Henry and Abouchuk were both Alaska Native women who had experienced homelessness. They were from small villages in western Alaska, Henry from Eek and Abouchuk from Stebbins.
Authorities say Henry was the victim whose death was recorded at the TownePlace Suites by Marriott, a hotel in midtown Anchorage. Smith was registered to stay there from Sept. 2 to Sept. 4, 2019; the first images showing her body were time-stamped at about 1 a.m. on Sept. 4, police said.
As detectives interrogated Smith about the Marriott case, authorities said, he offered up more information to police who escorted him to a bathroom: He had killed another woman, and he went on to identify her — Abouchuk — from a photo and to provide the location of her remains, along the Old Glenn Highway north of Anchorage.
“With no prompting, he tells the troopers in the bathroom, ‘I’m going to make you famous,’” District Attorney Brittany Dunlop said during a court hearing last week. “He comes back in and says ... ‘You guys got some more time? You want to keep talking?’ And then discloses this other murder.”
“These were two Alaska Native women,” Dunlop, then the assistant district attorney, said in 2019 after Smith was charged. “And I know that hits home here in Alaska, and we’re cognizant of that. We treat them with dignity and respect.”
Authorities said Smith, who is in custody at the Anchorage Correctional Facility, came to Alaska in 2014 and became a naturalized U.S. citizen the same month Henry was killed.
In a 2019 letter to the AP, he declined to discuss the case. He added that he was doing well: “I have lost weight, I have much less stress and I am sober.”
His wife, Stephanie Bissland of Anchorage, and a sister acting as a family spokesperson in South Africa, both declined to comment until after the trial.
The trial, expected to last three to four weeks, was scheduled to begin Monday with jury selection.
Alaska State Troopers in 2018 incorrectly identified another body as that of Abouchuk, because Abouchuk’s ID had been discovered with it, for reasons that remain unclear. But with the information Smith provided, investigators re-examined the case and used dental records to confirm a skull with a bullet wound found in the area Smith identified was Abouchuk’s, authorities have said.
Smith’s attorney, Timothy Ayer, unsuccessfully sought to have the digital memory card’s evidence — or even mention of it — excluded at trial. The woman who turned in the card initially claimed she had simply found it on the street, and it wasn’t until a second interview that she confessed she had stolen the card from Smith’s truck while he tried to get money from an ATM and she had it for a week before giving it to police, he said.
“In 2018 the defendant confessed numerous murders in both South Africa and in Alaska” to his then-girlfriend. The woman told police in 2018, prosecutors wrote, and “the 2018 investigation was critical in identifying Smith as a suspect in the pending homicides.”
