‘Zombie Hunter’ who beheaded Cumberland County woman sentenced to death

It took three decades, but the heinous, murderous acts of Bryan Patrick Miller — aka the Arizona “Zombie Hunter” — have finally caught up with him. And they will cost him his life.

An Arizona superior court judge on Wednesday sentenced Miller, 50, to death for the brutal, bloody first-degree knife murders of Angela Brosso, formerly of Lower Allen Township, Pa., and Melanie Bernas, 17. Both murders took place in the early 1990s along the metro Phoenix canal system as the women were biking there. Miller also raped both women, possibly as they were dying or dead.

“The defendant did not just murder them. He brutalized them. And he evaded capture for over 20 years,” Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Suzanne Cohen was quoted as saying, explaining why she condemned Miller to die, rather than serve life in prison for the “Arizona Canal Killings.”

“There is no question that what the defendant did deserves the death penalty,” Cohen said.

Brosso, a 22-year-old from Cumberland County who relocated to Phoenix, Arizona, was stabbed and beheaded in Nov. 1992 while on a pre-birthday celebration ride on her newly tuned-up purple mountain bike. She was a 1989 graduate of Cedar Cliff High School — and Miller’s first victim.

Miller’s knife attack was so frenzied, Brosso was nearly cut in half at the waist, according to forensic testimony. The exact number of stab wounds couldn’t be calculated; there were just too many.

Her body was discovered along the canal trial the next morning. Brosso’s head would not be found for 11 more days. It was located in a grate in the canal about a mile and a half away from where her body was found.

Angela Brosso’s mother, Linda Brosso Strock, still lives on the West Shore. She didn’t respond to PennLive’s repeated attempts to contact her for comment on her daughter’s case.

Ten months later another brutally stabbed female was found floating in the canal. This time it was a 17-year-old girl who was supposed to be home sick from school. Instead, Melanie Bernas went out for a bike ride along the canal in September 1993, only to encounter Miller.

Bernas suffered a deep stab wound to her back. Just like Brosso, the fatal knife plunge severed Bernas’ aorta and pierced her lung. Unlike Brosso, a cross was carved into Bernas’ chest, along with the initials “WSC.”The meaning of the initials was never determined.

Many more graphic details of both murders were chronicled by police, pathologists and forensic experts who testified at the trial.

The unsolved killings in the fall of 1992 and 1993 had Phoenix on edge as the desert city braced for the bloody reign of a brutal serial killer. Instead, the killings stopped. The sensational case grew cold for 22 years.

Then in January 2015, a DNA breakthrough finally linked the semen found at both murder scenes to Miller.

Miller was known as the “Zombie Hunter” for the converted police car that was parked in his driveway. Miller would splatter the old black-and-white police cruiser with fake blood, much to the delight of trick-or-treating neighborhood kids.

The car remained in his driveway right up until the day a breakthrough DNA match led to Miller’s 2015 arrest, some 22 years after his alleged crimes. Detectives used a fake job interview to lure Miller. They obtained his DNA from the lip of a beverage container he drank from during the ruse interview.

When the tests came back, they had their killer.

Following a months-long bench trial that began in October 2022, Judge Cohen in April found Miller guilty of two counts of first-degree murder, two counts of kidnapping and two counts of attempted sexual assault.

She handed down a death sentence to Miller on Wednesday afternoon, completing the sentencing phase of the trial — and closing a bloody chapter in Arizona history.

According to an account of Cohen’s ruling by AZcentral, the question was whether Miller’s tortured childhood as chronicled during the trial was enough to warrant the leniency of a life sentence.

“The answer is no,” she said.