At 4:06 on the afternoon of September 30, 2019, Anchorage police were called to the 3600 block of Lake Otis Parkway. A woman handed officers an SD memory card. Someone had written on its label "Homicide at midtown Marriott." She said she had found it lying on a street in the Fairview neighborhood. The card held 39 photographs and 12 videos. They appeared to show a woman being beaten and strangled in a hotel room, and then her body being moved. The Homicide Unit opened an investigation that day.
There was no face for the man in the recordings. He was careful to keep himself out of the frame. But he talked, and his voice carried an accent that Anchorage detectives had heard before, in an earlier investigation they have never fully described in public. They believed the voice belonged to a hotel maintenance worker from South Africa named Brian Steven Smith.
Two days later, at 9:14 on the morning of October 2, Alaska Railroad employees found human remains near the tracks close to milepost 108.5 of the Seward Highway, south of the city. On October 10 police identified them as Kathleen Jo Henry, 30. By then they had already arrested the man whose voice was on the card, and he had told them about a second woman, Veronica Abouchuk, whose death no one had known to investigate.
Brian Steven Smith was born in South Africa and, according to South African reporting after his sentencing, grew up in Queenstown, the town now called Komani. He later lived and worked in East London. By 2013 he was in a relationship with Stephanie Bissland of Anchorage, and that year he was managing a guesthouse in Estcourt, where the two of them stayed. Smith tried to get a U.S. work visa so he could visit her and found the restrictions too tight, so Bissland petitioned for a visa for him in September 2013. He arrived in the United States in March 2014, and they married on May 17, 2014. In February 2016 the couple traveled back to South Africa to see his family, friends and hometown.
In Anchorage, Smith lived what reporters later called a middle-class life. He worked in maintenance for Marriott hotels, including the TownePlace Suites by Marriott in midtown Anchorage, and his wife was a federal employee. The couple lived in the College Village area. Bissland later told a South African newspaper that he had taken care of her, that he was "a clever man," and that he had seemed "an open, pleasant, normal person." When she heard of his arrest, she said, she could not believe it.
Trial testimony described another side of his life. Prosecutors said he cruised Anchorage looking for women living on the margins: women who were homeless, struggling with addiction or mental illness, or doing sex work. He offered them alcohol, money, a meal or a warm place to stay. He had a girlfriend, Alicia Youngblood, outside his marriage. Prosecutors said she went to police more than once with what he had told her, well before his arrest. Those tips did not lead to charges at the time. Youngblood died on July 4, 2021, before the trial; prosecutors said she died by suicide.
In September 2019 Smith became a naturalized United States citizen. On the application he had answered "No" to questions about whether he had ever killed or badly hurt anyone, sexually assaulted anyone, or committed a crime for which he had not been arrested.
Veronica Rosaline Abouchuk came from Stebbins, a small village in western Alaska. She was a mother of four. Her daughter, Kristy Grimaldi, later said that Veronica had been sexually abused as a child by a priest in St. Michael, the neighboring village. Her family had already known violent loss: Veronica's youngest sister, Martha Tom, was found beaten under a picnic table in Anchorage in 2005, and that case has never been solved. Her older sister, Margie Lestenkoff, remembered Veronica simply as "a real nice person." In Anchorage, Veronica had experienced homelessness and addiction.
According to prosecutors, in mid-August 2018 Smith found her on the street and offered her what she needed most. In his police interview he was quoted as asking her, "Do you want some warm food and a warm place to sleep tonight?" His wife was out of town. He took Veronica to his home in College Village. There, he later told detectives, he asked her to take a shower. She refused, and he became angry, got a pistol and shot her in the head. He left her body beside the Old Glenn Highway north of Anchorage.
Her family reported her missing in February 2019, about seven months after they had last seen her. Before that, they had received word that she was dead. Alaska State Troopers had found the body of another woman in 2018 and, because Veronica's identification card was with it, identified that woman as Veronica Abouchuk. Kristy Grimaldi later testified that police first told her that her mother was already dead. When she was told, much later, that her mother had been found dead a second time, she said, she had hoped police were wrong again.
On April 10, 2019, mushroom pickers found a human skull along the Old Glenn Highway. It had a gunshot wound. No one connected it to Veronica until Smith described where he had left her.
