I don't get to many book signings any more, outside of conventions and book festivals, but I wasn't going to miss Troy Hillman at Changing Hands in Tempe. For once, I didn't know the author but I did know his subject matter: Bryan Patrick Miller, the Canal Killer, currently sitting on Death Row for a pair of murders here in Phoenix back in the early nineties, Angela Brosso and Melanie Bernas. Finding him closed a couple of notorious cold cases and, after waiving his right to a jury trial, Bryan put his fate in the hands of the judge, who found him guilty.

I had never had a personal connection to a serial killer until our daughter rang up to tell us that I was on the TV. It was 13th January, 2015 and Bryan had been arrested for double homicide. The news channels had trawled social media for photos of him and found plenty that my wife had taken. He'd been at a party at our house nine days earlier and we'd attended a bunch of the same steampunk events over the previous couple of months, including a dinner at Rawhide where he'd sat with us. Suddenly there he was on the news and I was in the same photos. Ironically, there were also pictures of me in Rawhide's electric chair but not Bryan.

The immediate question that tortured me, and many of the other members of our community, is this: how did I not know? Sure, I was still living in the UK in 1992 and 1993 when Angela and Melanie were murdered and I didn't meet Bryan until maybe 2010, but that didn't negate the question. He was a murderer and none of us saw it in him: not his daughter, also part of our community; not the multiple friends who dated him, two of which feature in this book; not even the friends who lived with him or saw him much more often than we did. I wondered if that question might be answered at Changing Hands.

It wasn't but Troy Hillman gave a fantastic talk and answered questions well. Naturally, I bought a copy of his book and devoured it in a single sitting the next day. What I realise now is that he has a lot of the same questions that we do. This book doesn't offer any magic insights into how Bryan's mind works. It doesn't explain why he did what he did. It certainly doesn't provide an answer into how he kept it quiet for so long. After all, serial killers don't stop. Hillman is convinced that Bryan killed at least one more girl, Brandy Myers, in 1992, but he couldn't find evidence enough to prove it. What else had he done since the early nineties? Who else had he killed?

What this book does is to explain how he was caught and, rather frustratingly for those involved, how he wasn't caught sooner. The title is highly appropriate, because it's about "chasing down" a killer, which was Hillman's job in the cold case division of the Phoenix police department. He put a team together and he did what he could, while doing the same thing for a whole slew of other cold cases. By the time the department was disbanded, there were three thousand of them. They had caught Bryan and other killers, but so many more are yet to be caught. Hillman is keen, both in person and in this book, to highlight how that won't happen if cold case departments aren't seen as more important and given the appropriate staff and budget to do their jobs.

I'll cut Hillman some slack on the writing front because he's a cop, not a writer. After a matter of fact intro to the victims and an autobiographical look at becoming a CPA but wanting out of that industry even before his graduation, he skips over his years of service to his start in cold case and his introduction to the canal killings case. This isn't an autobiography, even if it does function as a personal journey as much as anything else. He's not a bad writer but he isn't a natural one, which becomes all the clearer when he starts into dialogue. There are little awkwardnesses everywhere that are impossible to miss, but the thrust of it all is good. Hillman clearly worked hard at this but he needs to write a heck of a lot more words before they will ever flow naturally. Ironically, that feels appropriate here, as diligence was crucial to catching Bryan. Writing ability was not.

While Hillman, when he introduces us to the team he assembles to tackle this case, credits Mark Armistead for his organisational skills, it's clear that he structured this book very deliberately. It breaks down into chapters, each of which is distinct in theme and isolated from its peers, even as it moves the book along. While it must have been truly satisfying to solve the case and catch the killer, bringing a level of closure to the families of the victims, it must also have been frustrating to document all the wrong turns taken along the way. There were a lot of them and every one of them made sense to take. They'd find an appropriate candidate in the files, interview them and acquire their DNA, then wait until Kelley Merwin ruled them out and start over again.

One fascinating chapter involves Hillman and a couple of team members flying to Philadelphia to consult with the Vidocq Society, a crimefighting club comprised of professionals from appropriate fields. They understand serial killers better than local police forces do, leading the latter to frequently visit with their most frustrating cases, and the most telling line in the book arrives when Richard Walter, who used to be a forensic psychologist for the Michigan prison system before he retired, tells Hillman that "He's in your files." Probably the most frustrating detail is that Bryan was indeed in their files, but he was lost in them. When two cops work through those files in order, one starting at A and the other at Z, planning to meet in the middle at M, Miller is not going to show up quickly. They needed help to get there.

They found that help in Dr. Colleen Fitzpatrick, a forensic geneaologist, who took a sample of the DNA found at both crime scenes and turned it into a name: Miller. As an amateur geneaologist, I would have liked to hear a lot more of what Dr. Fitzpatrick did, but then this is Hillman's book not hers. It remains a fact, however, that this was the first cold case solved through that technique. What the Vidocq and Fitzpatrick chapters told me was that, while, Hillman's team was comprised of people with talent, experience and dedication, the police know what they know and that isn't enough.

