Episode 1 | From American Nightmares: Canal Murders

0:15Speaker 1:Pushkin. Hey everyone, it's Jake. Before we get started, I wanted to introduce you to a true crime series from our friends at Gamut Podcast Network called American Nightmares. If you listen to Deep Cover, you know that some of the most fascinating investigations begin when seemingly separate pieces of a story start to connect. That's at the heart of the new season of American Nightmares called Canal Murders. The series takes us to Phoenix, Arizona, where a number of disturbing crimes share an unsettling connection. Victims found in and around the city's canals. What begins with individual cases soon raises much bigger questions. Are these murders connected? Is there a pattern investigators have missed? And could the same person be responsible for more than one of them? American Nightmares Canal Murders digs into the cases, the investigations, and the questions that remain. Here's episode one of American Nightmares, Canal Murders.

1:22Speaker 1:After you listen, follow American Nightmares wherever you get your podcasts to continue the story.

1:29Speaker 2:This podcast series contains descriptions of violent assault and murder and is not intended for all audiences. Listener discretion is advised. When you think of big city crime in America, you're more likely to imagine the dark cobblestone alleys of New York or mob land Chicago or the private eyes and tabloid terrors of Los Angeles. Phoenix, Arizona probably doesn't make your list. It didn't make mine either. At 1.6 million inhabitants, Phoenix is America's fifth largest city. And these days, what it's most famous.

2:07Speaker 3:For is heat.

2:09Speaker 4:If you're not already fed up with triple digit heat in.

2:11Speaker 5:March, it could be sticking around for a bit longer.

2:14Speaker 6:Getting us to around 100 on Tuesday, 102 Wednesday, and around 103 on Thursday.

2:20Speaker 2:While today's temperatures break records, it's always been hot and dry here. And that is why, centuries ago, the very first inhabitants, the ancient Hohokam people, dug canals, moving water across the Phoenix Valley to irrigate their crops. Today, Phoenix still has a canal system. although the word system isn't exactly right. It's more like a haphazard mix of waterways, a few of which connect, others of which don't. Some meander along the paths of long-ago creeks. Some have the straight lines and hard angles of more modern engineering. All of them have paths alongside, which Phoenicians have always used for walking and biking. In some areas... Like wealthy Scottsdale to the east, the paths are manicured and lined with coffee shops and e-bike rental places. But in parts of central Phoenix, the canals have always been magnets for trouble.

3:21Speaker 2:Brianna Whitney is a local crime reporter.

3:24Speaker 6:I think the best thing about Phoenix can also be a catch-22. It's sunny, it's warm, it's active. People want to be out. So I think it's one of those things where running, walking, biking the canal, great activity in Phoenix.

3:38Speaker 5:Safest activity? Probably not.

3:40Speaker 2:I've walked miles of the canals and can attest that there are spots that are desolate and littered with trash and graffiti. In the pedestrian tunnels that run underneath the roads, I've seen homeless people and illicit drug use. But in the 1990s, the canal paths were even worse. If you lived in Phoenix in those days, the first thing you probably thought of when someone mentioned the canals wasn't just crime.

4:05Speaker 7:It was murder.

4:06Speaker 6:Were you planning to do anything with her the next day?

4:09Speaker 5:Objection relevant.

4:13Speaker 2:It was her birthday, so yes. This is Joe Krakowicki. He's on the witness stand at a trial nearly 30 years after one of the worst days in his life. He's here to talk about that day.

4:26Speaker 5:Do you remember that day?

4:28Speaker 2:It's been many, many years, but it's been with me that many years. In 1992, Joe is 23 years old, working as a bartender in Phoenix, and taking classes at the local campus of DeVry University, a business and technology school. He shares an apartment with his girlfriend, Angela Brasso. He calls her Angie. She's a DeVry graduate, that's how they met. And she now teaches at the school. They are both part of a growing movement to create tech jobs in Phoenix, which has earned the city the nickname Silicon Desert. On Sunday, November 8th, Joe is in their apartment preparing for Angela's 22nd birthday, the very next day.

