Let’s let Angela’s ghost testify at her killer’s trial

Angela Brosso was one of the first ghosts with whom I became acquainted. Her mother introduced us in 1992.

Angela has trailed behind me, along with many others, ever since.

A newspaper writer accumulates ghosts.

In the beginning, you’re like a skater on a pond. One person comes up from behind and grabs your hips, gliding along with you. Then another latches on. Then another.

As time passes and the line grows longer, you feel it turning when you turn, tugging and pushing, expanding and contracting like the cars on a freight train. You travel in single file and can’t help but wonder if the procession you lead leaves a wake. A whooshing sound, maybe. Or a trail of smoke.

The ghosts don’t often get a chance to speak. That’s where I come in. Particularly when they deserve to be heard, as is the case these days for Angela.

Her accused killer, Bryan Miller, is finally on trial, having been linked by DNA to the murders of 22-year-old Angela in November 1992 and 17-year-old and Melanie Bernas in September 1993.

Miller has pleaded not guilty for reasons of insanity.

His bench trial, being thoroughly and skillfully covered by The Arizona Republic’s Lane Sainty, has focused recently on Miller’s troubled childhood.

It’s what the defense must do, I suppose.

What I must do, on the other hand, is focus on Angela.

In late 1992, the story of Angela’s gruesome murder was big news in Phoenix and around the country.

Angela’s mother, Linda, lived in Pennsylvania, where Angela had grown up. It’s where I’d grown up as well, and after some effort I was able to reach Linda, not to talk about her daughter’s death, but about her life.

News reports up until that time had focused on the macabre aspects of the crime. Angela had been stabbed to death and mutilated afterwards. Decapitated. Imagine a mother reading that. The first time I spoke with Linda she told me, “I only wish people could know more about Angie. Even just a little. Maybe you could mention Angie in your column now and then. Not just to remind people of what happened to her, but as a way of – I don’t know – keeping her alive.”

If Angie was able to testify at her killer’s trial, she might say, as her mother told me, that she was a shy girl.

She might have spoken about how she always wore dresses as a child, and how her mom put her long hair into French braids or pigtails or buns.

She might have said she thought of becoming a veterinarian, and how, as a girl, she had a guinea pig named Rusty. And how, in high school, Angie spent practically all the money she earned at her part-time job at Kentucky Fried Chicken trying to save a sick rabbit.

And how she was heartbroken when it died.

She moved to Phoenix not too long before her murder in order to take a job with an electronics firm.

I spoke to Angela’s mother a number of times over the years. She said once, “To normal people like us this can never make sense. I know now that it never, ever will. It would never have made sense to Angie either. She was the type of people who couldn’t imagine hurting somebody else. It wasn’t a part of her.”

Angela Brosso would today be in her 50s. She would be ... something. Her testimony at the trial would have proved that.

Her mother told me, “I would have preferred her close to home. But I guess all mothers are like that. You couldn’t hold Angie back, though. She was a force. One of the things her father said about her was that she changed the nature of a room when she entered it. And it’s true, you know? She really did. She was like a light going on. So sunny. And witty. That’s what we’ll miss. That light.”