Tue, Feb 06, 2024 page5

• Memory card stolen from truck is key evidence in Alaska murder trial

  • AP, ANCHORAGE, Alaska
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  A woman with a lengthy criminal history including theft, assault and prostitution got into a truck with a man who had picked her up for a “date” near downtown Anchorage. When he left her alone in the vehicle, she stole a digital memory card from the center console.

  More than four years later, what she found on that card is key to a double murder trial set to begin this week: gruesome photographs and videos of a woman being beaten and strangled at a Marriott hotel, with her attacker speaking in a strong accent as he urged her to die and her blanket-covered body being snuck outside on a luggage cart.

  “In my movies, everybody always dies,” the voice says on one video. “What are my followers going to think of me? People need to know when they are being serial-killed.”

  

  Rena Sapp shows a photograph of her sister, Veronica Abouchuk, outside a courtroom in Anchorage, Alaska, on Oct. 21, 2019.

  Photo: AP

  About a week after she took the SD card, the woman turned it over to police, who said they recognized the voice as that of Brian Steven Smith, now 52, a South Africa native they knew from a prior investigation, court documents say.

  Smith has pleaded not guilty to 14 charges, including first and second-degree murder, sexual assault and tampering with evidence, in the deaths of Kathleen Henry, 30, and Veronica Abouchuk, who was 52 when her family reported her missing in February 2019, seven months after they last saw her.

  Henry and Abouchuk were both Alaska Native women who had experienced homelessness. They were from small villages in western Alaska, Henry from Eek and Abouchuk from Stebbins.

  Authorities say Henry’s death was recorded at the TownePlace Suites by Marriott, a hotel in midtown Anchorage. Smith was registered to stay there from Sept. 2 to Sept. 4, 2019.

  The first images showing her body were time-stamped at about 1am on Sept. 4, police said.

  The last images on the card were taken early on Sept. 6 and showed Henry’s body in the back of a black pickup truck, court documents say.

  Location data showed that at the time the photo was taken, Smith’s phone was in the area of Rainbow Valley Road, along the Seward Highway south of Anchorage, the same area where Henry’s body was found several weeks later, police said.

  As detectives interrogated Smith about the Marriott case, he offered up more information to police who escorted him to a bathroom: He had killed another woman, and he went on to identify her — Abouchuk — from a photo and to provide the location of her remains, along the Old Glenn Highway north of Anchorage, authorities said.

  “With no prompting, he tells the troopers in the bathroom: ‘I’m going to make you famous,’” Anchorage District Attorney Brittany Dunlop said during a court hearing last week. “He comes back in and says ... ‘You guys got some more time? You want to keep talking?’ and then discloses this other murder.”

  Henry’s family has not spoken publicly about her death and efforts to reach relatives have not been successful. Abouchuk’s family has not returned messages from The Associated Press.

  “These were two Alaska Native women,” Dunlop, then the assistant district attorney, said in 2019 after Smith was charged. “And I know that hits home here in Alaska, and we’re cognizant of that. We treat them with dignity and respect.”

  Authorities said Smith, who is in custody at the Anchorage Correctional Facility, moved to Alaska in 2014 and became a naturalized US citizen the same month Henry was killed.

  The trial, expected to last three to four weeks, was scheduled to begin yesterday with jury selection.
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