A woman stole a memory card from her date, a man in Anchorage, Alaska. The whimsical theft, however, led to Brian Steven Smith, 52, being charged with murder. On the card were gruesome images and videos of him killing other women, and she turned him in after what must have been a terrifying week of thinking about it.
"In my movies, everybody always dies," the voice says on one video. "What are my followers going to think of me? People need to know when they are being serial-killed."
About a week after she took the SD card, the woman turned it over to police, who said they recognized the voice as that of Brian Steven Smith, now 52, a South Africa native they knew from a prior investigation, court documents say.
Smith has pleaded not guilty to 14 charges, including first- and second-degree murder, sexual assault and tampering with evidence, in 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.
His lawyers wanted to have the card and its evidence excluded on the basis that the woman who stole it might have tampered with it. It's not exactly clear what the court thought of this but fabricating videos of missing, murdered women being killed seems obviously beyond the capabilities of your average petty thief and Smith admitted killing the women to officers.
