Arizona 'canal killings': 30 years later, Bryan Miller stands trial

Part 3: DNA helps police catch break in cold case

About Jan. 13, 2015

Lynn Jacobs was at home in Surprise, reading the news online, when he saw there had been an arrest in the canal murders.

He had followed the long-running Phoenix cold case for years, ever since Nov. 9, 1992, when he had pulled up at a crime scene on Cactus Road, next to the Woodstone Apartments, where he and his wife used to live. He sat in his car for about 15 minutes, watching helicopters overhead, the grim-faced officers combing the area.

He didn't know then what he was looking at, but later discovered it was the murder of Angela Brosso. She had gone out cycling on the eve of her 22nd birthday and never came home. Ten months later and 1.5 miles south, 17-year-old Melanie Bernas was killed as she cycled along the Arizona Canal.

Jacobs had occasionally thought back to the murders, wondered if Angela and Melanie's killer would ever be found. Now police thought they had their man: Bryan Patrick Miller.

The arrest piqued his interest for another reason: Jacobs had always wanted to sit through a trial.

Since he was a young man, he had been intrigued by how real life court cases diverged from the depictions on TV. He wanted to see the attorneys' thrust and parry, hear the eyewitness testimony, feel the emotion in the room.

Maybe this was it. He had a tenuous connection to the canal murders. He was retired and had days to burn.

Jacobs pulled his flip phone from the velcro pouch on his belt and called Maricopa County Superior Court to ask when Bryan Patrick Miller's trial would start.

Not yet, they said, and told him the next court date. Jacobs wrote it in his planner. Once it passed, he called back. When is the trial on? Sorry, not yet. Jacobs entered another date.

"And of course, that went on and on and on," Jacobs said.

It went on for close to eight years.

The delay was mostly on the part of the defense team, who set about reconstructing Miller's life story as they prepared to fight the capital case. It took time, partly due to the decades that had elapsed since the murders, and partly due to the scope of their investigation, which involved hundreds of people across more than a dozen states.

COVID-19 hit, and as the pandemic unfolded, there were more delays. The defense wanted Miller assessed to determine whether he was competent to stand trial. He was. In 2021, six years after the case was filed, Miller's attorneys said they would mount an insanity defense, a major change in strategy that would require more time.

The state, frustrated, said the insanity defense was yet another delay tactic and argued, unsuccessfully, to stop it. In January 2022, Linda Brosso and Marlene Bernas, the mothers of Angela and Melanie, filed a motion asserting their right to a speedy trial as victims of crime.

Jacobs kept phoning the court. One day in 2022, the person who picked up had something different to say.

Oh yes, they said. The trial is supposed to start on Oct. 3.

Sure, he replied. Now tell me when it's actually going to start.

No, they said. This time, it's actually happening.

Oct. 3, 2022, just before 11 a.m.

Bryan Patrick Miller walked into a downtown Phoenix courtroom and took a seat between his defense attorneys, his face obscured by a blue surgical mask.

He entered through a side door, his passage to and from Lower Buckeye Jail, where he had been in custody seven years, eight months, and counting. A correctional officer followed behind, one of several who would occupy a chair behind the defense team, never needing to act.

The legal teams were five strong: deputy county attorneys on one side, public defenders on the other. The court reporter sat poised at her steno machine, the bow-tied bailiff and other staff seated along the north side of the room. Two cameras zoomed in on Miller through the glass window of the media room.

There were a handful of people in the public gallery, mostly journalists, but also onlookers like Lynn Jacobs, who had arrived early to make sure he got a seat.

Just beyond the heavy wooden doors, south Phoenix stretched out through a vast glass wall, the downtown court tower offering an unrivaled view of South Mountain.

There was an expectant hum in the air, a shuffle of papers, an exhale. It looked for all the world like the start of any other murder trial in Maricopa County.

But something was missing: the jury. There would be none.

Miller, and everyone else ― his attorneys, prosecutors, and the judge — had agreed to waive his right to a jury trial, a decision so rare in a capital murder case in Arizona that nobody involved in the trial had experienced it before.

Instead, Miller’s fate lay in the hands of one person: Judge Suzanne Cohen.

