On the afternoon of September 30, 2019, Anchorage police were called to the 3600 block of Lake Otis Parkway. A woman had handed over an SD memory card and said it held a video of a killing. She told officers she had found it on a street in the Fairview neighborhood. The card held 39 photographs and 12 videos. They appeared to show a woman being assaulted and killed in a hotel room, and homicide detectives opened an investigation that day.
Two days later, on October 2, human remains were found near milepost 108 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 recordings.
Brian Steven Smith was born in South Africa. He came to Alaska in 2014, married Stephanie Bissland of Anchorage and worked at the TownePlace Suites by Marriott hotel in midtown Anchorage. In September 2019, the same month that Kathleen Henry was killed, he became a naturalized United States citizen. On the application he answered "No" to questions about whether he had ever killed or seriously harmed anyone, sexually assaulted anyone, or committed a crime for which he had not been arrested.
Kathleen Henry was from Eek, a small village in western Alaska, and had experienced homelessness in Anchorage. Investigators concluded that she was killed in the first week of September 2019 at the TownePlace Suites, where Smith worked and was registered as a guest. The first images on the card, which showed her body, were time-stamped at about 1 a.m. on September 4, 2019. Smith's face never appeared in the videos, but his voice did, with its South African accent, narrating what happened. Her body was later left in a rural area south of Anchorage.
Her family did not speak publicly about the case, and the Associated Press was unable to reach them.
A warrant for Smith's arrest on a first-degree murder charge was issued on October 7, 2019, and he was arrested the next afternoon at Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport. He was questioned and held overnight in the Anchorage jail.
During the interrogation, which his defense later said lasted about eight hours, Smith told detectives that he had killed a second woman, in 2018. He identified her from a photograph as Veronica Abouchuk and described where he had left her body, along the Old Glenn Highway north of Anchorage. According to prosecutors, he told troopers, unprompted, "I'm going to make you famous."
Veronica Abouchuk was from Stebbins, another small village in western Alaska. Like Kathleen Henry, she had experienced homelessness in Anchorage. Her family reported her missing in February 2019, about seven months after they had last seen her. Her sister, Rena Sapp, attended a court hearing in the case in 2019.
In his confession Smith said he had picked Abouchuk up in Anchorage while his wife was out of town and taken her to his home. When she refused his request to take a shower, he said, he became upset, got a pistol and shot her in the head, then left her body north of the city.
Alaska State Troopers had in fact found a body in 2018 and wrongly identified it as Abouchuk's, because her identification card was found with it. After Smith's confession, investigators went back to the case. In the area he described they found a skull with a bullet wound, and dental records confirmed that it was hers.
Police first described the woman who brought in the memory card as a good Samaritan who had found it. At trial the account changed. The woman, Valerie Casler, testified that she had taken Smith's phone from his truck, found the photographs and videos on it, copied them to the card and labeled it. She said she had first lied about how she got it because she was afraid of being arrested for theft or attempted prostitution. Smith's lawyers argued the recordings could not be trusted. Superior Court Judge Kevin Saxby ruled that she could testify about how she came to have the card and that the recordings could be authenticated.
The trial opened in Anchorage Superior Court in February 2024 and lasted about three weeks. Anchorage District Attorney Brittany Dunlop and Deputy District Attorney Heather Nobrega prosecuted; Timothy Ayer led the defense. Prosecutors had asked to close the courtroom while the videos were played. The Associated Press and other news organizations objected, and 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 only by their initials.
The defense argued that the confession about Abouchuk had been made under duress after a long interrogation, and that no family member or friend had linked either woman to the remains found beside the highways.
On February 22, 2024, after less than two hours of deliberation, the jury 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. Jurors also found that Kathleen Henry's killing involved substantial physical torture, which under Alaska law carries a mandatory 99-year sentence.
On April 19, 2024, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Alaska announced that Smith had been indicted on two federal counts of unlawfully obtaining citizenship, on the basis that he had lied on his naturalization application while he had already committed the crimes he was later convicted of. If convicted, he would lose his certificate of naturalization. No later ruling in that case was found.
At the sentencing hearing on July 12, 2024, Judge Saxby used the women's names in court, saying it would help restore their personhood. Abouchuk's daughter told the court she hoped Smith would spend the rest of his life without hope. Smith made no statement and showed no emotion.
"Both were treated about as horribly as a person can be treated," Saxby said. He sentenced Smith to 226 years: 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," the judge said. "There is only preventing Mr. Smith from killing again."
Before he was sentenced, Smith 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. In it, according to the episode's own description, Scott confronts Smith over his conviction for the two killings.
Smith was 53 when he was sentenced. He remains in prison in Alaska. Two Alaska Native women from small villages, both of whom had been living without stable housing in Anchorage, were killed. One was found only because a stranger took a phone from a truck, and the other was identified only because her killer described where she lay.