‘This is bad’: Jurors see interrogation video in which Smith admits dumping body, says he can’t remember killing

In hours of damning interrogation video, Brian Smith admitted to detectives that he woke up after a night of heavy drinking to find a body in the back of his truck – cold and covered in a tarp.

But for hours he maintained he didn’t remember beating and strangling Kathleen Henry to death, despite detectives playing him audio and showing him photos they said showed him doing exactly that.

“This is bad,” Smith said during the interview with two Anchorage police detectives. “This is not a nice thing to do. Or to find out that you’ve done. This is not nice. I don’t like this.”

Smith’s trial for the 2019 death of Kathleen Jo Henry, 30, and the 2018 death of Veronica Abouchuk, 52, started last week in Anchorage. On Tuesday, jurors were shown hours of the sprawling interrogation video, filmed on Oct. 8, 2019.

On that day, police had intercepted Smith at the Anchorage airport as he stepped off a flight from Washington, D.C., where he’d been vacationing with his wife.

They had plenty to ask him about: By this time police had images and videos that depicted a man with a British South African accent and physical characteristics matching Smith beating and strangling a woman to death in an Anchorage hotel room. Railroad workers had found Henry’s skeletal remains discarded off the Seward Highway.

The interview started with Anchorage Police Department detectives Jeff Bell and Brendan Lee gently prodding Smith about his use of digital devices. Smith said he made YouTube videos of himself at his Talkeetna property and camping.

But those weren’t the videos detectives wanted to talk about. Soon, they played an audio clip of the hotel room killing and showed him photos of a beaten Henry.

“The images led me to you,” Lee told Smith.

Smith continued to talk, despite at one point saying he might want some legal advice. Throughout the interrogation, Smith acknowledged that the evidence strongly suggested it’s him in the video.

“That’s my truck. That’s my voice. That looks like my shoes,” he said.

But he repeatedly denied having any memory of killing Henry. After some time, Smith admitted that he disposed of a body along the Seward Highway after “finding it” in the back of his pickup truck after a night of heavy drinking in September.

“I thought what the hell, what to do, what to do,” he said. “Who is going to believe me?”

The interrogation also offered a window into the way Smith said he operated in Anchorage: He described picking up multiple homeless women, sometimes directly from the Brother Francis Shelter, for drinking and sex, sometimes driving them around, and sometimes renting a hotel room using his Marriott employee discount rate. Sometimes he paid them, sometimes they were just very drunk and he got what he wanted for free, he said.

The detectives told Smith they thought he purposely targeted women living on the fringes as victims because he thought they were someone “no one would miss.”

“If you pick someone up in the dark of the night, an indigent person, in the dark by the homeless shelter, these are the type of people who are perfect for this,” Lee suggests to Smith. “And that’s what you did.”

Smith also admitted to posting videos on a pornographic website and adopting an alter-ego online personality “Bradley Phillips.” But when detectives pressed him about the video of the killing being a “snuff film” made for an online audience, he denied it.

The detectives said Smith seemed “very comfortable” in the violent footage — like he’d done it before. They asked if they should be investigating a serial killer.

Detectives prodded at Smith for a motive. He repeatedly said he had no memory of the killing and didn’t know why he would have done it. He rejected the idea that he killed Henry when a violent sexual fantasy went too far. He denied making the video for an audience.

“I’m probably the most stable person,” he said at one point.

At the end of the day in court, Anchorage Superior Court Judge Kevin Saxby reminded the jurors that they are not to make up their minds until all the evidence has been presented, and both sides have been able to make their arguments. More of the interrogation is expected to be shown on Wednesday.