Shocking Confession: Man Killed Native Women, Recorded Torture Death for 'Followers'
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July 15 2024, Published 4:17 p.m. ET
A man was sentenced to 226 years in prison for killing two Alaska Native women after he was heard speaking on a videotape he made of one of the victim's deaths, RadarOnline.com can confirm.
In 2019, Brian Steven Smith, a native of South Africa who became a naturalized U.S. citizen shortly before the incidents took place, was arrested when a sex worker stole his cell phone and found gruesome footage of 30-year-old Kathleen Henry’s torture and murder, Front Page Detectives reported.
A judge sentenced Brian Steven Smith to 226 years in prison in connection with the murders of two Alaska Native women.
The images were copied onto a memory card and the sex worker turned it over to police.
Smith eventually confessed to killing Henry and Veronica Abouchuk, who was 52 when her family reported her missing in February 2019, seven months after they last saw her. Abouchuk’s body had been found earlier, but was misidentified.
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Officials said both were Alaska Native women from small villages in western Alaska who experienced homelessness while living in Anchorage.
Police were able to identify Henry as the victim being tortured in the video, which was recorded at TownePlace Suites by Marriott in Anchorage.
At the scene, officers said they found a single gunshot in the wall.
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Smith worked at the hotel and was registered to stay there from Sept. 2-4, 2019, officials said. The first photos from the memory card showed Henry’s body and they were time-stamped around 1 a.m. on Sept. 4.
The last image on the memory card was dated early Sept. 6 and showed Henry’s body in the back of a black pickup. According to the charging documents, location data pulled from Smith’s phone showed him in the same rural area south of Anchorage where Henry’s body was found a few weeks later.
During the trial, the jury was shown videos from the memory card. While Smith’s face was never seen in the videos, his distinctive South African accent — which police were able to recognize from previous encounters — was heard narrating. He kept urging Henry to die as he beat and strangled her.
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The voice said on the video: “In my movies, everybody always dies. What are my followers going to think of me? People need to know when they are being serial-killed.”
During his interrogation, Smith confessed to killing Abouchuk after he picked her up in Anchorage while his wife was out of town. He took her to his home and he asked her to shower because of an odor, but she refused.
This upset Smith, so he retrieved a pistol from the garage and shot her in the head and then dumped her body north of Anchorage. He told police where he dumped her, and they later found a skull with a bullet wound in it at that location.
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In February 2024, after a three-week trial, a jury found Smith guilty after deliberating less than two hours.
On July 12, Alaska Superior Court Judge Kevin Saxby sentenced Smith to 226 years in prison for the murders of Henry and Abouchuk, MyPanhandle.com reported.
Smith, who showed no emotion when the jury found him guilty or during sentencing, received 99-year sentences each for the deaths of Henry and Abouchuk. The other 28 years were for other charges, including sexual assault and tampering with evidence.
During the sentencing, Saxby said: “Both were treated about as horribly as a person can be treated. It’s the stuff of nightmares.”