Kathleen Jo Henry came from Eek, a small coastal village in western Alaska. In Anchorage she struggled with addiction and homelessness. At 24 she earned her GED while held at Hiland Mountain Correctional Center, where people there remembered her as someone who loved to write poetry. She wrote openly about her struggles on Facebook. Friends in Anchorage knew her. One of them was Valerie Casler, the woman who would later bring the memory card to police.
Smith was registered as a guest at the TownePlace Suites in midtown Anchorage, where he also worked, from September 2 to September 4, 2019. Prosecutors said he brought Kathleen there. The recordings on the card, which the jury would later watch, showed what prosecutors described as 36 minutes of her fight for life. In them, prosecutors said, Smith beat and strangled her while narrating in his South African accent. On one recording he said, "In my movies, everybody always dies." He spoke as if to an audience, asking what his followers would think. The first images of her body were time-stamped at about 1 a.m. on September 4.
At 12:54 that morning Smith texted Ian Calhoun, a 27-year-old Anchorage heavy metal drummer: "Heh. You up? I'm having fun." Calhoun answered about seven hours later that he had been asleep. Smith replied that he did have fun and "wanted to share." At 9:20 a.m. he wrote, "I have something to show you. Something I can't keep for too long." That afternoon he suggested a "secluded spot to meet." Phone records placed Smith at Forsythe Park on the Anchorage Hillside for about ten minutes, from 4:46 to 4:56 p.m. He later told detectives that Kathleen's body was in the covered bed of his pickup at the time, under a blue tarp and a white sheet. Prosecutors believed Calhoun probably saw it. He has never been charged with any crime.
Photographs showed her covered body being taken out of the hotel on a luggage cart and loaded into a black pickup. The last images, taken early on September 6, showed her in the back of the truck. At about 2 that morning a McDonald's surveillance camera recorded Smith paying cash for two Big Macs from the driver's seat of his black Ford Ranger, with a woman in a blue hat and black coat in the passenger seat. Police received a possible name for her but never found her. Smith's phone placed him near Rainbow Valley Road on the Seward Highway, south of the city. Kathleen was left there, a few feet from the railroad tracks.
Her family did not speak publicly about the case, and reporters for the Associated Press and other outlets were unable to reach them. Family members and friends did attend the trial.
Valerie Casler lived in a tent behind Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church. One night in September 2019, by her later account, Smith picked her up in his black truck near downtown and they drove around while she drank flavored vodka from a Gatorade bottle. At a Shell station he stopped at an ATM to get money for her. While he was out of the truck, she took his phone.
She looked through it and found the photographs and videos. She did not recognize the woman in them; the injuries were too severe. She copied the files onto an SD card she had taken from a grocery store, wrote the label herself and kept it for about a week. Then she called police. She later said she lost the phone itself after tripping in the woods.
When she handed over the card on September 30, she told officers she had found it on the street. Police and the public knew her for years only as a good Samaritan who had picked up a memory card. In a second interview she said she had taken the card from Smith's truck during the ATM stop. Only after she was subpoenaed for trial did she give the account she gave on the witness stand: that she took the phone itself. She said she had lied because she was afraid of being arrested for theft or attempted prostitution, and because she was scared.
Detectives matched the voice on the card to Smith. The FBI provided investigative and technical help. On October 7, 2019, a warrant was issued for his arrest on a charge of first-degree murder. Smith was out of the state on vacation. When he flew home on October 8, police met him at Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport and arrested him at about 3:30 p.m. He was 48.
The interview that followed ran for many hours. The defense later put it at eight or nine hours; the recorded portion prosecutors relied on ran about five and a half. Smith at first said he had no memory of the killing. He told detectives he had found a dead woman in his truck the morning after, driven around with her for two days and then left her at a turnout on the Seward Highway. Shown images from the card, he began to admit what they showed. "That's my stomach," he said. "That's my hand." "That is me, I'm not denying that." At another point he said, "I am convinced I have done this."
Then, while the detectives were asking about the hotel, Smith volunteered that he had killed another woman. He picked Veronica Abouchuk out of a photograph and told them where he had left her body. According to prosecutors, he also told them, "I'm going to make you guys famous."
Investigators went back to the skull the mushroom pickers had found in April. Dental records confirmed that it was Veronica's. A flash drive seized at Smith's home held deleted video of her, from before and after her death. Another phone seized in 2019 held photographs from Smith's home: a short video, under a minute long, showing Smith naked beside her body on a red couch, with his face visible, and a picture of her body on the floor near a television. Prosecutors later said he had shown a girlfriend a photograph of himself abusing her body.
