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Forensic Tales discusses topics that some listeners may find disturbing. The contents of this episode may not be suitable for everyone. Listener discretion is advised. Throughout the early 1990s, Phoenix, Arizona was terrorized by a series of violent crimes, including the murders of two young women. The crimes went unsolved for decades, and the man responsible remained unidentified.
By the time the police caught up to him, he had a new persona and was hiding in plain sight. But besides the two victims he would eventually be charged with murdering, are there any more innocent victims out there? This is Forensic Tales, episode number 275, The Zombie Hunter. ♪♪
Phoenix, Arizona, the state's capital and most populous city. Today, over 1.6 million people call Phoenix home.
It's known for its urban desert landscape, world-class sports and entertainment venues, hotel resorts, hot summer temperatures, and of course, southwestern food, including great Mexican food.
Not much has changed about Phoenix, Arizona since the early 1990s. It's still a good place to live. It definitely gets a little hot during the summertime, but overall, it's a decent place to live and raise a family at an affordable cost. But something dark was happening in Phoenix during the 1990s. Young women were mysteriously turning up dead along popular biking trails.
When you think about Phoenix, you probably think of the hot, dry desert. You don't think about the ocean. You don't think about salty beaches.
but the canal system goes right through the center of the city. And the more people that moved to the area, the more the trails started to be used for walking, running, and biking. As a female runner and cyclist myself, I know that safety and personal protection are always in the back of my mind. It also doesn't help that I do a true crime podcast for a living, but it's always in the back of my mind to be careful.
I try to always run during the daytime. I used to carry pepper spray in my running belt. I always look around and just pay attention to my surroundings. It's just something that we have to do as female runners. I can think of at least a few other female jogger cases being attacked that we've covered on this show alone.
But these bike and running trails that run through the downtown part of Phoenix, they weren't considered dangerous. You wouldn't have to look over your back at every turn. Violent crimes like rape and murder didn't usually happen there. Until they did.
The first victim was Angela Broso. On November 8, 1992, the eve of her 22nd birthday, Angela went out for a solo evening bike ride along the Phoenix Canal system. She went by herself while her boyfriend Joe stayed back to finish baking her birthday cake.
The plan was for Angela to ride her bike for about 60 minutes, come home, and then have her birthday cake with her boyfriend. But she never made it home from the ride. Angela did something many other people who lived in the area did, went walking or biking along the canal trails. She was just hours away from turning 22, worked in tech, and had recently moved to Phoenix.
And like so many others, she was taking advantage of the beautiful weather outside and wanted to get a little exercise. For those in other parts of the world or the U.S., Phoenix, Arizona is the type of place where you can ride your bike outside at night. A few hours went by and Angela still hadn't returned home. So her boyfriend Joe decided to get his bike and go out looking for her.
At first, he thought maybe something had happened to her bike, like possibly a flat tire or an issue with a chain. So he went out and started looking for her. He knew where she usually rode, so it shouldn't have taken him that long to find her. But after searching her normal bike route three times up and back, he couldn't find her. He couldn't find her bike. He couldn't find any sign of her.
He spoke with her friends. No one had heard from her. He called her mother, who was living all the way across the country in Pennsylvania. But she hadn't heard from her daughter either. So that's when Joe phoned the Phoenix police. The next day, the police spent all morning searching for Angela. But it would only take a couple of hours until they found her. Her torso was found in the field right next door to her apartment building.
She had been stabbed in the back multiple times. She was naked except for a pair of shoes and socks, sexually assaulted, had her genital area mutilated, she had a cut down her sternum, and she had been decapitated. She didn't show any signs of defensive wounds, so she was probably attacked from behind. Investigators believed the stab wound to her back had even penetrated her heart.
Now, you probably caught on that I said torso. It was only her torso that was found in the field next door to her apartment. Her head wasn't anywhere around. But 10 days later, that would show up too. 10 days after Angela's torso was found, a man fishing in a different section of the canal spotted a head stuck on a grate. This was a spot about two miles south of the murder site.
And from what this fisherman said, the head was in amazingly good condition, especially considering this was over a week and a half after the murder. This is what Morgan Lowe, an investigative reporter who had reported on the case for more than a decade, had to say about that particular detail. Quote, We've heard that the head looked like it had been preserved, like it was a memento for the killer. End quote.
Angela's head, it didn't match up, Detective Hillman from the Phoenix Police Department said. The level of decomposition of the head was not consistent with how long the head could have potentially been in the water, end quote.
