Unveiling the Zombie Hunter

0:00Music

0:14When you think of the Phoenix desert, you definitely aren't thinking of a waterfront. Music The canal system goes right through the center of Phoenix. The more people that were moving to the area, the more that the trails along there were being used for walking, running, biking.

0:42There are not many crimes that are like this one.

0:51You had women riding bicycles along the canal. on a typical Phoenix evening, ambushed, stabbed multiple times. Police are looking for whoever killed 22-year-old Angela Brasso. Angela Brasso dismembered, decapitated. Police are looking at this scene and thinking, what on earth happened and who did this? 10 months later, a 17-year-old junior at Arcadia High School, Melanie Bernis. This is the high school that Steven Spielberg attended. Melanie Bernis' mother goes out to dinner, and Melanie decides to go on a bike ride. And the following morning, a woman is riding her bike. Right here, there was just a big puddle.

1:50It looked different as I rode through it, and all of a sudden I'm like, that is blood. So she called the police. The police saw a blood trail, and they see Melanie Bernis' body at the bottom of the canal.

2:09My time in my life froze at that very moment, the day we found out. I made a promise to myself. I just never stopped talking about her. These murders became widely known as the Phoenix Canal murders

2:31My name is Clark Swartzkopf And I was assigned to the cold case unit Investigating the canal murders I think there was over 600 persons of interest I said, okay, give me the list In this mound of information of all these people and all these possible suspects, I believed our killer was listed. Eventually, Detective Schwarzkopf found his prime suspect on that list and discovered that the alleged canal killer had a second identity, a man who dressed up like a comic book superhero and cruised the valley in a decorated car dripping with fake blood. The public knew this man as the zombie hunter. What was his life as the zombie hunter like?

3:22What did he do? He would go to parades and festivals and show off this car and kind of be a part of the excitement, if you will.

3:35Your assignment was to find this guy and you have found him. He is accused of being a killer, but here he is posing with police officers before they discovered what he'd done. It was almost like a slap in the face, like, I'm here, but you don't know it. It was like he was hiding in plain sight.

4:12It's one of those cases that you just don't forget. You can't unsee what happened to those girls. You just can't. Long before the man known as the zombie hunter became the prime suspect in the canal murders, Clark Schwarzkopf was a detective with the Phoenix Police Department's Cold Case Squad. His mission was simple but pointed. Find the killer responsible for those vicious murders of two young women from the early 1990s. To this day, I'm still not exactly sure about what happened on those bike paths. The case began on November 8, 1992. Angela Brasso, a tech worker who had recently moved to Phoenix, was taking advantage of beautiful weather to get in a little exercise, says Brianna Whitney, the true crime reporter for the CBS affiliate KPHO in Phoenix.

5:11Each night she would go out for her evening bike ride, just at golden hour at sunset, the best time to be riding out here. Angela was only hours away from turning 22 years old. And like a lot of locals, she liked to bike on the paths that ran alongside the city's distinctive canals, says Schwarzkopf, a 48 Hours consultant. Are there places that are sort of natural ambush sites if somebody wants to attack someone? Yeah, they are. There's a lot of tunnels that go underneath the interstate. That November evening in 1992, Angela left her apartment around 7 p.m. Her boyfriend, Joe, later told police.

5:56He said he stayed home to bake Angela a birthday cake and didn't expect her to be gone long. Hours go by and Joe grows concerned. Angela hasn't come home and that's not like her. Joe told police he took his bike out three times that night, frantically searching for Angela on the canal paths. He spoke to her friends, even her mother back in Pennsylvania. Finally, he reported Angela missing to police. The next morning, searchers came upon a horrific scene. Angela Brasso's torso was found in a field next to the trail that she had been riding her bike on. Angela had been stabbed to death. Some 10 days after Angela's headless body was discovered, a man fishing along this section of the canal spotted her head stuck on a grate.

6:55And from what we have heard from witnesses, the head was in amazingly good condition, especially considering this was days after the murder. I'm Morgan Lowe and I'll take you. Morgan Lowe, an investigative reporter who also works at KPHO and is a consultant for 48 hours, has been working on the canal killer case for more than a decade. We've heard that the head looked like it had been preserved, like it was a memento for the killer. Angela's purple mountain bike was also missing. There were no solid leads, and the case went quiet until September of 1993, some 10 months after Angela's murder, when the mother of 17-year-old Melanie Burness returned from a dinner date to find her daughter had broken her curfew and was not home.

