ANCHORAGE, Alaska — A man who tortured and killed two Alaska Native women and claimed that “everybody always dies” in his films was given a 226-year jail sentence on Friday.
For the deaths of Kathleen Henry, 30, and Veronica Abouchuk, 52, who was discovered missing by her family in February 2019, seven months after they had last seen her, Brian Steven Smith was given sentences of 99 years each.
Judge Kevin Saxby of the Alaska Superior Court delivered the punishment, stating, “Both were treated about as horribly as a person can be treated.”
Saxby remarked, “It’s the stuff of nightmares.”
The other twenty-eight years were spent on allegations of evidence tampering and sexual assault. In Alaska, there is no death punishment.
Smith did not show emotion before the sentence. Smith is a native of South Africa who became a naturalized citizen of the United States soon before torturing and killing Henry at an Anchorage hotel in September 2019.
He also showed little emotion when, following a three-week trial in February, a jury convicted him guilty after less than two hours of deliberation.
The victims’ initials were all that was used to identify them during the trial. During the sentencing process, Saxby stated that their names would be used to reclaim their identity.
When a sex worker took Smith’s iPhone from his truck in 2019 and discovered the graphic footage of Henry being tortured and killed, Smith was taken into custody. After the photos were eventually transferred to a memory card, she gave the police the card.
After a while, Smith admitted to killing Henry and Abouchuk, whose bodies had already been discovered but were misdiagnosed.
These two Native American ladies from western Alaska came from small towns and were homeless in Anchorage.
Henry was the victim whose death was reported to the authorities at the TownePlace Suites by Marriott in midtown Anchorage. Smith, a hotel employee, was scheduled to stay there from September 2–4, 2019. First photos from the card, timestamped at approximately one in the morning on September 4, showed Henry’s body, according to authorities.
The final photo, taken early on September 6, shows Henry’s corpse in the rear of a black pickup truck. The location data on Smith’s phone, according to charging documents, was in the same remote area south of Anchorage where Henry’s body was discovered a few weeks later.
The jury saw videos from the memory card during the trial, but the gallery did not show any of them. The recordings never showed Smith’s face, but his characteristic South African accent, which the police later identified from earlier interactions, could be heard narrating as though there were a group of listeners. He battered and strangled Henry while urging her to die over and over on the recording.
On one video, the voice adds, “Everyone always dies in my movies.” “What will my supporters think of me? People must be aware of when they are the target of serial killings.
Smith admitted to killing Abouchuk during the eight-hour police questioning that was captured on camera after he picked her up in Anchorage while his wife was out of town. When he urged her to take a shower when they arrived at his house, she balked due to an unpleasant smell.
Smith claimed that after growing agitated, he went to the garage, took out a pistol, shot her in the head, and dumped her body north of Anchorage. He provided the location to the police, who subsequently discovered a skull with a bullet wound there.