Besides her head, Angela's purple mountain bike was also missing from the initial crime scene. It wasn't found near her torso or the canal with her head. It was simply gone and never found throughout the course of the investigation.
For the next 10 months, the investigation into Angela Broso's murder was pretty quiet. Tips came in, but none of them led to any arrest, and things were moving fairly slowly. Until September 21st, 1993. Ten months later, high school junior Melanie Bernis took an evening bike ride while her mom Marlene went out to dinner.
But when Marlene came home, her daughter Melanie was nowhere to be found. She should have been home from her bike ride, but she wasn't. By 10.30 p.m. that night, Marlene was calling around to her friends, asking if they had heard from her, but no one had.
So just like Angela, Melanie was reported missing to the Phoenix Police Department after going missing from riding her bike near dusk. The next morning, a Phoenix resident named Charlotte Pottle was riding her bike with her daughter in the back seat when she saw a strange looking puddle on the ground. So she circled her bike back around to get a second look at it.
I could tell that it was a puddle of red, that it was a puddle of blood, she told CBS News. She also saw drag marks across the bike path. So she and her daughter rode back home as fast as they could and immediately called the police.
Within hours of Charlotte's phone call to investigators, the local news reported that a woman's body had been found in the canal close to where Angela's head had been found just months earlier. The body was soon identified as Melanie. When the police arrived at the scene, Melanie's body was discovered floating in the water, dressed in a blue bodysuit. It looked like the kind of bodysuit that maybe a dancer or a gymnast might wear.
Fairly early on, Phoenix detectives were able to draw some connections between her murder and the murder of Angela just a few months earlier. Both women had been stabbed to death in nearly the same exact spot on their backs, and they were both killed while riding their bikes practically on the same path. So this led investigators to suspect the same person was responsible for attacking both women.
Based on all of the evidence collected at the scene, investigators believed the killer dragged Melanie's body off the canal path, removed her clothing, and dressed her in that blue bodysuit. The bodysuit didn't belong to Melanie, so she must have gotten it from whoever did this to her.
Other similarities between the two murders were that both women had been sexually assaulted before they were killed and had parts of their bodies dismembered. But that wasn't all the similarities between the two cases.
They also had shared DNA from an unknown male. Since both girls had been sexually assaulted, DNA collected from Melanie's scene was compared to DNA collected at Angela's. And when the results came back, they were a match. The same unknown male profile was at both crime scenes, so the Phoenix police knew they were looking for the same suspect in both murders.
The murders of 22-year-old Angela Broso and high school student Melanie Bernis shocked everyone living in the greater Phoenix area. There was something so vulnerable about a young woman being attacked while riding her bike that just terrified people. This is something that I can really relate to myself.
After these murders, no one wanted to go out running or walking on these bike paths, especially not single young females. If you rode your bike or went walking there, you went with a friend. You wouldn't go alone. That's just how scared and terrified the residents of Phoenix felt at the time. It was especially scary knowing that the same person was responsible for both murders.
So now, are the Phoenix police looking for a serial rapist and murderer? The crime also went beyond a quote-unquote regular murder, if there is such a thing. These girls had been mutilated, dismembered. Angela's head was possibly kept for over a week and a half as some type of trophy. These weren't your typical murders.
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One of the earlier theories in the case was that the suspect had some type of medical experience. He was a doctor or a surgeon. They knew the stab wounds to both victims had been done with such precision that it only made sense that someone with some type of medical background could have done something like that.
It didn't seem like anyone who wasn't a doctor could have done that. Now that theory reminds me of another popular case, probably a more popular case, and that's the murder of the Black Dahlia, Elizabeth Short.
In 1947, a mother and her young daughter discovered the body of a young woman later identified as Elizabeth Short in Los Angeles, California. She got the nickname Black Dahlia by the press because they reported her as a 22-year-old aspiring actress, a Hollywood hopeful.
Although, to be fair, the press misreported a lot of truth regarding Elizabeth, her personal life, as well as her murder. But either way, the Black Dahlia is usually how people remember her. So Elizabeth's body was found brutally mutilated. Her torso had been cut in half. Her body had been drained of almost all of its blood. And then it was eventually posed where it was discovered.
Well, the precision at which Elizabeth's body had been bisected as well as drained of its blood, this detail alone led the Los Angeles Police Department to theorize that, hey, maybe her killer was some type of doctor or surgeon. They believed at the time that only a person with a medical background or medical experience could have pulled something like that off.
