PHOENIX — Editor's Note: The above video is from an earlier broadcast.
A judge has found a man charged with sexually attacking and fatally stabbing two young women in separate killings nearly 30 years ago near a canal system in metro Phoenix is mentally fit to stand trial.
Judge Suzanne Cohen agreed with two court-appointed experts that Bryan Patrick Miller is psychologically competent to be tried on charges in the deaths of 22-year-old Angela Brosso and 17-year-old Melanie Bernas.
The judge said another expert who was working with Miller’s defense team couldn’t rule out that Miller was faking a mental disorder.
Cohen hasn’t ruled on a request to bar Miller from claiming he was insane at the time the crimes were committed.
Brosso disappeared on the eve of her 22nd birthday in November 1992. She rode her bicycle along the canal near 25th Avenue and Cactus Road the day before her mutilated body was discovered a short distance away.
Bernas disappeared in the same area the following year while also riding her bicycle. Her body was found not far from the first crime scene.
Miller was arrested in 2015 after undercover detectives obtained a DNA sample from the suspect and scientists determined it allegedly matched evidence left behind at the crime scenes.
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