Latest / Murder Files Unsealed / Murder of Kathleen Jo Henry

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Murder of Kathleen Jo Henry · Murder Files Unsealed

0:00
Speaker 1: I want you to close your eyes for a second. Well,
0:01
not if you're driving obviously.
0:02
Speaker 2: Right, definitely keep your eyes on the road if you will.
0:04
Speaker 1: Yeah, please do. But if you're somewhere safe, I want
0:07
you to picture Anchorage, Alaska. And I don't mean, you know,
0:11
the postcard version with the northern lights dancing over some
0:14
pristine snow capped mountain.
0:16
Speaker 2: No, not the tourist brochure exactly.
0:18
Speaker 1: I want you to picture the pavement. Because it's September thirty,
0:22
twenty nineteen. The air has that specific bite to it,
0:25
you know, that wet, heavy cold that sinks right into
0:28
your bones.
0:29
Speaker 2: It really tells you winter isn't just coming, It's already
0:32
got his foot in the door.
0:33
Speaker 1: It does. It's a very visceral setting.
0:35
Speaker 2: Anchorage at that time of year is really transitioning into
0:39
the long dark. I mean the tourists have largely packed
0:43
up and gone home, and the leads are rotting on
0:44
the ground, and the city kind of it just contracts,
0:48
It settles into its own gritty reality.
0:52
Speaker 1: It reveals the city underneath the city. Right, and on
0:55
this particular street corner we find the people who usually
0:58
get edited out of those travel brochures we're talking about
1:01
the unhoused, the people battling addiction, the folks living minute
1:05
to minute just to survive. Yeah, and right there in
1:08
the middle of all that struggle is a woman named
1:11
Valerie Castler.
1:12
Speaker 2: Valerie is so crucial to this story. She has a
1:15
woman experiencing homelessness, dealing with severe addiction issues, and to
1:19
the average passerby, she is invisible, or you know, worse,
1:25
She's seen as a nuisance, just someone to step around, exactly.
1:28
But on this day she becomes the most important person
1:32
in the entire state of Alaska.
1:33
Speaker 1: Because she makes a choice. And look, let's be honest
1:36
about this. It wasn't a noble choice initially, Oh not
1:39
at all. It was a survival choice. She's out there
1:41
and she sees a black Ford Ranger truck park near
1:44
a gas station. The drivers inside, he's distracted, and sitting
1:47
right there on the front seat is a cell phone.
1:49
Speaker 2: It's your classic crime of opportunity. Ah. I mean, in criminology,
1:53
we talked about the routine activity theory. You need a
1:55
motivated defender, a suitable target, and the absence of a
1:59
capable guardian. And here the driver left the guardian himself
2:04
basically inside the store. The target was the phone. Valerie
2:09
took it.
2:10
Speaker 1: She swipes it. She isn't thinking, uh, I'm gonna solve
2:13
a major crime today, Definitely not. She's thinking, this phone
2:16
can buy me food, it can buy me a night inside,
2:19
it can buy me a fix. So she takes it
2:20
back to her tent. And this is where the universe
2:22
plays one of those terrifying sick jokes, because she opens
2:25
that phone, probably looking to wipe it or you know,
2:28
find a setting to factory reset it, and she finds
2:31
a folder.
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Speaker 2: And this isn't just a folder of you know, family
2:34
barbecues or pictures of a dog.
2:36
Speaker 1: It's an archive of absolute hell. She finds photos and videos,
2:40
specifically a video labeled in a way that eventually leads
2:43
her to label an SD card homicide at Midtown Marriott. Yeah,
2:46
she watches a woman being strangled. She hears a voice,
2:49
this man's voice, taunting the victim, and just like that,
2:53
a petty street theft turns into the unraveling of a
2:55
serial killer.
2:56
Speaker 2: It is a profound aha moment that's such a dark one,
3:00
really challenges our entire perception of justice. And we spend
3:03
millions on forensics, on profiling on these massive task forces.
3:08
Speaker 1: Oh totally.
3:09
Speaker 2: But in this case, the breakthrough came from the absolute
3:12
chaos of the street.
3:13
Speaker 1: So here is our roadmap for today's deep dive. We
3:16
are looking closely at the Alaska SD card murders. We
3:19
are going to talk about the man who owned that phone,
3:21
Brian Stephen Smith, a guy who was living a double
3:25
life that is frankly terrifying in its banality, it really is.