5:11Speaker 5:Did you decide to bake her something?

5:13Speaker 2:Yes, I was.

5:14Speaker 5:What did you bake her?

5:15Speaker 3:I was baking her a cake that night.

5:16Speaker 5:That was the reason I didn't go on the bike ride.

5:20Speaker 2:The couple had done a bunch of Sunday things that Sunday. Picked up their bicycles from a bike shop where they had been for service, eaten a meal at a nearby Friday's restaurant. The sun is setting when Angela changes into exercise clothes, grabs her Walkman cassette player and headphones, remember it's 1992, and gets on her newly tuned bicycle. There is a bike path that passes very close to their development. It runs alongside Cave Creek, a tributary of a bigger canal to the south called the Arizona Canal. Angela rides this path several times a week, and always on Sundays.

5:59Speaker 4:Did there come a point that evening where she let you know that she wanted to go on a bike ride? Yes.

6:06Speaker 5:What did you say to her about that?

6:08Speaker 2:At the time, I really wasn't as cautious as I am today, so I really didn't even think about it, to be honest.

6:15Speaker 5:It was just, go for your bike ride.

6:18Speaker 2:But on this day, Angie doesn't return from her ride. Hours go by. Evening becomes night. Joe takes his own bike and goes looking for her three times. The bike path in those days was not well lit. Dark shadows are everywhere. But there is no Angie. It's nearly midnight when Joe Krakowicki calls 911.

6:47Speaker 5:What was your purpose in calling police?

6:50Speaker 2:The hopes to broaden the search to maybe things I didn't have available to me to find her. Morning arrives. Police start searching, on foot, on bicycles, even a helicopter. A little after 9 a.m., officers find Angela Brasso. Murdered and brutally mutilated. Dragged several yards from the bike path and left on a grassy slope, within only a hundred feet of her own apartment complex. To make the unspeakable even worse, the death of Angela Brasso is just the beginning.

7:45Speaker 6:Phoenix has bizarre crime.

7:47Speaker 5:Perfect for a podcast.

7:49Speaker 4:It was such a shock and it was so unexpected that people were like, well, are we safe?

7:54Speaker 3:The reality to me is he's a sexual saviors. You don't just happen to wander out there and decide, oh, I'm going to kill somebody like that.

8:02Speaker 5:I trust my dog. Boy, she didn't want him coming in the house. The more you dig, the more certain you get that something's really wrong with this guy.

8:10Speaker 3:Those two crimes, Melanie and Angela, that can't be his first rodeo.

8:16Speaker 2:I'm Brian Peter Falk. From the Gamut Podcast Network, this is Season 6 of American Nightmares, The Canal Murders. This is Episode 1, The Killing Year. Crime in Phoenix has its own southwestern desert flavor. What crime reporter Brianna Whitney calls bizarre crime. This is mostly because of its unique topography. First, it's a city surrounded by remote deserts.

8:51Speaker 6:The desert plays a pretty large role in how crimes play out. It's a lot harder to find bodies in the desert. It completely changes the terrain that somebody has to face to commit a crime.

9:03Speaker 2:And then there's the canal system.

9:07Speaker 6:It's very popular for people to be on the canal.

9:10Speaker 5:I mean, we don't have a lot of water here.

9:11Speaker 6:So I think people like running and walking and biking along the canal.

9:15Speaker 5:Because you get a little bit of that sense of water.

9:17Speaker 6:But the further you get into that kind of North Phoenix area, the more dangerous it would become.

9:24Speaker 2:The story I'm going to tell you is one of these sorts of crimes, the bizarre sort. It involves both the canals and the desert. And it begins in 1992. 1992 was a violent year in Phoenix, a year in which the number of murders spiked higher than 91 and 93. The 136 Phoenicians who were killed by another in 1992 resulted in a local homicide rate that was 45% higher than the national average. Poorer areas of the city bore the brunt of the increase as they so often do.

