On the Hunt for the Zombie Hunter

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Speaker 14 Tonight, on dateline.

Speaker 15 Angela went out for a bike ride around dusk. She never came back.

Speaker 16 We thought it was someone she knew at the time.

Speaker 17 That she was living with?

Speaker 16 A boyfriend, yeah.

Speaker 18 Then details started coming.

Speaker 19 It was surreal.

Speaker 20 What did you find out about the zombie hunter?

Speaker 15 That really caught our attention.

Speaker 22 It said zombie hunter on the vehicle.

Speaker 20 The zombie hunter car.

Speaker 23 The zombie hunter car, yeah, with the dummy in the back. You had everything there: bars, handcuffs.

Speaker 15 17-year-old Melanie was riding her bike. She was later found floating in the canal.

Speaker 25 The way she was killed just traumatizes you.

Speaker 26 There is a madman on the loose.

Speaker 25 I thought we would never know who did this.

Speaker 26 Everybody wanted to find this guy.

Speaker 28 Does either of you think that there are more murders that we don't know about?

Speaker 26 I do.

Speaker 15 The FBI profile said

Speaker 15 killer would not stop.

Speaker 29 The zombie hunter. It sounds like a Halloween costume, but was this one worn by a killer? I'm Lester Holt, and this is Dateline.

Speaker 30 Here's Keith Morrison with On the Hunt for the Zombie Hunter.

Speaker 21 It was a Sunday evening in November, Phoenix, Arizona. A wash of cool air finally as the sun dropped behind the valley's mountains.

Speaker 36 She loved this time alone as she pedaled the long path by the canal that snaked through the city and out along the valley floor.

Speaker 38 She could think on her bike, prepare.

Speaker 40 But of course, we can't really know what she was thinking,

Speaker 37 can only imagine all these years later.

Speaker 21 Can only remember.

Speaker 26 That is burned into my brain. I'll never, ever forget that.

Speaker 26 No,

Speaker 26 not that horror.

Speaker 21 Or the fear that went with it.

Speaker 44 I was really scared.

Speaker 44 I always thought that he was hiding around my apartment, like waiting in a bush to kill me.

Speaker 45 It still gives me goosebumps and a pit in my stomach.

Speaker 35 What was it haunting the Arizona Canal?

Speaker 25 I think it's just

Speaker 25 evil and deep, and more than we know.

Speaker 7 But now, back up.

Speaker 49 Months before that bike ride by the canal, when life was still normal, better than normal, exciting.

Speaker 39 It was 1992.

Speaker 32 Technological innovation was exploding everywhere.

Speaker 21 Phoenix, eager to be a leader, had become a magnet for young, ambitious people ready to make their mark.

Speaker 6 People like Jill Kelly, who worked for a company called Sintelect.

Speaker 45 They were one of the first companies to to do interactive voice response, which back then was you call your bank and you wanted to find out your balance and so you'd enter your account number over the telephone and it would speak the balance back to you.

Speaker 20 Was this all kind of new cutting-edge stuff at the time?

Speaker 45 Yeah, it was. When I started working there, it really started booming and...

Speaker 20 What did it feel like to be working for a

Speaker 20 company on the cusp of all new things?

Speaker 45 It was fun and interesting and most of the people there were young and smart.

Speaker 35 In that talented crowd, the new hire stood out.

Speaker 8 Her name was Angela Brosso.

Speaker 38 It was going to be her very first grown-up job.

Speaker 20 What were your impressions of Angela when she came on board?

Speaker 45 She was just very composed and very intelligent and could really portray herself well, which you need to be able to do in front of a classroom full of customers.

Speaker 14 Classroom of customers?

Speaker 6 Well, yes.

Speaker 32 Companies that bought the technology had to learn how to use it. And bright young Angela was just the person to teach them.

Speaker 52 Or so Sintelect decided.

Speaker 45 She was brought in to develop a class for a new product, and she worked diligently for four months. And her first class with customers flying in from all around the country.

Speaker 20 That must have been a very big thing that she was looking forward to.

Speaker 55 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 45 Yeah. I mean, we were all helping her get ready and it was a big thing.

Speaker 56 Was she nervous?

Speaker 45 I'm sure she was a little nervous. Yeah.

Speaker 21 Sunday evening, the eve of her big day, Angela put on her white sneakers, her walkman, and her headphones.

Speaker 58 and left the apartment she shared with her boyfriend.

Speaker 37 He was baking a cake for her birthday, her 22nd, the very next day.

Speaker 28 She needed time alone.

Speaker 20 It was going dark by the time she got on her bike.

Speaker 38 She loved that bike, loved the long ride up and down the canal, loved the solitude, the peace, time to think.

Speaker 11 Maybe the time to settle her nerves.

Speaker 20 The next morning was going to be the most important of her young professional life, and she had to be ready.

Speaker 60 And so she rode.

Speaker 21 And then Monday morning, November 9th, 1992.

Speaker 16 We were waiting for her to come in for this class to begin. We had customers sitting there and no Angela.

Speaker 2 Dead Little John was Angela's boss.

Speaker 16 And she

Speaker 16 didn't show up, didn't show up, didn't show up.

Speaker 9 Finally, one of the others stepped in to teach Angela's class.

Speaker 64 But where was she?

Speaker 6 She'd been so looking forward to this.

Speaker 32 Angela's workstation, as it happened, was right next to Jill's.

Speaker 45 The phone on her desk rang, and I just automatically picked it up. And it was her mother.
And

Speaker 45 she asked to speak to Angela. And I said she's not here at the moment.
And her mother just

Speaker 45 really

Speaker 45 didn't say much more, but it was

Speaker 45 chilling.

Speaker 20 So you could tell her mother was looking for her and was pretty freaked out.

Speaker 45 Yeah.

Speaker 8 And so it began a decades-long mystery.

Speaker 65 Though the first part, where was Angela, was not a mystery for long.

Speaker 61 No,

Speaker 8 that was when the horror began.

Speaker 20 Are you sure this is happening?

Speaker 16 It's unbelievable.

Speaker 2 Angela Brasso's workmates knew right away that Monday morning in 1992, this was no ordinary absence, not a case of nerves, no sudden unannounced resignation.

Speaker 3 Something was up, and it couldn't be good.

Speaker 45 She never would have, you know, not come in on time on this particular day.

Speaker 47 It was her 22nd birthday, and Jill Kelly knew she had worked hard to prepare for her very first class as an instructor.

Speaker 46 So, where was she?

Speaker 6 Angela's mother, thousands of miles to the east, could only phone and phone and phone.

Speaker 16 It wasn't like Angela not to pick up, and she was really concerned, really upset.

Speaker 65 Angela's boyfriend had called her mother the night before, told her Angela left to ride her bike, but didn't come home.

Speaker 49 He got so worried, he called the police to report her missing.

Speaker 68 She'd gone on a bike ride, which was somewhat routine for her.

Speaker 69 Kevin Robinson was the spokesperson for the Phoenix Police back then.

Speaker 68 She would always come home in time enough to watch a particular show on television. So it it was so unusual when she didn't come back.

Speaker 70 Angela's boyfriend Joe told police he had stayed home Sunday night to bake Angela a birthday cake but after an hour or so passed he went out on his bike to look for her at 8 30 at 9 30 and again just before 11 p.m no sign of her and that is when joe called 911 But police noted this.

Speaker 21 After he reported Angela missing, he called another woman who came to their apartment just before midnight. He said he didn't want to be alone.

Speaker 68 There were some strange things about it, most definitely, and so obviously it drew the attention of the detectives who may want to just find out a little bit more.

Speaker 3 Police learned that Angela and Joe had been dating for more than a year and a half.

Speaker 4 They rented an apartment together when she moved to Phoenix in June of 92.

Speaker 32 They'd even bought matching 21-speed diamond-backed Topanga mountain bikes.

Speaker 74 Angela's was her favorite color, purple.

Speaker 45 She loved life and she enjoyed riding her bike and she was, you know, 22 and fearless.

Speaker 6 Angela had always been bold.

Speaker 48 She grew up in a small Pennsylvania town called Camp Hill, but moved across the country to study at the DeVry Institute of Technology in Los Angeles.

Speaker 49 And she was a good student, eager, ambitious.

Speaker 4 Deb Littlejohn was impressed.

Speaker 16 Her genuineness came through in her interview and she had a sense of humor, you could tell. She'd always make you laugh or smile.

Speaker 18 We kind of got there at the same time.

Speaker 52 Chuck Fitzgerald was a co-worker.

Speaker 32 He and she were both assigned to the new interactive voice response system.

Speaker 18 It was new stuff that no one else was ever doing. So it was pretty exciting to be involved in all that, both for me and I think for her as well.

Speaker 20 And she figured it out.

Speaker 71 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 73 Oh, yeah, she figured it out. Yep, she was bright.

Speaker 4 No way Angela would miss teaching her first class.

