Marathon 'canal killings' trial nears finish line, with closing arguments set to start
It has been 30 years since Angela Brosso and Melanie Bernas were killed in Phoenix, but the trial of their accused killer is only now drawing to an end.
Closing arguments are set to begin Wednesday in the double murder trial of Bryan Miller, who was arrested eight years ago and could be sentenced to death if found guilty. The trial has been underway in the Maricopa County Superior Court since Oct. 3.
For six months, Miller, 50, has sat flanked by his attorneys and listened as the major events and minutiae of his life were put on the record, all in an effort by the defense team to prove his insanity on two nights in the early 1990s.
The trial has been unusual for a number of reasons: the amount of time elapsed since the crimes in question, the fact it is a capital murder case with no jury, and the sheer length of the bench trial.
Presided over by Judge Suzanne Cohen, the trial has run in fits and starts, the lack of a jury allowing for a far more flexible schedule than the average capital case.
There have been breaks long and short to accommodate pre-existing commitments, to allow for complicated and constantly shifting witness schedules, and, occasionally, for unforeseen events like illness.
Some witnesses also took longer than expected, most notably key defense expert Dr. Mark Cunningham, who spent 13 days on the stand.
This week, the state and defense will offer their final words as they seek to convince Cohen of Miller's guilt or innocence.
The deaths of two young women
On Nov. 8, 1992, the eve of her 22nd birthday, Angela Brosso went out for a bike ride. She never came home.
Her body was found the next morning, decapitated and mutilated, in a field just east of the apartment building where she lived with her boyfriend. Her head was found 11 days later in the Arizona Canal, where it runs by the Metrocenter mall.
Ten months later, in September 1993, the body of high school student Melanie Bernas was found in the same canal, not far from where Brosso's head was located.
There were obvious similarities between the killings: Both victims were young women, Brosso 21 and Bernas 17, who were believed to have been riding alone on the canal when attacked. Neither of their bicycles was ever recovered. They were both killed by a forceful stab wound to the back that pierced their lung and aorta. Forensic evidence suggested they had been sexually assaulted at some point during the attack.
There were differences too: Brosso's head was missing, and her torso subject to a frenzied knife attack, while Bernas had a shallow cut to her neck and figures carved into her chest. And Bernas appeared to have been dressed in a turquoise body suit after her death.
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By 1994, police had linked the deaths using forensic evidence. But with no suspect to match with the sample, the so-called "canal killings" case ran cold.
Miller was arrested in January 2015 after a new DNA analysis led detectives to him. It was a huge breakthrough in a case that had languished for more than two decades.
But the wait for answers was far from over.
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A trial in fits and starts
The case took eight years to get to trial, delayed by the difficulty of examining a crime decades after the fact and by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Finally, on Oct. 3, 2022, it began.
The first few weeks focused on the killings themselves, the court hearing from police who attended the grisly crime scenes, medical examiners, and a woman who rode through a pool of blood on the footpath as she cycled through the Interstate 17 underpass in September 1993, leading to the discovery of Bernas's body.
Then the focus turned to Miller's insanity defense.
People who knew him as a child in Hawaii and adolescent and teen in Arizona testified about abuse meted out to him by his mother, Ellen, who died in 2010.
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A series of expert witnesses diagnosed Miller with a number of mental disorders, including autism spectrum disorder, PTSD and its complex variation, anxiety, depression and dissociative disorder.
Cunningham tried to tie the threads together in testimony that spanned from Jan. 17 to Feb. 16 and involved a PowerPoint presentation with hundreds of slides. The forensic psychologist said Miller met the criteria for an insanity defense in two ways.
One, that at the time of the killings, he was in the grip of a dissociative "trauma state," a split-off part of his consciousness that had formed due to his mental disorders, childhood abuse, and his mother's dysfunctional and sexually inappropriate parenting. Miller's normal state, where he functioned day-to-day, had no or little awareness of the insights and actions of his trauma state, Cunningham said.
Two, that Miller's autism and immaturity meant he was functioning at an age equivalent to someone under 14 at the time of the killings, despite his actual age of 20.
Miller did not testify in his own defense.
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Judge will weigh evidence, testimony
The state's experts broadly opined Miller has antisocial personality disorder and sexual sadism disorder, neither of which meet the criteria for an insanity defense.
The state rested its case Monday, six months to the day after the trial began.
Their final witness was Amy Miller, Miller's ex-wife and the mother of his daughter. The couple married in August 1997, split in 2005 and formalized their divorce in 2006.
Miller came to court several times before actually taking the stand due to the erratic schedule. She finally began her testimony on March 8, continued it on March 9, then returned to court on March 29 and again on April 3.
'Canal killings' testimony: Accused wasn't violent toward his ex-wife or daughter
She testified Miller was the "epitome of a gentleman" on their chaste first date to Castles N' Coasters — close to where Brosso's head was found in the canal — but their marriage was beset by financial problems and slowly devolved to the point where she began to fear Miller would harm her.
Amy said Miller's gentlemanly behavior started to drop off after their engagement on New Year's Eve of 1996. "By the end of our marriage," she said, "it was definitely no longer something I would think to call him."
After the state closed its case, the defense sought to return Cunningham to the stand to respond to various state experts, but Judge Cohen denied the motion.
Judge Cohen said she had done "a lot of research" on how to conduct a bench trial in a capital case.
She said she intended to come to a decision in the jury room, for a broadly relatable reason: "If I deliberate in my office, people are going to bug me."
As well, she said, she would be physically closer to the boxes of evidence.
If Miller is found guilty, the case will proceed to a second phase addressing whether he can be sentenced to death, and then potentially a third considering if he should be.
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: 'Canal killings': Marathon trial of Bryan Miller reaching end
