Alaska
Man gets 226 years in deaths of 2 Native women
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — A man who killed two Alaska Native women and was heard while videotaping the torture death of one say 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.
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.
He also displayed no emotion when a jury deliberated for less than two hours and found him guilty after a three-week trial in February.
During the trial, the victims were not identified by name, only initials. Saxby said during sentencing that their names would be used in order to restore their personhood.
Smith was arrested in 2019 when a sex worker stole his cellphone 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 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.
Authorities identified Henry as the victim whose death was recorded at TownePlace Suites by Marriott in midtown Anchorage. Smith, who worked at the hotel, was registered to stay there from Sept. 2-4, 2019. The first images from the card showed Henry’s body and were time-stamped about 1 a.m. Sept. 4, police said.
The last image, dated early Sept. 6, showed Henry’s body in the back of black pickup. Charging documents said location data showed Smith’s phone in the same rural area south of Anchorage where Henry’s body was found a few weeks later.
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 on 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.
Kansas
Court voids last conviction of researcher in case that started as Chinese espionage probe
A federal appeals court has reversed the conviction of a researcher who was accused of hiding work he did in China while employed at the University of Kansas.
Feng “Franklin” Tao was convicted in April 2022 of three counts of wire fraud and one count of making a materially false statement. U.S. District Judge Julie Robinson threw out the wire fraud convictions a few months later but let the false statement conviction stand. She later sentenced him to time served.
But the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver on Thursday ruled that the government failed to provide sufficient evidence that Tao’s failure to disclose his potential conflict of interest actually mattered, and it directed the lower court to acquit him of that sole remaining count.
The case against Tao was part of the Trump administration’s China Initiative, which started in 2018 to thwart what the Justice Department said was the transfer of original ideas and intellectual property from U.S. universities to the Chinese government. The department ended the program amid public criticism and several failed prosecutions.
Tao was a tenured professor in the chemistry and petroleum engineering departments at the University of Kansas from 2014 until his arrest in 2019. The appeals court noted that while it began as an espionage case, the FBI found no evidence of espionage in the end.
But the professor was accused of failing to disclose when filling out an annual “institutional responsibilities form,” under the school’s conflict-of-interest policy, that he had been traveling to China to work on setting up a laboratory and to recruit staff for Fuzhou University, where he hoped to land a prestigious position. Federal prosecutors argued that Tao’s activities defrauded the University of Kansas, as well as the U.S. Department of Energy and National Science Foundation, which had awarded Tao grants for research projects at Kansas.
Tao’s attorneys argued in their appeal that the case against Tao was a “breathtaking instance of prosecutorial overreach” that sought to turn a human resources issue at the university into a federal crime.
In a 2-1 ruling, the majority said there was insufficient evidence for the jury to have found that Tao’s failure to disclose his relationship with the Chinese university affected any decisions by the Energy Department or Science Foundation regarding his research grants, and therefore it did not count as a “materially” false statement.
Appeals Judge Mary Beck Briscoe dissented, saying Tao’s failure to disclose his time commitments related to his potential position at Fuzhou University, was in fact, material to both agencies because they would have wanted to know in their roles as stewards of taxpayers’ money who are responsible for ensuring the trustworthiness of research results.
Man gets 226 years in deaths of 2 Native women
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — A man who killed two Alaska Native women and was heard while videotaping the torture death of one say 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.
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.
He also displayed no emotion when a jury deliberated for less than two hours and found him guilty after a three-week trial in February.
During the trial, the victims were not identified by name, only initials. Saxby said during sentencing that their names would be used in order to restore their personhood.
Smith was arrested in 2019 when a sex worker stole his cellphone 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 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.
Authorities identified Henry as the victim whose death was recorded at TownePlace Suites by Marriott in midtown Anchorage. Smith, who worked at the hotel, was registered to stay there from Sept. 2-4, 2019. The first images from the card showed Henry’s body and were time-stamped about 1 a.m. Sept. 4, police said.
The last image, dated early Sept. 6, showed Henry’s body in the back of black pickup. Charging documents said location data showed Smith’s phone in the same rural area south of Anchorage where Henry’s body was found a few weeks later.
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 on 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.
Kansas
Court voids last conviction of researcher in case that started as Chinese espionage probe
A federal appeals court has reversed the conviction of a researcher who was accused of hiding work he did in China while employed at the University of Kansas.
Feng “Franklin” Tao was convicted in April 2022 of three counts of wire fraud and one count of making a materially false statement. U.S. District Judge Julie Robinson threw out the wire fraud convictions a few months later but let the false statement conviction stand. She later sentenced him to time served.
But the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver on Thursday ruled that the government failed to provide sufficient evidence that Tao’s failure to disclose his potential conflict of interest actually mattered, and it directed the lower court to acquit him of that sole remaining count.
The case against Tao was part of the Trump administration’s China Initiative, which started in 2018 to thwart what the Justice Department said was the transfer of original ideas and intellectual property from U.S. universities to the Chinese government. The department ended the program amid public criticism and several failed prosecutions.
Tao was a tenured professor in the chemistry and petroleum engineering departments at the University of Kansas from 2014 until his arrest in 2019. The appeals court noted that while it began as an espionage case, the FBI found no evidence of espionage in the end.
But the professor was accused of failing to disclose when filling out an annual “institutional responsibilities form,” under the school’s conflict-of-interest policy, that he had been traveling to China to work on setting up a laboratory and to recruit staff for Fuzhou University, where he hoped to land a prestigious position. Federal prosecutors argued that Tao’s activities defrauded the University of Kansas, as well as the U.S. Department of Energy and National Science Foundation, which had awarded Tao grants for research projects at Kansas.
Tao’s attorneys argued in their appeal that the case against Tao was a “breathtaking instance of prosecutorial overreach” that sought to turn a human resources issue at the university into a federal crime.
In a 2-1 ruling, the majority said there was insufficient evidence for the jury to have found that Tao’s failure to disclose his relationship with the Chinese university affected any decisions by the Energy Department or Science Foundation regarding his research grants, and therefore it did not count as a “materially” false statement.
Appeals Judge Mary Beck Briscoe dissented, saying Tao’s failure to disclose his time commitments related to his potential position at Fuzhou University, was in fact, material to both agencies because they would have wanted to know in their roles as stewards of taxpayers’ money who are responsible for ensuring the trustworthiness of research results.