3:30
We're going to talk about the victims, Kathleen, Joe Henry
3:32
and Veronica Abuchuk, and crucially the system that failed them
3:36
way before they ever crossed paths with Smith.
3:38
Speaker 2: And we have to talk about the why why was
3:40
he able to operate like this? What is the psychology
3:43
of a man who narrates his own murders like he's
3:45
directing a film. And we really need to discuss the
3:48
Mi MIP crisis, missing and murdered Indigenous people, because this
3:52
isn't just about one bad apple, It's about the whole orchard.
3:56
Speaker 1: It's a heavy one, for sure, but I want you
3:58
to stick with us because at the center of all
4:01
this darkness there are these weird glimmers of humanity and resilience.
4:06
Let's go back to Valerie for a second. So she
4:08
has the phone, but she doesn't go to the police immediately,
4:12
does she. No.
4:13
Speaker 2: And this is a really critical point that often gets
4:16
misunderstood when people first hear this story. The theft happened
4:19
around September nineteen. She didn't hand over that SD card
4:24
until September thirty.
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Speaker 1: That's a ten day gap, ten whole days, ten days
4:28
holding onto a phone that contains a literal murder. I mean,
4:31
my first instinct, and probably your first instinct listening to this,
4:34
is to scream, why didn't she run straight to the precinct. Sure,
4:37
but we're looking at this from the comfort of our
4:39
homes or studios.
4:40
Speaker 2: Precisely, you really have to empathize with Valerie's position in
4:43
the social hierarchy. She is an addict. She just committed
4:46
a felony theft. She is living an attempt. In her experience,
4:50
interactions with law enforcement rarely end well. If she walks
4:54
into a police station and says, hey, I stole this
4:56
phone and look what I found, she has a very,
5:00
very justified fear that the conversation stops it I stole
5:05
this phone.
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Speaker 1: That's such a depressing reality. She's terrified she becomes the
5:09
criminal and the narrative rather than the witness.
5:12
Speaker 2: It's the perfect victim problem in reverse. Yeah, she is
5:15
the imperfect witness, and predators like Smith they rely on this.
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They operate in zones where people don't call the police.
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They target sex workers, the homeless, the addicted, because they
5:26
know those populations are terrified of the justice system.
5:29
Speaker 1: The silence of the marginalized is basically the killer's greatest weapon.
5:32
Speaker 2: Exactly.
5:33
Speaker 1: But she does eventually come forward, and the way she
5:35
does it is fascinating. She transfers the files to an
5:38
SD card. She labels it homicide at Midtown Marriott. That
5:41
specificity gives me chills. Right, it's like she was filing
5:44
a police report and the only way she.
5:45
Speaker 2: Knew how that label is the smoking gun. It tells
5:49
us she watched it, She analyzed it. She recognized the location,
5:53
the carpet, the furniture as a Marriott. That shows a
5:56
level of lucidity and observation that completely contrad the sceotype
6:01
of a confused addict. She knew exactly what she was.
6:04
Speaker 1: Holding, And think about the sheer irony of the situation.
6:07
If she hadn't stolen that phone, if.
6:09
Speaker 2: She hadn't stolen the phone, Brian Stephen Smith would likely
6:12
still be driving that black Ford Ranger today. Wow, Kathleen
6:15
Joe Henry's disappearance might have remained a mystery indefinitely. It
6:19
really forces us to ask what constitutes a good citizen.
6:23
In this specific case, a thief was the only moral
6:26
actor on the stage.
6:27
Speaker 1: Let's talk about the woman in that video, because for
6:30
a long time, to the police and the public, she
6:32
was just a face on a screen. But she had
6:34
a name. Her name was Kathleen Joe Henry.
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Speaker 2: Kathleen was thirty years old. And to really understand Kathleen,
6:39
we have to look away from Anchorage for a moment
6:41
and look at where she came from. She was born
6:43
in Bethel, but she was from Eke, Alaska.
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Speaker 1: Eek spelled e e k yes Eke.
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Speaker 2: It's a small, u big village. The population's only around
6:52
three hundred people. And when we say village in Alaska,
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we aren't talking about a suburb or a quaint little
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town down a highway. T talking about a place with
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absolutely no roads connecting it to the rest of the world.
