He Posed With Cops At Crime Scenes. He Was The One Who Put The BODIES There

Are you ready to dive into the unknown? Join me, Peyton Moreland, on Into the Dark, the true crime podcast from Ono Media with a hint of horror and mystery. Each week, I dive into a different case, breaking down the facts, and pondering the age-old question, why do people do what they do? Now, sometimes the answer isn't so clear, and that's why I'll also explore conspiracy theories, hauntings, and all things spooky. In the Green River Killer, to The Mothman Incident, we will unravel all of the questions that keep us up at night. So don't miss out, subscribe now on your favorite podcast platform, new episodes drop every Wednesday. Into The Dark, where true crime meets the eerie unknown. I'm Richard Serrett. Join me on Strange Planet for in-depth conversations with the world's top paranormal investigators, alien abductees, big-foot trackers, monster hunters, time travelers, and more. The handler one day told her this whole thing about how they've been terraforming on Mars, and they're building a colony and they're recruiting specific people, a specific blood lines and specific talents and skill sets to go on to the planet. On Richard Serrett's Strange Planet, we're redefining reality. Listen now wherever you get your podcasts. Every town has a dark side. The following story is one that genuinely got onto my skin because the man we're talking about today wasn't a killer who ever hid in fear. He was never hiding or laying low. In fact, he was the exact opposite. He was out in public showing up at parades, imposing for photos with cops and even signing autographs for fans. He had a costume, a custom car, and a whole identity that people in Phoenix loved him for. The entire time, for over 20 years, he was one of the most brutal killers this city had ever seen. Hey guys, it's Andrew and thanks for tuning in to every town we're today. We have a real crazy one for you. So, if you haven't heard of this guy, you're in for a ride. Let's head on over to Arizona now and check out Brian Miller, aka the zombie hunter. To really understand what Brian Miller became, you have to go back to before anyone was watching. Before the costume, before those fans, before the police cars lined up to take photos with them. You have to go back to 1989 when he was just a 16-year-old kid on a Phoenix city bus. A 24-year-old woman named Celeste Bentley got off at the same stop as Miller that day morning. She was headed to her job at a department store and her paradise valley mall just another Tuesday. She noticed the teen away and noticed anybody sharing the same sidewalk. Briefly, no reason for concern, and then she moved on. But a moment later, he ran past her and she felt what she thought was a hard shove to her back. If she turned around to yell at him, then she reached back and her hand came away, covered in blood. Miller had driven a knife into her upper back and then kept on running. A doctor who treated her later said the blade had narrowly missed her spine in her organs. Another inch in either direction and Celeste doesn't walk out of that hospital and she might not have walked again at all. Miller was caught nearby shortly after. He pleaded guilty to aggravated assault and was sent to Juvee detention until he turned 18. And look, that alone is serious. 16-year-old kid randomly stabbing a woman on her way to work, and that's not a kid making a bad choice, it's something much darker and deep-rooted. But here's the thing, what came next? Well that's what should have changed everything, and somehow, it didn't. While Miller was locked up, his mother Ellen went through his room at home and what she found made her stomach drop. It was a hand-ridden document, titled simply "Plan". She took it straight to the police because what was in it wasn't an angry scribbling of a troubled kid, it was organized, specific, and methodical. It laid out, step by step, exactly how Brian Miller intended to find a young woman, a doctor, restrained her, assay her, kill her, and then dismember her. As a reminder, he was just 16 years old. When he was younger, he wrote this letter describing what he was going to do or what he was fantasizing about doing to what he said was a 17-year-old girl in the letter. Now here's the messed-up part. Some of the specific details in that document, things about decapitation, and what he wanted to do afterward, the later match almost exactly what was done to the first woman he murdered. He had written it all down years before he ever did it. His mom was so terrified by what she found that when Brian was released she refused to let him come home. As she told the police directly, "I am scared of my own son." And then, Brian Patrick Miller walked out a juby detention at 18 years old, moved into a halfway house run by the Mennonite Outreach Ministry in North Phoenix. That note, he went