So for many, many years, the LAPD believed they were looking for a doctor or a surgeon in Elizabeth Short's murder. But as of today, the case of the Black Dahlia remains unsolved. Was Elizabeth Short killed by a surgeon back in 1947? Nobody knows. Over the years, there have been countless theories and suspects involving her murder, but no convictions.
Back in Phoenix, investigators wondered the same thing. Could Angela and Melanie have been killed by someone with a medical background? The stab wounds to their backs were so precise, almost surgical. But that was just one of the many possibilities about who the killer could be. It was entirely possible that they weren't looking for a doctor or a surgeon, and all of that was simply a distraction.
I think people wanted to believe that it had to be a doctor because it was just too scary and too disturbing to think that maybe someone without any type of professional medical training could have such precision in decapitating another human being.
The press began referring to the murders as the Canal Murders, but the question of who was responsible lingered heavily over everyone. In 1994, detectives received a tip regarding the child-size teal-blue bodysuit that Melanie was wearing when her body was discovered. I already mentioned how the bodysuit didn't belong to her, which meant her killer had dressed her in it sometime before dumping her body.
Well, in 1994, investigators got an anonymous tip from someone saying that they thought they knew who the bodysuit belonged to, a man by the name of Brian Patrick Miller. It's unclear exactly why the caller said that they thought it belonged to Brian Miller. All we know is that the police did receive a tip about it.
However, it doesn't appear like Phoenix investigators followed up on this tip back in 1994. They never pursued him. Much more on Brian Patrick Miller coming up.
Even with the tremendous amount of tips coming in every single week, the identification of hundreds of persons of interest, something that we'll talk more about in just a second, both murder investigations eventually turned cold. In fact, not much happened in either one of them until years later in 2011.
In 2011, Phoenix Police Detective Clark Schwarzkopf was assigned to the department's cold case unit and given the canal murders. And as soon as he was given the case file, one of the first things he noticed was just how many persons of interest had been identified. If you're lucky, you might get two or three good persons of interest in a murder investigation like this.
But according to this detective, there were over 600 persons of interest. I said, OK, give me the list. Let's start at A, and I'm going to go through all the backgrounds of these people and see if I can find anyone in there that would be possible of committing this type of potential violence, he told CBS News. But a list of 600 names is a really long list to go through.
And among this long list, no one in there really stood out among the others. So fast forward another three years, 2014. In late 2014, a widely known forensic genealogist, Colleen Fitzpatrick, connected with Phoenix cold case investigators at a local conference.
She was at the conference with her company, Identifiners International, a company that specializes in applying forensic genetic genealogy to both violent crimes and for the identification of unidentified human remains.
At this particular conference, Colleen Fitzpatrick spoke about how her company had developed software that could search through public databases looking for matches to crime scene DNA. And when Phoenix detectives working the canal murders heard her speak, they contacted her almost immediately to see if her company could help.
After speaking with each other, detectives sent her the DNA evidence from both cases, the DNA profile of the unknown male. After that, Colleen Fitzpatrick Company got to work uploading it to databases and looking for any possible relatives. That's when she discovered the surname Miller.
Forensic genetic genealogy doesn't always work by identifying the exact source of unknown DNA. Usually it involves finding relatives of the source and looking for the suspect that way. This case was no different.
Once Identifyners International had the unknown DNA collected from the canal murders case, they uploaded it to publicly searchable DNA databases, and that's when they identified the surname of Miller. From there, they built multiple family trees looking for a possible suspect. Was there someone in the Miller family who lived in Phoenix at the time that the murders happened?
Were they of the appropriate age? Did they have a criminal record? Could they see someone like that doing such a thing? Or were they already on that list of 600 persons of interest? When all the genealogy work was done, Colleen Fitzpatrick and her company had identified six people with the last name Miller and turned it over to detectives working the case in Arizona.
One of those names being Brian Patrick Miller. Sound familiar? Brian Patrick Miller had been added to that list of 600 names after the police received that tip involving the blue bodysuit.
but for some reason, the police never really pursued him. But now, by 2014, they were very interested in finding out as much as possible about him. A simple background search of Brian Miller revealed a pretty dark past, including an arrest when he was a juvenile for the stabbing of Celeste Bentley.
In May 1989, Celeste Bentley, a Phoenix, Arizona woman, got off a bus at the same stop as 16-year-old Brian Miller. Well, when he had run by me, I thought he just hit me, Celeste Bentley said in a CBS news article. But then I reached to my back and I pulled my hand up and I saw the blood, end quote.