Speaker 45 Unless she couldn't show up.

Speaker 53 All that day they waited and worried.

Speaker 70 And then late afternoon, detectives showed up at the door.

Speaker 2 A woman's body had been found by the canal.

Speaker 21 And they knew now

Speaker 11 this was Angela's.

Speaker 33 She had been murdered, sexually assaulted, and stabbed to death.

Speaker 45 Now that was horrific.

Speaker 45 First she's missing, and you don't know where she is, and then you find out that she was killed, and it just affected us incredibly for just months and even years. And even now, when I think about it,

Speaker 45 I feel the same way that I did way back then.

Speaker 16 You have a lot of people who work for for you that come and go, but when you have something like this go on, it really kind of cements you in the moment.

Speaker 76 Chuck was at a sales meeting halfway around the world in Thailand when he heard what happened, bit by bit.

Speaker 18 I remember sharing every one of those conversations we had with the Sinelex CEO.

Speaker 18 just what that did to the atmosphere of the sales meeting, learning what had happened.

Speaker 20 What did that feel like when you heard it?

Speaker 18 It was just bizarre.

Speaker 67 This can't be happening.

Speaker 22 Angie, really?

Speaker 18 It just couldn't be happening.

Speaker 70 Oh, but it was.

Speaker 77 And it was about to get

Speaker 59 worse.

Speaker 18 And then details started coming.

Speaker 70 It was surreal.

Speaker 68 A lot of detectives who had been on the department for a very long time, had seen a lot of things, had never seen anything as bad as this.

Speaker 28 On the afternoon of November 9th, 1992, William Herman got the assignment he will never forget.

Speaker 2 Herman had been following an unusual career path.

Speaker 65 A year earlier, he had left his job as a school principal to work for the Arizona Republic newspaper.

Speaker 26 I got a call that day and they said, we need you to come in early and go out. They told me we're up by Cactus Road and the I-17.
They said, you'll figure it out when you get there. And I did.

Speaker 53 It was serious.

Speaker 38 There could be no doubt about that.

Speaker 35 Just based on the area the police had cordoned off.

Speaker 78 How bad, though?

Speaker 31 He couldn't tell.

Speaker 75 Couldn't see the crime scene.

Speaker 35 So he turned to a friend.

Speaker 26 A television reporter I knew had a long lens on it, and he let me take a look, and it was about as bad as it gets.

Speaker 20 What did you see?

Speaker 26 It was of a woman's naked body. She had shoes and socks on, I believe, but the head was gone.
She'd been beheaded.

Speaker 17 Oh, my God.

Speaker 26 I tell you, obviously, my blood froze, and she was eviscerated. That is burned into my brain.
That is burned into my brain.

Speaker 42 I'll never, ever forget that.

Speaker 68 It was a extremely horrific, gruesome murder.

Speaker 35 For those who knew Angela, the news was simply unbelievable.

Speaker 16 We, as a group, the whole group of us, got together and went over to where they found her.

Speaker 22 We couldn't believe it.

Speaker 30 We were all shocked.

Speaker 16 And of course, distraught.

Speaker 20 I can't imagine what that must have felt like.

Speaker 16 It leaves you kind of numb.

Speaker 26 I sat down in the dirt and wrote my story and called it into my editor.

Speaker 26 But I stayed out there looking and trying to get police to talk to me. And they were under orders not to talk to the likes of me, I can tell you that.

Speaker 12 No one could understand the sheer brutality of it.

Speaker 3 In something like a state of shock, Reporter Herman joined others in a bacabra and fruitless search.

Speaker 26 As I was looking for Angela Brasso's head, there was a feeling of the horror of the thing. And there were other people out there, you know, and someone would pass me, a police firefighter,

Speaker 26 and we'd exchange looks of,

Speaker 26 you know, and the look said, good God,

Speaker 26 this is the worst, you know, and some few murmured words.

Speaker 37 Nor did the horror end.

Speaker 19 For more than a week, police searched for the rest of Angela Brasso.

Speaker 33 And finally, on the 11th day, a local drifter called the Fisher King, for his habit of fishing the canal,

Speaker 2 found her head in the water.

Speaker 41 He said he just came upon it.

Speaker 65 But police said it seemed preserved somehow, as if refrigerated.

Speaker 33 And the whole city seemed to shudder.

Speaker 26 It caught hold of everyone. It was in the air.

Speaker 62 There was something else in the air, too.

Speaker 51 Fear.

Speaker 26 My God, there is a madman on the loose. You know, there is a bad guy out there.
Everybody wanted to find this guy.

Speaker 68 This is somebody who identified a victim, attacked that victim, killed that victim. And were they capable of doing that another time? Or have they done it already?

Speaker 20 Were there any obvious things like any clues or any witnesses who may have seen something happen?

Speaker 68 No, there wasn't.

Speaker 68 When you talk about starting at ground zero, that's truly where the detectives started.

Speaker 8 But why Angela?

Speaker 4 Either she was just an unlucky random victim, or,

Speaker 75 well, there's a kind of killing that is sadly more common.

Speaker 74 A killing that often involves overkill, a huge amount of rage, the domestic kind.

Speaker 6 And Angela's friends began wondering about the boyfriend, Joe, who said he was at home baking a cake.

Speaker 16 We thought it was someone she knew at the time.

Speaker 20 That she was living with?

Speaker 16 A boyfriend, yeah.

Speaker 2 Police said that friends and co-workers told them the couple may have been on the cusp of breaking up, that he could be jealous, and her mother didn't approve of him.

Speaker 68 You go about talking to people who were close to her. In this case, the boyfriend, most definitely.

Speaker 68 That's always something that has to be done.

Speaker 9 Later, Joe spoke by phone to NBC affiliate KPNX in Phoenix.

Speaker 83 They went through my whole apartment.

Speaker 84 You know, they found this knife in my kitchen sink that had this pinkish red material on it. And he's like, can you explain this? And I'm like, yeah, it's for the birthday kick and that's icing.

Speaker 2 Three times they interviewed Joe.

Speaker 75 Three times he swore he didn't do it.

Speaker 2 And then less than five months after Angela was killed, the DNA found on her body ruled out Joe altogether.

Speaker 21 Though, didn't feel like it to him.

Speaker 84 In the media's eye or in the public's eye, there are probably people that swore I did it.

Speaker 70 But there was someone else in Angela's life who caught the attention of detectives.

Speaker 4 One of Angela's professors at DeVry, police believed he had a crush on her.

Speaker 2 Could he be angry that she didn't return his feelings?

Speaker 50 They traveled out to DeVry in California to speak to him.

Speaker 68 You're going to look at people closest to the victim to make sure there wasn't something, something nefarious, something going on there that you're unaware of.

Speaker 12 The professor told police he had seen Angela in LA just days before she was murdered.

Speaker 3 They had drinks, he said, and then she flew back home to Phoenix.

Speaker 32 Investigators were also chasing down a lead about Angela's purple diamond-backed Topanga mountain bike.

Speaker 11 A clerk at a Circle K near Angela's apartment had tried to sell a bike that looked similar.

Speaker 49 Was he the killer?

Speaker 58 Or did the killer keep the bike discarded somewhere?

Speaker 53 There was a chance at least that the bike might lead them to the killer, so they distributed a photograph.

Speaker 11 Crime reporter William Herman kept a copy of it in his pocket.

Speaker 26 To show it to people, you know, and the police thought if maybe that bike had been abandoned somewhere. Oh, I saw a bike just like that.
That would have been invaluable to the police.

Speaker 20 Did it seem like the police were working as hard as they should have been at this to solve the case?

Speaker 30 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 16 We talked to them several times.

Speaker 16 They came to work and, of course, interviewed everybody at work.

Speaker 58 But all their efforts produced no break at all.

Speaker 28 Though there were still persons of interest, the professor, the Fisher King who found Angela's head.

Speaker 82 They both insisted they were innocent.

Speaker 52 And then, 10 months after the killing of Angela Brasso, A woman named Charlotte took a ride on the bike path beside the canal.

Speaker 85 All of a sudden, I noticed there were drag marks, and it went right around here, and my feet were right on the edge of this canal here, and I saw nothing but just drag marks of blood going into the canal.

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Speaker 38 It was early when they climbed on their bikes that September morning, almost a year after Angela was killed.

Speaker 33 As usual, Charlotte Fottle, her sister, and their kids took the canal path racing along wind in their hair toward a local playground near the canal.

Speaker 85 So that particular day, we came up here pretty fast, and right as I got up here, there was a big puddle.

Speaker 1 Odd.

Speaker 32 Not the sort of thing you'd expect to see on the path on a hot September morning.

Speaker 85 The reflection was hard to tell what color it was. And so I just assumed it was a puddle of water or something.

Speaker 17 Right here, Ruth.

Speaker 30 Right up here.

Speaker 42 She shook it off, no big deal, and on they went.

