‘In my movies, everybody always dies’: The stolen memory card that lead to a gruesome double murder trial
Police said a memory card contained gruesome recordings of a killing
![Brian Steven Smith pleaded not guilty to 14 charges](https://static.independent.co.uk/2024/02/04/05/Memory_Card_Killing_85199.jpg)
Support truly
independent journalism
Our mission is to deliver unbiased, fact-based reporting that holds power to account and exposes the truth.
Whether $5 or $50, every contribution counts.
Support us to deliver journalism without an agenda.
![Louise Thomas](https://static.independent.co.uk/static-assets/support-us/louise-thomas.png)
Louise Thomas
Editor
“In my movies, everybody always dies,” the voice says on video. “What are my followers going to think of me? People need to know when they are being serial-killed.”
A woman got into a truck with a man who had picked her up near downtown Anchorage. When he left her alone she stole a digital memory card from the center console.
What was on the card shocked police and launched a huge murder investigation.
Gruesome photos and videos of a woman being beaten and strangled at a Marriott hotel, her attacker speaking in a strong accent as he urged her to die, her blanket-covered body being snuck outside on a luggage cart.
More than four years later the contents of the card could be key to a double murder trial set to begin this week.
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.
![Brian Steven Smith sits in a courtroom in Anchorage, Alaska, Oct. 21, 2019](https://static.independent.co.uk/2024/02/04/05/Memory_Card_Killing_96189.jpg)
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 was the victim whose 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 1 am on September 4, police said.
The last images on the card were taken early on September 6 and showed Henry's body in the back of a black pickup, according to charging documents. 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, authorities said, 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.
![Rena Sapp, outside a courtroom Monday, Oct. 21, 2019, in Anchorage](https://static.independent.co.uk/2024/02/04/05/Memory_Card_Killing_08156.jpg)
“With no prompting, he tells the troopers in the bathroom, ‘I’m going to make you famous,’” 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.”
Alaska State Troopers in 2018 incorrectly identified another body as that of Abouchuk, because Abouchuk's ID had been discovered with it, for reasons that remain unclear. But with the information Smith provided, investigators re-examined the case and used dental records to confirm a skull with a bullet wound found in the area Smith identified was Abouchuk's, authorities have said.
Smith's attorney, Timothy Ayer, unsuccessfully sought to have the digital memory card's evidence — or even mention of it — excluded at trial. The woman who turned in the card initially claimed she had simply found it on the street, and it wasn't until a second interview that she confessed she had stolen the card from Smith's truck while he tried to get money from an ATM and she had it for a week before giving it to police, he said.
For that reason, he argued, prosecutors would not be able to demonstrate the provenance of the 39 photos and 12 videos, establish whether they were originals or duplicates, or say for sure whether they had been tampered with.
“The state cannot produce a witness to testify that the video fairly and accurately depicts any act that actually happened,” Ayer wrote.
![Brian Steven Smith, 48, who has been charged with first-degree murder, appears at the Anchorage Jail courtroom on 9 October 2019, in Anchorage, Alaska.](https://static.independent.co.uk/s3fs-public/thumbnails/image/2019/10/11/09/anchorage-murder.jpg)
However, Third Judicial District Judge Kevin Saxby ruled late Friday that the woman can testify about her possession of the card until she handed it over to police and that the recordings can be properly authenticated.
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, came to Alaska in 2014 and became a naturalized U.S. citizen the same month Henry was killed.
In a 2019 letter to the AP, he declined to discuss the case. He added that he was doing well: "I have lost weight, I have much less stress and I am sober.”
His wife, Stephanie Bissland of Anchorage, and a sister acting as a family spokesperson in South Africa, both declined to comment until after the trial.
The trial, expected to last three to four weeks, was scheduled to begin Monday with jury selection.
Prosecutors had suggested the possibility of closing the courtroom to prevent the gruesome videos from being seen by the public.
Subscribe to Independent Premium to bookmark this article
Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? Start your Independent Premium subscription today.