10:04Speaker 2:One of those was the north-central Phoenix neighborhood of Sunny Slope. I spent several days there recently, and Sunny Slope is no longer the hardscrabble place.

10:13Speaker 5:It once was.

10:15Speaker 2:But in the 90s, cops called it The Slope. Nine square miles that you didn't want to be found in after dark. Phoenix resident Jill Slocum says, still remembers trips to a Sunny Slope grocery store.

10:30Speaker 4:The Smitty's that was in Sunny Slope was the Smitty's that my dad used to go to all the time. So I had a lot of experience being there, and it was the only time I can remember my dad or my mother saying, you hold onto my hand, you hold onto the cart, you do not look at anybody, you do not talk to anybody. And they never did that at other grocery stores or anything else like that. As I got older, it was known as, like, if you wanted to go pick up drugs, you went to Sunny Slope.

10:56Speaker 3:The homicides were up, and part of that was because of the crack cocaine epidemic. Another part of living in Phoenix is we're considered a border state, so you actually have a lot of human trafficking, drug smuggling. They all lead to homicide.

11:11Speaker 2:William Shira grew up in Phoenix and joined the Phoenix Police Force in 1986. By 92, he was working a beat in a city-owned housing project in Sunny Slope.

11:21Speaker 3:The Slope is just one of the ones that was known for higher crimes. Some of the bikers, I think the Hells Angels had a motorcycle club up in the Slope on Hatcher, I believe. I may be wrong on the address because it's been a while. You have a Vietnamese population in there that we're having some gang issues with. They're all fighting over territory and turf and all that stuff leads to ripoffs of robberies or crimes.

11:46Speaker 2:Violence in the Slope disproportionately affected women and girls. In 1992, those sorts of crimes were as numerous as they were random. February 4th. Cynthia Cano is at a bar called Cheers on Bethany Home Road near 19th Ave, on the western edge of Sunny Slope. Some news reports will say she is 29 years old, others 27.

12:16Speaker 5:She's a mother.

12:19Speaker 2:Children, husband at home. She is last seen leaning against the jukebox, waiting for a friend to come out of the bathroom. But when the friend emerges, Cynthia is gone. She is found early the following morning, 10 miles to the south, lying in a drainage ditch off of Buckeye Road, an industrial area populated by warehouses and junkyards and the county jail. She's bleeding from multiple stab wounds. Cynthia Cano dies on the way to the hospital. She never identified her attacker. May 26th, 13-year-old Brandy Myers, a student at Sunny Slope Elementary, leaves her home to collect money for a school book drive. Brandy's the kind of kid who stands out in a crowd. Blonde bangs, oversized glasses, a big toothy smile. She's also considered slow, what we'd probably call special needs today. She meets up with a friend, then heads off alone, knocking on neighborhood doors. She is spotted at a local Smitty's grocery store near the intersection of Cave Creek Road and Hatcher Road, then maybe a couple blocks west of that. Then she disappears without a trace.

13:38Speaker 2:May 28th. While searching for Brandi Myers, police are alerted to the remains of another girl near a more remote part of Cave Creek Road, nine miles north of where Brandi.

13:48Speaker 5:Was last seen.

13:49Speaker 2:The body is under a piece of plywood on the bank of a canal that is labeled on maps as the Central Arizona Project. The level of decomposition tells investigators that this victim had been there for at least a couple weeks. A medical examiner determines that the cause of death was likely strangulation absent other evidence. The remains are also impossible to identify, and the Arizona Canal victim is entered into the system as a Jane Doe. I will revisit all of these cases later in the series, but for now, just know that they have more than the year 1992 in common. All of them are part of a long list of unsolved murders and disappearances that have plagued Phoenix for decades. Then, Sunday, November 8th comes. Angela Brasso goes out for an evening bike ride along a nearby canal. Of all the murders in 1992... The Brasso case is at the very top. The one killing that everyone will remember for years to come.

15:00Speaker 6:Here you have this woman who's about to turn 22. She's doing anything that any other person would do. Bike riding along the canal.

15:08Speaker 3:In the evening.