Brian Miller had stabbed Celeste in the upper back. Later on, he said he did it because Celeste looked like his mom, who allegedly had a history of abusing him. Now, Miller was eventually charged with aggravated assault and was sent to juvenile detention, where he stayed until he turned 18, stabbed in the upper back from behind. That also sounds familiar, right?
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They watched him do everything. They watched as he went to work each day at a local Amazon warehouse.
They watched as he stopped at gas stations to fill up his car. They watched him grocery shop. They watched practically his every move. But in order for them to determine if he was the canal murder suspect, the police needed to get a DNA sample from him for a direct comparison. But no one thought that he would willingly turn it over.
If he was really the guy, why would he voluntarily provide the police with a sample of his DNA? So that's when detectives got creative. During one of Miller's work breaks at the Amazon warehouse, a police detective approached his car, introduced himself, and offered Miller a job. This is what that detective had to say about it.
I introduced myself as a security consultant. I said, listen, I've got a team of people here in this parking lot and we're watching this building that's north of you. He then told Miller the owner of that building suspected that people were stealing merchandise from him. So he had hired him to watch the building. You're always out here for your breaks, the detective said that he told Miller.
Would you be interested in working for me as a security officer watching the building while you're outside?
So Miller agreed, and the two of them scheduled a meeting to fill out a job application with hopes of getting his DNA. Days later, they met at a local Chili's restaurant in Phoenix. But before Miller showed up, the police already went inside and told the restaurant staff what they were doing. They also wanted to make sure that all of the table's silverware and dishes were completely free from contamination.
they needed to make sure that they were going to get a good DNA sample. At the meeting, Miller surprised everyone. He surprised the undercover cop he was meeting, as well as the group of detectives that were secretly parked outside.
he brought his 15-year-old daughter with him. Once they all sat down at the prearranged table, the undercover detective, Miller, and his teenage daughter ordered food. Miller ordered a hamburger and a glass of water. At first, everyone was questioning whether they had the right guy or not.
They knew about his assault charge back when he was a teenager. But other than that, this guy looked like a completely normal and nice guy. Again, he even had his teenage daughter with him who was just as nice as he was. So all of the detectives started to question whether this was their suspect or not.
Over the course of the meeting, Miller filled out the fake job application, ate his meal, his hamburger, touching all of the silverware, and talked with the undercover detective about this fake job.
Then once the meeting was over, Miller and his teenage daughter walked out of the restaurant, and then the detectives who were waiting outside swooped in, grabbed everything from the table, possibly containing his DNA, including that water cup. After that, everything they collected from inside the Chili's restaurant was sent to the Phoenix Police Department crime lab to be tested. Then by January 3rd, 2015, there was a match.
Eleven days after the water cup had been sent to the crime lab, there was a positive match. It belonged to Brian Miller. In 2014, Brian Miller was 42 years old and still living in the Phoenix area. Colleen Fitzpatrick Company had taken the Y-DNA profile from the crime scenes and matched it to Miller's.
Now, he was the primary suspect in the canal murders. But could he be this terrible monster who murdered and dismembered young women riding their bikes? The same guy who brought his daughter to that Chili's restaurant thinking that he was getting a new job?
The more and more detectives uncovered about Miller's personal life, the more confident they felt they had the right guy. While he was in juvenile hall for stabbing Celeste, his mom went through his bedroom back at their house in Phoenix. And while searching through his things, she found something very disturbing. It was a note. A note titled, The Plan.
Inside, it outlined, step by step, what he wanted to do to a female, a woman. This included kidnapping her, tying her up, cutting off her clothes. The notes spelled everything out. He talked about wanting to abduct this girl, sexually assault her, kill her, even dismember her.
So after finding this note inside of his bedroom, Miller's mom called the Phoenix Police Department to tell them about it. She knew her son was about to turn 18 years old, which would mean that he was going to be released from juvenile hall. She also told the police that she was afraid of him and she didn't want him returning back to her house once he was released.
But despite the letter, Miller was released in 1990. And once he got out of juvie, he was sent to go live at a halfway house in Phoenix. In 2002, after Miller had gotten married, had a daughter, and moved to Effort, Washington, he was charged with yet another violent crime. A woman accused him of stabbing her in an unprovoked attack.
The woman said Miller offered her a ride and a phone to make a phone call. But before she could get inside of his car, he pulled out a 12-inch knife and stabbed her in the back multiple times. Again, that sounds familiar, right? The attack left the woman with 30 stitches. But when it came time for justice, Miller denied the woman's allegations, saying that he didn't do anything wrong.