into a file and two years passed by. By May of '92, Miller was 19 years old, still living in the same place and trying to figure things out. On the 26th of that month, their teen-year-old Brandy Myers stepped into that neighborhood when she left her family's home to collect donations for a school book drive. She was going door-to-door, just a kid doing a school thing. Her older sister, Kristen, later described her as her best friend. The girl he won between the two of them, always trying to keep up with Kristen, who was outdoors and climbing trees, even though it wasn't really her style. To see Brandy was developmentally delayed, emotionally closer to a 9 or 10-year-old, that she was trusting, eager, and she saw the good in people, the way kids like that do, openly and without suspicion. As she headed out that evening with her clipboard and a purpose, she was last seen less than 70 feet from the building where Brian lived, walking in the direction of his door, and she was never seen again. Police came through hard in the days that followed, canine units, door-to-door knocks, and officers digging through trash bins looking for anything. Miller was reportedly at work when they came to his building, and in the end, no suspect emerged, because nobody was ever found. Unlike so many missing persons' cases with nothing concrete to hold on to, it went cold. When investigators wouldn't piece together until decades later, it was something that the people in the Mennonite community hadn't forgotten. At that same time, a terrible smell had been coming from Miller's apartment, persistent enough that a group of neighbors eventually got together and did something about it. They organized an informal cleanup of the space while Miller was gone. They went in, scrub surfaces, and threw things out without looking too closely at what they were throwing away, and then they left. They had no idea what they had walked into, no clue what they had just cleaned up. That was the fall of 92, several months after Brandy Myers vanished, and it wouldn't mean anything to anyone for a very long time. Raise your hand if you've been putting off a dental cleaning, an annual physical, or some nagging thing, and keep googling at 1 a.m. Yep, my hands up too. My doomed scroll symptoms, self-diagnose, vent to my wife, and still don't book a doctor. When this year, I'm doing it differently with ZocDoc. ZocDoc is a free app and website that helps you find and book high-quality, in-network doctors, so you can find someone you love. We're talking about booking in-network appointments with more than 150,000 providers across all 50 states. Whether you're looking for dermatology, dentistry, primary care, eye care, or one of the 200-plus specialties offered on ZocDoc, you can easily search by specialty or symptom to build a care team that's right for you. Want to see your doctor in person? Great. Prefer a video visit? You can do that too. You can view thousands of verified patient reviews to get a real sense of who your doctor is, and when you're ready, you can see their real time availability and click to book instantly. I use ZocDoc, and if you've been putting this off, you should too. Stop putting off those doctor's appointments and go to ZocDoc.com/everytown to find and instantly book a doctor you love today. At zoc.com/everytown, ZocDoc.com. dot com slash every tab. Thanks, Doc, for sponsoring this message. (upbeat music) Six months after Brandy disappeared, Angela Brasso went out for an evening bike ride. She was a 22 year old tech worker who moved to Phoenix to build something. Her career, some independence, a life that was just starting to find its shape. She loved those night rides along the canal paths after the heat had died down. It was her thing, her wave unwinding. On November 8th of '92, which was her birthday, she headed out around 7 p.m. Her boyfriend Joe encouraged her to go as he stayed back to prepare some gifts and get her cake ready. But then he waited, man, she didn't return. Enough time had passed to make Joe grab his bike and go out looking. He was worried she might have fell and hurt herself, but he couldn't find her. After that, he called her friends and called her mother back in Pennsylvania. And eventually, he called the police. The following morning, authorities went searching and they fanned out from the canal and onto the neighboring properties. And it was in one of those fields that they made the grizzly discovery. Angela hadn't just been stabbed and assaulted, she'd been decapitated. Her bicycle was nowhere to be found and the same went for her head. A week and a half later, a fisherman would end up pulling it from the canal. It was found two miles from where her body lay in that field. But the detail that really stood out here was that there was almost no decomposition after nearly two weeks. The belief was that whoever did this, had kept it refrigerated