A woman with a lengthy criminal history got into a truck with a man who'd picked her up for a "date" near downtown Anchorage, Alaska. When he left her alone in the vehicle, the AP reports that she stole a digital memory card from the console. Now, more than four years later, what she found on that card is key to a double-murder trial set to begin this week: 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. "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."
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 known to them. 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. Both were Alaska Native women who'd experienced homelessness. Authorities say Henry was the victim whose death was recorded at a hotel in Anchorage. Smith was registered there from Sept. 2 to Sept. 4, 2019; the first images showing her body were time-stamped at about 1am on Sept. 4. The last images were taken early Sept. 6 and showed Henry's body in the back of a pickup.
Location data showed that at the time the photo was taken, Smith's phone was in the same area where Henry's body was found weeks later. As detectives interrogated Smith about the Marriott case, he offered up more: He went on to ID another victim—Abouchuk—and provide the location of her remains. "With no prompting, he tells the troopers ... 'I'm going to make you famous,'" DA Brittany Dunlop said in court last week. Smith attorney Timothy Ayer unsuccessfully sought to have the memory card's evidence excluded at trial, arguing that prosecutors wouldn't be able to show the provenance of the 39 photos and 12 videos, establish whether they were originals or dupes, or prove they'd been tampered with. A judge ruled against him. Several outlets, including the AP, have contested prosecutors' moves to close the court in an effort to prevent the gruesome images from being seen by the public. More here.
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