7:03
Right either fly in or you take a boat.
7:05
Speaker 1: So it's incredibly isolated.
7:07
Speaker 2: Geographic isolation, yes, but also cultural richness. It's a true
7:12
subsistence lifestyle. People hunt seal, they fish for salmon, they
7:16
pick berries. The community bond is incredibly tight because you
7:20
literally rely on your neighbors to survive the winter. Everyone
7:23
knows everyone.
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Speaker 1: So imagine that transition. Kathleen leaves that environment where her
7:28
role is clearly defined, her community is right there, and
7:30
she moves to Anchorage. Why make that jump?
7:34
Speaker 2: The why is the same story we see across the globe, really,
7:38
but it's so intensified in the Arctic. It's the urban
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rural divide. People move for opportunity, jobs, education, better healthcare.
7:46
Makes sense, But the skills that make you a successful,
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respected woman in Eeke, knowing how to process the seal,
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knowing the ice patterns, knowing the deep lineage of the families,
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those skills don't translate to currency in downtown Anchorage.
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Speaker 1: That's a heartbreaking way to put it. Her expertise just
8:02
became invisible exactly.
8:04
Speaker 2: She arrives in the massive city and suddenly she faces
8:07
this profound cultural dislocation. She faces racism, She faces an
8:12
economic system she might not be prepared for. And without
8:15
that tight safety net of the village. If you slip,
8:18
if you lose a job or struggle with trauma, you
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fall really, really hard.
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Speaker 1: And the sources tell us she did fall. She struggled
8:25
with the law, she struggled with substance abuse. But she
8:28
was also and I love this detail, she was a poet.
8:30
Speaker 2: She was, and that detail is so incredibly important to remember.
8:34
She wrote poetry about her about pain, about her family.
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Her social media was filled with pictures of her smiling
8:40
with these warm, kind eyes. She wasn't just a victim.
8:44
She was the woman who is actively trying to process
8:47
her worl through art.
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Speaker 1: It kills me that the media often flattens people like
8:51
Kathleen into just homeless woman found dead. But she had
8:54
this rich in her life, and she met Smith just
8:57
days before her death. The implication from the deep dive
9:01
into the sources is that she was looking for a ride,
9:04
or warmth, or maybe money.
9:06
Speaker 2: It was a survival transaction. It was September, it was
9:08
getting cold. Smith offered a resources truck a hotel room
9:12
when you were living in a tent. The offer of
9:14
a warm room isn't.
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Speaker 1: A luxury, right, it's a lifeline.
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Speaker 2: It's a life saving necessity. Smith weaponized his comfort against
9:21
her desperation.
9:22
Speaker 1: Let's pivot to him, Brian Stephen Smith, because looking at
9:26
his background, he doesn't fit the stereotypical mold of the
9:29
creepy loaner living in a basement that people usually picture.
9:32
Speaker 2: No, not at all, and that's exactly why he's so dangerous.
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He's what we call a camouflage killer. He was forty
9:37
eight years old, he was married. He had a steady
9:39
job as a maintenance worker at the Townplace Suites by Marriott.
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He drove a reliable truck. He'd landed right into the
9:45
multicultural oil economy workforce of Alaska. To his neighbors, to
9:49
his coworkers, he was just Brian.
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Speaker 1: But his history, he's not from Alaska. He's from South Africa.
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Speaker 2: Born in Queenstown, South Africa, in March of nineteen seventy one.
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Speaker 1: Which puts his childhood smack in them middle of the
10:00
apartheid era.
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Speaker 2: It does, and we have to be careful here. Obviously,
10:04
the sources don't say that apartheid made him a serial killer.
10:07
That's far too simplistic. But he did grow up in
10:10
a society where state sanctioned violence against his specific racial
10:14
group was the actual law right.
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Speaker 1: It was baked into everyday life.
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Speaker 2: He grew up in a system that explicitly dehumanized the other,
10:22
that kind of conditioning the idea that some people matter
10:25
and some people just biological matter that can linger.
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Speaker 1: And it seems like it didn't just linger, it festered.
10:30
He moves to the US in twenty fourteen. He marries
10:33
an older woman, Stephanie Bisslin, who was seventy three at
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the time.
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Speaker 2: A marriage of convenience perhaps or cover. He moves into
10:40
her house, he gets his green card, and get this,
10:42
he becomes a naturalized US citizen in September twenty nineteen.
