![]() ![]() Miller pleaded guilty and was sentenced to juvenile detention until he turned 18. Bryan Miller was charged with aggravated assault.Ĭeleste Bentley: They said that if he had held the blade the other way, he would've gone straight through my ribs, and I could have died. About 30 minutes later, when Bentley was in the back of an ambulance -Ĭeleste Bentley: The police came and said they found him, and they wanted to bring him to the ambulance to show him to me.īentley identified her assailant. With a single knife wound to her upper back, Bentley screamed and managed to make it to the store where she worked. I was like … "why - 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. … and a forensic genealogist from California is also at the conference.Ĭeleste Bentley: He had ran by me, I thought he had just hit me. Then, science finally caught up with the calendar.īriana Whitney: It's in 2014, Phoenix police detectives are at a DNA conference. But more than two decades passed and the canal murder cases went cold. Investigators had collected matching male DNA from both the victims. And it just kept going on and - nothing and nothing and nothing. Morgan Loew: They watched the news and read the newspaper every day, hoping that police would make an arrest. The murders of Angela Brosso and Melanie Bernas in the early 1990s created fear in Phoenix that lasted for a generation. THE TRAIL LEADING TO THE "CANAL KILLER" BEGINS WITH DNA FROM THE CRIME SCENE Morgan Loew: The details about what happened … were the kinds of things that kept parents from letting their kids out when the sun went down. 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. So, we knew for sure that we were dealing with the same perpetrator. That's when she made a horrible realization.Ĭharlotte Pottle: I could tell that it was a puddle of red, that it was a puddle of blood.Ĭharlotte Pottle (pointing to a tree): And all of a sudden, as I'm looking at it, I noticed that there are some drag marks that went along over here.Ĭlark Schwartzkopf: when the DNA from Melanie's scene was finally tested later, it … matched to Angela's scene. Pottle says something about the puddle bothered her, so a few minutes later she doubled back. … Ended up riding right through it … and having it splash up over me. Just as they came out of one of those tunnels that ran under the interstate, she spotted a puddle.Ĭharlotte Pottle: There was just a big puddle of something. I thought she was with a friend and just forgot to communicate with her mom where she was.Įarly the next morning Charlotte Pottle, a local resident, happened to be riding along the canal with her young daughter in a bicycle seat. Peter Van Sant: So initially when you hear … that her mother's looking for her … You're not thinking something terrible has happened to your friend? Rachel Schepemaker was one of Melanie's close friends in high school. Rachel Schepemaker: Well, my mom took the phone call … said that Melanie's mom was frantic and like nervous … ![]() ![]() Morgan Loew: Melanie decides to go on a bike ride … by around 10:30 when Melanie did not return, her mother … started calling her friends. "My time and my life froze at that very moment the day we found out," said friend Rachael Schepemaker. Melanie Bernas, 17, was a student at Arcadia High School. She then noticed that Melanie's bicycle was missing. There were no solid leads, and the case went quiet until September 1993-10 months after Angela's murder-when the mother of 17-year-old Melanie Bernas returned from a dinner date to find her daughter had broken her curfew and was not home. … We've heard that the head looked like it had been preserved … Like it was a memento for the killer.Īngela's purple mountain bike was also missing. Morgan Loew: And from what we have heard from witnesses … the head was in amazingly good condition, especially considering this was days after the murder. Morgan Loew, an investigative reporter who also works at KPHO and is a "48 Hours" consultant, has been working on the canal killer case for more than a decade. Approximately 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. ![]()
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