His lawyers argued that the woman tried to rob him at knife point and that her injuries were the result of a struggle that followed.
The case eventually went to trial, but Miller was acquitted. Years later, in 2014, the police found out about the note that his mom had found, and as they read it, they couldn't help but notice the similarities between what was written on the note and Angela's murder. They were almost identical.
It was like Miller wrote about his plan of doing this to some innocent young woman years earlier. Phoenix detectives were still digging into Brian Miller's background when something else interesting popped up. He was somewhat of a local celebrity in the area. People in the Phoenix area knew him as the zombie hunter. He was like a real-life comic book character, a good guy fighting the bad guys.
How Brian Miller gained that nickname was because he would regularly dress up in a full zombie hunting costume for parades and festivals around town. He wore this long trench coat complete with goggles and a helmet. He also carried around this fake gun pretending to use it to shoot the zombies.
And if the costume wasn't enough, he even had a tricked out car in which he said it was used to drive around and hunt the zombies. He had bought an old police car and completely decked it out, writing zombie hunter on the side of it. Here's what one of his close friends would later say about it.
Miller's zombie hunter persona attracted a big fan base, including law enforcement officers who lined up to pose with him. If you don't believe me, you can check out these photos online for yourself. At some of these parades and festivals, even Phoenix cops asked to take pictures with him, the famous zombie hunter.
they had no idea that he was actually the person responsible for at least two brutal unsolved murders. So over the years, Brian Miller became known around Phoenix as the zombie hunter, this completely innocent, unassuming guy who liked to dress up at different town events and parades. If you're still having a hard time picturing this, then
This almost reminds me of what some of the people you might see on the streets of Las Vegas. They're just people who like to dress up. They become this alter ego or persona, take to the streets, and they take pictures with people.
That's pretty much what Brian Miller did. He was known around Phoenix as the zombie hunter because he would dress up in public. Alongside his decked out car, take pictures with people, he had pretty much become this local celebrity. But by this point, detectives knew he wasn't just the friendly guy who dressed up like a zombie hunter for local festivals and parades. He was also a murderer.
On January 13, 2015, the same day his DNA was matched to the crime scene DNA, Brian Miller was arrested on first-degree murder charges for both Angela Broso and Melanie Bernis. When a detective told him that they had his DNA and it linked him to the canal murder victims, Miller replied, I don't see how that's possible. I didn't kill anyone."
The next day, the police got a search warrant for his house where he and his daughter lived. But when investigators got inside, they were shocked by the condition of it. The place was beyond filthy. Think about that television show, Hoarders.
The entire place was stacked floor to ceiling with trash. Old food containers, bottles and cans, trash was everywhere. Here's what one of the detectives had to say about it. I can remember like it was yesterday, walking up to the front door and everyone going, you can't get in that way. It's full of crap, end quote.
It would be another seven years before the start of Brian Miller, a.k.a. The Zombie Hunter's Trial.
But finally, by October 2022, it started. While he may have claimed total incompleteness since before, his defense seemed to change by October 2022. Instead of outright denying the murders, his defense lawyers argued that the abuse he had suffered as a child made him not responsible for his actions.
They said he had developed severe mental health problems from it, and his lawyers argued he was not guilty by reason of insanity. So it wasn't like he was denying complete involvement, but he claimed to have an excuse for his actions.
At the trial, a psychologist testified that he had developed a condition known as dissociative amnesia, basically this inability to remember some traumatic events. So Miller's attorneys claimed that he had no memory of the canal murders. On the other side, prosecutors had Miller's ex-wife testify, someone who we're going to talk about again toward the end of the episode.
She said she noticed some pretty disturbing behavior from him pretty much starting from the beginning of their marriage. She said how their sex life was extremely unusual. On one occasion, he brought a knife to their bedroom, carved on her, and then licked up the blood. She said this was the type of behavior that led to their divorce. I mean, can you blame her?
He began to engage in violent role play that disturbed her and led to the end of their marriage. Stuart Somershu, a Phoenix police detective, said in an interview for the television show Snapped, "...to some, disassociative amnesia might seem like a good defense for a lot of other things."
But on April 11, 2023, more than 30 years later, Brian Miller was found guilty of both murders, kidnappings, and sexual assaults. This is our version of Jack the Ripper. Phoenix detective Stuart Somershu said, You had victims that were horribly murdered, and no one knew who had done it. He instilled a lot of fear in a lot of people."