before putting it in the water, which tells you something about who you're dealing with. This was someone who was doing exactly what they wanted to do with the body and it was organized, deliberate and sadistic. And they recovered male DNA from the scene. Hundreds of tips came in and there were hundreds of interviews. On the persons of interest list, eventually grew it over 600 named, but the DNA matched nothing in any database. Without that one piece, the investigation had a ceiling it couldn't push through. Then came September of '93, 10 months after Angela's murder. Melanie Burnus was a 17 year old high school student who had dipped out for a bike ride on the night of September 21st, while her mother was out in town having dinner. When her mom came home and found her gone, she started calling Melanie's friends, but no one knew anything. As the hours ticked by, the worry that it started as a low hum turned into something she couldn't ignore anymore. Early the following morning, a woman riding along the canal with her young daughter strapped in the bike seat behind her, rode through what looked like a puddle coming out from one of the tunnels beneath the interstate. But something about it bothered her enough to turn around and loop back for a second look. This puddle, it was red, and there were drag marks beside it, leading from the path towards the water. Police were called and it didn't take long for them to find Melanie laying face down in that canal, where she too had been stabbed several times, NSA'd, but this seemed as different from Angela's in ways that told investigators something important. Melanie's own clothes had been removed and she'd been dressed up in a teal body suit that wasn't hers. And furthermore, the letters WSC had been carved into her chest. The killer had stayed and taken his time. There was nothing frantic or impulsive about any of it. He enjoyed what he was doing. When the DNA from Melanie's scene came back from a lab, will it mash the DNA from Angela's murder? Same man, both women, and he had simply walked away from it, twice. Phoenix PD escalated everything they had. Undercover officers worked the canal paths at night. The DNA samples were pulled from persons of interest across multiple states. The unknown profile was then uploaded to CODIS, the National Criminal DNA Database. No match. Years passed by and the canal murders settled into Phoenix's collective memory the way the worst unsolved cases do. That's something unresolved, but always still there just under the surface. The kind of thing the parents who lived through it still brought up and explaining why they didn't let their kids go out after dark. Men in 2011, a detective named Troy Hillman took over the cold case unit and went back through everything from the beginning. He later described reading those original files as one of the most disturbing things he'd encounter in his entire career. The kind of details he said that don't leave you. Because of that, he became obsessed. His unit flew across the country collecting additional DNA samples to rule people out. They brought in forensic experts to build a profile of whoever had done this. And what that profile kept pointing to was someone local. Someone drawn to acting out violent fantasies. Someone who was very likely already hiding somewhere inside those case files. By 2014, a forensic genealogist named Colleen Fitzpatrick had been developing something that didn't really exist before. Through her company, a dentist finder is international. She had built software that could do something the criminal justice system had never had access to. Instead of searching for a direct hit in a law enforcement database, well, it could mind public genealogy websites. The kind people used to trace their ancestry for partial DNA matches. That means that every person who submits their DNA to find out if their 12% Scandinavian or whatever is actually now a possible solver of crimes. If a relative of a killer is curious enough about where they came from, well, Fitzpatrick's software can take a killer's DNA and find that partial match online, build out a family tree from there, and work backward through the bloodline until it found its way to the killer himself. The science was brand new at the time, completely untested in a real criminal case. When Hillman brought the idea to department leadership, it took him three months just to get approval to fund it. Nobody knew if it would work because it had never been tried before. The Phoenix police sent Fitzpatrick the DNA profile from the canal murders. Her team ran it through the system, and they came back with a surname, Miller. It is one of the most common last names in the country, so this was a starting point, not an answer. But it was more than the investigation had produced in over 20 years. Hillman went back to his master list and pulled every person named Miller from those 