7:54She then noticed that Melanie's bicycle was missing. Melanie decides to go on a bike ride. By around 10.30, when Melanie did not return, her mother started calling her friends. Is Melanie there? Well, my mom took the phone call, said that Melanie's mom was frantic and, like, nervous. Rachel Shepmaker was one of Melanie's close friends in high school. So initially when you hear that her mother's looking for her, you're not thinking something terrible has happened to your friend? Definitely not. I thought she was with a friend and just forgot to communicate with her mom where she was. Early the next morning, Charlotte Pottle, a local resident, happened to be riding along the canal with her young daughter in a bicycle seat.

8:43Just as they came out of one of those tunnels that ran under the interstate, she spotted a puddle. There was just a big puddle of something. Ended up riding right through it and having it splash over me. Charlotte says something about the puddle bothered her. So a few minutes later, she doubled back. That's when she made that horrible realization. I could tell that it was a puddle of red, that it was a puddle of blood. And all of a sudden, as I'm looking at it, I notice that there are some drag marks that went along over here. Toward that tree? Towards that tree, yes. And then went around the tree and was drugged back.

9:25You could see the drag marks right here to the canal. Charlotte went home and called police. Later that night, the local news reported that a woman's body had been found in the canal, close to where Angela Brasso's head had been located. They found the body in a teal bodysuit. I was told by some other friends that Melanie did not own that. It can't be her. Rachel went to sleep convinced the body in the canal was not Melanie. But the next day... I'm at school. My friends just come up to me crying and saying, it was Melanie.

10:09Detectives strongly suspected Melanie had been targeted and stabbed in the back by the same person who had killed Angela. Police believe that somehow the killer got her off of her bike, whether he knocked her off of her bike or whether he asked her a question. Clark says the evidence indicates the killer approached the women from behind. Both and I have wounds with the exact same position. Investigators say the killer dragged Melanie's body off the canal path, removed her clothes, and dressed her in that teal bodysuit, similar to this one obtained by police. Along with the stabbing and the dismemberment, there was another component to these murders, wasn't there?

10:59Yeah, both women were sexually assaulted. And that meant investigators had a crucial piece of evidence, DNA. When the DNA from Melanie's scene was finally tested later, it matched to Angela's scene. So we knew for sure that we were dealing with the same perpetrator. Investigators noted that the initial stab wounds to the backs of each woman were fatal and so precise that detectives suspected the killer might be a surgeon. The details about what happened were the kinds of things that kept parents from letting their kids out when the sun went down.

12:00The murders of Angela Brasso and Melanie Bernas in the early 1990s created fear in Phoenix that lasted for a generation. You know there's some guy out there and you don't know where he is. They watched the news and read the newspaper every day hoping that police would make an arrest. And it just kept going on and nothing and nothing and nothing. Investigators had collected matching male DNA from both the victims. But more than two decades passed and the canal murder cases went cold. Then, science finally caught up with the calendar. It's in 2014. Phoenix police detectives are at a DNA conference.

12:52And a forensic genealogist from California is also at the conference. Colleen Fitzpatrick, founder of Identifinders International, was there to meet with law enforcement. And she goes up to these detectives and says, hey, I can take Y chromosomes and create these DNA profiles and try to match with genealogy to help solve criminal cases. Fitzpatrick's company had developed software that could mine public genealogy databases searching for matches to crime scene DNA. The detectives heard her out. And then several weeks later, they sent me the Y DNA profile from the crime scene for the Phoenix Canal murders.

13:38Fitzpatrick's company started crunching the data, hoping to provide Phoenix detectives with a name. We entered the numbers from the forensic profile into our software, and that's where I came up with six matches to the name Miller. While the genetic genealogy search produced the name Miller, it is also one of the most common last names. Detective Schwarzkopf started digging. You check your files and what do you find? I think there were a total of six Millers that were on what I called my master list. And I went down through the list, got to Brian Patrick Miller. But who was Brian Patrick Miller?