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Speaker 1: The very same month he kills Kathleen.
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Speaker 2: The compartmentalization is just absolute. He is standing in a
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room raising his right hand, swearing allegiance to the Constitution,
10:55
promising to be a good citizen. Yea, And at the
10:57
exact same time he has a dead woman's video on
11:00
his phone and maybe even a body in his truck.
11:03
It shows a complete lack of moral integration. He can
11:07
switch roles like changing a channel on a TV.
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Speaker 1: We see that switching in his online behavior too. The
11:12
sources detailed his core posts, and wow, they are intense.
11:16
Speaker 2: They are completely vitriolic. He posted these long racist rants,
11:20
citing totally fake statistics. He claimed things like black people
11:24
are far more likely to commit crimes, throwing around fake
11:27
numbers like six hundred percent more likely.
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Speaker 1: Well, im just completely fabricated, And of course we are
11:32
reporting what he wrote here to understand his mindset exactly.
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Speaker 2: Now, his victims in Alaska were Indigenous, not black, but
11:39
the underlying pathology is identical. It's the other ring. He
11:42
viewed anyone not like him as dangerous, inferior, and ultimately disposable.
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Speaker 1: He also had this bizarre persona He called himself a director.
11:51
In the video Valerie Found, he literally says, in my movies,
11:54
everybody dies.
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Speaker 2: That line in my movies, everybody dies. Yeah, it chills
12:00
me to the bone. It tells us everything about his motive.
12:02
This wasn't a crime of passion. It wasn't a drug
12:04
deal gone wrong or an argument. It was a production.
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Speaker 1: He was putting on a show.
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Speaker 2: He was the director of the writer in the star.
12:11
The victim was just a prop for his narrative.
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Speaker 1: Well, why narrate it? Why talk to the camera like that?
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Speaker 2: Narcissism, Pure narcissism and a desperate need for validation. He
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talks to his followers. He says, what are my followers
12:24
going to think of you? To the victim.
12:26
Speaker 1: Did he even have followers?
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Speaker 2: He didn't have a live stream, he didn't have a
12:29
cult following or anything like that. But in his head,
12:32
he was performing for an audience. He wanted to be
12:34
seen as powerful and terrifying. The camera basically became the
12:38
witness he created for himself.
12:40
Speaker 1: Let's get into the timeline of the murder itself, and
12:43
I have to give a warning to you listening. We
12:45
are going to discuss the mechanics of what he did
12:47
because it's central to the trial and the sentencing. It
12:49
gets very graphic. It's necessary context. Unfortunately, the brutality wasn't
12:54
a byproduct. It was the entire point. Smith used his
12:58
employee discount to rent room three to twenty at the
13:00
Town Place Suites. He checked in on September two, and
13:04
Kathleen was killed on September four.
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Speaker 2: He brings her to the room, and the video documents
13:10
what happens next. He stomps on her, he strangles her.
13:14
But it's the dialogue that is just so profoundly disturbing.
13:17
He says, just take it you live, you die, You live,
13:21
you die.
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Speaker 1: He is playing god. That's really the only way to
13:25
describe the psychology there. He is deriving pleasure not just
13:28
from the death, but from his absolute control over the
13:30
dying process. He's turning her life switch on and off.
13:34
That is the legal and moral definition of torture.
13:36
Speaker 2: And then the practical side of him kicks in right
13:38
in the middle of it. He says, I guess I
13:40
need to stop this because the blood is getting to
13:42
the floor.
13:43
Speaker 1: And that is the maintenance worker speaking exactly.
13:45
Speaker 2: It's not oh God, what have I done. It's oh man,
13:48
this is going to stain the carpet, and I might
13:49
lose my deposit or get fired for my job. It
13:52
is the ultimate terrifying detachment. He worries about the physical
13:57
carpet more than the human being in front of him.
14:00
If she is dead, he treats her like luggage. He
14:02
wraps her in a blanket, He puts her on a
14:04
hotel luggage cart, again using his job's tools, and literally
14:08
wheels her out to his truck.
14:10
Speaker 1: Then he drives. He drives south on the Seward Highway. Now,
14:14
for those who haven't driven it, the Seward Highway is stunning.
14:17
It hugs the Turnagan Arm. You've got massive mountains on
14:20
one side, the ocean on the other.
