A man who killed two Alaska Native women and was heard in a video of the torture death of one of them saying that in his movies "everybody always dies" was sentenced Friday to 226 years in prison.
Brian Steven Smith received 99-year sentences each for the deaths of Kathleen Henry, 30, and Veronica Abouchuk, who was 52 when her family reported her missing in February 2019, seven months after they last saw her.
"Both were treated about as horribly as a person can be treated," Alaska Superior Court Judge Kevin Saxby said when imposing the sentence.
"It's the stuff of nightmares," Saxby said.
The remaining 28 years were for other charges, like sexual assault and tampering with evidence. Alaska does not have the death penalty.
Two of the jurors attended the sentencing, the Anchorage Daily News reported, and one of them said the sentence was justified.
"It was the law being executed to the letter," juror Michael Stewart said.
Smith, a native of South Africa who became a naturalized U.S. citizen shortly before torturing and killing Henry at an Anchorage hotel in September 2019, showed no emotion during sentencing.
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Smith was arrested in 2019 when a sex worker stole his cell phone from his truck and found the gruesome footage of Henry's torture and murder. The images were eventually copied onto a memory card, and she turned it over to the police.
Smith eventually confessed to killing Henry and Abouchuk, whose body had been found earlier but was misidentified.
Both Alaska Native women were from small villages in western Alaska and experienced homelessness when living in Anchorage.
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Videos from the memory card were shown during the trial to the jury but hidden from the gallery. Smith's face was never seen in the videos, but his distinctive South African accent - which police eventually recognized from previous encounters - was heard narrating as if there were an audience. On the tape, he repeatedly urged Henry to die as he beat and strangled her.
"In my movies, everybody always dies," the voice says in one video. "What are my followers going to think of me? People need to know when they are being serial-killed."
During the eight-hour videotaped police interrogation, Smith confessed to killing Abouchuk after picking her up in Anchorage when his wife was out of town. He took her to his home, and she refused when he asked her to shower because of an odor.
Smith said he became upset, retrieved a pistol from the garage and shot her in the head, dumping her body north of Anchorage. He told police the location, where authorities later found a skull with a bullet wound in it.