15:09Speaker 5:It wasn't even dark.

15:10Speaker 2:Again, local crime reporter Brianna Whitney.

15:13Speaker 6:It was the eve of her birthday. Her boyfriend was staying back to make a cake. They were going to watch a show together. She often went for a bike ride in the evening, golden hour sunset, which is the best time to be outside.

15:25Speaker 5:Here in Arizona. It's beautiful. So, I mean, this was so run of the mill.

15:30Speaker 2:But what happens that evening to Angela is anything but. At a spot on the bike path south of Cactus Road, right next to her own apartment complex, Angela is likely knocked off her bike. And then she is stabbed, once in the back with a long, sharp blade. It's a precision strike that fractures a rib, slices her left lung, and pierces her aorta, the main artery to the heart. It's a fatal blow. And now we have to talk about what happens to Angela next. I always put a pretty standard not-for-all audiences disclaimer at the top of every episode.

16:14Speaker 2:But I need to warn you again. What you're going to hear for the next two minutes is horrific. If you are at all squeamish or triggered by descriptions of sadistic violence, please skip ahead. I'll give you a few moments.

16:30Speaker 5:To do that.

16:40Speaker 2:When I first got interested in this case several years ago, I knew what had happened to Angela Brasso's body after she was stabbed. But I had not seen the photos from the crime scene and autopsy. Now I have. And when I first saw them, I was immediately reminded of a more famous murder victim, Catherine Eddowes, the fourth woman killed by perhaps the world's most famous serial killer, 19th century London's Jack the Ripper. Eddowes was found in an alley on September 30, 1888. Her throat was cut, her torso eviscerated and pulled wide open. Her intestines were removed and displayed around her body. After Angela Brasso was fatally stabbed, her killer removed her clothes and sexually assaulted her. Retired homicide detective William Shira describes what happened next.

17:34Speaker 3:It's just ridiculous the amount of savageness that was put upon this lady. I mean, he cut her stem to sternum, actually tried to cut her in half is what it appeared, and whether or not the knife he had or whatever he used couldn't cut through those bones to get all the way around, or something spooked him so he couldn't finish it. He just filleted her open. It was just brutal.

17:59Speaker 2:Detective Mike Meislisch was the scene investigator at the Brasso killing. Here is how he described Angela's wounds years later in court.

18:07Speaker 8:She had an incision that went from roughly the top portion of her chest down to above her pubic bone area. There was another incision that went circumferentially around from the front to the sides to the back, all the way around her body. There were stab wounds in parts of her chest where the skin had been pulled back, and there were also some stab wounds onto, I believe it was her left breast.

18:37Speaker 2:As if this horror movie made real was not enough, there came its climax. Angela's killer decapitated her body and claimed her head as a trophy. When Angela's remains were found, her head was missing.

18:52Speaker 3:That is strikingly different than almost any homicide you see at all. That just doesn't happen. I mean, the percentages aren't that great. And even just what he did to her body, but to cut the head off is just pure craziness. And then he leaves her kind of on display.

19:08Speaker 6:They find her body stabbed, horrifically sexually assaulted, and she's decapitated. And you're thinking, how on earth could something like this happen where families are going biking, running, walking, fishing regularly at that time, too? And I think that created an immense fear because nobody knew, one, who did that.

19:31Speaker 5:And then why her? Why her? Why would this happen to her? And how did this happen?

19:36Speaker 6:I think that was what was so perplexing about this.

19:38Speaker 5:Not only was it a terrifying crime, but how did somebody pull this off?

19:43Speaker 2:How indeed did somebody pull this off? Even logistically, the whole thing just seems so impossible. One of the crime scene photos from the Brasso murder was taken by police helicopter. Remember, there were no.

19:56Speaker 5:Drones in 1992.

19:58Speaker 2:The aerial photo shows Angela's body very small in the frame, so small I actually missed it the first time. It's laying in an open field about 100 feet west of the bike path. Still obvious, even from that height, is a wide, dark smear that crosses the path and into the field.