Speaker 40 But as she pushed her daughter on the swing, she wondered about that puddle.

Speaker 30 What was it?

Speaker 85 I was very uneasy, and so we hurried back on our bikes and started heading back home this way.

Speaker 85 So once the sun was to my back, I could see right where the puddle was right up here that it had a red tint to it. And it was pretty big.

Speaker 85 And so I stopped and I had my sister hold the bike and I got down and looked at it really close to see is it what I really think this is?

Speaker 85 But still in my mind logically trying to make excuses for it. Like this isn't blood.
This isn't.

Speaker 20 Well, you wouldn't think it could be, right?

Speaker 17 Right, right. You had to be a mistake.

Speaker 85 Right, but I, all of a sudden I noticed there were drag marks, and it went right around here. And so I followed over to the drag marks, walked around the tree, and then it led me back right here.

Speaker 85 And then I noticed the drag marks went off right here.

Speaker 85 You just have this eerie feeling about you.

Speaker 73 Eerie, I would say.

Speaker 85 Yeah, you need to get out. Need to get out of here.
And so we quickly hopped on our bikes and struggled with the thought

Speaker 85 that was a big mall at the time and we had to use pay phones and I really struggled with do I stop and call 911 at a pay phone or do I just hurry and get home and decide from there and still all the way home trying to rationalize did I really see what I saw is that real what else could it be and should I call the police

Speaker 37 she did

Speaker 47 and before long investigators were following those drag marks to a young woman's body floating in the canal Oh, my heart just sunk and just that sick feeling.

Speaker 2 Crime reporter William Herman heard about it on a police scanner and made his way back to the canal and found a contact with Phoenix Police.

Speaker 26 And he said, we found the body of a young woman in the canal, profound injuries to her chest.

Speaker 26 And I said, was she riding a bike?

Speaker 26 And he said, you guessed it, buddy. And the bike's gone.
And I just, you know, my heart sort of sunk. I thought,

Speaker 26 God,

Speaker 26 here he is again. He said, I'm not, he said, I'm not saying that, William.
We are not saying yet that this is our guy.

Speaker 9 But of course, it had to be.

Speaker 74 Again, there were signs of sexual assault.

Speaker 12 Again, he'd used a knife.

Speaker 80 And again,

Speaker 48 seemed to know very well how to use it.

Speaker 68 One particular wound was delivered that may have incapacitated her, you know, killed her right then toward the back.

Speaker 68 So there was a thought maybe this person really understood that type of thing, what could incapacitate someone immediately with one type of blow.

Speaker 4 He'd carved letters into her skin, as if sending some kind of sickening message.

Speaker 11 And then police discovered his victim was a teenager, just 17 years old, a high school kid named Melanie Burnes.

Speaker 25 I believe I found out at school.

Speaker 11 Rachel Shepmaker was her close friend.

Speaker 25 It just just, it was hell, you know. They let her friends come together and just kind of grieve together.

Speaker 25 They brought counselors in for whoever wanted to talk. And

Speaker 25 I think my mom just picked me up and took me home. But I remember I wanted to be with Melanie's friends who all loved her closely.

Speaker 25 But it was horrible.

Speaker 20 What does that do to you when a friend who's that close to you just suddenly is killed that way?

Speaker 25 The way she she was killed

Speaker 25 just traumatizes you. It's not like she, you know, it's not like something innocent happened to her and she fell, she died in her sleep.

Speaker 91 She was brutally attacked and murdered.

Speaker 53 Some information was withheld, of course, things only the killer would know.

Speaker 37 Well, police started from scratch again.

Speaker 51 For one thing, piecing together Melanie's last hours, starting with the night before, when she went out for an evening bike ride and didn't come home.

Speaker 54 Her mom had called our house frantically at 11 p.m.

Speaker 25 trying to find her, and my mom just said, no,

Speaker 25 she's not here. Rachel's in bed sleeping.

Speaker 21 Thing was, Melanie had planned to go riding with a friend, but then her friend had to work late, so Melanie climbed on her bike and struck out on her own.

Speaker 2 They found her body more than 10 miles from home.

Speaker 92 And the first thought that came to to my head was, how the heck did she get all the way out there?

Speaker 53 Daphne Marcus was a neighbor back then.

Speaker 92 She could be shy at first and a bit quiet, but once you had an opportunity to get to know her and get, you know, in kind of her inner circle, that's when she opened up quite a bit more and she was energetic and happy.

Speaker 11 Melanie had just started her junior year at Arcadia High School.

Speaker 25 She wasn't a party animal and distracted by the social scene. She had her close close circle of friends and she just took her school seriously.

Speaker 32 William Herman, a former principal, remember, happened to know one of Melanie's teachers and spoke with him.

Speaker 26 He said, we're not allowing any media on the campus meet me, and he named a sandwich shop by Arcady High School. So I went out and my friend was in tears.

Speaker 26 He said, we loved her, we loved her, and all the students loved Melanie.

Speaker 19 What was it about this path?

Speaker 59 And bicycles?

Speaker 10 That the killer was horribly depraved was just all too depressingly obvious, but

Speaker 20 was he a serial killer?

Speaker 5 Plainclothes police officers wandered up and down these paths as decoys for months, but looking for what they didn't exactly know.

Speaker 46 Even as regular folk increasingly stayed away, the man had struck twice.

Speaker 59 Might he do so again?

Speaker 16 You just couldn't believe

Speaker 73 that

Speaker 16 that it could happen to another person.

Speaker 20 Must have seemed like there was a monster out there somewhere.

Speaker 73 Absolutely.

Speaker 67 Absolutely.

Speaker 28 A monster who knew how to use a knife.

Speaker 49 Well, at least the police knew that.

Speaker 38 It might be a way to find him.

Speaker 39 Phoenix wasn't the same after the murders of Angela Brosso and Melanie Burnes.

Speaker 25 It just changes the way you live.

Speaker 81 Melanie's friends, Rachel and Daphne.

Speaker 25 It changed me instantly. I stopped walking the canal.
I stopped, I would not exercise alone.

Speaker 25 I wouldn't pretty much, I wouldn't walk anywhere alone or, you know, do anything, always looking over your shoulder.

Speaker 92 I think during that time, you know, for most of us, you know, young women, you were more self-aware of everything, everybody that was around you, because you never know what could happen.

Speaker 68 People very quickly realize that there was someone out there who was now responsible for the death of two women, two women who were on the canal. So now everything starts back up again.

Speaker 68 If it had died down a little bit from the first incident, it definitely heightened back up right away.

Speaker 32 Kevin Robinson, Phoenix Police spokesperson at the time, said the department had to walk a fine line between warning the public about a potential serial killer while not jeopardizing the investigation.

Speaker 68 You're going to release a little bit more information than what you normally would so that someone might identify or remember seeing something.

Speaker 3 The Phoenix police went public with a piece of evidence they hoped might actually produce a breakthrough.

Speaker 40 The killer had thrown Melanie's clothes in a nearby trash bin, but had dressed her in an ill-fitting lycra bodysuit post-mortem.

Speaker 2 Might anybody recognize it?

Speaker 25 I think the assumption was that he put that on her after.

Speaker 20 Whoever killed her must have done that.

Speaker 20 That adds a layer of something, doesn't it?

Speaker 30 Yeah.

Speaker 32 So, what do you wonder about?

Speaker 25 You have to turn your brain off at some point and not keep on thinking, like, what was she thinking? How is she feeling?

Speaker 25 My prayer is that she

Speaker 25 blacked out right away and doesn't know that she

Speaker 25 was mentally, emotionally saved a little bit from all the trauma that he put her through.

Speaker 49 Whoever killed Melanie began his assault with a single, carefully placed thrust of a very sharp knife.

Speaker 28 Just as he had done to Angela.

Speaker 49 So police thought maybe the killer had specialized training, maybe military.

Speaker 21 Remember Angelus Professor from DeVry, who police had interviewed?

Speaker 40 Turned out he'd been a major in Army Special Forces.

Speaker 28 So police kept him on their list and kept looking literally everywhere.

Speaker 26 They were looking all over the world for similar crimes.

Speaker 20 How much concern was there that this guy would strike again?

Speaker 26 There was plenty of concern.

Speaker 39 But no evidence to tie any of their persons of interest to the murders.

Speaker 20 Pressure had to be just enormous.

Speaker 68 That's in the back of your mind. You know, they've done it twice, at least twice.
And are they capable of offending again? The odds will tell you yes.

Speaker 68 Experts will tell you that in a lot of these cases, the only thing that stops these folks is either getting arrested and going to prison, or they die.

Speaker 68 They don't just stop cold turkey in most cases.

Speaker 40 Disturbing.

Speaker 68 Extremely disturbing. But you have to realize that we have people like that that are out there, people who are capable of acting on those types of instincts.

Speaker 68 And it was incumbent upon the homicide detectives to identify anybody who could be responsible for these crimes and to get them apprehended and convicted as quickly as possible.

