The Zombie Hunter Murders: Phoenix's Most Haunting Cold Case Finally Solved
10 Minute Murder | Bingeable True Crime Stories
Joe
4.9 • 638 Ratings
🗓️ 12 March 2026
⏱️ 14 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In November 1992, Angela Brosso, age 21, was murdered and decapitated on a Phoenix, Arizona canal path on the eve of her 22nd birthday. Ten months later, 17-year-old Melanie Bernas was found in the same canal system, staged in clothing that didn't belong to her. For 22 years, the Phoenix Canal Murders stood as one of Arizona's most haunting cold cases until forensic genealogy and a glass of water at a Chili's finally put a name to the killer: Bryan Patrick Miller.
What makes this one so hard to shake is the life Miller built around himself while living inside the very community he terrorized. He was a local character, a self-styled "Zombie Hunter" with a custom car, a prop gun impressive enough to land in an airport exhibit, and a regular spot at Phoenix festivals where he posed for photos with actual police officers on the weekends. Behind that persona was a man with a childhood that reads like a case study in how to manufacture a predator, a handwritten murder blueprint discovered when he was 16, and a legal system that let him walk free in 2002 when the evidence said something very different.
#PhoenixCanalMurders #BryanPatrickMiller #TrueCrimePodcast #ColdCase #ForensicGenealogy #PhoenixSerialKiller #AngelaBrosso
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | He was the guy everyone knew in Phoenix, the eccentric local with the custom car covered in fake blood, |
| 0:07.0 | the elaborate homemade costume, the prop gun impressive enough to land in an airport exhibit. |
| 0:13.0 | He called himself the zombie hunter. |
| 0:15.0 | He went to festivals, he posed for photos with cops, and for 22 years nobody looked twice. |
| 0:21.6 | This is the story of Brian Patrick Miller and the Phoenix Canal murders. There's a quality to the evenings in the early 1990s that people who live there still |
| 0:53.5 | describe the same way. |
| 0:55.0 | The heat breaks just enough around sunset to make going outside feel like an actual reward, |
| 1:01.0 | and the canal paths that run through the valley become something genuinely beautiful at Golden Hour. |
| 1:06.0 | Miles of paved trail through the desert, and when the light drops low, it does things to the |
| 1:11.9 | landscape that photographers travel from all over the place to try to capture. |
| 1:16.9 | Families were out there, joggers, cyclists. |
| 1:20.4 | People doing ordinary things people do in places they have decided are safe. |
| 1:25.9 | Phoenix, in the early 1990ss was a city moving fast, |
| 1:29.5 | new apartment complexes rising alongside every strip mall, |
| 1:33.1 | the desert getting paved over at a pace that felt almost breathless. |
| 1:37.0 | The canal paths were where people exhaled. |
| 1:41.1 | Angela Brasso was 21 years old, |
| 1:43.5 | recently arrived from Pennsylvania and building a life in Phoenix's |
| 1:47.1 | burgeoning tech scene alongside her boyfriend Joe. Not me, by the way. And on the evening of November |
| 1:54.2 | 8, 1992, she had a simple plan. Joe was back at their apartment near 25th Avenue and Cactus Road, baking her |
| 2:02.2 | a birthday cake because tomorrow she was turning 22. Angela was headed out for a solo ride on |
| 2:08.4 | the canal path, something she did often without a second thought. She went out at golden hour |
... |
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