20:18Speaker 5:It's blood.

20:20Speaker 2:The image is stunning for what it says about the brazenness of this awful crime. While the attack did occur at night, there is no real tree cover at the site, or bushes, or long grass. The pedestrian tunnel that could lend cover to a potential attacker is 100 yards away. This is not a dark alley, or some remote hiking path, or a stretch of open desert. Angela Brasso was attacked, her clothes removed, and her remains savagely violated, all of which must have taken several minutes right out in the open.

20:54Speaker 2:And her body remained undetected for hours in the middle of one of America's largest cities. I had to see the site for myself. Okay, so we are east of the I-17, like not even a quarter mile, and south of Cactus Road. And this is the spot where Angela Brasso was murdered.

21:24Speaker 7:And you can see, I mean, we're on the path.

21:26Speaker 2:We're right on the bike path. We are standing on the bike path, yeah. It's a warm spring day, and I've arrived at a small parking lot that is a more recent addition to Cave Creek Park. I'm here with one of our producers, Erica Stapleton. Erica lives in Phoenix. And one of the first things we notice as we approach the site of Angela Brasso's murder is that we are all alone.

21:48Speaker 7:Kind of put people here. The paths, the canal paths in Phoenix are vast. They connect a lot of different places, but it's not like you're ever going to see swaths and swaths of people, even back in the nineties, moving along these paths. So it's, even though it's in an area where there are homes and roadways and cars driving by, it's not like people are out here all the time. So I can understand how maybe something could go overlooked for.

22:12Speaker 3:A little while.

22:13Speaker 2:And in fact, you and I are standing here. There's not another person around. On this side of the canal, there's one guy walking on the other side of the canal, but right here we are by ourselves.

22:23Speaker 7:And it probably would be that way for a really long time if we were to stand out here for hours and hours before someone comes by, maybe cyclists or someone on foot, but it's, yeah, they're not heavily trafficked.

22:35Speaker 2:It's a short walk to the actual site. Based on the crime scene photos, it looks pretty similar to the way it was in 1992, except for the access road that ends in the new parking lot. an empty field sloping gently upward from the bike path to the east. Angela's old apartment complex to the west, now with a different name and a big sign advertising newly renovated units. Traffic goes by on Cactus Road, about.

23:02Speaker 5:300 yards to the north.

23:05Speaker 2:There's a little slope on the west side of the path, a little berm, and that's supposedly where her body had been dragged up the berm, and that's where she was found by police.

23:17Speaker 7:And it is hard to believe that it took a while for someone to notice.

23:21Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, you're out in the open here. If anybody were lying here within 200 yards, you would see them. It is astonishing how open to the public it is. You can hear the traffic going by. Everything is right here. This is not the middle of nowhere.

23:38Speaker 7:But if you don't know you're looking for something, you could easily just drive right by it.

23:42Speaker 2:That is, if anyone drives by at all. In the half hour we were here, the number of bike riders who passed by was one. And we're recording this on a Saturday.

23:55Speaker 7:Saturday morning, nonetheless, when it's not a million degrees in Phoenix.

23:58Speaker 2:It's a beautiful day. It's in the 70s, a beautiful day for a bike ride. We have seen literally one gentleman on a recumbent bicycle go by.

24:07Speaker 7:Yeah, and it's calm and peaceful in a way, but it's also unnerving because you don't see anything coming.

24:15Speaker 2:Standing here, it strikes me that this was a murder of convenience. The assailant was here, Angela was here, and so here is where it happened. As strange as it seems, Angela Brasso's killer actually benefits from this place. Little trafficked, poorly lit, some dumb luck. He also has a convenient getaway vehicle at his disposal, Angela's bicycle. Her Walkman tape player and headphones are missing, And so is her bike, a purple 18-speed Diamondback Topanga. The missing bike and the prospect that the killer used it to make his escape only add to the tragedy. To live in Phoenix is to know castles and coasters, an amusement park in an area called Metro Center. The Arizona Canal runs right past it, of course. It is in that section of water, about two miles from the Brasso murder site, that a transient fisherman makes a horrible discovery. It's November 20th, 12 days after Angela Brasso's murder, and bobbing in the water up against a storm grate is her severed head.