Speaker 28 And yet,

Speaker 32 it didn't lead anywhere.

Speaker 20 I mean, the case went cold.

Speaker 68 Unfortunately, it did.

Speaker 78 What more could they do?

Speaker 76 And years went by, but there were no more similar murders along the canal.

Speaker 2 And gradually, the assumption hardened that the killer was gone, maybe left town, maybe was dead. That's what the police told the families and friends of Angela and Melanie.

Speaker 92 I was disappointed that they hadn't found anybody to make them pay for what they did.

Speaker 25 I thought we would never know who did this. I gave gave up.
I thought, we'll never know.

Speaker 9 Until this guy came along.

Speaker 15 I remember reading word for word, and I was traumatized by what I read. It was almost as if I was reading about something truly evil.

Speaker 21 Somewhere in all this, there was an answer, just had to be.

Speaker 17 All he had to do was find it.

Speaker 15 It became kind of an obsession to keep researching:

Speaker 15 What is this?

Speaker 10 Anniversaries came and went.

Speaker 12 Anniversaries of the killings by the canal.

Speaker 42 Those who loved and missed Angela and Melanie were left to wonder if they would ever know who killed them and why.

Speaker 20 Did it seem like the police were investigating all the while or like they'd maybe given up?

Speaker 25 I thought they gave up for sure. I think they tried their hardest for so many years and leads were just ending and so they have to move on to the next case.

Speaker 26 And then reporters looking for stories and anniversary dates would write a story and they tell it over again and the police are glad for that in the hopes of waking it up.

Speaker 91 But nothing did.

Speaker 37 Until 2011, when a sergeant named Troy Hillman, who headed up the cold case unit, opted to take on the ultimate challenge.

Speaker 4 Almost 20 years after the murders, he would try to give the families some answers.

Speaker 15 We didn't want to give them false hope. We didn't want to say, hey, we're definitely going to prove this and find our killer, but we're going to give it one heck of a shot.

Speaker 2 William Shire and Dominic Rostenberg had joined the unit too and, first things first, pulled out the old case file.

Speaker 7 It was a room full of files.

Speaker 22 We had probably 800 people that had been interviewed, that had been questions.

Speaker 34 800 people?

Speaker 22 At least.

Speaker 17 Wow.

Speaker 2 A lot of changed since the early 90s.

Speaker 53 For one thing, DNA.

Speaker 35 The science had certainly advanced, even as the case grew cold.

Speaker 32 One thing the DNA could confirm was what they had long suspected.

Speaker 95 The male DNA sample matched both the girls, so we knew it was the same person.

Speaker 71 One man, two murders.

Speaker 38 The killer's DNA profile was uploaded to CODIS, the National DNA database, back in 2000, but no matches, meaning the killer's DNA was not in the system.

Speaker 69 Of course, Phoenix Police had received hundreds of tips after the murders, and some led them to persons of interest who had provided blood samples.

Speaker 89 But many, and there were many, had not.

Speaker 22 Just seeing the amount of people that were contacted along the canal banks and how many dangerous predators, it was a lot of people.

Speaker 48 So, where to begin?

Speaker 2 It happened that Hillman was an accountant first and then a cop.

Speaker 21 So, we approached the case like an audit, line by line.

Speaker 15 We cast a wide net to make sure that

Speaker 15 we get everything because there could be just that morsel in there. So getting organized was priority one.

Speaker 2 First, they came up with a long list of people the original detectives had looked into, but from whom they had not collected DNA.

Speaker 15 There were a host of names that we saw and were intrigued by and needed to rule out.

Speaker 20 And how'd you go about doing that?

Speaker 15 We put two detectives on a plane to basically get their blood samples so that we could

Speaker 15 do DNA comparison.

Speaker 20 Just tracking them all down must have been rather difficult.

Speaker 15 Yeah, we traveled all over the country.

Speaker 12 But Hillman decided he needed to go beyond traditional methods.

Speaker 32 So he sought out the Vedak Society in Philadelphia, forensic experts and investigators who volunteered to review difficult cases.

Speaker 15 They call themselves the modern-day Sherlock Holmes.

Speaker 12 The Vedak Society gave Hillman possible characteristics of the killer.

Speaker 35 a man still living in the area who had committed earlier crimes, perhaps set fires or acted out fantasies.

Speaker 74 They agreed with that earlier theory that the killer likely had a military background, but added they were looking for a sexual sadist motivated by people's pain.

Speaker 15 One of the biggest nuggets they taught us was they kept saying, in a case like this, he's in your files. 95%

Speaker 15 chance he's in your files.

Speaker 32 So Hillman and the detectives took another look at men who had attracted suspicion early on, including the professor who police heard had a crush on Angela.

Speaker 15 We had received an anonymous tip that every time somebody mentioned Angela, he would go into a hysteria and an emotional rage. And he just made some really kind of odd statements that we found.

Speaker 15 And the fact that he was a major in the special forces, we said, we need to go talk to this guy and we need to get his DNA.

Speaker 32 Off they went to Maryland to knock on his door and collect his DNA.

Speaker 15 I think every time that we would get excited, we'd get the DNA, we'd wait.

Speaker 11 But once the results came in, he was ruled out.

Speaker 15 It was like a punch in the stomach.

Speaker 22 You get frustrated and you get upset about it for a minute and then you just kind of get back on the bandwagon.

Speaker 35 They went back to that theory that the killer might have been trained for combat and tracked down former U.S.

Speaker 74 Air Force pilots who'd been stationed at nearby Luke Air Force Base back in the early 90s.

Speaker 15 It's not too far from the crime scenes, so we thought maybe he's hiding in plain sight.

Speaker 4 These are people who would be based there for a little while.

Speaker 20 They might be based somewhere else. They could be scattered all around the world, really.

Speaker 15 Absolutely.

Speaker 95 Right around.

Speaker 39 Detectives even contacted authorities in Europe when they heard of a similar crime there.

Speaker 15 Two young women that were killed in the early 90s in a similar fashion. One was in Amsterdam and one was in Germany.

Speaker 59 But

Speaker 21 no connection.

Speaker 15 My wife can attest that I truthfully became obsessed by this case. I desperately wanted to figure this out.

Speaker 39 And maybe that's why Hillman agreed to meet with a woman from California who had been pitching an idea that sounded crazy.

Speaker 15 It's new technology, it's unproven, there's a little bit of fear behind it.

Speaker 4 Fear, resistance, and a big gamble,

Speaker 35 and a world-changing result.

Speaker 4 Sergeant Troy Hillman and his cold case detectives have been dealing with the ups and downs of their investigation into the Arizona Canal murders for three long, frustrating years.

Speaker 15 I always describe it as a roller coaster ride.

Speaker 2 Their most promising leads had been ruled out by DNA, and they were no closer to an arrest than they were when the murders happened more than 20 years ago.

Speaker 11 And that's when one of his detectives left him a voicemail.

Speaker 15 And she said, hey, boss. He's like, I got this strange phone call from a woman that says she's a forensic genealogy.
Would you take a listen?

Speaker 7 But why not?

Speaker 21 They tried everything else.

Speaker 57 Which is how Troy Hillman found himself on the phone with this woman, Colleen Fitzpatrick.

Speaker 9 Dr. Colleen Fitzpatrick.

Speaker 48 She is a forensic genealogist, which means, she told the detective, that she uses a person's DNA profile, that unique sequence we all have, to figure out not exactly who they are, but who they're related to.

Speaker 4 A similar process people use to find distant relatives on Ancestry DNA or 23andMe.

Speaker 16 It became very common for an adoptee to test with one of those companies and find their birth parents.

Speaker 33 Dr.

Speaker 21 Fitzpatrick said she'd figured out a way to reverse the process and use genealogy databases to work her way toward the owner of that unknown male DNA, or Y DNA, police had collected from the crime scenes.

Speaker 16 I could get DNA from cold cases, Y DNA, and compare them to the genetic genealogy Y DNA databases and maybe come up with a last name for killers.

Speaker 14 It's not that you can say it was Individual individual A or individual B, but that it was this family, which includes A, B, C, and D.

Speaker 20 And so look into those guys and you might find that.

Speaker 16 No, it was even simpler than that. I supplied a name, the last name for their killer.

Speaker 2 Remember, this was back in 2014.

Speaker 49 It was four years before the arrest of the Golden State killer.

Speaker 29 The mystery surrounding an infamous killing spree that confounded investigators for decades.

Speaker 8 That case.

Speaker 49 Widely celebrated for using a very similar technique.

Speaker 53 But no one knew about that when Dr.

Speaker 52 Fitzpatrick traveled to Phoenix and told the detectives what she thought she could do.

Speaker 15 It was quiet in the room amongst the team members, and we were trying to absorb what she was talking about.

Speaker 74 Of course, they were eager to try anything, but this was brand new, nothing police had ever used before.

