The Reno Predator

Brianna Denison was nineteen, a psychology major at Santa Barbara City College, home in the Reno area for winter break in January 2008. Police there were already hunting a man who had attacked two young women near the University of Nevada, Reno, the previous fall. On January 19 Brianna went out with friends and stayed the night at a house on Mackay Court, near campus, asleep on the living room couch.

Sometime before dawn on January 20, someone came in through an unlocked door and carried her out. Her friends woke to find her gone, her shoes and phone still there and a small bloodstain on her pillow. Hundreds of volunteers searched for weeks. On February 15 her body was found in a field near a Reno business park. She had been strangled with underwear belonging to one of the women attacked months earlier, and DNA tied all three cases to the same man.

A tip that November about unfamiliar underwear in a pickup truck pointed investigators to James Michael Biela, a twenty-seven-year-old former Marine living in Sparks. With his girlfriend’s consent, police swabbed his young son, and the result showed a close male relative had left DNA on Brianna. Biela was arrested on November 12, 2008, convicted on May 27, 2010, and sentenced to death.