Following the conviction, a judge sentenced the zombie hunter to death, which under Arizona law means that he will automatically get an appeal.
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When he was asked by producers of the television show 48 Hours why his DNA was found at both crime scenes, he said, But are these two murders the zombie hunters' only victims?
Brandy Myers was just a 13-year-old girl when she went missing in 1992.
Although her body has never been found, the police have never stopped investigating her disappearance. And after new evidence surfaced about a possible confession, Phoenix detectives now wonder if the zombie hunter could have also killed her. Brandy Myers was last seen knocking on doors for a school book drive on May 16, 1992 when she disappeared. All
Although she was technically 13 years old, her mental and emotional age was closer to 9 or 10. Interestingly enough, Brian Miller lived less than a half mile from where she was last seen. The reason why some detectives suspect Brandy may have been his third victim is because Miller's ex-wife, the one that we talked about during the trial,
told an FBI agent and a Phoenix detective during an interview that he had confessed to killing a teen who matched Brandy's description. He was our guy, the former head of the Phoenix Police Department's cold case unit, Troy Hillman, told NBC's Dateline.
There are many secrets to Brian Miller that we still don't know about. We can't prove it, but we all strongly believe that Brian Patrick Miller killed Brandi Myers."
He will never harm another woman or child, and that's the important thing, said Stuart Sumshew, a retired Phoenix missing person detective. But, he said, Brandy was nearly forgotten in the drama and the intense media coverage surrounding Miller's trial.
That frustrates me greatly because, again, she's a true victim, he said. She did nothing wrong and didn't deserve the fate that befell her, end quote. Miller and his ex-wife had been married from 1997 until they separated in 2005.
She told investigators that he had told her about the fatal stabbing of a person he identified as an intellectually challenged Girl Scout who looked to be in her mid-teens.
She said it happened sometime after he had been released from juvenile hall while living in an apartment complex operated by the Mennonite Outreach Program just north of Central Phoenix. The ex-wife said that when Brandy knocked on Miller's door, he grabbed her, pulled her into the apartment, and then cut her throat. He then allegedly put her body in the bathtub, where he intended to preserve the body with cold water, but...
but he mistakenly ran hot water instead. So that's when he decided to dismember her body and place the remains in a trash can.
He just left the trash can sitting in the house till trash day, she recalled Miller saying, according to court records. When the neighbors complained of the smell, he just told them that some meat in the kitchen had gone bad, end quote. According to Miller's ex, he never identified the girl as Brandy, at least not by her name.
However, a lot of his confession lines up with the evidence. While she wasn't a Girl Scout, Brandy had been knocking on doors for a book drive when she went missing on May 26, 1992, so it's possible he just mistook her for a Girl Scout selling cookies.
Plus, the date of her disappearance lines up perfectly with the ex-wife's statements. It was roughly two years after Miller was released from juvenile detention.
Witnesses also said that Brandy was last seen less than 70 feet away from Miller's apartment. People who lived with Miller in that apartment building told detectives later on that yes, his unit did smell really bad at one point. They said it smelled way worse than rotting meat. This
This was in the fall of 1992. But to this day, Brandy's remains have never been found, and the zombie hunter hasn't been charged with her murder. But that didn't mean detectives didn't try. In late 2015, Phoenix detectives submitted the case to the District Attorney's Office, the Maricopa County D.A.,
But the DA declined to press charges, citing a lack of evidence proving that Miller did in fact murder Brandy Myers.
The current DA highlighted that Miller's confession didn't include a name, leaving doubt about the identity of the victim. The case of Brandy Myers remains unsolved, leaving her family, investigators, and the city of Phoenix without many answers as to what really happened to her. Was she a victim of the zombie hunter? I don't know.
As of 2025, Brian Patrick Miller has received two death sentences for the first-degree murder of Angela Broso and Melanie Bernis. His case is still pending an automatic appeal. No execution date has been scheduled as of the time of this recording. The man, once known for dressing up as a self-proclaimed zombie killer, may not have actually hunted zombies.
Instead, he preyed on real people, real victims. And without advancements in DNA and genetic genealogy, the zombie hunter's true identity may have never been revealed.
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And Savannah.
If you'd like to become a producer of this show, head over to our Patreon page or send me an email at Courtney at ForensicTales.com. For a complete list of sources used in this episode, please visit ForensicTales.com. Thank you for listening. I'll see you next week. Until then, remember, not all stories have happy endings.
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