Speaker 4 And they'd have to share the killer's DNA profile with someone outside the investigation, Dr.

Speaker 11 Fitzpatrick.

Speaker 38 Plus, it wasn't cheap, which became the next next challenge.

Speaker 15 It was about three months on trying to push the upper chain of command to approve this because

Speaker 15 they thought they had fears of it endangering our investigation. My team and I tried to say there's no downside risk.

Speaker 15 We spend more money traveling across the country looking for DNA than we do on this. So this is worth a shot.

Speaker 15 I think at one point we almost took up a collection and just kind of went rogue and did it by ourselves.

Speaker 20 Is that how it eventually got paid for?

Speaker 15 No, eventually

Speaker 15 a chief decided to sign it.

Speaker 77 What'd you do? How did you work with her?

Speaker 15 We didn't provide her really any details about the investigation other than

Speaker 15 we provided her with some type of DNA sequence.

Speaker 39 Dr. Fitzpatrick went to work.

Speaker 14 Weeks went by.

Speaker 76 Nobody heard a word.

Speaker 77 So, was it a waste of money?

Speaker 74 Another dead end?

Speaker 21 No,

Speaker 21 it was not.

Speaker 5 She had a result.

Speaker 16 I came up with the name Miller, turned it into the police.

Speaker 15 I remember getting the call, and I was with extended family, and she said, hey, Troy, I think his surname is Miller.

Speaker 20 Did that make any sense to you, that somebody would come up with a name?

Speaker 15 At this point in the investigation, it made enough sense for me to want to rush out and go check our files.

Speaker 75 So one of his detectives went to the basement and pulled files with the last name Miller.

Speaker 15 And he threw them on my desk. I shut the door.
I started looking through the Millers. And when I got to a certain file, I

Speaker 15 was interested. And

Speaker 15 it sent

Speaker 15 chills up my spine.

Speaker 21 The name on the file?

Speaker 1 Brian Patrick Miller.

Speaker 15 It was about a half an inch thick file. And on the top of it, it said anonymous tip.

Speaker 20 It was an old tip, decades old.

Speaker 9 It had to do with the turquoise bodysuit Melanie Burness was wearing when she was found.

Speaker 15 An anonymous person called in and said a roommate of Brian's had seen that same bodysuit that was found on Melanie.

Speaker 95 The tip was looked at and based on Brian's age and the circumstances that they felt at the time.

Speaker 95 He was too young to have been the one that had done this.

Speaker 8 And there was more.

Speaker 3 Back in 1990, a few years before Angela and Melanie were killed, Miller's mother told the police she was afraid of her teenage son.

Speaker 75 She gave them something he had written, something

Speaker 40 ghoulish, awful.

Speaker 53 He had called it the plan.

Speaker 71 And there it was.

Speaker 78 Still in the old file.

Speaker 15 It described step by step

Speaker 15 what the author intended to do to this woman.

Speaker 15 It was eerily similar to what happened to our victims. It was in the file? It was in the file.

Speaker 20 And had been on along. Wow.

Speaker 15 It had been all along, yes.

Speaker 38 Did it make you wonder why that was not acted on earlier?

Speaker 15 To a degree, yes.

Speaker 4 What Miller wrote in the plan was certainly disturbing.

Speaker 36 It didn't prove anything, mind you.

Speaker 74 Certainly not that he'd committed actual murders, but

Speaker 2 there was another name in the Miller file, too.

Speaker 6 And another hair-raising story.

Speaker 44 I wouldn't doubt that's what he was trying to do, or at least getting there.

Speaker 35 It was the spring of 1989.

Speaker 3 Angela Brasso was graduating from high school.

Speaker 48 Melanie Burness was a carefree kid in middle school.

Speaker 33 It was three years before the terrors on the canal.

Speaker 44 I felt very safe. I, you know, I rode the bus all the time.

Speaker 35 Celeste Bentley was 24 years old then, had lived in Phoenix all her life, and to her, it was easy routine to ride the bus the five miles from home to her job at a store near the Paradise Valley Mall.

Speaker 44 The drive to Paradise Valley was very short. It was a straight shot to the mall.

Speaker 21 That morning, the morning of May 17th, 1989, she wore her favorite lime green shirt with white pants.

Speaker 21 She noticed as she got on the bus a young man sitting near her.

Speaker 44 Kind of a bookworm-looking kid, and I just acknowledged him. I kind of realized there was someone there, you know.

Speaker 36 And then she sat back and thought about nothing in particular as the bus rumbled

Speaker 44 And they drop us off in the front of the mall.

Speaker 40 It was when she was walking across the parking lot that she sensed it.

Speaker 1 Someone behind her.

Speaker 44 I had gotten about halfway across and I had realized that he was walking behind me.

Speaker 44 And I had just glanced over my shoulder and I saw that, you know, he was still walking behind me, but it was a ways back.

Speaker 39 That nerdy kid must have gotten off the bus too, she figured.

Speaker 44 Then I was walking and all of a sudden I just felt something hit me in the back and he ran by me. He ran ran fast right by me.

Speaker 44 I kind of turned and yelled at him and grabbed my back and I was like, what the heck did you do that?

Speaker 55 You know, what the heck do you hit me for?

Speaker 44 And he just kept running. And then I pulled my hand in front of me and realized that there was blood on my hand.
And so I started panicking.

Speaker 77 It felt like you'd been hit.

Speaker 44 Yeah, it felt like I had been punched in the back.

Speaker 14 What was that like?

Speaker 20 Was it confusion? Was it terror? Was it what?

Speaker 44 I was very afraid. I couldn't believe it.
Why would he punch me in the back?

Speaker 44 And then when I saw the blood, I couldn't believe it and knew that he had stabbed me or something and I started running to my work and I had to go through that parking lot and I got to my work and started ringing the buzzer to get in.

Speaker 72 You're bleeding all the way? Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 44 The manager came and opened the door and let me in and I was like screaming, oh my god, I've been stabbed, I've been stabbed and everybody was kind of like all in a panic and they were calling 911 and took me back to the break room and we were waiting for the police and fire to come.

Speaker 7 Once inside the ambulance, she began to learn more about her injury.

Speaker 44 It was about an inch and a half long, and then they said it had gone in. I believe it was like an inch and a half to two inches in.

Speaker 79 Whoa.

Speaker 17 Yeah.

Speaker 12 She gave the police a description of the person who had attacked her and it didn't take long.

Speaker 43 They tracked him down at a nearby apartment complex and then they brought him to the ambulance.

Speaker 6 Is this him?

Speaker 17 They asked.

Speaker 44 They had the doors open. They had him standing right at the doors.

Speaker 20 What feeling went to that?

Speaker 44 I just was in shock and couldn't believe that this person had stabbed me.

Speaker 14 Did he look sorry?

Speaker 44 No, he looked blank.

Speaker 44 He looked very blank and very

Speaker 27 just

Speaker 44 strange, like not even caring.

Speaker 26 That's weird.

Speaker 44 Yeah, it was...

Speaker 44 It was weird.

Speaker 19 It was the kid from the bus, 16 years old.

Speaker 40 He had used a stake knife to stab her in the back.

Speaker 44 The doctors at the hospital had said that had he held the blade flat, horizontal instead of vertical, it would have gone straight through and punctured organs.

Speaker 44 But he had held it vertical and it hit my ribs and slid around inside instead of going through the ribs.

Speaker 20 Whoa, the small things that make a big difference.

Speaker 17 Yeah.

Speaker 20 I mean, it could have killed you.

Speaker 44 Definitely.

Speaker 55 Yes.

Speaker 65 The name of this person who'd almost killed her?

Speaker 7 Brian Patrick Miller.

Speaker 49 More than two decades later, Sergeant Troy Hillman read the police report about Celeste's attack.

Speaker 9 The original investigator had written, I asked Brian if he did it to see what it felt like.

Speaker 58 Brian said, Yes, I guess that's why I did it.

Speaker 15 One of the officers asked him, Hey, Brian, what did this make you feel? And he said it sent chills up his spine.

Speaker 17 Oh, my.

Speaker 15 At that point, I was even more hook line and sinker.

Speaker 46 This is our guy.

Speaker 15 This guy's looking good.

Speaker 32 Miller eventually pleaded guilty to attempted murder, but as a juvenile, he served only a year in detention.

Speaker 39 For a while, it seemed he had turned his life around.

Speaker 98 He's real shy, yeah.

Speaker 33 He worked for a religious charitable organization.

Speaker 3 And here he is in a home movie with family in 1992.

Speaker 4 This was just months before the first murder at the canal.

Speaker 98 So anyway,

Speaker 38 by 1999, he got married, had a daughter, and moved away, he and his young family, to the Seattle area, where Miller got in trouble again.

Speaker 12 He was arrested in May 2002 for stabbing a woman.

Speaker 49 He claimed it was self-defense and was found not guilty by a jury.

