Phoenix canal murders: 2 shocking cases, 22 years of mystery
Shaun McKinnon
A 22-year-old woman vanished one night, then turned up dead in a park near her home.
Within 10 months, a high school junior disappeared on a bike ride, becoming a second victim.
Police found few clues in the cold cases for more than 20 years, until an arrest this week.
On a Wednesday morning in September 1993, Phoenix police fished the body of a 17-year-old girl from the water of the Arizona Canal.
The canal, which spills from empty fields more than 20 miles east, winds through old Scottsdale and Arcadia and past the Biltmore resort. It meanders through working-class Sunnyslope, skirts North Mountain and then starts its final run northwest.
There, just before where the water slips beneath the hissing traffic of Interstate 17, a jogger had spotted blood on the canal bank. Police arrived and found the body.
The girl was identified as Melanie Bernas, an Arcadia High School junior. The night before, she had taken her bicycle out for a ride on the canal path, and hadn't returned.
Police came to a stunning conclusion. She had been stabbed, her body dumped in the canal. Her bike, police would confirm later, had been stolen.
Though police would not say it yet, the moment for them would mark the discovery of a serial murder.
Ten months before, on a cooler November Friday — just downsteam, past the freeway, near where the canal brushes past the Metrocenter mall — a man had found a human head floating in the water.
The head was that of a 22-year-old woman named Angela Brosso, who had disappeared more than a week earlier.
Her body had been found in a park south of Cactus Road, one of the parks that flank the course of Cave Creek as it drains out of the north Valley, before it reaches the Arizona Canal.
Brosso, like Melanie, had taken her bicycle out for a ride and never returned to her home at an apartment complex a couple of miles north.
Brosso, too, had been stabbed. Her bike, too, was missing.
Detectives and the media saw a connection between the two deaths right away, but police would wait nearly six months before they could deliver the news to a city already on edge: The same killer, a man almost certainly, was responsible for the deaths of both women.
The headlines were chilling: A headless body, mutilated almost beyond recognition. Victims dumped in a canal. Experts saw hints of a serial killer at work, perhaps one inspired by the movie "The Silence of the Lambs." People avoided the canal paths, kept loved ones inside, walked in pairs, and worried, would he strike again?
And then, nothing.
The cases turned cold. A growing city began to forget, reminded only when occasional stories arose — "Murderer remains at large." Authorities pleaded for new clues. Still, nothing.
Until Tuesday, when police arrested 42-year-old Bryan Patrick Miller and named him a suspect in the killings.
"They never stopped looking," said William Hermann, who covered the murders for The Arizona Republic and followed the case himself over the years. "That was a bee in their bonnet. It drove them crazy. It got under everyone's skin."
Phoenix was a growing city in the fall of 1992, part of a metro area of about 2.3 million people. But it still felt like its smaller, younger self to many people who had watched the orange groves along the canal banks disappear. Metrocenter, near Dunlap and Interstate 17, was the largest mall for miles around and would be for another year, until the bigger Arrowhead Towne Center opened farther to the north.
Angela Brosso lived with her boyfriend in an apartment not far from Metrocenter, near 25th Avenue and Cactus Road. She worked as a trainer at Syntellect, a communications company.
"They told me how thrilled they were that she accepted their offer to work there, and they called her their shining star," Angela's mother, Linda Brosso Strock, said in a 2012 interview with The Republic.
"I think she was still of the notion that if you're wonderful to people, people will be wonderful to you and nothing bad is going to happen," Strock said. "She was just happy-go-lucky. She never mentioned anything about 'I'm scared here.' "
Angela didn't return home the night of Nov. 8. Her purple Diamond Back mountain bike was gone when her boyfriend called police.
A decapitated body was discovered in the park the next morning. The killer had mutilated the rest of the body. Police would not identify the remains for another day.
The killing and the grisly details captivated the media and terrified residents of her apartment complex.
At the time, Jeremey Robinson told The Republic he noticed a change among residents.
"I don't see people walking around a lot," he said. "Usually, there are people walking around and kids playing."
Eleven days later, a man named Mark Qualls spotted the rest of Brosso's remains in the canal water near Metrocenter.
Qualls, then 39, was known to live outdoors, and went by the nickname "Fisher King." Some suggested it had come from the Robin Williams movie of the same name, but Qualls also successfully fished from the canal.
His mother had told him she believed he would find the slain woman's head.
"It was just a strong feeling I had," she told a reporter.
Even more disturbing, Hermann said, was what police deduced after the finding.
"I was told her head was in too good of shape to have been in the canal all that time," Hermann said. The killer "either kept it in a refrigerator or an ice chest. Now we had a pretty good portrait of a 110 percent madman. He had two trophies, a head and a bike. And he put the head back."
The case was drawing attention from other parts of the county as police searched for similar killings. Rumors flew. Police knocked down some of the more grisly stories, such as alleged similarities to the murders in the hit movie of the era, "The Silence of the Lambs."
By May 1993, there had been no new killings and no new clues. Police appealed to the public for help.
"You don't commit a crime without leaving evidence behind, and this person did that," Lt. Sharon Kiyler, who headed the Police Department's homicide unit at the time, said in a Republic story. "We just don't know where that evidence leads us."
Angela's mother wrote an emotional letter to the newspaper, begging people to come forward if they knew who had killed her daughter.
"The person or persons who know who killed Angie are allowing this to happen, allowing this criminal to have a life, to breathe air," she said. "I wish this criminal had the courage to stand face-to-face with me and tell me why he did this terrible thing to my precious daughter, but I'm sure he is too much of a coward."
In September of that year, the discovery that seemed inevitable was made. Melanie Bernas' body was found in the water, and no one could ignore the coincidence.
Hermann said one of the first questions he asked was whether Melanie Bernas was riding a bicycle before she was killed. His sources said she had a bike, a green SPC Hardrock Sport, and had been riding it along the canal. It was not found at the scene.
"A shiver went up my spine," Hermann said. "Now we had two."
Authorities intensified their search for similar cases elsewhere, but found no evidence. They hoped someone would come forward. The bodies in each case had been left in visible locations: a park near a busy street and a large apartment complex, a canal along a freeway, near a popular mall.
For a while, Hermann said, the lack of an arrest unnerved people who lived nearby.
"No women went out walking alone," he said. "Exercise along the canal dropped off. People jogged in pairs."
But the second case went as cold as the first, for a year, five years, 10 years. Then 20.
In the 2012 Republic interview, Angela's mother talked about the lack of a resolution.
"I don't know why people talk about closure," she said. "There's no such thing as that. This person is out enjoying his life. He can take dinner and is sleeping at night. She's not and neither are we."
Then, on a mild Tuesday night in January 2015, police arrived at a warehouse in southwest Phoenix to pick up an employee named Bryan Patrick Miller.
Around the same time, miles away, other officers pulled to a stop in front of a low rental house in Sunnyslope, at the foot of North Mountain, just off the Arizona Canal. They knocked on the door, met Miller's teenage daughter, and began to search the house.
Late that evening, officers emerged from a rusty shed behind the house, carrying an old bicycle.