14:17Records show he was 42 years old with a Phoenix address. That name was just one of more than 600 persons of interest who had lived in those case files for years. Police at the time seemingly never pursued Miller. We discovered his file downstairs. Police learned Brian Miller had a record dating back to before the Canal murders. In May of 1989, when he was just 16 years old, Miller crossed paths with Celeste Bentley. I was 24, and I was going to work. I had just noticed a young boy on the bus. Celeste says she and the boy got off at the same stop. Moments later, she felt something in her back. He had ran by me.

15:08I thought he had just hit me. I just yelled at him. I was like, why'd you do that, you know? And then I reached back and touched my back and realized that it was blood. I had been stabbed. With a single knife wound to her upper back, Celeste screamed and managed to make it to the store where she worked. A co-worker called for help. About 30 minutes later, when Celeste was in the back of an ambulance... The police came and said they found him, and they wanted to bring him to the ambulance to show him to me. Celeste identified her assailant. Brian Miller was charged with aggravated assault. They said that if he had held the blade the other way, he would have gone straight through my ribs and I could have died.

15:52Miller pleaded guilty and was sentenced to juvenile detention until he turned 18. It was a far cry from where Miller's life had begun. He was living in Hawaii for a while as a kid with his mom and his dad, but his dad died early on in a motorcycle accident. Years later, Miller and his mother Ellen moved to Phoenix. So for most of his life and early years, it was Brian Miller and his mom. While Miller was in juvie, his mother made a disturbing discovery. Brian Miller's mom was looking through his stuff and she found a note that he wrote. The pages detailed a sinister plan. Kidnap the girl, tie her up in the truck, and cut her clothes off.

16:45This note spelled out how he wanted to find, abduct, rape, murder, and dismember a young woman. And Brian's mom was so disturbed by this piece of paper that she took it to Phoenix police. It was Miller's 18th birthday, and he had just been released as an adult. She flat out told the police at the time that she was really scared for her safety and that she was not going to allow him to come home. So after his release, Miller ended up at this Phoenix halfway house. When Schwarzkopf read that note in 2014, he was struck by something. There was a lot of things in there that were close or similar to what happened specifically to Angela.

17:37Including a description of decapitating a victim and preserving the head. Phoenix police wanted to locate Miller. Luckily, he was very easy to find.

18:07In December 2014, Phoenix police continued digging into potential suspect Brian Miller, who they discovered was actually a local celebrity. Everybody at the time in the Phoenix area knew Brian Patrick Miller as this character called the zombie hunter. The zombie hunter, like a comic book character? Yeah, like a comic book character, like a good guy fighting the bad guys. Miller's alter ego was a costume figure who participated in parades and festivals around town. Thousands of zombies taking over the streets of downtown Phoenix. He wore this long trench coat with these goggles and helmet and had this large Gatling gun.

18:55And if you're going to hunt zombies, you need a way to get around. He bought an old police car and tricked it out, wrote the zombie hunter on it. And it had a full-size zombie mannequin in the back and blood on the side.

19:15friend eric braverman says miller's zombie hunter persona attracted a big fan base including law enforcement officers who lined up to pose with him collected pictures of himself with the cops like trophies they're all smiling big with him leaning on the car eric says miller's superhero character was the opposite of what brian was like when he wasn't in costume. He seemed like a harmless marshmallow that was immersed in this goofy lifestyle. He's just that unassuming guy. But could Miller be the canal killer? The only way to find out was to get his DNA. Investigators began to surveil Miller, who worked at an Amazon warehouse.

20:05Every day when he got there, Miller parked the zombie mobile in the same spot. He would come out for his 15-minute break, blast his music really loud. Lunchtime, came out to the car, same thing, blast this god-awful music. Schwarzkopf came up with an elaborate plan to get his DNA. I went up and introduced myself to Miller. He was in his car. What did you introduce yourself? I introduced myself as a security consultant. Schwarzkopf told Miller that thieves had been stealing goods from a warehouse across the way. I said, would you be interested in working for me as a security officer, watching the building while you're outside?