Speaker 20 So late 2014, was he easy to find? Was he around?

Speaker 15 Yeah, he was definitely not hiding.

Speaker 28 Miller and his wife eventually moved back to Arizona.

Speaker 71 They divorced, but their daughter lived with her dad, with Brian, in this simple home.

Speaker 33 Now he was the focus of the cold case unit.

Speaker 15 It was like a beehive of activity where everybody was researching Brian Patrick Miller, and we began to really unlock Brian Miller.

Speaker 95 area.

Speaker 35 He seemed to be living a normal life, worked at an Amazon warehouse.

Speaker 42 But at night?

Speaker 53 At night,

Speaker 35 he was something else entirely.

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Speaker 21 These bike trails go all the way down to the canals about a mile and cold case detectives investigating the death of two young women along the canal were looking into one Brian Patrick Miller, whose life appeared unremarkable.

Speaker 2 Single dad living in a central Phoenix neighborhood, he worked at an Amazon distribution warehouse.

Speaker 65 A typical guy with a typical life.

Speaker 59 That is, until you saw what he drove to work.

Speaker 60 The zombie hunter car.

Speaker 23 The zombie hunter car, yeah, with the dummy in the back.

Speaker 20 Dummy in the back?

Speaker 23 Dummy in the back. You take a left turn and it slides to the right.
You take a right turn and it slides back behind him.

Speaker 10 That dummy was actually a life-size zombie doll.

Speaker 76 The car was part of a fantasy persona Miller took on called the Zombie Hunter.

Speaker 6 He and his friend Keena Zaria would cruise around in the decked-out car with props, including the dummy in the back seat.

Speaker 20 It was his daily driver, was it?

Speaker 23 It was. He had everything there, bars, handcuffs.

Speaker 24 My, my, my.

Speaker 21 It was a real police car that Miller modified.

Speaker 2 Instead of red and blue LED lights, the zombie hunter mobile flashed green.

Speaker 40 Faked blood splashed the doors.

Speaker 82 Letters on the trunk read zombie hunter.

Speaker 7 What was it all about?

Speaker 8 Well, that would go back more than a decade to a meeting of the Arizona Steampunk Society.

Speaker 6 Similar to this gathering in the UK.

Speaker 21 It's where Keene and Miller met.

Speaker 4 Steampunk is a science fiction subculture that shares a love for costumes and homemade gadgets inspired by a fusion of 19th century Victorian period and futuristic technology.

Speaker 11 Who is an Arizona zombie hunter?

Speaker 39 Arizona Society members dressed up and sometimes showed off their creations in steampunk fashion shows, like this one.

Speaker 61 Thank you for keeping us safe.

Speaker 53 Here is Miller

Speaker 43 on the catwalk.

Speaker 57 What fires a steampunk gun, Steam?

Speaker 61 Gunpowder?

Speaker 61 I'm not sure.

Speaker 23 I think

Speaker 23 it's a funny yet kind of ironic subculture celebrating one of the most innovative times in the world.

Speaker 23 That's all aesthetics. It's fun and you meet some good people in it.

Speaker 82 People like Mike Seifert, who told us steampunk appealed to his creative side.

Speaker 100 This is Polly Styrene.

Speaker 4 He hosted costume and gadget workshops in his dining room.

Speaker 100 I bring all the stuff and teach you how to paint a gun or make a pair of goggles or, you know, whatever it is for your costume.

Speaker 31 Miller and his daughter were frequent visitors.

Speaker 100 The first time I ever saw him, he was with his daughter. I think she was about 10 at the time.

Speaker 2 Mike said Miller developed his character gradually.

Speaker 20 How did he develop this zombie hunter persona?

Speaker 100 It started with the gun.

Speaker 21 It was a bit of fakery that Mike made, and that became the centerpiece of Miller's costume.

Speaker 20 How'd you make it? What are the components made of?

Speaker 15 Cardboard and wood.

Speaker 20 You're a creative guy.

Speaker 17 So

Speaker 100 he got this gun and he's like, well, I've got this gun now. I need to build something around this.
So I helped him with some ideas. And then he found this trench coat at the thrift store.

Speaker 100 And he found this mask that he, I think it was one of those paintball masks.

Speaker 30 Okay.

Speaker 100 And then like a hard hat that he glued the mask into the hard hat.

Speaker 40 The transformation from warehouse worker to midnight cruiser was complete.

Speaker 32 But the car stole the limelight.

Speaker 48 At events like the Phoenix Comic-Con and

Speaker 21 annual zombie walk and so on.

Speaker 47 Miller even posed with Phoenix police officers.

Speaker 100 You know, it's like, oh, that thing's really cool. You know, this car is like, it actually looked like he ran down some zombies.
Really awesome.

Speaker 20 How did he react to this attention?

Speaker 100 He loved it, but he was under a mask. He is a shy individual until he was able to put that

Speaker 100 mask on and then he could be a little bit more out in the open.

Speaker 72 Friends, Keene and Mike could not help but notice that the zombie hunter and Brian Miller seemed like two different people.

Speaker 60 Very shy, you know.

Speaker 17 Wasn't the guy who would

Speaker 20 make it easy to approach.

Speaker 34 A seemingly shy single dad, a warehouse worker, and the zombie hunter?

Speaker 35 Sergeant Hillman, when he picked up the Miller file, had never heard of steampunk.

Speaker 20 What did you find out about the zombie hunter business?

Speaker 15 So that really caught our attention for the fact that Brian lived in this fantasy world.

Speaker 20 Did you get the impression that somehow his behaviors were

Speaker 20 at least existing side by side with other darker fantasies he may have had and maybe part of that fantasy.

Speaker 15 Absolutely. I think he was enjoying it.

Speaker 12 Hillman added this zombie hunter business to a growing list of curious things connected to Brian Miller.

Speaker 1 But was it enough?

Speaker 89 No, they needed concrete proof like DNA.

Speaker 21 But how to get it?

Speaker 7 And then detectives decided to put on a little play of their own.

Speaker 12 Would Miller take the bait?

Speaker 35 The Phoenix Police Department cold case unit tried to rein in their excitement.

Speaker 2 It was early in January 2015, and after more than three years criss-crossing the U.S.

Speaker 21 for a killer, they'd found a convincing lead in a most unlikely place.

Speaker 95 I didn't know anything about these genres of zombie hunters.

Speaker 1 Brian Miller had been putting on a show as Phoenix's very own zombie hunter for years.

Speaker 21 Reporter William Herman was one of many spectators.

Speaker 26 I've seen him for years driving around town.

Speaker 3 There was more to Brian Patrick Miller than met the eye.

Speaker 78 Who was it, really?

Speaker 28 behind that mask.

Speaker 74 Could he be the brutal killer who'd slaughtered Angela Brasso and Melanie Burnes all those years ago?

Speaker 96 The detectives needed his DNA, and so the zombie hunter became the hunted.

Speaker 95 Obviously, we'd follow him from his home to work, and then he'd be at work for several hours, and we would sit there and watch and see if maybe he would come out on a break or lunch break and, you know, have a big gulp or something and throw it out the window to where we would be able to collect that and get some DNA, but he never did.

Speaker 95 He just continued to sit in his car and would go back after break break and then come back.

Speaker 21 No big gulps, and apparently Miller didn't smoke.

Speaker 41 In fact, though they trailed him everywhere, eyes always on him, he never did discard anything on which he may have left his DNA.

Speaker 80 Almost to an unusual degree that he was avoiding the kind of behavior that you could make use of.

Speaker 101 Yeah, he was just very, very careful individual.

Speaker 14 So, what to do?

Speaker 15 I got the call from one of my detectives and he was frustrated, and he said, Hey, here's my plan. What do you think? And I said, green light, I like it.

Speaker 7 The plan?

Speaker 62 If Miller could play a role, so could they.

Speaker 15 The detective

Speaker 15 called me and said, Hey, what about I introduce myself to Brian? Obviously, he sits in the parking lot a lot.

Speaker 15 What we know about him is he kind of is interested in security. Why don't I pretend like I'm a building manager and there's a lot of theft in that parking lot?

Speaker 15 And I'm going to hire him to basically watch for me.

Speaker 32 Miller took the bait.

Speaker 37 So the detective set up a job interview and very intentionally chose a restaurant.

Speaker 6 The management of this Chili's agreed to cooperate.

Speaker 21 The idea was the detective would buy Miller's lunch, hoping he just might leave his DNA on a dish or on a glass or a straw.

Speaker 15 Is this the Chili? This is is the chilies. This is where we entered.

Speaker 37 By then, the cold case unit had prepared the place ahead of time and very carefully.

Speaker 22 I know we had briefly discussed me dressing up as a waiter, but then we decided, you know, knowing how clumsy I was, that I'd probably drop their drinks and their soup.

Speaker 6 Instead, before Miller arrived, Detective Rostenberg carefully cleaned anything Miller might touch.