600 plus files. The six names came up, and he started working through them one by one. And there, partway down the list was a name that had been sitting in those files since the early '90s. Brian Patrick Miller, 42 years old with a Phoenix address. Shortly after the murders and anonymous caller had tipped police that a teenager named Brian Miller had access to a teal bodysuit. Similar to the one Melanie Bernace was found wearing. That tip had been looked at and then quietly set aside. He was too young, they thought, and they moved on. Now, Hillman pulled the full file and started reading. That was when he saw the 1989 stabbing of Celeste Bentley. He saw the note marked plan and what a teenage Miller had written he wanted to do to a young woman. He saw the proximity to where Brandy Myers was last seen in '92. He saw a man with a documented history of violence against women who had been in Phoenix for both murders, whose last name had just been flagged by a genetic genealogy search for the very first time in history. The hair on the back of his neck stood straight up. What Hillman didn't know yet was what Miller had been doing with himself the past 20 years. Detective Clark Schwartzkopf began the surveillance, watching Miller on his brakes at the Amazon warehouse. And he did the same routine every single day. Miller clocked out, walked to the parking lot, sat in his car, and proceeded to blast music loud enough to hear from across the lot. When he was done expelling whatever released the music gave him, he just went back inside, predictable as a clock. You could say perhaps that's ordinary, but the car he was sitting in was anything There was an old crowned Vic police cruiser that had been completely transformed. Fake blood running down the doors and green emergency lights with the standard ones used to be. A full-size zombie mannequin was strapped in the back seat behind bars like a trophy and custom graphics across the back that read "Zombie Hunter". And this wasn't just a car, it was a whole identity. For years, Miller had been showing up at Phoenix Comic Conventions, parades, and car shows. He was always in full costume consisting of a long trench coat, goggles, hard hat, fabricated gatling gun, and people they loved him for it. Fans came specifically looking for him, the lines formed for autographs. And for those who knew this guy, well they described him as a harmless marshmallow, gentle, unassuming, a good single dad who brought his 15-year-old daughter everywhere he went and seemed genuinely incapable of making anyone uncomfortable. And cops posed with him, actual uniform police officers smiling arm-and-arm with Brian Miller, completely unaware of what they were standing next to. When investigators obtained a search warrant and then gained access to his house, what they found painted a very different picture than what people thought of this guy. The front door couldn't be opened. Belongings were stacked floor to ceiling throughout the house, but narrow paths carved through the piles just to reach the bathroom in the kitchen. And on the outside of his refrigerator, not hidden away or tucked in a drawer, but right there where anyone walking into the kitchen could see it, was a photograph of an actual decapitated human head, taped up like a piece of art, reminiscent of what had happened to Angela. And his teenage daughter, well she saw it every single day. To make an arrest though, they needed his DNA, and Schwarzkopf had an idea. So I came up with an idea that I would accrue Mr. Miller as a security person that I told that we were out there doing security on that particular office complex warehouse and that there had been some thefts from it. Miller was interested and they arranged to meet properly and go over the details, which is how this killer ended up sitting across from a cold case detective at a Chili's restaurant in Phoenix on January 2, 2015. Schwarzkopf had coordinated everything in advance. Undercover detectives were already inside and had personally pulled a clean glass straight from the dishwasher and moved it to a specific booth away from other customers. Nothing contaminated, nothing left to chance. Every single thing Miller touched at that table was going to be collected the second he walked out that door, which Schwarzkopf hadn't planned on was for Miller showing up with his daughter. While she sat with him through the entire meal while Miller ordered a burger and a water, he ate that burger in about 5 bites and didn't use any silverware. And then he didn't touch his drink, just let it sit there. Schwarzkopf kept the conversation going, mass Miller if he wanted something else, although running through scenarios in his head about how this whole thing was about to fall apart because of one untouched glass of water. Then, Brian finally picked it up and drank. Schwarzkopf had what he needed. After the meal, Miller gave