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Speaker 2: It's breathtaking, but it's desolate at night. There are these
14:25
long stretches with absolutely no lights, just the black water
14:29
and the cliffs. He drove down to mile post one oweight,
14:32
that's a pretty good distance from Anchorage, and he dumped
14:35
her body off the side of the road.
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Speaker 1: He thought he was free and clear. He thought the
14:38
snow and the animals would just take care of the
14:40
evidence for him.
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Speaker 2: And honestly, the almost did. Her body wasn't found until
14:44
October two. By that time, decomposition and wildlife had done
14:48
significant damage. If not for that as d card, even
14:51
if hikers found the body, they might never have linked
14:54
it back to Smith. They might have ruled it exposure
14:57
or an overdose, or it would just be another unsolved
15:00
case in the wilderness.
15:01
Speaker 1: But the sd CARD changed everything. Police see the video,
15:05
they see the carpet pattern and recognize it, and they
15:08
recognize the accent.
15:09
Speaker 2: Yes, the Anchorage Police Department, and you really have to
15:12
give credit to them here, had looked into Smith before.
15:15
There was a prior assault investigation that didn't lead to charges.
15:19
But his name, his face, and that very distinct South
15:22
African accent were already in their system, so.
15:24
Speaker 1: They connected the dots quickly.
15:26
Speaker 2: They did, and the truck in the surveillance footage matched
15:30
his vehicle registration perfectly.
15:32
Speaker 1: So the net closes. October eight, twenty nineteen. He's at
15:34
the airport Ted.
15:35
Speaker 2: Stevens International Airport. He's returning from a trip to Washington, DC,
15:39
which is just.
15:39
Speaker 1: Wild to me. He tortures and kills a woman, dumps
15:42
her body off a highway, and then just hops on
15:44
a plane to go toward the nation's capital.
15:47
Speaker 2: It's that exact compartmentalization we talked about earlier. He felt
15:50
entirely safe. He probably thought he completely got away with it.
15:54
He lands, he's walking through the terminal, probably just thinking
15:57
about grabbing his luggage, and suddenly he's completely surrounded by
16:01
law enforcement.
16:02
Speaker 1: Take us into that interrogation room, because this is where
16:05
the director persona kind of cracks, but then weirdly reassembles
16:09
itself in a new way.
16:10
Speaker 2: It's an eight hour session long grueling. At first, Smith
16:14
plays the confused, innocent guy. I don't know what you're
16:18
talking about. You have the wrong guy. Then, when they
16:21
actually confront him with the evidence. He pivots. He goes
16:24
to I found her body in my truck. I panicked
16:26
and dumped it.
16:27
Speaker 1: The classic it wasn't me, I just cleaned up the
16:29
mess defense.
16:30
Speaker 2: Right, which never works when the police have a literal
16:34
video of you narrating the killing.
16:36
Speaker 1: Yeah, pretty hard to talk your way out of that.
16:38
Speaker 2: But the really pivotal moment comes during a break he
16:41
asks to use the bathroom. He's standing there with the tripper,
16:44
very casually, and he says, and this is a direct
16:47
quote from the sources, I'm going to make you guys famous.
16:49
Speaker 1: I'm gonna make you guys famous. Let's unpack that. He
16:53
is in handcuffs, he's facing life in prison, and his
16:56
main concern is fame.
16:57
Speaker 2: It's his ego. Frantically scrambling a foothold, he realizes he
17:02
can't be Brian the successful, normal immigrant anymore. That mask
17:06
is completely shattered, so he decides to become Brian the monster.
17:09
Speaker 1: He leans into it.
17:10
Speaker 2: Exactly if he has to go down, he wants to
17:13
go down as a legend. He wants to control the
17:15
narrative of his own destruction.
17:16
Speaker 1: And to buy that fame, he offers up a token.
17:19
He casually confesses to a second murder.
17:22
Speaker 2: Veronica Obuchuk.
17:23
Speaker 1: This was a totally cold case.
17:25
Speaker 2: Freezing coal. Veronic had been missing since August twenty eighteen.
17:29
That was a full year before Kathleen was killed.
17:31
Speaker 1: Tell us about Veronica.
17:32
Speaker 2: She was fifty two years old. Like Kathleen, she was
17:35
a last canative. She was a nupiek from the village
17:38
to Saint Michael. She was a mother of four children.