Speaker 22 I sterilized, you know, the plates, the cups, the silverware that they would be using at the table. I actually ran them through the dishwasher myself.

Speaker 14 That's being careful.

Speaker 22 We felt we only had one chance to get it right, and we just didn't want anything to go wrong.

Speaker 33 They took their places and waited.

Speaker 15 I think all of our hearts were racing.

Speaker 36 He arrived in his zombie hunter car.

Speaker 17 Surprise, he wasn't alone.

Speaker 22 We were

Speaker 15 taken aback, though, that he brought his 15-year-old daughter with him to the interview.

Speaker 20 My goodness, his daughter's there. Did you think this is going to mess up the whole idea?

Speaker 15 We thought, hey, is he on to us?

Speaker 4 The try-to-act natural lunch and the fake job interview lasted no more than an hour.

Speaker 21 Miller ate a sandwich, but barely sipped his drink, and then he and his daughter left the restaurant.

Speaker 15 I think he only drank a couple times, and so he wondered, hey, is there going to be DNA on there?

Speaker 20 How'd you get the water out without destroying the evidence?

Speaker 22 Well, I wish I had some fancy way. I probably should have drilled the water out.
I just dumped the water out of the side that I believed he had his mouth probably hadn't touched.

Speaker 52 I mean, it's quite possible you just messed up.

Speaker 43 Absolutely.

Speaker 1 Detective Rostenberg sent the mug Miller drank from to the lab, and they all waited and waited.

Speaker 14 Almost two weeks passed.

Speaker 42 And then one day the unit happened to be gathering for one of its regular meetings.

Speaker 15 We were all kind of going over some boring administrative stuff, and the door burst open and it's Kelly and her whole team of DNA analysts.

Speaker 31 Unheard of.

Speaker 35 Why not just phone?

Speaker 53 Oh, this news needed to be delivered in person by the full squad with the boss, Kelly Merwin, leading the way.

Speaker 15 The fact that a whole team of scientists would come over and abruptly open the door,

Speaker 15 we just, again, were in shock. And the first thing Kelly said is, you did it.

Speaker 56 He's your guy.

Speaker 19 You could hear a pin drop in the room.

Speaker 22 I was in shock after all these years.

Speaker 15 It was very emotional.

Speaker 15 I could still to this day, we had poured our heart and soul into three and a half years chasing, hunting down this guy, and to hear that and for the families, just to hear that we got him and we can give that to the families.

Speaker 9 Detective Shira, who rode a bike along the canal in 1992 to assist in the investigation, had just left work when he found out and he needed convincing.

Speaker 95 One of the other detectives on the squad called me on the phone and told me as I'm driving home, I'm like, I don't feel like playing games today. I'm not in a good mood.

Speaker 75 But he turned his car around and returned to the station.

Speaker 95 It's a 20-mile ride. By the time I got there, I was still going, this isn't true.

Speaker 20 But it certainly was.

Speaker 77 Sergeant Hillman called forensic genealogist Colleen Fitzpatrick with the good news.

Speaker 16 And I went, oh my God, they got him. I didn't expect the call.
I didn't expect, you know, I hoped it would work, but,

Speaker 15 you know, oh my God, it worked.

Speaker 4 This was a DNA breakthrough that would eventually change the way cold cases were solved.

Speaker 42 Hours later, a SWAT team arrested Brian Patrick Miller at work and delivered him to an interview room where Detective Shira was ready.

Speaker 71 And what happened next?

Speaker 33 Well, that was a surprise.

Speaker 101 It was as brutal as it was perplexing. Two young women, 22-year-old Angela Brosso and 17-year-old Melanie Burnes, found dead, their bodies mutilated.

Speaker 2 Finally, after more than 20 years and arrest,

Speaker 2 Angela's friend Jill Kelly got the news from her niece, who, pure chance, worked in the same warehouse as Brian Miller.

Speaker 45 She just happened to tell me, oh my god, this

Speaker 45 guy where I work was just arrested for murder.

Speaker 20 When you thought about that the first time that hit you, that she has been in close proximity to the very person you've been afraid of for years and years?

Speaker 45 It was

Speaker 45 terrifying to think of that.

Speaker 2 And now Celeste Bentley understood what could have happened to her.

Speaker 44 I couldn't believe it. I was in shock.

Speaker 44 Just to put that together, that he was the person that had stabbed me all those years ago, and now he's the person they're looking at for killing these women, was...

Speaker 46 So horribly.

Speaker 79 Yeah.

Speaker 20 I mean, he was practicing on you, apparently.

Speaker 44 I would believe that, yeah.

Speaker 35 And Brian's friends?

Speaker 23 Yeah, and

Speaker 23 it was a gut punch, to say the least.

Speaker 63 You know.

Speaker 100 I was just like,

Speaker 17 what?

Speaker 50 They can't have the right guy.

Speaker 5 Are you sure?

Speaker 35 Sergeant Hillman and his cold case unit were sure.

Speaker 21 Once Miller was in custody, Detective Rostenberg searched Miller's home for evidence and got another surprise.

Speaker 22 It was probably only a 1,200 square foot house, but it was a hoarder house that I've never seen in my 25-year career.

Speaker 22 I remember one of our SWAT team members coming to me and saying, hey, we can't clear the house because we can't even make entry.

Speaker 75 Rostenberg and others spent more than five days working their way through it all.

Speaker 11 Collected more than 6,000 items.

Speaker 6 Among them, a hacksaw, a sword, teeth. And this was worrisome.

Speaker 3 Women's credit cards, a driver's licenses.

Speaker 56 And here in the house where he raised his daughter were magazines, images, videos that Rostenberg wishes he could somehow wipe from his memory.

Speaker 22 Women, you know, having their heads cut off,

Speaker 22 stabbed, beaten, strangled. It was, I remember leaving that place every night.

Speaker 22 I would take a shower and I just had such a difficult time sleeping, just trying to get those images and those pictures out of my head.

Speaker 2 One graphic image hanging in Miller's kitchen stood out from the rest.

Speaker 22 Not only did he have a large severed head on the front of his refrigerator door, but many of these videos, these photographs, arguably the worst photos i've ever seen

Speaker 30 but

Speaker 58 no evidence in the house seemed to connect directly to the murders and meanwhile under questioning by detective shira miller claimed he had no idea why he might be in trouble

Speaker 58 more concerned with what's going on

Speaker 78 they wouldn't tell me anything on the car your name came up in investigation so we have to bring you down to chat with you about it and slowly and carefully Shira brought up the location of the murders, the bike path along the canal.

Speaker 102 You know all those oak bike paths they have around yeah, I know what you're talking about. Those always scared me, that's why I didn't take them.

Speaker 102 But had you taken them? I may have taken them once and then didn't like it.

Speaker 65 The detective started to press Miller a little.

Speaker 102 Did you ever have any sex with any women out on the bike trails or anything? No.

Speaker 102 So there's no reason that your DNA should be anywhere around out out there.

Speaker 102 Never had sex with any women, anything like that.

Speaker 21 Then, down to cases.

Speaker 102 Do you remember the name Angela Brosso at all?

Speaker 102 No.

Speaker 102 Well, she was killed around the bike pass in 1992.

Speaker 102 And then in 1993, there's a girl by the name of Melanie Burnett who was also killed

Speaker 102 around the bike, you know, the canals and the bike paths over there.

Speaker 102 And there's some DNA evidence that kind of links you to those girls. Is there any way you can explain that to me?

Speaker 32 Sergeant Hillman watched the interview in real time from a nearby room.

Speaker 20 What were your impressions of him as he sat there answering questions?

Speaker 15 He's very stoic, really kind of no emotion.

Speaker 80 Even when when the detective pressed him again and again.

Speaker 102 How can you explain to me that your DNA is there? I can't.

Speaker 102 I can't remember everything I did back then, but I know I didn't kill anyone. So you sure you don't want to, you know, now's your chance.

Speaker 102 Kind of come and tell me, is there a reason something like that happened?

Speaker 102 Would help you get out of your chest if you did something like that.

Speaker 24 I didn't kill anyone. Everyone, as far as I know, everyone that I've I've ever had sex with is still alive.

Speaker 102 So you've never killed anybody? Nobody.

Speaker 38 The only victim Miller was willing to talk about was

Speaker 10 himself.

Speaker 47 He claimed he'd been abused as a child.

Speaker 102 How was your childhood with her?

Speaker 24 Uh, with me and my mom?

Speaker 84 Horrible.

Speaker 84 What made it horrible? Um,

Speaker 84 physical abuse.

Speaker 28 There would be no confession from Miller in that room.

Speaker 91 But that's not to say the interview was a total loss.

Speaker 94 There were a couple of points in that

Speaker 94 interview that turned out to be helpful.

Speaker 9 Vince Mbordino is the deputy county attorney on the case.

Speaker 7 And those helpful moments?

