A man sentenced to 226 years in jail on Friday for killing two Alaska Native women and being heard while videotaping one of their torture deaths saying that “everybody always dies” in his movies.
Brian Steven Smith received 99-year sentences 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 last saw her.
“Both were treated about as horribly as a person can be treated,” Alaska Superior Court Judge Kevin Saxby stated in pronouncing the punishment.
“It’s the stuff of nightmares,” Saxby explained.
The remaining 28 years were spent on additional counts, including sexual assault and tampering with evidence. Alaska does not have a death punishment.
Smith, a South African native who became a naturalized US citizen weeks before torturing and killing Henry at an Anchorage hotel in September 2019, displayed little emotion throughout his sentencing. He also showed little emotion when a jury deliberated for less than two hours before convicting him after a three-week trial in February.
During the trial, the victims were recognized simply by their initials. During punishment, Saxby stated that their names would be used to restore their personhood.
Smith was arrested in 2019 after a sex worker stole his iPhone from his truck and discovered a graphic film of Henry’s torture and murder. The photographs were eventually duplicated onto a memory card, which she passed over to the police.
Smith eventually admitted to killing Henry and Abouchuk, whose bodies had been discovered earlier but mistaken. Both Alaska Native women were from small towns in western Alaska and faced homelessness while living in Anchorage.
Henry was recognized as the person who died at the TownePlace Suites by Marriott in midtown Anchorage. Smith, who worked at the hotel, was scheduled to stay there from September 2-4, 2019. The first photographs from the card revealed Henry’s body and were timestamped at 1 a.m. on September 4, according to authorities.
The final image, from early September 6, shows Henry’s body in the back of a black pickup truck. According to the charging documents, location data revealed Smith’s phone in the same remote area south of Anchorage where Henry’s body was discovered a few weeks later.
The jury viewed videos from the memory card during the trial, but they were kept hidden from the gallery. Smith’s face was never visible in the films, but his unique South African accent — which police later recognized from previous encounters — could be heard narrating as if there were an audience. In the footage, he constantly told Henry to die while beating and strangling her.
“In my movies, everybody always dies,” the speaker says in one video. “What will my followers think of me?” People deserve to know when they are being serially murdered.”
During the eight-hour videotaped police interview, Smith admitted to killing Abouchuk after picking her up in Anchorage when his wife was out of town. He took her home, but she refused to shower due to an odor as per ABC News.
Smith claimed that when he became agitated, he took a revolver from the garage and shot her in the head before discarding her body north of Anchorage. He directed officers to the location, where they later discovered a skull with a bullet hole.
