody was sure would work has since been used to crack hundreds of cold cases across the country.
It changed forensic investigation permanently.
Because of what happened along the Arizona Canal in 1992 and 1993, because of Angela and Melanie, detectives now have a tool that did not exist before. And soon enough, another killer will get caught.