Speaker 94 Interestingly enough, one of them, or two of them, were when nobody was in the room but the defendant, and he's talking.

Speaker 94 I can't even stand the state of blood.

Speaker 65 He knows he's being recorded.

Speaker 65 Tell me, I just

Speaker 65 working in my head.

Speaker 2 No, these were not just ramblings, thought Embordino.

Speaker 32 They were a glimpse into Brian Miller's defense.

Speaker 12 And he was worried it just might work.

Speaker 42 Finally, the long-delayed reckoning.

Speaker 11 It was October 2022, almost eight years since the arrest of Brian Patrick Miller.

Speaker 10 Eight years of hearings and legal wrangling and COVID.

Speaker 34 Here he would face two counts of kidnapping, attempted sexual assault, and first-degree murder.

Speaker 2 The case against him anchored by the unmistakable signature of his own DNA on both his mutilated victims.

Speaker 41 But Miller pleaded not guilty.

Speaker 12 by reason of insanity.

Speaker 74 The prosecutor had a feeling this was possible after watching Miller's police interview.

Speaker 74 Please tell me this is just a nightmare.

Speaker 94 Our belief was that he was saying things to try to make it appear that he had mental health issues.

Speaker 10 Oh, it didn't just appear, said Defense Attorney R.J.

Speaker 74 Parker.

Speaker 10 Miller, he said, suffered from a long list of disorders, autism, depression, hoarding, PTSD,

Speaker 52 and dissociative disorder.

Speaker 71 Illness is so severe, said Parker, Miller's brain simply won't let him recall anything about killing Angela and Melanie.

Speaker 14 He didn't remember killing these women?

Speaker 93 It's not a process as simple as he didn't remember. It's a more complicated process that involves not having access to very, very deep experiences that fundamentally conflict with his own humanity.

Speaker 61 So, sanity, or the lack of it, would be the issue.

Speaker 5 Both sides agreed to a trial by judge alone.

Speaker 8 She would determine culpability.

Speaker 2 And if she found him guilty, she, Judge Suzanne Cohen, would decide the punishment, life behind bars or death.

Speaker 77 Prosecutor Vincent Bordino began with the plan.

Speaker 7 the one Miller wrote as a teen, which described, or imagined, a killing so gruesome, his mother took the note to the police.

Speaker 94 The plan basically outlined what he did to Angela and Melanie.

Speaker 77 Prosecutors said Miller's attacks were methodical and precise.

Speaker 4 He approached both Angela and Melanie, disabled them with a fatal stab wound in the back, and then dragged them to a secluded area where he brutalized them.

Speaker 3 There were more than 20 witnesses.

Speaker 40 Angela's boyfriend, Joe.

Speaker 15 I was baking her cake that night.

Speaker 68 That was the reason I didn't go on the bike ride.

Speaker 4 Charlotte Pottle, who discovered the second murder scene.

Speaker 104 I often would stand up and pedal just get more momentum and

Speaker 104 then ended up riding through a puddle of blood.

Speaker 8 There was no doubt who committed the two murders, said the forensic scientist.

Speaker 90 The probability of selecting an unrelated individual at random, having a DNA profile matching the DNA profile from this item, is at least one in 460 quintillion.

Speaker 28 No argument, said the defense.

Speaker 31 Miller did it.

Speaker 56 But is so overcome by these disorders, they argued, he should be treated for mental illness, not thrown in prison or executed.

Speaker 90 Brian was treated like a dog, literally made to walk on all fours and eat out of a dog bowl.

Speaker 47 Defense attorneys told the judge that Miller's mother, Ellen, who has since died, routinely beat and tortured her son.

Speaker 20 And that wasn't all.

Speaker 93 The abuse he endured crossed many different lines that included sexual conduct.

Speaker 20 Parker said Miller's mother walked around the house half naked and gave her son Playboy magazines when he was only seven.

Speaker 56 It was all so damaging, said Parker, that Miller's mind created two states of consciousness, a normal state and a trauma state.

Speaker 93 The trauma state was able to harbor rage, anger, resentment, humiliation, a desire for revenge.

Speaker 82 And Miller was in that trauma state, went the argument, when he killed Angela and Melanie.

Speaker 93 As part of this dissociative process, not having access to those experiences or that information means it's fundamentally not a part of his world. It's not something that he can engage with.

Speaker 14 But he did do those things. He did.

Speaker 9 His DNA is all over them.

Speaker 32 But he wouldn't admit in court that he did these things.

Speaker 93 The case was never about whether Brian could or or could not admit to offenses. It was about what recognition within himself he could have about those experiences.

Speaker 53 A forensic psychologist appointed by the court had an opinion about the trauma state claim.

Speaker 12 Essentially, Baloney,

Speaker 40 these were sex crimes, pure and simple.

Speaker 25 I think they were planned and they were carefully executed.

Speaker 105 He evaded detection and harass for a long time.

Speaker 54 That was the battleground.

Speaker 94 Was he insane?

Speaker 106 Did he remember doing it?

Speaker 47 After six months of testimony, it was up to the judge now.

Speaker 94 At last,

Speaker 34 an answer.

Speaker 25 As to count one, first-degree murder, Angela Brasso, as follows.

Speaker 97 Guilty.

Speaker 97 As to count two, first-degree murder, victim Melanie Burnes, as follows. Guilty.

Speaker 87 Guilty on all counts.

Speaker 37 Angela and Melanie's families had watched the trial on a video call set up for them, and now they address the judge.

Speaker 12 Jill Canetta is Melanie's big sister.

Speaker 107 Words cannot even begin to describe the level of excruciating pain we experienced with the news of her horrific death.

Speaker 8 Linda Brasso, Angela's mother.

Speaker 90 The defendant stole her future, her innocence,

Speaker 93 her life.

Speaker 8 Judge Cohen had one more big decision before her.

Speaker 31 Should Miller get the death penalty?

Speaker 6 The lawyers faced off for the last time.

Speaker 21 One trying to save Miller's life.

Speaker 91 Where would Brian be now if he had a mother who nurtured him, who gave him hugs and showed him affection, who kissed him with love in her heart?

Speaker 32 The prosecutor on the other side did not mince words.

Speaker 106 This will sound harsh, I'm sure.

Speaker 106 Angela and Melanie didn't get to choose when they died.

Speaker 106 They didn't get to choose the day,

Speaker 87 the hour, the moment.

Speaker 7 This defendant deserves to know the day,

Speaker 62 the hour

Speaker 106 of his death for what he did.

Speaker 20 It's clear that you took this case pretty personally, too. I felt you get to know somebody and you want to represent them well.

Speaker 65 Correct.

Speaker 54 I can still get emotional about it, as you can probably tell right now.

Speaker 32 Judge Cohen got ready to read her decision.

Speaker 104 The question the court must answer is if the totality of the mitigation is sufficiently substantial to call for leniency.

Speaker 54 And there was a pause. I don't know whether she paused on purpose, but during that pause, I wasn't sure what she was going to say: yes or no.

Speaker 104 The answer is no.

Speaker 14 Brian Miller was sentenced to death.

Speaker 20 What's that feeling?

Speaker 93 I don't know that I can put into words how it feels to sit next to Brian after all these years and hear the judge

Speaker 93 sentence him to death.

Speaker 103 It's

Speaker 93 an overwhelming experience that carries its own trauma.

Speaker 15 If you saw the

Speaker 15 horrendous things that Brian Miller did to those women, death penalty was suitable at that point.

Speaker 15 We can't bring those girls back, but we can give them some form of closure in seeing Brian Patrick Miller removed from society.

Speaker 3 Miller is now on Arizona's death row, where he has access to email.

Speaker 9 He wrote to Dateline that he has always denied being involved with the murders, and he did not agree with the defense and the opinion of experts.

Speaker 3 Miller has appealed the conviction.

Speaker 4 But is the investigating over?

Speaker 2 No, it is not.

Speaker 20 Does either of you think that there are more murders out there that we don't know about?

Speaker 26 I do.

Speaker 22 I'm hoping, praying that I can talk to him and hopefully clear some more cases, get some more relief for some of the other families, because I do think he did other murders.

Speaker 9 30 years ago, two bright young women each set out for bike rides along the canal, and neither came home.

Speaker 34 Justice has finally been done, but the loss is forever.

Speaker 16 Well, she'd probably be a mother and have

Speaker 16 a few children and some dogs and some cats and some rabbits and some animals around her. She would be a person of love.
She really would.

Speaker 25 I think of what she would have been like, what kind of mom she would have been, what kind of career she would have chosen. In our yearbook, she signed it.

Speaker 25 saying, I hope we are friends for the rest of our lives. I think we truly would have been friends forever.

Speaker 29 That's all for this edition of Dateline. We'll see you again Thursday at 10, 9 Central.
And of course, I'll see you each weeknight for NBC Nightly News.

Speaker 46 I'm Lester Holt for all of us at NBC News.

Speaker 51 Good night.

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