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Apr 11, 2023 · Bryan Miller has been found guilty of murdering two young women, Angela Brosso and Melanie Bernas, in Phoenix 30 years ago. The verdict was delivered Tuesday by Maricopa County Superior Court...
- Lane Sainty
- Storytelling Moments Reporter
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Who killed Angela Brosso & Melanie Bernas?
Did Bryan Patrick Miller kill Angela Brosso & Melanie Bernas?
Who were Angela Brosso and Melanie Bernas?
How did Brosso and Bernas die?
Oct 21, 2023 · The authorities found a body that had been dropped into the water and had drifted up to 12 feet before it was caught in some bush. The police identified the body as that of Melanie Bernas. Just a week after her 17th birthday, Melanie had begun her junior year at Arcadia High School.
Oct 27, 2023 · Who was Melanie Bernas and what happened to her? In September 1993, almost one year after Brosso's body was found, Melanie Bernas, a 17-year-old junior at Arcadia High School, was reported missing by her mother, Marlene Bernas.
- Jennifer Roback
Oct 3, 2022 · Miller is accused of killing 22-year-old Angela Brosso in November 1992 and 17-year-old Melanie Bernas in September 1993. Brosso and Bernas both disappeared while riding their bicycles along the...
- Overview
- Knife attacks in Arizona and Washington
- A stench so bad the neighbors complained
- Case goes cold
- Enough to go to trial?
Bryan Patrick Miller was sentenced to death this year for a pair of horrific murders that shook Phoenix in the early 1990s.
But prosecutors in Maricopa County declined to charge him in a third case from before the killings — the disappearance of 13-year-old Brandy Myers in 1992 — even though retired detectives in the cold case unit that solved the murders of Angela Brosso, 21, and Melanie Bernas, 17, believe he may be responsible for Brandy’s death.
Miller, a steampunk enthusiast known for his elaborate “zombie hunter” costume, is also linked to three nonfatal stabbings that span more than a decade. In one of the cases, Miller was 15 when he was arrested. He pleaded guilty to a charge of second-degree attempted murder in the stabbing.
Although Brandy’s body has never been found and no physical evidence links Miller, now 51, to her disappearance, authorities point, in part, to an apparent confession revealed eight years ago as evidence of his possible guilt. In an interview with an FBI agent and a Phoenix police detective, Miller’s ex-wife told authorities that he admitted to killing a teen who matches Brandy’s description.
“He was our guy,” the former head of the Phoenix Police Department’s cold case unit, Troy Hillman, told NBC’s “Dateline.” “There are many secrets to Bryan Miller that we still don’t know about. We can’t prove it, but we all strongly believe that Bryan Patrick Miller killed Brandy Myers.”
Stuart Somershoe, a retired Phoenix missing persons detective who investigated Brandy’s case, told NBC News, “He will never harm another woman or child, and that’s an important thing.” But, he said, Brandy was nearly forgotten in the drama and the intense media coverage surrounding Miller’s trial.
In fall 1989, Miller pleaded guilty to attempted murder after a woman walking through the parking lot of a Phoenix mall said he plunged a knife into her back and fled.
A doctor later said that had Miller angled the blade a little differently, he could have severed her spine or punctured a vital organ, a court filing from the case obtained by “Dateline” shows. The woman, who had been walking to her department store job that May when she was attacked, was “lucky to be alive,” according to the doctor cited in the filing.
Miller was arrested shortly after the stabbing and ordered to remain in juvenile detention until he turned 18. In an email, his lawyer in the recent trial said he was released in summer 1990.
In 2002, after Miller had gotten married, had a daughter and moved to Everett, Washington, he was charged with assault when a woman accused him of stabbing her in an unprovoked attack, according to a probable cause affidavit obtained by “Dateline.” The woman said Miller offered her a ride — and a phone to make a call on — before he approached her with what she described to authorities as a 12-inch knife.
He stabbed her in the back multiple times, causing injuries that required 30 stitches, according to the affidavit.
