‘Are you guys in a rush?’: Smith interrupted police interview to confess to second killing

Several hours into a 2019 interview with police, Brian Smith had admitted a lot: He said he’d found a woman’s body in his truck and dumped it by the Seward Highway. He’d acknowledged the voice and body in a video of a hotel room killing of a woman seemed to belong to him.

Detectives were wrapping up, preparing to place Smith under arrest and take him to the Anchorage jail for processing.

He wasn’t done talking. Before leaving the interrogation room, he said something unexpected: “Are you guys in a rush?”

Smith is on trial for murder in the deaths of Kathleen Henry, 30, and Veronica Abouchuk, 52. His trial started last week in Anchorage. On Wednesday, jurors watched more of a nearly nine-hour long interview between Smith and law enforcement officials recorded on Oct. 8, 2019, including the moment the investigation expanded to include a second victim.

After the detectives told Smith they were in no rush, the interview shifted. Smith told them he’d picked up a woman from the parking lot of a Fairview grocery store while his wife was out of town. He couldn’t remember exactly when, but said he had offered her a warm meal and a place to sleep. Smith told detectives he’d taken her to his house and grown annoyed she wouldn’t take a shower.

Smith said he had walked into the garage, retrieved a pistol and shot her in the head as she laid on the couch.

“It was unprovoked,” he told the detectives. “She didn’t do anything. She just pissed me off.”

Smith said he didn’t know why he had shot her. She was nice older woman, he said. He told detectives he could help them find where he’d dumped her body.

“I’m already … going down for the rest of my f--king life,” Smith said at one point. “One more thing isn’t going to hurt me.”

The woman Smith described killing was Veronica Abouchuk, 52, a mother from St. Michael area. Her sisters cried in the front row of the courtroom gallery as the video of the interview played. Like Henry, Abouchuk had been homeless in Anchorage when Smith picked her up.

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

After he shot Abouchuk, Smith said he’d taken disturbing sexual photos with her body. Then he covered her with a black plastic bag and drove, with the body uncovered in the back of his truck, to a gravel turnout just past the Eklutna Power Plant on the Old Glenn Highway, he said. He’d disposed of the body so close to the road it was visible, he told detectives. Her skull had been found in the area by mushroom pickers in April of 2019.

Prosecutors say Abouchuk was killed in mid-August 2018.

Smith’s defense attorney Timothy Ayer tried to call into question the circumstances and legality of the long police interview while cross-examining detective Jeff Bell, drilling into the calculated tactics detectives use — such as minimizing the moral harm of a crime — to keep suspects like Smith talking. He also questioned the detective about Smith’s legally required Miranda warning, which happened early in lengthy interview, which went on for more than eight hours. Ayer pointed out that Smith never wavered from his statement that he didn’t remember what had transpired in the hotel room with Henry.

Brittany Dunlop, the prosecutor, asked Bell on redirect if Smith had spoken freely, even after the Miranda warning that anything he said could be used against him.

“Did he continue to talk for hours after that?” Dunlop asked.

“Ad nauseam,” Bell replied.