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A man accused of killing a woman and recording it on a memory card, which was later stolen by a sex worker he had picked up and turned over to police, is finally facing trial.
Brian Steven Smith, now 52, will face jury and judge in Alaska this week as a double murder trial gets underway for alleged crimes that date back almost five years.
The contents of the memory card are considered to be one of the prosecution’s key pieces of evidence, as the card contained gruesome photos and video of a woman being beaten and strangled in an Anchorage hotel before her blanket-covered dead body was snuck out of the hotel on a luggage cart.
The backstory
On Sept. 30, 2019, a woman contacted Anchorage police with a horrifying discovery. She told police that she had found an SD card containing footage and photographs of another woman being raped, strangled and beaten to death.
The woman, a sex worker with a lengthy criminal history including theft, assault and prostitution, stole the memory card from the truck’s centre console when the man who was soliciting sex left her alone in his vehicle.
The card was labelled “homicide at midtown Marriott,” authorities said.
Detectives with the Anchorage Police Department were shocked to find 39 photos and 12 videos on the card that showed a bruised and bloodied woman on the floor next to a bed, according to an affidavit of the criminal complaint, as viewed by CNN. The videos showed the woman struggling to breathe as she was being strangled.
“In my movies, everybody always dies,” the voice said on one video, reports The Associated Press. “What are my followers going to think of me? People need to know when they are being serial-killed.”
A clue in the voice
According to court documents, investigators had a hunch that they knew the voice behind those chilling words.
The man in the video had the same strong accent as Smith, a South Africa native they knew from a prior investigation.
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Two days later, police responded to a call about human remains that had been found near a highway in the southern part of Anchorage. They believed the remains could be the same woman that appeared on the memory card.
Getting to work, they matched the carpet in the videos to that of the TownePlace Suites by Marriott. Hotel records showed Smith had booked a room from September 2-4, the same timeframe as the timestamps on the photos and video on the memory card.
The last images on the card were taken early on Sept. 6 and showed the woman’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 the remains found several weeks later, police said.
Days later, on Oct. 8, Smith was taken into custody at the Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport and charged with the death of 30-year-old Alaskan Kathleen Jo Henry.
Another confession
Once in custody, Smith admitted to police that he was the man seen in the videos retrieved from the memory card.
But he didn’t stop there.
During his interrogation, on an escorted trip to the bathroom, he told investigators that he was responsible for the death of 53-year-old Veronica R. Abouchuk, telling authorities that he fatally shot her “sometime between 2017 and 2018,” reports the New York Times.
“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.”
Abouchuk’s remains — a skull with a gunshot — had been found earlier that year, in April, and using information from Smith’s confession, as well as dental records, they were able to identify her.
An attempt to block key evidence
Smith’s lawyer, 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.
However, this past Friday, Third Judicial District Judge Kevin Saxby ruled that the woman who stole the card will be able to testify about her time with the card before she turned it in to police. He also said the recordings can be properly authenticated.
The charges and trial
Smith’s trial begins this week, with jury selection having taken place on Monday. It is expected to last three to four weeks.
Smith has pleaded not guilty to 14 charges, including first- and second-degree murder, sexual assault and tampering with evidence.
— With files from The Associated Press
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