A grand jury indicted Smith, attaching a special finding that he had subjected Kathleen Henry to "substantial physical torture." He was arraigned in October 2019. Veronica's sister, Rena Sapp, stood outside the courtroom. Assistant Public Defender Dan Lowery, his first lawyer, declined to comment. Brittany Dunlop, then an assistant district attorney, said of the victims, "These were two Alaska Native women."
Smith was held at the Anchorage Correctional Complex for more than four years before trial. In 2019 he wrote to the Associated Press declining to talk about the case, but saying he had lost weight, had less stress and was sober. His wife and a sister acting as the family's spokesperson in South Africa declined to comment until after the trial.
As the trial began, Smith mailed an 11-page handwritten letter, dated February 6, 2024, to the Anchorage television station KTUU. He complained that attorney mail had gone missing and accused the Department of Corrections of reading his mail, which officials denied in court. He questioned the source of the SD card and wrote that he had raised the problem four years earlier and no one had believed him. The last pages were about Alicia Youngblood. He wrote that she had "allegedly" died by suicide and accused the district attorney's office of threatening and coaching witnesses. Prosecutors declined to comment on the accusations during a pending case.
Before trial, the defense lawyer Timothy Ayer moved to keep the card's contents out of evidence, or any mention of it. He argued that the state could not show where the files had come from, whether they were originals or copies, or whether they had been altered. "The state cannot produce a witness" to verify the videos, he wrote. Superior Court Judge Kevin Saxby of the Third Judicial District ruled on the Friday before trial that Casler could testify about how she came to have the card, and that the recordings could be authenticated.
Prosecutors asked to close the courtroom while the videos were shown. The Associated Press, the Anchorage Daily News, Alaska's News Source and Alaska Public Media objected. Saxby kept the courtroom open but arranged for the footage to be shown only to the jury, out of sight of the gallery and the livestream. Throughout the trial the two women were referred to by their initials.
Opening statements were given on February 6, 2024. Anchorage District Attorney Brittany Dunlop began by apologizing to the jurors. They would see things, she said, that they could not forget, and would "carry the burden of knowing." She described a man who had "lived, worked, walked among us" while hunting "the most vulnerable among us." Of the stolen phone, she said, "She had no idea what was on that phone, but that phone contained the lynchpin to this case."
Ayer told the jury the case had "a lot of holes." The origin of the hotel video was largely unknown, he said, and the woman who brought it in had changed her story four years into the case. He suggested police had tried to "reverse engineer a crime based on what they think they saw on the video." The confession, he said, came from a man exhausted by travel and worn down by hours of pressure. And he reminded jurors that Smith was not on trial for his sexual interests, his use of pornography, his contact with sex workers or his adultery, only for two murders.
Valerie Casler testified on February 7. She described the hotel-room video and explained how she had come to have it, admitting her earlier lies. Asked by the defense whether she owned video-editing software, she laughed and said no. Henry had been her friend, she told the jury, and she testified because she "just wanted her to go home." The same day an Alaska State Trooper and a medical examiner testified about the skull, and Kristy Grimaldi described learning twice that her mother was dead.
Over three weeks, more than 30 witnesses testified for the state. An FBI cellphone expert walked jurors through location data that put Smith at the hotel, at the Hillside park and on the Seward Highway. Jurors watched more than half an hour of video from the card. Anchorage Police Detective Brendan Lee, the lead detective, read Smith's messages to Calhoun, including an exchange on October 2, the day Henry's remains were found. Calhoun sent Smith a link to the news story on Facebook Messenger. Smith answered "oops" and said he was surprised it had taken so long. Calhoun replied that he had been "kinda hoping that it would hurry and snow."
Calhoun was in the courthouse but did not testify. Through his lawyer, Wally Tetlow, he invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination; the court found the claim valid and released him from his subpoena.
Detective Lee also testified about a recorded jail call in which Bissland asked her husband whether he had slept with the women he was accused of killing, and Smith answered, "Not with those two." Saxby told the jury to disregard it. Bissland attended much of the trial and sat silently. Family members and friends of both women, some of whom left the courtroom in tears, sometimes directed their anger at her.
The state rested on February 21. The defense called no witnesses, and Smith did not testify.
