LINK TO 3RD VICTIM?
Police seek additional murder charge against suspect in 1990s killings
Phoenix police are investigating links between the city’s notorious canal murders and the disappearance of a third girl from her Sunnyslope neighborhood more than 23 years ago.
In September, police submitted firstdegree murder charges against Bryan Patrick Miller, the man held in the canal murders, in the presumed death of Brandy Myers, a 13-year-old girl whose missing-persons case has languished since 1992.
Prosecutors have reviewed the information and have asked detectives to investigate further.
Myers, a skinny blonde with glasses that swallowed her face, had gone missing May 26, 1992. A day into the search for Myers, the decomposed remains of a slightly older girl were discovered in a rugged desert area in northeast Phoenix.
The apparent age difference helped rule out the possibility that Myers and the girl were one and the same. In 2011, DNA would identify the remains as those of 16-year-old runaway Shannon Aumock.
Neither of the cases has been solved, and Myers has never been found. But the girls’ similar ages and appearances prompted long-running speculation that the crimes were connected.
The canal murders
Now, police are pursuing possible links between Myers and Miller, the man accused of murdering Angela Brosso and Melanie Bernasin separate incidents and discarding them in the Arizona Canal in the early 1990s.
Their bodies were discovered days after their deaths, but Miller, 43, wasn’t arrested until January, after DNA evidence tied him to their deaths. He has pleaded not guilty and is awaiting a capitalmurder trial scheduled for April 2017.
As the cases for Bernas and Brosso weave their way through the justice system, prosecutors have requested more information from police before they file charges in the Myers case.
The two canal cases had all the trappings of a serial killer. The victims were young and attractive, and the attacks followed the same M.O.: Bernas and Brosso had been abducted and murdered 10 months apart while riding their bikes near the canal.
After Miller’s arrest, police began looking into other cold cases around the same time frame and proximity to Miller’s Sunnyslope home. Myers’ case fit the criteria.
Brandy Myers
Phoenix police spokesman Sgt. Trent Crump said Miller is a “strong lead.”t.
“(Prosecutors are) wanting some more detailed witness information that we don’t know if we’re going to be able to provide or not,” he said.
The time that has elapsed between the crime and today’s investigation presents considerable hurdles, he said. The fact that no body has been discovered further complicates the process.
“In every homicide case, typically a large portion of your evidence is recovered on the body,” Crump said. “When that is missing, it is obviously more difficult for investigators. The task is monumental.”
Jerry Cobb, a spokesman for the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office, said it’s not unusual for prosecutors to request more evidence before they officially file charges.
According to earlier Arizona Republic reports, Myers was last seen at about 7 p.m. at a Smitty’s store near Cave Creek and Hatcher roads. On evenings, she had been collecting pledges for a school reading project at Sunnyslope Elementary School.
She was $6 away from her goal.
Hundreds of Valley volunteers joined Phoenix police in the search for the missing sixthgrader. They fanned out over the Sunnyslope neighborhood and continued to search for weeks in mountain and desert areas. Thousands of fliers were handed out to residents and displayed in businesses’ windows.
Maria Lix, a former classmate of Myers’ who lived in the same apartment complex at the time, said the girl’s disappearance prompted a de facto lockdown for kids in the area.
“Even to go to the bathroom you had the buddy system,” she said. “Nobody’s walking home alone, nobody’s doing anything alone at that point.”
As the weeks and then months rolled by without any clues and the search missions phased out, Myers’ parents held out hope that she was still alive.
Her father, Darrell Myers, told The Arizona Republic a year after her disappearance that he had consulted with three psychics who told him Brandy was well.
Her mother, Cheryl Nalls, around the same time said she couldn’t conceive of someone harming her daughter.
“She’s too sweet. She’s too loving and willing to do anything to make you happy,” she told the paper. “Maybe she was taken by somebody who thought they needed her more than I did. She could be living with a family.”
Her family declined to comment for this article.
Linking Myers, Miller
Police declined to release any additional details on how they traced Miller back to Myers. But Miller’s ex-wife, Amy, said he at one point claimed to her that he had killed a girl whose circumstances seemed similar to Myers’.
“He told me some teenage girl, probably in her mid-teens, had come to the door and she was trying to deliver Girl Scout cookies, or something similar to that,” Amy told The Republic in a recent interview. “And he hadn’t even ordered any, but he told her to come inside for a minute. And when she did … (Bryan) attacked and killed her.”
Amy said Miller then offered disturbing details of how he disposed of her body.
Miller told her that he put the body in the bathtub and ran what he meant to be cold water on it, she said. But the water was hot, which sped up decomposition.
“So he cut her up, put her in bags and put her in his big trash can,” Amy said. “He said he stored it in his house until trash day, and then he just put the trash out.”
Neighbors complained that the trash can smelled bad, Amy recalled Miller telling her. He told them there was rotten meat in it.