She had been on the bench a decade. A former deputy county attorney, she had prosecuted Baseline Killer Mark Goudeau, who now sits on death row. In this case, she would act as both judge and jury.

She would decide whether Miller was guilty of six charges: first-degree murder, kidnapping and attempted sexual assault in relation to both Angela and Melanie.

If her answer was guilty, she would decide his sentence: life in prison, or death.

Questions would surface months later about who had pushed for a bench trial. But for now, it would proceed this way.

Veteran prosecutor Vince Imbordino went first. His tone was measured and halting as he spoke into a handheld microphone, occasionally moving around the courtroom.

He hadn't really thought about it until he woke up that morning, he said. But soon, on Nov. 8, it would be 30 years to the day since Angela Brosso was murdered.

"Murdered doesn't really describe what happened to her," he added.

The photos he displayed were for Cohen's eyes only. The images were too graphic, too traumatizing to be displayed to the public gallery or beamed over the Microsoft Teams link, which carried the trial to the victims' families.

He showed Cohen the Woodstone Apartments. The bike path. The drag trail leading up the berm, where Robert Wamsley and his partner had braked.

"And this is what Officer Wamsley found," Imbordino said.

There was a pause.

Later, Imbordino would describe Angela as having been "butchered." She had been decapitated, incisions visible around the stump of her neck. Her torso was cleaved by an incision that ran from her neck down to her pelvis. She had been stabbed over and over. Wounds pockmarked her chest and abdomen.

Her attacker had tried to cut her in half at the waist, seemingly turning her over from side to side, desperate to achieve his goal. By the time he finished, or perhaps gave up, only her spinal cord connected the top half of her body to her hips and legs.

Melanie was mutilated too. The damage to her lifeless body was less frenzied, more deliberate. Her killer had made a shallow cut across her neck and carvings into her chest, a cross with the initials W.S.C. Detectives would never figure out what it stood for.

Imbordino drew certain details to Cohen's attention.

There were lights on the bike path where Angela was attacked, but not where she was drug up on the berm.

The diversion canal close to where she was killed was dry, and did not converge with the Arizona Canal, where her head was eventually found, and which had water in it.

The only lights along the cycleway where Melanie was murdered were in the tunnel under Interstate 17.

Most of Melanie's clothes were found in a dumpster at the back of a nearby business. On the way there, someone had dropped her white sports bra, cut and stained with blood, on the sidewalk.

These details were important, not just in figuring out what happened, but figuring out why.

Defense attorneys planned to tell Miller's story. They had spent years pulling together the threads of his life, the experiences and relationships and struggles that they believed had led him to violence.

What happened to Angela and Melanie was horrific, defense attorney Denise Dees said. Senseless. The killings had left everybody with questions: Why did this happen? How did this happen?

Like everyone else, she said, Bryan Miller was in the dark. "Mr. Miller doesn’t know what happened those two evenings," she told Cohen.

The question of his DNA hung in the air, but Dees did not address it. It was for the state to prove. She wasn't saying Miller wasn't physically there, that Angela and Melanie didn't die by his hand.

She was saying the Bryan Miller sitting in court was not the Bryan Miller in control.

The crux of the insanity defense was that, long ago, Miller's consciousness split in two. The break emerged when he was a child and he began to dissociate as a way to cope with Ellen's abuse.

But the two parts of his mind had never integrated.

There was his normal state, the everyday Bryan Miller, a shy, anxious man who used Steampunk and costuming to compensate for his social awkwardness. A loyal friend and a loving dad, not one who would win Father of the Year, but who raised his daughter the best he knew how. A man haunted by his childhood, who had made his way through life struggling with autism, dissociative disorders and various mental illnesses.

This Bryan Miller did not know what he was doing when he killed Angela and Melanie.

The Bryan Miller who did, Dees said, was the other part of his consciousness.

As a child, a "trauma state" had begun to form within Miller, a walled-off part of his mind where he stored things he couldn't handle: the worst of the abuse, the intense rage and humiliation he harbored, his disturbed and violent sexual fantasies. One expert would characterize it as a "toxic stew," a dark place devoid of ethics and empathy.