Closing arguments came the next morning, February 22, before a packed courtroom. Deputy District Attorney Heather Nobrega told the jury, "The defendant has admitted to killing these women and dumping their naked bodies on the side of the road." The footage was true, she said, even though the woman who delivered it had lied about how she got it. "It is difficult to explain the callousness and the brutality the defendant has perpetrated on these women."
In a closing of nearly an hour, Ayer called Casler "a comfortable and constant liar," described the interrogation as "eight hours of pre-planned hours of psychological warfare," and pointed out that some important evidence had never been tested for DNA. No family member or friend, he argued, had linked the women in the images to the remains found beside the highways. "If there's any part of this case that makes you think, maybe not, that's reasonable doubt."
The jury took the case at about 12:30 p.m. and returned in less than two hours. It found Smith guilty on all 14 counts, including two counts of first-degree murder, second-degree sexual assault, tampering with physical evidence and misconduct involving a corpse. In a separate finding, the jurors agreed that he had subjected Kathleen Henry to substantial physical torture, which under Alaska law requires a 99-year sentence for her murder. "Consider what it must have been like for 36 minutes," Dunlop told them, "fighting for your life and not being able to breathe."
Smith sat expressionless as each count was read. His wife stared ahead. In the gallery, the women's families wept and held one another, and someone whispered, "Kathleen and Veronica got justice." Rena Sapp, who had come every day, said the verdict brought her peace. "They're at peace now," she said, calling the day "a life celebration and a spiritual celebration."
On April 19, 2024, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Alaska announced that a federal grand jury had indicted Smith on two counts of unlawfully obtaining citizenship. Prosecutors said he had lied on his naturalization application, because by the time he filled it out, they said, he had already committed the killings, with the torture and sexual assault, for which he was later convicted. A conviction would mean the loss of his U.S. citizenship. No later ruling in that case was found.
Sentencing took place on July 12, 2024, at the Nesbett Courthouse in Anchorage. Outside, a group of mostly Alaska Native women dressed in red held signs reading "Honk for justice" and "We do not feel safe."
Inside, Dunlop showed the court photographs from another of Smith's phones, taken in 2019 not long after Henry's death. They showed a woman lying bloody and unresponsive on grass. She was not Kathleen or Veronica, and it was not known whether she was alive. Smith had told police he once left a woman passed out outdoors. The images, Dunlop said, showed "a complete lack of remorse" and continued predatory behavior. "There is true evil in the world and it is sitting in this courtroom with us," she said. That woman has never been identified.
Kristy Grimaldi gave the only victim impact statement. She thanked her mother for teaching her to love her family, said it was a relief that Smith would "rot in prison," and said she hoped he would spend the rest of his life without hope and would someday feel guilt. "I feel her all around me, watching over me," she said, and "true love never dies." She asked the court to remember "Veronica Rosaline Abouchuk and Kathleen Jo Henry." Abouchuk's family sat together in the jury box.
Ayer, a public defender, asked for 132 years. The torture finding already guaranteed a 99-year term, he argued, so anything longer served only retribution. Smith declined to speak and showed no emotion. He did not turn to look at his wife behind him.
Judge Saxby used the women's full names, saying it would help restore the personhood that had been taken from them. He read aloud words of Smith's from the hotel videos, including "You live. You die." He found Smith among the worst offenders on each count. "Both were treated about as horribly as a person can be treated," he said. "He takes joy in torturing and killing vulnerable women." If Smith were ever released, the judge said, "he will probably kill again." He said he hoped the sentence would deter others who come to Alaska to exploit people living on the street.
Saxby imposed the 226 years the state had asked for: 99 years for each murder and 28 years for the other counts. Alaska has no death penalty. "There is no hope. There is no restoration," he said. "There is only preventing Mr. Smith from killing again." Smith, 53, was fingerprinted and led out in handcuffs, wearing an orange jumpsuit.
Two of the jurors came to watch. Michael Stewart called the sentence "the law being executed to the letter" and said the images from the trial stayed with him. D. Matt Duncan said he was seeing a therapist. He said Smith's bragging suggested a circle of people who had enabled him, and that police should have acted sooner, noting that Alicia Youngblood had reported him years earlier. Both jurors credited Valerie Casler; Duncan called what she did heroic and said she might still be in danger. Margie Lestenkoff, Veronica's older sister, also called her a hero, and an advocate for sex workers, Amber Nickerson, called her "an absolute brave, amazing woman." Lestenkoff said she was glad Smith would be in jail "forever." Rena Sapp said the sentence was a relief for now, but she believed he had other victims.