Miller at the time was living less than a mile from where Myers was last spotted, according to public records.
Amy said it wasn’t the first time Miller had apparently confessed to violence, but said she always thought the stories were intimidation tactics. Even today, she says she has no way of knowing whether to believe him.
Myers’ wasn’t the only case police revisited after Miller’s arrest. His criminal record suggested a pattern of violence against women.
Miller had been convicted as a juvenile of stabbing a woman near Paradise Valley Mall in 1990. He was acquitted of the 2002 stabbing a woman in Everett, Wash., when he lived there in the early 2000s. Both women survived.
Shannon Aumock
Though the evidence isn’t as substantial in the Aumock case, police are not ruling out Miller’s involvement. Crump was unable to elaborate on what evidence links the runaway to Miller, but he called the defendant an “interesting lead” in the Aumock case.
Efforts to reach Aumock’s family were unsuccessful.
According to earlier reports, Aumock was was born to a 16-year-old mother who later turned over the girl to state custody. She was placed in a foster home at age 3.
The girl was deemed one of the city’s “throwaway” children who jumped from home to home during her brief life. A 2011 interview with Phoenix police said officials received 40 reports of Aumock running away. The reports stopped after late 1991.
Aumock’s body had been in the desert for more than eight weeks by the time she was discovered. No one had reported her missing.
Victoria Mikelsen
The trail led detectives to Washington state, where they interviewed Victoria Mikelsen, who narrowly survived a stillunidentified attacker when she was 14 years old in Everett.
The year was 2000, and Mikelsen was 15 minutes into her 40-minute walk to the school bus stop.
It was a different route than she was accustomed to. A girl at her own stop had been picking on her, so for the first time, Mikelsen decided to instead trek to the one near her best friend’s house.
She would cut through on the Interurban Trail — a popular bike path flanked by pockets of bushes and private property on one side and a greenbelt leading to Interstate 5 on the other. Mikelsen left just after 6 a.m. but had already been passed by a few joggers.
It was why Mikelsen wasn’t immediately alarmed when she first noticed the man enter the trail from a wooded patch of land to her right.
He was “creepy,” though, Mikelsen said. His jeans were ripped up, and it looked like he had been sleeping in the dirt. When she began walking faster, he did as well.
She turned back to face the man about 10 times, each time finding him closer to her than the last. The coy chase went on like this for about five minutes before Mikelsen turned around for the final time.
“I turned around to the right and he wasn’t there, and I turned around to the left and he put his arm around my neck,” Mikelsen said.
The man started stabbing her in the neck and stomach, but Mikelsen said she doesn’t remember feeling pain. She believes her adrenaline took over, though, and she broke free from her attacker, turned to face him and kicked the knife out of his hands.
They both dove for the weapon, but Mikelsen beat him to it. She intertwined her fingers around its base and rolled into the fetal position.
After a few moments of struggling, the man told her he wouldn’t hurt her if she gave the knife back. She obliged.
“I couldn’t process anything,” Mikelsen said in a recent interview. “I just kept thinking I wanted to get to my best friend’s house and tell her, and be able to get to school today. If I miss school today, I’m screwed.”
The man stabbed her two more times in the back, strangled her until she passed out, then placed her backpack under her head as a pillow.
“I remember closing my eyes, and I remember turning my head and watching him walk away,” she said.
Mikelsen was saved by a bystander who she believes interrupted the attack. She was stabbed 17 times.
Doctors had to cut out a foot and a half of her intestines, and one of the wounds stopped oneeighth of an inch from her aorta.
Mikelsen worked with a sketch artist and described a young, White man with long, stringy hair and days-old scruff. Police presented her with “books upon books” of possible assailants, but after weeks and then years, a suspect never materialized.
This summer, Mikelsen told the same story to the Phoenix police officers who showed up at her door. After seeing a picture of Miller, she says she’s about 95.5 percent sure he was the one who attacked her.
Crump said Mikelsen may be used as a witness in Miller’s Phoenix murder trial, but it would be up to Everett police to file any official charges in her attack.
“They said if they need me, would they be able to count on me (to be a witness)?” Mikelsen said of Phoenix police. “And I said, ‘For sure.’ ”
Mikelsen said she recently spoke to Everett police about what she had learned but was told too much time had passed to reopen the case.
“It’s upsetting. I want it to be in the books as solved, but I know the deal,” she said. “It makes a difference for me just knowing that he got caught up in the all the other things. It’s like he’s paying for it anyway.”
“In every homicide case, typically a
large portion of your evidence is
recovered on the body. When that is
missing, it is obviously more difficult
for investigators. The task is
monumental.”
PHOENIX POLICE SPOKESMAN SGT. TRENT CRUMP
ON INVESTIGATING BRANDY MYERS’ DISAPPEARANCE