17:41
Her family described her as having a huge heart, someone
17:43
who loved deeply and was loved.
17:45
Speaker 1: But she fell into that same gap.
17:47
Speaker 2: Yes, she fell into the homelessness and addiction cycle that
17:50
traps so many people transitioning from village life to the city.
17:53
Speaker 1: And Smith picked her up too.
17:54
Speaker 2: He did. He brought her to his home. His life
17:57
was out of town at the time. Yeah, this was
17:58
clearly his pattern. When the wife is away, the predator
18:01
comes out to play.
18:02
Speaker 1: And the reason he killed her is I read this
18:04
in the source material and I literally had to read
18:06
it twice because it's just so incredibly petty.
18:09
Speaker 2: She refused to take a shower, That was it. He
18:12
demanded she shower, likely because he viewsed these marginalized women
18:16
as dirty or contaminated, which is a whole other dark
18:19
psychological layer.
18:20
Speaker 1: And she said no, she asserted a boundary.
18:22
Speaker 2: She asserted a boundary. And for a malignant narcissist like Smith,
18:25
a boundary as an insult.
18:27
Speaker 1: It's an existential threat to his control.
18:29
Speaker 2: Exactly, he has to be the one in control. So
18:31
he retrieved a point two two caliber pistol and shot
18:34
her in the head.
18:35
Speaker 1: Just like that, over a shower, just like that.
18:37
Speaker 2: No struggle, no fight, just an execution. And then, and
18:42
this is where it gets even darker, if you can
18:44
believe it, He treated her body as a toy. He
18:47
took photos, he fondled the remains.
18:49
Speaker 1: The necrophilia aspect of the crimes.
18:52
Speaker 2: Yes, it suggests that for Smith, the actual living, breathing
18:55
human being was an obstacle to his fantasy. He preferred
18:58
them dead because they can't sit no, right when they're dead,
19:02
they don't say no, they don't refuse showers, they don't
19:04
assert boundaries. There's just objects he can pose and manipulate.
19:08
He even shared images of her dead body with a friend,
19:11
as if showing off a hunting trophy.
19:13
Speaker 1: Her skull was found by mushroom pickers right yes.
19:16
Speaker 2: Out on the old Glen Highway that was back in
19:19
April twenty nineteen. But because it was just a skull
19:23
and there were absolutely no leads, she remained a Jane
19:26
Doe for.
19:26
Speaker 1: A long time until the bathroom break.
19:29
Speaker 2: Right. Smith's confession allowed the authorities to go back and
19:32
match her dental records. Without his ego driven confession that
19:36
I'll make you famous line, Baronica might never have been identified.
19:41
Her family would just never know.
19:42
Speaker 1: So now we have two confessed murders. The trial finally
19:45
happens in February twenty twenty four. Why the massive delay,
19:48
that's almost five years after the arrest, Well, the wheels.
19:51
Speaker 2: Of justice always grind slow, but especially with a global
19:54
pandemic in the middle of it. COVID shut down the
19:57
courts for a long long time. But also the defense
20:00
fought tooth and nail. They tried to get the confession
20:02
thrown out on what grounds They argued it was coerced.
20:05
They literally called it psychological warfare by the state troopers.
20:09
Speaker 1: Did the jury buy that at all?
20:11
Speaker 2: Not for a single second. I mean, when the prosecution,
20:14
led by Brittany Dunlop and Heather Nobrega, plays a video
20:17
of the defendant narrating a murder and then plays a
20:19
confection that directly leads to a mything woman's skull. There
20:23
is no reasonable doubt left in the room.
20:25
Speaker 1: No, The jury deliberated for what less than two hours,
20:30
very briefly. They found him guilty on all fourteen counts.
20:33
Speaker 2: Murder, sexual assault, tampering with physical evidence, misconduct with the corpse,
20:38
the full list.
20:39
Speaker 1: Let's talk about the sentencing, which happened on July twelfth,
20:41
twenty twenty four. Judge Kevin Saxby hands down two hundred
20:45
and twenty six years. Now, in some states you just
20:48
get life. Why the specific massive number here.
20:52
Speaker 2: Alaska is unique in its sentencing. We don't have the
20:55
death penalty, but we have very specific sentencing guidelines. He
20:58
got ninety nine years for Kathleen, and that was mandatory.