When it took over, normal Miller didn't have a say, the argument went. The trauma state was likely at the wheel when he stabbed Celeste in 1989. Possibly when he wrote The Plan. And certainly when he killed Angela and Melanie on two nights, 10 months apart, in the early 1990s.

The whole point of the trauma state was to protect the normal state, to hold the things it couldn't countenance, the defense would argue. It wasn't that the murders had slipped Miller's mind. It was that he had "no access" to whatever happened those nights.

Witness for the prosecution:'Canal killings' trial: Accused was sane, expert says, and 'carefully executed' deaths

The state's argument would be simpler.

There's just one Bryan Miller, and he's a sexual sadist who derives pleasure from killing, mutilating, and sexually assaulting women.

"That's who he is," Imbordino said.

Jacobs would drive in from Surprise, snag free parking west of downtown and take the bus into court. Sometimes, he stopped for a lurid green pistachio muffin and coffee at a nearby restaurant.

He did this whenever court was on, which was by no means predictable. The trial proceeded in fits and starts. There were planned days and weeks and mornings off, a flexibility permitted by the lack of a jury, and unplanned ones too, which threw the carefully constructed witness schedule into disarray. Some of the delays were unavoidable, illness or family emergency, and others less so, witnesses taking far longer than expected.

As it ground on, it brought to Courtroom 5B people who had been touched by the case decades ago, some who knew they would never be free of the canal murders, and others who might have assumed their role in this tragedy was long in the past.

Robert Wamsley testified about finding Angela's body. Marlene Bernas told the court, from her home, about the last time she saw her daughter. Charlotte Pottle remembered the morning she cycled through a pool of blood on the pavement. Celeste relived the day she was stabbed at Paradise Valley Mall in 1989. As he listened to her testimony, Miller grew emotional, and court adjourned early.

The court also watched a tape of Miller's police interview, recorded in downtown Phoenix on Jan. 13, 2015, the day he was arrested. He told Detective William Schira he was scared of the tunnel that ran under Interstate 17, that he might have gone there once but didn't hang out there.

Left alone in the interview room, the camera still rolling, he issued a plea to his daughter: "Please don't believe them."

As Miller was questioned that day, detectives searched his home. It was a "hoarding house," Clark Schwarztkopf recalled in testimony, only accessible via small trails that ran through towering piles of stuff. There were dozens of knives. There were dozens, if not hundreds, of a lot of other things, too: keychains, photographs, Hot Wheels cars, trinkets, CDs, VHS tapes, records, boxes, trash.

But a few things stood out.

Violent pornography, found printed and on Miller's computer, photos of women who had been mutilated, cut and stabbed. A full-length poster on the fridge depicting a severed head and other body parts, one that in another home might be considered a gruesome Halloween decoration, but in this one held significance. A box full of letters he had written to Amy.

There was also a VHS tape labeled "Shocking Asia."

As fall turned into winter, the testimony veered far from those two nights in the early 1990s and into a painstakingly detailed exposition of Miller's life. Neighbors from Hawaii, relatives, and the church community who housed him as a young man would all make an appearance.

The film "Shocking Asia," and another like it titled "Faces of Death," would be discussed in court time and time again.

Defendant's behavior:'Canal killings' trial: Experts disagree on role of violent films

They were mondo-documentaries, fictional films full of realistic depictions of sexual violence and extreme gore. They were intentionally beyond the pale, designed to shock and appall in their depictions of a cannibalistic cult orgy, a woman being raped by Nazis, a close shot of a sex-change operation in which a penis is removed.

Because Miller claimed his mother forced him to watch them as a child, which may or may not have been true, a number of people involved in the trial had to watch them too. Judge Cohen watched them, though not while on the bench. Dr. Tina Garby, an expert in sexual sadism called by the state, said she watched them on a Saturday night.

And Dr. Mark Cunningham, an affable forensic and clinical psychologist who spent 16 days on the stand, watched them.

"Several times," he said confidently, asked if he had seen “Shocking Asia.” "In its entirety."

