ANKERAGE, Alaska — A man who recorded the violent death of an Alaska Native woman on his cell phone was unanimously convicted Thursday of first-degree murder for her death and that of another Alaska Native woman by a jury that deliberated for less than two hours.
Brian Steven Smith, a 52-year-old from South Africa, remained unresponsive in the courtroom and stared into space as the judge read out the jury’s verdict. He was arrested after a woman stole his cell phone from his truck and discovered the gruesome footage from 2019. The woman, a sex worker who became a key witness at the Anchorage trial, then copied the images to a memory card and eventually surrendered it. to police, prosecutors said.
Smith later confessed to killing another Alaska Native woman whose body had previously been found but misidentified.
Smith was found guilty of all 14 charges, including two counts of first-degree murder in the 2019 deaths of Kathleen Henry and Veronica Abouchuk in either 2018 or 2019. Alaska does not have the death penalty, so he would serve a life sentence . .
Jurors returned to the courtroom Thursday after returning the verdict to hear more evidence on whether the first-degree murder conviction carries aggravating factors.
The graphic videos were only shown to the jury during the three-week trial, but audio could be heard in the gallery, where some heard Henry gasp before he died. Prosecutors said he drove around for two days with Henry’s body in the back of his pickup truck before dumping her body on a rural road south of Anchorage.
The video never shows the man’s face, but his distinctive accent can be heard on the tape. He speaks as if to an audience, urging Henry to die as she is repeatedly beaten and strangled in an Anchorage hotel room.
“In my films, everyone always dies,” says the voice in one video. “What will my followers think of me? People need to know when they are experiencing a serial killing.”
Henry and Abouchuk came from small villages in western Alaska, Henry from Eek and Abouchuk from Stebbins. Both women had experienced homelessness.
Authorities say Henry was the victim whose death was recorded at the TownePlace Suites by Marriott, a hotel in downtown Anchorage. Smith was registered to stay there from September 2 to September 4, 2019; The first images showing her body were timestamped around 1 a.m. on September 4, police said.
The last photos on the card were taken early on Sept. 6 and show Henry’s body in the back of a black pickup truck, according to charging documents. Location data showed that at the time the photo was taken, Smith’s phone was near Rainbow Valley Road, along the Seward Highway south of Anchorage, the same area where Henry’s body was found several weeks later, police said .
Valerie Casler, the woman who provided the footage to police, has changed her story over the years about how she came into possession of the SD memory card.
She first claimed she found the card labeled “Murder at the Midtown Marriott” on the ground.
She later claimed she stole the card from the center console of Smith’s pickup when they were on what she called a “date,” but then changed the card to say she stole Smith’s phone from the truck.
When she charged the phone, she found 46 images and one video on it, and later transferred them to an SD card she stole from a department store. She then labeled the card.
During an eight-hour police interrogation at Anchorage airport, Smith confessed to police that he also killed Abouchuk. Smith had picked her up in Anchorage while his wife was out of town. He said she smelled, but Abouchuk refused to shower when he asked.
He became upset, grabbed a gun from the garage and shot her in the head before dumping her body north of Anchorage. He told police where the body had been left, and authorities later found a skull with a gunshot wound there.