Naman Shrestha
In the late 2010s, several Native Alaskan women began disappearing. Two of them were Kathleen Jo Henry and Veronica Abouchuk, whose disappearances and killings were found to be connected. As the police dug deeper into the cases, they came across a crucial SD card and were led to a common perpetrator who was a potential serial killer. In Investigation Discovery’s ‘Lost Women of Alaska,’ all the intricate details surrounding the cases and the investigation that ensued were covered in a detailed manner with the help of exclusive interviews with the loved ones of the deceased women and the officials linked to the case.
Kathleen Jo Henry and Veronica Abouchuk’s Remains Were Found on Different Anchorage Highways
Born on December 22, 1988, in Bethel, Alaska, Kathleen Jo Henry grew up in the Yup’ik Eskimo village of Eek. In 2012, while she was serving time at Highland Mountain Correctional Center, she obtained her GED. At some point, she was married, but it didn’t work out and she got divorced. Kathleen battled addiction and reportedly had several run-ins with law enforcement. In her free time, she liked going on social media and also loved expressing herself through self-written poems.
Kathleen became homeless by the time she turned 30, making her life all the more difficult. In early September 2019, she was last seen alive in Anchorage, Alaska, at the TownePlace Suites hotel. About a month later, her remains were discovered along Alaska’s Seward Highway on October 2, 2019. Upon performing an autopsy report, it was determined that the 30-year-old woman was reportedly strangled to death in one of the rooms of the TownePlace Suites hotel on September 4, 2019.
Earlier that same year, in April 2019, the police came across the remains of a woman in her early 50s along an Anchorage highway. By October 2019, they determined that the remains belonged to Veronica Rosaline Abouchuk, who was born in 1966 in Saint Michael, Alaska. She was raised in a loving household and grew up to become a mother to multiple children, including her daughter, Kristy Grimaldi. By 2018, she had become homeless in Anchorage. Although she was last seen by her family in July 2018, she was not reported missing until February 2019. Unlike Kathleen, Veronica died of a fatal gunshot wound in October 2018.
Kathleen Jo Henry and Veronica Abouchuk’s Killer Allegedly Took More Female Victims
During the investigation of Kathleen Jo Henry’s murder, the authorities had seen videos and photos of Kathleen being tortured and killed on a phone that belonged to a man named Brian Steven Smith. They also remembered how a woman named Alicia Youngblood approached them in August 2018 and reported seeing a video of someone being killed on her boyfriend, Brian’s, phone. As they dug deeper into the suspect, they realized that he had flown to Washington, DC. When he returned to Alaska in October 2019, the detectives questioned him at the Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport. During the interrogation, he admitted to killing Veronica Abouchuk, whom he had brought home while his wife, Stephanie Bissland, was out of town.
He told the detectives that he got angry when she refused to take a shower upon his insistence, and he shot her in the head while she was lying down on the couch. As for Kathleen, Brian took her to the TownePlace Suites hotel, where he was an employee, and killed her. By the end of the interview, he was arrested and charged with the sexual assault and murder of Kathleen. Nearly 10 days later, on October 17, he was also charged with killing Veronica. The authorities revealed that they found 39 photos and 12 videos related to Kathleen’s murder on the SD card provided to them by a woman who stole Brian’s phone from his truck. Even after the arrest, they continued looking into the accused’s past as some witnesses claimed that he had killed multiple women in South Africa, where he had lived earlier. He was also tied to the murder of another Anchorage resident, Cassandra Boskofsky.
In early February 2024, Brian’s double homicide trial got underway. During the trial, the jury was shown videos from the SD card but hidden from the rest of the court. In one of the videos, Brian was heard saying, “In my movies, everybody always dies…What are my followers going to think of me? People need to know when they are being serial-killed.” After three weeks of testimonies, on February 22, the jury deliberated for less than two hours and found him guilty of all 14 counts, including two counts of first-degree murder, second-degree sexual assault, tampering with physical evidence, and misconduct involving a corpse. A few months later, on July 12, 2024, Brian was sentenced to 226 years in prison — two 99-year sentences for the murder convictions and an additional 28 years for other convictions.
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