A South African immigrant in the United States has been sentenced to 226 years for the first-degree murders of two Alaska Native women who had gone missing in 2019.
Fifty-three-year-old Brian Steven Smith, of Queenstown in the Eastern Cape, received 99 years for the murder of 30-year-old Kathleen Jo Henry and 52-year-old Veronica Abouchuk in Anchorage, Alaska’s largest city. An additional 28 years were imposed related to sexual assault and tampering with evidence charges.
One of the murders was filmed and Smith later admitted under questioning that he was the man in the footage and had disposed of the victim’s body.
Smith became a naturalised US citizen shortly before the torture and killing of Henry at a hotel in Anchorage in September 2019.
He’d also been charged with the fatal shooting more than a year earlier of Abouchuk. Authorities said at the time that the location Smith gave police for disposing of her remains matched the wooded site north of Anchorage where Alaska state troopers recovered her skull with a gunshot wound in April of 2019.
Smith was identified through his strong South African accent on the torture video which was discovered on a digital camera card and turned over to the police. The Judge said both victims were treated as horribly as a person could be treated, calling it the stuff of nightmares.
Source: BBC
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