25:34Speaker 6:When a fisherman finds her head floating in the canal, that added a whole other just horrific layer to the whole thing.

25:42Speaker 5:The brutality of it was just far.

25:43Speaker 6:Beyond what was even comprehensible to people.

25:55Speaker 2:Erica and I have driven the two miles southwest from the Brasso murder site to the spot in the Arizona Canal where her head was found. Okay, so we've We've parked just off of I-17 at the canal where it's by castles and coasters. It doesn't look like it's open, which is weird on a Saturday. And we're looking at the crime scene photos to sort of figure out where we are. And I think we've inadvertently parked about 50 feet from where Angela Brasso's decapitated head was found.

26:31Speaker 7:Yeah, and if you look at the police photo, it kind of points to where that spot is and indicates it's by a staircase, and we can see from where we're sitting the railing of that staircase kind of going down toward the water in the canal.

26:47Speaker 2:All right. Let's go. I know that Angela Brasso's head was found at this location more than 34 years ago. But I do have to say that as we approached the maintenance stairs that lead to the water's edge, I still flinched, expecting to see the worst. There was only a discarded water bottle. Okay, so several days after Angela Brasso's murder, sort of this local vagrant who hung out on the canals is walking past and sees what looks like the head of a mannequin floating in the water, not even a couple miles from where Angela Brasso was murdered. and Angela Brasso's head is found just bumping up against the same grate that was here in the 1990s based on the evidence photos, and he just finds it right here.

27:37Speaker 2:I mean, you are right next to the access road to I-17. I mean, you're steps from it. This head is just bobbing in the water here.

27:45Speaker 7:That had to have been terrifying to see, and even just looking at it now, to me it brings into focus just like the heinousness.

27:52Speaker 2:Of this crime. It's just unimaginable. It's just awful.

27:56Speaker 7:And as you said, this area is right off the highway. The water is just, you can see it bobbing up and down, and this is a moving waterway.

28:07Speaker 2:And remember, it's also days later. Yeah. Where the head was thrown into the canal is anybody's guess. It could have been right here. It could have been anywhere else, and it just ended up flowing to here.

28:19Speaker 6:Yeah.

28:19Speaker 2:Who knows? A young woman on a bicycle, a gruesome killing, a dismembered head. The Brasso murder has the people of Phoenix rattled. Phoenix resident Jill Slocum.

28:33Speaker 5:It was more of a shock, I think, for Phoenix itself.

28:36Speaker 4:Somebody got killed, put them in this public spot.

28:39Speaker 5:Who would do that?

28:40Speaker 4:Because typically when you hear of somebody getting murdered, they're killed within their own home or they're missing and they're found in the desert. Maybe in a different town, it'd be like they're found near a lake. But you don't typically hear of a body being found in the middle of a park. or a body being found, in our case, a canal. It was such a shock and it was so unexpected that people were like, well, are we safe?

29:04Speaker 2:For the Phoenix Police Department, this is an all-hands-on-deck investigation, even for a young beat cop like William Shira, who is now patrolling on bicycle.

29:15Speaker 3:After Angela was murdered, because I was on one of the bike squads, they were using us They took us out of the projects and we literally rode the canals for two to three weeks. So we worked four tens. So four nights a week, my partner and I rode the canals all the way from Metro Center to all around that area and just seeing if we could see any activity or see somebody suspicious.

29:42Speaker 2:When I first started this podcast, I petitioned the Phoenix PD for the Brasso case file. I received it several weeks later. It's 1,500 pages long. It tells the story of a complex investigation. In the days following the murder, the two crime scenes are thoroughly processed. There are long lists of recovered evidence. Blood droplets, cigarette butts, clothing fibers, dirt samples, hair samples, shoe prints. A piece of plywood with the words, I chopped that bitch's head off, scrawled in red lipstick, had been found in an alley a couple blocks from the scene. It is also photographed and tested.