Cunningham, who wore sneakers and a suit to court and collected $420,000 testifying in criminal cases last year, was the glue that held the defense case together. His testimony, in a nutshell: "If Ellen had set out when Bryan was an infant to create someone who was going to commit a sexual homicide, she left no square unchecked."

Cunningham presented his direct evidence through a Powerpoint, hundreds of slides containing a bewildering amount of information about Miller's life. The anecdotes inspired whiplash, going from a Little League teammate who recalled Miller twirling absently in the outfield, to a threat Ellen made to cut off her son's penis, to a whale-watching trip Miller didn't remember, possibly due to dissociation.

As Cunningham's evidence progressed, the slides became increasingly complicated, boxes with diagnoses and personality traits and experiences, haphazardly connected by arrows shooting this way and that, all of it an attempt to illustrate Miller's complex pathology.

Cross-examined:'Canal killings': Expert's autism diagnosis questioned by state

He argued Miller was in the grip of the trauma state when he killed Angela and Melanie. He said Miller’s autism, combined with his immaturity, meant he was incapable of grasping how wrong his actions were. Both, or either, made him insane at the time of the murders.

Cunningham thought “Shocking Asia” and “Faces of Death” were a crucial part of Miller's story. There were clear parallels to the murders, Cunningham said, as he argued that the films were one of many ways Ellen had wired her young son for sexual violence.

Not everyone agreed.

Garby, a Scottsdale-based psychologist who diagnosed Miller with sexual sadism disorder, agreed there were similarities, but it didn't necessarily follow that the films traumatized Miller, or that they lent much insight into his sexual interests at all.

"We do not know what leads to somebody being a sexual sadist," she said, adding that she had treated people who appeared to have "perfect families" and still, their desires revolved around causing pain and humiliation to others.

The interest is typically lifelong, Garby said, but "they have a choice in what they do."

Days were spent on dueling diagnoses as a roll call of experts combed over Miller's history to try to determine if he was insane on two nights 30 years ago. Broadly, dissociation, autism and PTSD on the defense side. Antisocial personality disorder and sexual sadism disorder on the state side, with some disagreement and overlap.

At times, it was easy to lose sight of what it was all about. To establish the defense of not guilty by reason of insanity, Miller's attorneys had to prove he had a mental disease or defect that prevented him from knowing the nature and quality of his acts, or if he did know, that prevented him from knowing it was wrong.

When Miller killed Angela and Melanie, did he understand what he was doing? Did he know that it was wrong?

Dr. Leslie Dana-Kirby thought so.

"I think they were planned and they were carefully executed," she said. "He evaded detection and arrest for a long time."

Dana-Kirby was a court-appointed expert called by the state, an unassuming witness who testified she thought Miller was sane at the time of the murders. Like all of the others, she had her diagnoses, and had gone through some of Miller's life experiences, though not as many as Cunningham.

She thought it was unlikely he had no recall of those two nights in the 1990s.

He professed no such amnesia over stabbing Celeste, nor the Washington incident in which he was found not guilty, nor more minor infractions like arson or shoplifting. She thought he had good recall of his childhood trauma. As far as she was aware, Dana-Kirby said, the only things Miller claimed to forget were things that would incriminate him in the murders of Angela and Melanie.

There was a lot of evidence to show Miller knew what he was doing was wrong, she said plainly.

He had prepared for the murders. He brought a knife both times, the turquoise bodysuit the second. He picked young females who were alone. He tried to conceal the crimes, dragging Angela up on the berm and dropping Melanie in the canal, her clothes discarded in a dumpster. Neither their bikes nor their Walkmans nor the murder weapons were ever found.

And then there was Randy McGlade's joke, about where Miller was the night Melanie died. He had seen a news report about a young cyclist murdered as she rode the Arizona Canal near Metrocenter, west of where they lived.

He mentioned it to Miller: Hey, weren't you out riding the canal that night?

I was riding on the east side, Miller said.

His answer was telling, Dana-Kirby said. Miller didn't say that he didn't remember that night, or that he didn't know where he was when Melanie was killed.

He said he was not there.

Part 5, coming Friday, Sept. 1, to azcentral.com: Miller gets ultimate punishment; families, friends remember victims.