21:01
Why I'm mandatory because the jury found a specific aggravator,
21:04
substantial physical torture.
21:06
Speaker 1: So the law recognizes that what he did to Kathleen
21:09
before she died deserves its own extreme punishment.
21:13
Speaker 2: Exactly, it wasn't just a killing, It was an agonizing
21:17
torture session that ended in death. Then he got another
21:20
thirty to ninety nine years for Veronica and the judge
21:24
random consecutively, not concurrently.
21:27
Speaker 1: Meaning one sentence starts only after the other one ends.
21:29
He's never getting out never.
21:31
Speaker 2: Judge Saxby had a quote during the sentencing that really
21:34
stuck with me. He said, there is no hope, There
21:36
is no restoration. There is only preventing mister Smith from
21:39
killing again.
21:40
Speaker 1: It's a bleak statement, but it's incredibly honest. Sometimes rehabilitation
21:44
just isn't on the table. The judge recognized that Smith
21:47
is essentially a broken machine that cannot be fixed. The
21:50
only function of the court at that point is absolute containment.
21:54
Speaker 2: Right, and Veronica's daughter spoke at the sentencing too. She
21:58
wished him a life without hope. I think that's incredibly powerful.
22:01
She didn't wish him death. She wished him the exact
22:04
emptiness he caused their family.
22:05
Speaker 1: It's a profound curse. And now he sits in a cell,
22:08
no audience, no movies, just concrete conquer But and this
22:12
is really the so what part of our deep dive today?
22:15
We can't just clap her hands and say, Okay, bad
22:17
guy is gone. Problem solved because Smith didn't operate in
22:20
a vacuum.
22:21
Speaker 2: No he didn't. He operated in a very specific ecosystem
22:24
that allowed him to hunt for years. We have to
22:27
talk about the systemic shadows here. We have to talk
22:30
about the m MIP crisis missing.
22:32
Speaker 1: And murdered Indigenous people. The stats are just horrifying.
22:36
Speaker 2: They are Indigenous people are a significant part of Alaska's population,
22:41
but they are vastly, vastly overrepresented in homicide and missing
22:46
person statistics, and specifically Indigenous women. The sources quote an
22:51
advocate named Natasha Gamash who said Native Alaska women are
22:55
considered invisible, but we're.
22:56
Speaker 1: Not that perceived invisibility is exactly what Smith counted on.
23:00
He knew that if he picked up a woman who
23:02
was considered high risk, homeless, addicted, Indigenous, a visible the
23:05
police response might be a little slower, the media outcrime
23:08
might be a little quieter.
23:09
Speaker 2: We call it the less dead.
23:11
Speaker 1: That's awful.
23:12
Speaker 2: It's a terrible, terrible term from criminology. It refers to
23:16
victims who, in the eyes of society or the media
23:19
or sometimes law enforcement, supposedly matter less sex workers run
23:23
away as the homeless. Smith was a sadistic predator, yes,
23:27
but he was also a calculating opportunist. He knew our
23:30
system had giant cracks, and he intentionally hunted in those cracks.
23:34
Speaker 1: There may be jurisdictional issues in Alaska too, right, that
23:37
contributes to the cracks massive ones.
23:39
Speaker 2: In Alaska, you have this incredibly complex patchwork of state troopers,
23:44
local municipal police, and village public safety officers or vpsos.
23:49
Sometimes crimes happen on tribal land or involve tribal members,
23:53
and it falls into this legal gray area where the
23:55
state says, well, that's not our jurisdiction, and the FED
23:58
say we're too busy for this. Yea. It's these tragic
24:00
zones of impunity where predators can hide.
24:03
Speaker 1: And even with Smith behind bars, there are so many
24:05
loose ends. I mean, the sd cart it didn't just
24:07
have Kathleen and Veronica on it.
24:09
Speaker 2: No, And this is the part that genuinely keeps me
24:11
up at night. There were photos of other women on
24:14
that drive. Some looked unconscious, some looked visibly beaten.
24:17
Speaker 1: There was one specific woman mentioned in the sources, the
24:19
woman with the butterfly tattoo.
24:21
Speaker 2: Yes, a woman with a distinctive butterfly tattoo on her chest.
24:25
Her family identified her from the description as Cassandra Boskovsky
24:30
and she is legally dead, but Smith hasn't been charged
24:33
with her murder.