30:22Speaker 2:A medical examiner determines that Angela's head had been preserved for several days before it was discarded, likely in a refrigerator. Most importantly... Angela's body is swabbed and semen is recovered. That means DNA. DNA identification is still a pretty new technology in 1992, but one that promises a quick resolution to the case. And there's also a lot of what cops call good old-fashioned police work.

30:51Speaker 3:It was the homicide guys back in the day. Russ Davis was the original, what they called the case investigator guy. And Mike Mises was the scene investigator. I mean, and everybody else in Homicide, they were going door to door, knocking on doors, trying to find out what happened, doing follow-ups with people that Angela worked with, trying to determine what could have happened. The apartment complex that she lived in was literally adjacent to where her body was found.

31:16Speaker 3:And it's a huge complex. They went through and talked to as many people as they could. They had a tip line coming in.

31:23Speaker 2:Police received dozens of phone tips and letters. They hear from psychics, women who are convinced their husband or boyfriend is the killer, someone reporting human sacrifices in the town of Prescott, leads on abandoned bikes, sex offenders, peeping Toms, and much more. Among those the police interview are Angela's family, friends, and co-workers. Those interviews lead police to a person of interest, Angela's boyfriend, Joe Krakowicki. When he was baking her birthday cake, He didn't appear to know Angela was planning on moving out of their shared apartment. Their relationship had problems, Angela apparently told others. But there's ultimately no evidence to tie Krakowicki to her killing. Still, at this point, many suspect him.

32:12Speaker 2:He receives death threats. He eventually moves out of Phoenix. I've left several messages for Joe Krakowicki, but they've gone unanswered. I have also tried to contact Russ Davis, the former lead investigator. but have been unable to find him. Retired detective William Shira couldn't find him either. Davis' former partner, Mike Meislisch, refused my request for an interview. But based on the story that the Brasso case file tells, these men were certainly determined to catch her killer. Still, it was never going to be easy.

32:47Speaker 3:With what they had at the time, they did the best they could. But, I mean, eventually, you've done, to a certain extent, all that you can... without a tip coming in that's going to lead you in one direction or the other.

32:59Speaker 2:Days become weeks, and weeks become months. By the summer of 93, the investigation of Angela Brasso's horrific murder has only uncovered dead ends. Then, in September, it happens again.

33:19Speaker 4:After this one person, Brasso, passed away, they could have been more proactive and put lights up or signs up saying, like, check your surroundings, but they didn't do anything like that.

33:30Speaker 6:The woman goes through what she thought was water at first and then discovers it's blood and calls police.

33:36Speaker 5:Did you look into the water?

33:39Speaker 6:Just from the ground level. The water in the canal is quite often very murky, and I saw a large, light-colored item at the bottom, but I could not tell what it was.

33:50Speaker 3:A lot of people were saying, is this a serial killer?

33:52Speaker 5:Because there's two.

33:53Speaker 3:Bodies found, and they're both riding their bikes. And I'm no expert in serial killers, but a lot of them have a method of operation.

34:00Speaker 1:I could tell how young she is by looking at her hand in those photos.

34:04Speaker 5:And to see that, it's like you realize how young she was.

34:09Speaker 2:That's on the next episode of... The Canal Murders. The Canal Murders is a production of the Gamut Podcast Network. The series is written, narrated, and produced by me, Brian Peter Falk. Erica Stapleton is our Phoenix producer. Executive producers for Gamut are John Goforth, Jeremy Simon, and Dan Zampillo. Sound editing and mixing by Scott Person. Explore Keen Azariah's graphic novel, The Zombie in the Rearview, and much more about the Canal murders case at the American Nightmares website. Also, check out my Substack publication, The Falk Files, where I'm doing a deep dive on the storytelling behind this series.

34:52Speaker 2:Please like, comment, and subscribe.

35:20Speaker 1:That was episode one of American Nightmares, Canal Murders. To continue the story, search for and follow American Nightmares wherever you get your podcasts.