Miller denied the allegations, and in a legal brief obtained by “Dateline,” his lawyer wrote that the woman had tried to rob him at knifepoint. Her injuries were the result of a struggle that followed, according to the document. Miller took the case to trial and was acquitted.
More than two decades later, after a combination of genetic genealogy, DNA and other evidence allowed authorities to identify Miller as a suspect in the killings, a cold case detective and an FBI agent interviewed the woman who, by then, was his ex-wife. They had married in 1997 and were separated by 2005, according to a transcript of the interview obtained by “Dateline.”
She told the investigators that Miller had told her about the fatal stabbing of a person he identified as an intellectually challenged Girl Scout who appeared to be in her mid-teens, according to the transcript.
The killing Miller allegedly described occurred after he was released from juvenile detention on the attempted murder charge, his ex-wife told investigators, while he was living in an apartment operated by a Mennonite outreach program north of central Phoenix.
When the girl knocked on Miller’s door, his ex-wife recalled him saying, he grabbed her, pulled her into the apartment and cut her throat. He allegedly put the body in the bathtub, where he intended to preserve it with cold water, she recalled Miller saying. He mistakenly ran hot water, instead, she said, and allegedly dismembered her body and placed her remains in a trash can.
He “just left the trash can sitting in his house ’til trash day,” she recalled her ex-husband saying, according to the transcript. “When the neighbors complained of the smell, he just told them that some meat in the kitchen had gone bad.”
Miller didn’t identify Brandy by name, according to the transcript. But parts of the account were corroborated, Somershoe said.
Miller wasn’t suspected in her disappearance at the time, Somershoe said, and the case went cold after an initially promising lead. A man who was later convicted of three killings in the Phoenix area said he would admit to having murdered Brandy in exchange for leniency from prosecutors, Somershoe said. Authorities came to doubt the confession, and no deal was offered to that man, Somershoe said.
Other factors stymied Somershoe and other investigators looking into Brandy’s disappearance. There was no security camera video showing her approaching Miller’s apartment, for instance, or cellphone data pinpointing Miller’s or Brandy’s locations at the time of her disappearance.
A forensic search of the apartment in 2015 yielded little. In the bathroom, investigators found blood, Somershoe said, but it didn’t match that of Miller or anyone else connected to the killings or the disappearance.
An interview investigators conducted with Miller also produced little, Somershoe said. He recalled the case but denied knowing Brandy or having had anything to do with her disappearance or death, he said.
When Somershoe confronted Miller with the alleged confession, he didn’t say who’d disclosed the account.
“He said, ‘Whoever told you that, they’re lying,’” Somershoe recalled.
Even though Brandy’s body had never been found — and even though there was no physical or other direct evidence tying him to Brandy’s disappearance — Somershoe submitted the case investigators had built to the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office for possible criminal charges in late 2015, he said.
"The county attorney basically turned it down, saying ‘no reasonable likelihood of conviction,’” he said. “They’re saying, ‘We don’t feel we have enough to take this to trial and get a conviction.’”
In an interview with “Dateline,” one of the deputy county attorneys who prosecuted Miller in the recent trial said the alleged confession and other circumstantial evidence weren’t enough to definitively link him to Brandy.
“He didn’t give a name,” Vince Imbordino said, so it wasn’t clear “if the description he gave his ex-wife was Brandy Myers or a fantasy.”
“There simply at this point is not enough evidence to be certain that he’s responsible,” he said.
For Somershoe, who retired from the Phoenix Police Department in 2020, that response leaves the case “solved but not resolved.”
Jun 7, 2023 · PHOENIX — Three decades after the shocking murders of Angela Brosso and Melanie Bernas, their killer, Bryan Patrick Miller, was sentenced to death.
3 days ago · Miller continued to deny he murdered Angela Brosso and Melanie Bernas even though he was found guilty by Judge Suzanne Cohen in a trial without a jury. Cohen sentenced Miller to death in...