him a quick tour of the zombie hunter car and they parted ways like two guys who just had a perfectly normal lunch. The moment Miller was gone, was undercover detectives moved in and secured the glass. But as Schwarzkopf drove away from that chillies, when he was genuinely not convinced they had their man, because he had just spent an hour watching Brian Miller with his daughter, how naturally was with her, how easy and how completely ordinary he was, and he could not make that person fit the violence on those canal paths in 92 and 93. He's got what's telling him, they were about to clear Brian Miller and move on. Eleven days later though, they got the results back, it was a match. After that meeting, they took Miller's glass and it was the DNA from that glass that led to his arrest. The DNA from that glass was the same DNA that had been sitting in those case files for over two decades, collected from the bodies of Angela Brasso and Melanie Bernace. Miller was arrested that same day, in the interrogation room when detectives told him his DNA had been matched to both victims, but he said he didn't see how that was possible. When they pushed harder, he said he couldn't remember everything he'd done back then, but that he knew he hadn't killed anyone. The trial didn't begin until October of 2022, more than seven years after his arrest. Competency hearings, lengthy delays, and ultimately a decision by Miller to wipe his right to a jury trial entirely, so just him and a judge. His defense team stood up in that courtroom and did something unexpected. They conceded everything. The DNA, the murders, all of it. Brian Miller killed those women they said. He just shouldn't be held responsible because he didn't have the mental capacity to understand what he was doing at the time. They built their entire case around his childhood. A mother documented his deeply abusive, who had used her law enforcement belt on him as discipline, starting when he was five years old, who neighbors described as someone who openly resented her own son. The defense tried to establish that he was not guilty by reason of insanity, and one of the requirements there is that he did not know that what he was doing was wrong, so getting sort of two different views of the same scene there. A defense psychologist testified that Miller had developed dissociative amnesia from that trauma. He had carried out the murders in a dissociative state and had no memory of the afterward. A Miller himself, when he rejected all of it, but from prison, he maintained consistently that he didn't have dissociative amnesia. He just knew he hadn't committed the murders at all. But the prosecutors, well they had a simple answer to all that. He remembered stabbing Celeste Bentley in 1989, and he remembered a 2002 stabbing in Washington state, clearly enough to mount a self-defense case and get acquitted. His memory, may argued, was selective in a way that mapped perfectly onto his legal exposure. After six months of testimony and 36 witnesses, well Miller was found guilty on all accounts, and he was sentenced to death. From death row, Brian Miller writes, "Long carefully worded letters about being misunderstood, about masks and how everyone wears one. About how the media took a costume he put on a few times a year and built an entire monster around it that had nothing to do with who he actually was." He writes about his daughter, from whom he's been largely estranged since his arrest, and says he isn't going to push her, and he knows she'll reach out when she's ready. He has opinions about the death penalty, about the men around him on death row, and he says he's always been against it. What he doesn't write about, not really, is Angela Brasso or Melanie Bernace, and not Brandy Myers either, whose case is still officially open and whose body has never been found. And he hears what the case is left behind beyond the conviction. It was the first cold case in history saw through investigative genetic genealogy. The method Colleen Fitzpatrick helped develop Detroit Hillman fought for three months just to get funded. That nobody was sure would even work, but it did. And since then, the same approach has been used to crack hundreds of cold cases all across the country. It changed forensic investigation permanently. Which means that somewhere out there right now, there's a detective sitting with a case file that's been cold for 20 years. Because of what happened along the Arizona Canal in 92 and 93, because of Angela and Melanie, well, they have a tool that didn't exist before, and soon enough, another killer will get caught. So that's going to do it for today's episode of Every Town, hope you enjoyed it, and if you did, well great, glad you stuck around to the end. Remember to come on back here next week for another episode filled with wild and crazy stories. because you never know, maybe your town will be next.