20:43Did his eyes light up? Yeah, because it was a good paying job. I said, look, I'll pay you 20 bucks an hour. On January 2nd, 2015, Schwarzkopf met Miller at this Chili's restaurant to fill out a job application. The cold case unit was behind the scenes, ready to bag anything that had Miller's DNA on it, such as utensils or a glass. They set a table for me and Mr. Miller away from everybody else in a part of the restaurant where nobody else is at. Miller arrived with a surprise guest, his 15-year-old daughter, Sarah. Miller was a divorced single dad. He was very gentle and caring about his daughter.

21:27He often brought his daughter where he would be going. The trio sat down and ordered hamburgers. When the food arrived... He swallows his hamburger in like five bites. Won't take a drink of his water. And I'm sitting there going, are you sure you don't want something else to drink? Have you just got water? No, no, I'm good, I'm good, I'm good. Schwarzkopf started to worry this operation would be a bust. What does he finally do that makes this mission accomplished? He finally took a drink from the water glass. That's when I knew that, okay, now we've at least got his DNA. Despite knowing about Miller's juvenile record, As their meal ended, the veteran detective's gut told him Miller was not their man.

22:09Seeing him with his daughter, I just don't see this guy as being the monster in 1992 and 93 that would do this to these women. Miller gave Schwarzkopf a quick tour of his zombie hunter mobile and the two parted ways, with the detective saying he'd be in touch. The cold case unit sent Miller's water glass off to the crime lab. 11 days later... We got a call from the lab and we're sitting there and we're like, what is this all about? And in this meeting, these Phoenix detectives say as a joke, they must have solved the canal murders. But Detective Schwarzkopf says it was no joke when the head of the lab arrived.

22:51She leans down to me, she goes, it's him. I go, what? She goes, Brian Miller, it's him. Well, the blood rushed from my head. I kind of sat back and I went, you've got to be kidding. Brian Miller's DNA from that water glass matched the DNA recovered from Angela Brasso and Melanie Bernas more than 20 years before. Miller was arrested within hours. During a police interview shortly after, Miller was told why he'd been taken into custody in connection with the canal murders. We have DNA that links you to those two ladies. See how that's possible. He just kind of went through it in his dopey, kind of, I don't know what you're kind of talking about.

23:41It would help you get that off your chest if you did something like that. I didn't kill anyone. You didn't kill anybody? No. Investigators got a search warrant for Miller's house. the home he shared with his teenage daughter, and just about everything he'd ever collected in his life. I can remember like it was yesterday, walking up to the front door, and everybody going, you can't get in that way. It's full of crap. Brian Miller's house was like it came from the show Hoarders. There was a little path where you could get to a bathroom in the kitchen and where the TV was, and that's it. Everything else is just stacked to the roof with garbage.

24:23Did you look around and go, this is madness? Not only madness, I go, this is a nightmare. Schwarzkopf and his investigators would have to sift through all of it, looking for other possible evidence. Detective Schwarzkopf also focused on a new source, someone Miller himself had ominously singled out in his interview.

24:51Miller's ex-wife, Amy, who would end up revealing gruesome details from Miller's violent past. He had told her about the murder of a young girl who had come to his door accidentally.

25:12What do you think motivated Brian Miller to dress up as the zombie hunter? See more of the case on Facebook at 48 Hours.

25:31In January 2015, more than 21 years after the Canal murders, Brian Miller was charged with first-degree murder in both Angela Brasso and Melanie Bernis' deaths. Melanie's friend Rachel Shepmaker says she felt a wave of relief. A very joyous moment of, oh my gosh, this is what we've been waiting for, for decades upon decades. Detective Schwarzkopf wanted to talk to the one person who probably knew Miller best, his ex-wife Amy. They had been married for eight years, there was a divorce. Amy told Schwarzkopf that she was just 19 when she met Miller in 1996. They married less than a year later and moved to Everett, Washington.

26:20Amy had a shocking revelation for the detective. She told Schwarzkopf Miller had revealed a gruesome secret to her, that he had killed a young girl in Phoenix years earlier, before he'd ever met Amy. Schwarzkopf says Amy never reported it to police before for a number of reasons. She didn't know if it was true. She was afraid of Miller. And she said she wanted to be a good wife. You support your man no matter what. Detective Schwarzkopf says Amy told him what Miller had said. That a young girl had come to his door. That he had grabbed this young female, pulled her in, killed her immediately. Amy said Miller told her he dismembered the girl and disposed of her remains in trash left on the curb.