Alaska Serial Killer Secretly Records Murders: ‘In My Movies, Everybody Dies’

Mar. 15, 2025

Brian Smith.Photo:Mark Thiessen/AP Photo; Bill Roth/Anchorage Daily News via AP

Mark Thiessen/AP Photo; Bill Roth/Anchorage Daily News via AP

With nothing else to do for the evening, Valerie Casler was hanging out near a grocery store in Anchorage, Alaska, on Sept. 19, 2019, when a man with a foreign accent pulled up in a black Ford Ranger and asked her if she wanted to go for a drive.

Casler, who was homeless and addicted to drugs at the time, climbed into the truck for what became an hours-long cruise through the city streets. When the driver pulled over at a gas station and went inside to withdraw cash, she reached across the center console and pocketed his phone.

“I had been up drinking and getting high for like two weeks straight,” Casler, 52, testified about seeing the images in an Anchorage courtroom on Feb. 7. “And then I turned it on, and I was sober in less than five minutes.”

Casler downloaded the disturbing images on a memory card, which she later admitted she had stolen, and labeled it “Homicide at midtown Marriott.” Ten days later, she turned the data over to police, unleashing an investigation that led to the arrest of a South African immigrant on suspicion of murdering two Alaska Native women.

Investigators had analyzed the footage of a man boasting and taunting his victim. “In my movies,” he says in one chilling sequence, “everyone dies. What are my followers going to think of you? People need to know when they are being serial-killed.”

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Kathleen Jo Henry; Veronica Abouchuk.Kathleen Henry/Facebook; Anchorage Police Department/Facebook

Kathleen Henry/Facebook; Anchorage Police Department/Facebook

During an eight-hour police interrogation on Oct. 8, 2019, Smith, who was arrested at Anchorage airport as he returned from a vacation in Washington, D.C., initially claimed that he didn’t remember the violent incident seen on the video but eventually admitted that, after a night of drinking, he found the body of a woman later identified as Kathleen Jo Henry, 30, in the bed of his truck.

After a bathroom break—during which Smith told a trooper who escorted him that he was “going to make you guys famous”—Smith confessed to murdering another woman he had met on the streets of Anchorage, 52-year-old Veronica Abouchuk, who, like Henry, had experienced homelessness and addiction. And in a further shocking admission, Smith told police that he took a photo of himself fondling the woman’s corpse and shared it with a female friend.

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Veronica Abouchuk’s sister Rena Sapp.AP Photo/Mark Thiessen

AP Photo/Mark Thiessen

Smith, who faces a mandatory 99 years in prison, is scheduled for sentencing in July.

activist Natasha Gamache.AP Photo/Mark Thiessen

But on Thanksgiving of 2018 she was a no-show. “That was weird,” recalls Lestenkof.

Brian Smith.Loren Holmes/Anchorage Daily News/AP

Months later, Henry—who grew up in Eek, Alaska, earned a G.E.D. and was known to write poetry—was anticipating a brief respite from homelessness when she joined Smith for a stay at a midtown Anchorage hotel on Sept. 4, 2019. At Smith’s trial, jurors were shown hard-to-watch footage of Smith torturing her there.

“I’m glad Smith was convicted and can’t ever hurt another woman,” says Natasha Gamache, an advocate for Native Alaska women, who attended a hearing in Smith’s case to show support for the victims’ families. “I’m glad the criminal justice system here got it right, because they frequently get it wrong. Native Alaska women are considered invisible—but we’re not.”

source: people.com