Smith has appealed, so the convictions are not final. The Alaska appellate courts' case management system, checked on October 14, 2026, lists two appeals by him to the Alaska Court of Appeals, both titled Brian Steven Smith v. State of Alaska: No. A14512, opened on October 7, 2024, from trial court case 3AN-19-09901CR and in the briefing stage, and No. A15048, opened on June 24, 2026, from trial court case 3AN-20-06708CR and awaiting the record and transcript. No ruling has been issued in either. As of the latest reports found he was held by the Alaska Department of Corrections; his facility has not been reported.
Before he was sentenced he gave a jailhouse interview to the investigative journalist David Scott for Court TV. It became the first episode of Court TV's series Interview With a Killer, "A Double Life," released in October 2024. According to Court TV's description, Scott confronts Smith about his conviction.
The case drew advocates working on the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous people in Alaska. A 2018 report by the Urban Indian Health Institute ranked Anchorage among the top three U.S. cities for cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. Charlene Apok, director of Data for Indigenous Justice, described unhoused relatives as the "pre-MMIP," people already at risk before they disappear, and argued that housing has to be part of any answer. Veronica's son, Sean Hinson, said women like his mother are "faceless to the world." "We're one piece of that puzzle," he said. "Everyone has their own piece." Golda Ingram, an advocate with Victims for Justice who sat through the trial, said she had not been prepared for the extent of the trauma.
In February 2026 HBO premiered "Lost Women of Alaska," a three-part documentary series narrated and executive-produced by Octavia Spencer. It centers on Kathleen Henry, Veronica Abouchuk and the advocates who pushed for answers, and describes how clergy abuse, violence, addiction and displacement from rural villages left both women unhoused and exposed to the man later convicted of killing them.
The following points were raised in court or in reporting but have never been proven:
The woman in the grass. Prosecutors presented photographs of a third, injured woman, taken in 2019. She has not been identified, and it is not known whether she survived. Advocates have called her a possible third victim. Smith has not been charged in connection with her.
Ian Calhoun. Prosecutors said Calhoun probably saw Kathleen Henry's body. He invoked his right not to testify and has never been charged with any crime.
The earlier investigation. Police recognized Smith's voice because of an earlier investigation that has never been described in detail. One juror and advocates have asked why tips from Alicia Youngblood did not lead to action sooner. Smith's suggestion that her death was not a suicide is his own claim; prosecutors said she died by suicide.
Other victims. Rena Sapp and others believe Smith killed more women. No other killing has been charged.
March 2014: Smith arrives in the United States; he marries Stephanie Bissland in Anchorage on May 17.
Mid-August 2018: According to prosecutors, Smith kills Veronica Abouchuk, 52, at his home in Anchorage.
2018: Alaska State Troopers misidentify another woman's remains as Abouchuk's.
February 2019: Abouchuk's family reports her missing.
April 10, 2019: Mushroom pickers find a skull with a gunshot wound along the Old Glenn Highway.
September 2 to 4, 2019: Smith is registered at the TownePlace Suites in midtown Anchorage; Kathleen Jo Henry, 30, is killed there.
September 6, 2019: Henry's body is left near milepost 108.5 of the Seward Highway.
September 2019: Smith becomes a naturalized U.S. citizen.
September 30, 2019: Valerie Casler gives police the memory card.
October 2, 2019: Alaska Railroad workers find Henry's remains.
October 7 and 8, 2019: An arrest warrant is issued; Smith is arrested at the Anchorage airport and confesses to killing Abouchuk.
October 10, 2019: Police identify Henry.
July 4, 2021: Alicia Youngblood dies.
February 6, 2024: Trial opens.
February 22, 2024: Smith is found guilty on all 14 counts.
April 19, 2024: Federal indictment for unlawfully obtaining citizenship is announced.
July 12, 2024: Smith is sentenced to 226 years.
October 7, 2024: Smith's appeal No. A14512 opens in the Alaska Court of Appeals.
October 2024: Court TV releases "A Double Life."
February 2026: HBO premieres "Lost Women of Alaska."
June 24, 2026: A second appeal, No. A15048, opens.
October 14, 2026: Both appeals pending, per the court's case system.