They needed the Vidocq Society's insight because serial killers aren't an everyday thing for local cops. There were profiles done on the Canal Killer by FBI experts and they're pretty accurate for the most part, though they led the team down wrong paths by suggesting military training. The Vidocq Society provided crucial insights. The Phoenix PD had looked at familial DNA searching at one point but chose to fund rapid DNA testing instead. The concept was so novel to the cops that Hillman wondered if it was "weird science" or "voodoo". However, he had the gumption to accept the help and that got him a name. With that, he could look at the five Millers in their files and see the logical choice.

These gaps in police training might not seem all that vast. After all, the two cops working through the files would eventually have reached M and File 668 would have stood out like a beacon. Bryan would have been interviewed and his DNA taken and, unlike all the other promising candidates, it would have come back positive. The case would have been closed anyway. However, after they got the shortcuts they needed and Bryan was in custody, they looked at who he was and it's clear that they didn't understand what they saw.

It seems to me that it takes a certain mindset to become a cop, all the more so to become a good one, and that mindset places them into a certain bubble. The police are a subculture of their own and everything they do happens within that subculture, with all the benefits and drawbacks that brings. However, they have to interact with the broader world to do their job and that leads them to all sorts of other subcultures, even if it isn't as many or as frequently as a TV show like 'Castle' might suggest. However, it's crucial that they understand the people they meet and understand their motivations. If they don't understand those subcultures, how are they going to understand the people who live in them?

I mention that because I knew Bryan, who was part of a few subcultures, some of which I also belong to. It's pretty clear that neither Hillman nor his team understand what the steampunk scene is, what the zombie scene is or what the Comic-Con scene is, starting with the fact that it's actually a whole slew of scenes, not just one. When Hillman lists some of the wildly outrageous films that he saw in Bryan's house, I actually laughed aloud, which really isn't appropriate for a book like this. I remember the news coverage in the days after Bryan's arrest being highly dismissive of what the alleged killer was into. He must have been weird if he hung around with freaks like me, right?

Well, Hillman, who came across to me in person as genuine, passionate and driven to find answers where investigations had turned up nothing, falls into that trap here. He and his team had gone through Bryan's DVDs and VHS tapes, hoping that he'd recorded his murders. He hadn't, at least not in that location, but what they found, to use Hillman's words, was "tons of disturbing violent pornography". What sort of disturbing violent pornography, you might ask? Well, how about 'True Blood Season 1'? No, I'm not kidding. The Primetime Emmy winning HBO show. If Bryan's a psycho because he watched that, then so are millions of other Americans.

I knew a lot of these titles and looked up the rest. This "disturbing violent pornography" includes a variety of horror movies, some of them comedies and many of them low budget. Bryan was into Misty Mundae, it seems, a low budget exploitation actress. Only a couple were actually hardcore porn and, even then nothing particularly deviant. The most telling film, from its title alone, given the guesswork that Bryan may have been a cannibal, is 'Blood Fest-All You Can Eat', which is really 'Blood Feast 2: All U Can Eat', the long awaited Herschell Gordon Lewis sequel to 'Blood Feast', his groundbreaking 1963 drive in classic. That nearly made my first book, but I went with 'The Corpse Grinders' instead for him. I wonder what Hillman would think of that title?

There's a serious point beyond that flippancy and that is that the police would probably benefit a great deal from acknowledging not just what they know but what they don't. Just as Hillman was able to benefit from an open mind to how the Vidocq Society and a forensic genealogist might be able to help, maybe the gulf between the subculture that is the police force and those the rest of us inhabit could be shrunk if they were willing and able to talk to the right people. Hillman talked with experts in symbols and religion, because that's where the case took him before it was solved. He doesn't seem to have talked to equivalent experts in steampunk or horror movies after Bryan's arrest and that has the unfortunate effect of damaging his credibility. If he doesn't know that 'True Blood' isn't "disturbing violent pornography", what else doesn't he know?

I enjoyed this book and it taught me some things. I appreciate the dedication of Hillman's team to reveal Bryan as a serial killer and bring him to justice. I share his frustration that underfunding of cold case departments means that the closure he could bring to the families of Angela Brosso and Melanie Bernas isn't going to be brought to other families of victims, whether they be Bryan's or other killers nobody's identified yet. This book works best as a study of just how much work it takes to go through entire filing cabinets worth of files and follow up on every promising lead, long after the events took place, often when the investigating officers are retired or dead. It doesn't give us insight into why Bryan did what he did and it doesn't answer many of the unanswered questions left in the wake of this case. Maybe we'll learn that in a later book, if Bryan ever decides to open up.

Oh, and this did answer one of my questions. No, the police didn't get Bryan's DNA from that party at our house. They took him to a Chili's to supposedly solicit his help with a fake security issue at the Amazon warehouse where he worked. ~~ Hal C F Astell