24:34
Speaker 1: Why not if she's on his drive and she's dead.
24:37
Speaker 2: It likely comes down to a lack of concrete physical evidence.
24:41
A photo of a woman looking unconscious isn't definitive proof
24:44
of a homicide in the court of law, especially if
24:47
they don't have a body linked to him with forensic evidence. Right,
24:51
But the implication is screaming at us there were others.
24:54
Speaker 1: And the DNA in his truck.
24:56
Speaker 2: Unknown female DNA was found in the Ford Ranger. It
24:59
wasn't Kathleen, it wasn't veronicas, which means another woman was
25:02
in that trek in a context that left genetic material behind.
25:06
Speaker 1: Is she a survivor who somehow got away or is
25:09
she just another victim lying out in the snow somewhat.
25:11
Speaker 2: We don't know? And think about his timeline. He started
25:14
this at age forty eight.
25:15
Speaker 1: That seems late, Yeah, highly unlikely. Serial sexual homicide usually
25:20
manifests much much earlier in a person's life.
25:22
Speaker 2: The FBI is actively looking into his past. In South Africa,
25:27
you don't just wake up at forty eight years old
25:29
and decide to become a director. Of snuff films. There
25:32
is almost certainly a dark history there that we just
25:35
haven't uncovered yet.
25:36
Speaker 1: That is terrifying. He could have a literal trail of
25:38
victims across two continents.
25:40
Speaker 2: It's a very distinct possibility.
25:42
Speaker 1: As we wrap this up, I want to circle back
25:44
to the title of the article we used as a
25:45
source for this deep dive, Shadows in the Snow. It's poetic,
25:50
but man, it carries so much weight.
25:52
Speaker 2: It really captures the duality of Alaska. You have the
25:55
breathtaking beauty of the snow, but also the terrifying ability
25:58
of that snow to hide things is cover up the
26:01
darkness and freeze it in place.
26:03
Speaker 1: The trial brought some of those shadows into the light. Finally,
26:06
it honored Kathleen and Veronica. It forced the city and
26:10
the state to look at them not as statistics but
26:12
as mothers and poets and human beings.
26:15
Speaker 2: That is the one real redemption here. Their stories were told,
26:20
they were seen by the world.
26:21
Speaker 1: But the structural problems remain. The housing crisis and anchorage
26:25
is still there. The lack of resources for people moving
26:28
from remote villages like Eke is still a problem. The
26:32
systemic racism hasn't vanished, and.
26:34
Speaker 2: As long as those vulnerabilities exist, there will be another
26:37
Brian Stephen Smith. The environment creates the hunting ground. We
26:41
caught the wolf, yes, but we haven't fixed the fence.
26:44
Speaker 1: That's the heavy truth. Okay. I want to leave you
26:47
the listener with one final thought, and this is the
26:49
one thing that really really messes with my head. The
26:52
more I look at this case, K four, think about
26:55
the massive resources of the state, the detectives, the patrol cars,
26:59
the judges, the prosecutors, millions and millions of dollars, decades
27:03
of specialized training. None of that stopped Brian Stephen Smith.
27:07
Speaker 2: No, it didn't.
27:08
Speaker 1: A woman stealing a cell phone to buy a sandwich did.
27:11
It was a complete chaotic accident. If Valerie Castler decides
27:15
to rob a different truck that day, Smith is still
27:18
out there. If she decides to sell the phone without
27:20
opening the photo gallery, Smith is still out there.
27:23
Speaker 2: It creates a real crisis of faith in the system, doesn't.
27:25
Speaker 1: It It does. It makes you realize just how fragile
27:28
our safety really is. So my question to you listening
27:31
to this is how many other predators are out there
27:35
right now, operating in the shadows, relying on our collective
27:38
indifference to keep their secrets. And are we really okay
27:42
with a world where a stolen cell phone does more
27:44
for public safety than the massive systems we built to
27:47
protect us.
27:48
Speaker 2: That is a question that demands an answer from all
27:50
of us.
27:50
Speaker 1: Thank you for going on this deep dive with us.
27:52
It wasn't an easy one, I know, but it really matters.
27:55
Speaker 2: Keep asking questions, and please see the people around you,
27:59
really see them.
28:00
Speaker 1: We'll see next time. Stay safe out there,