Family of missing Alaska woman believes she may be Brian Smith’s third victim

In the summer of 2019, Cassandra Boskofsky’s family stopped hearing from her.

The 38-year-old, originally from Ouzinkie, had been a presence in the lives of her aunt and cousin for years, checking in by phone, text or Facebook message even when her own life was unstable. They saw her one last time in August of that year. Then the contact stopped altogether.

“That was the last time we talked to her,” said Terrie Boskofsky, her aunt, in a phone interview.

In September of that year, Boskofsky was officially reported missing.

Now, Boskofsky’s family believes that she may have been the third victim of convicted murderer Brian Steven Smith.

South African-born Smith was convicted in February of killing Veronica Abouchuk in August 2018 and Kathleen Jo Henry in September 2019. His trial drew national and international attention both because of the brutality of the killings and because Smith targeted vulnerable women.

At the monthlong trial, jurors heard about how Smith, a married hotel maintenance worker, cruised Anchorage and picked up women — often homeless, suffering from addiction or mental illness — from the streets with promises of a meal, a place to stay or alcohol. In at least two cases, he killed them, documenting their deaths with sickening photos and video.

At his sentencing July 12, an Anchorage judge said that if Smith was released, he would likely kill again. He was sentenced to 226 years in prison.

Activists and family members have long believed Smith may have more victims.

Graphic photos found on Smith’s phone and released in court filings ahead of his sentencing suggested that might be true: They show a woman bloodied on the ground, unconscious or dead.

On July 19, Marcella Boskofsky-Grounds filed a presumptive death petition in Anchorage Superior Court, saying she believes the as-yet officially unidentified woman pictured in the photos is her missing cousin, Cassandra Boskofsky.

In the petition, she wrote that an Anchorage Police Department detective contacted her on July 6 and showed her photos that he said had been extracted from Smith’s phone after his arrest in October 2019.

“I recognized the photo of Cassandra Lee Boskofsky,” she wrote. “We grew up together in Ouzinkie, Alaska. I have known her since age 5. From the photographs, I do not think she was alive.”

The Daily News reached out to the lead prosecutor and detective on the case with questions about the nature and timing of the police investigation into the photos.

Anchorage District Attorney Brittany Dunlop declined to answer questions about the timing and nature of the investigation into the photos, saying that releasing information could compromise any potential future criminal charges. There is an open and ongoing investigation into the identity of the woman in the photos, she said.

Police and district attorneys “care about bringing closure to any victim’s families,” she said. “That’s important to the detectives and myself.”

Cassandra Boskofsky spent her early life in the small island village of Ouzinkie, off Kodiak, with a large extended family, her cousin said.

The two played on the beach, went on picnics, played hacky sack and “got into mischief,” Boskofsky-Grounds said. Cassandra Boskofsky spent a few years living in Kentucky with her aunt Terrie Boskofsky before landing in Anchorage, her aunt said, and was as close as siblings with some of her cousins.

Cassandra was “happy, outgoing, jolly, family-oriented,” her aunt said.

As an adult, she earned a GED and kept in touch with family but also struggled with alcohol and sometimes unstable living situations, her family said.

She was a mother of seven, her cousin said. “Even though they got adopted out, she was still close to them,” keeping in touch with foster and adoptive parents, Boskofsky-Grounds said.

The Boskofsky family says they have unanswered questions about why they only learned years later about the photos found on Smith’s phone.

The photos were never mentioned at Smith’s murder trial, and only written about in passing in the attorney’s filings with the court.

In July, prosecutors filed a sentencing memorandum with the court that included the images. The images had been extracted from Smith’s phone by detectives in October 2019, the memorandum said. Police had never identified the woman, and it wasn’t clear from the photos whether she was dead, prosecutors wrote.

At the sentencing, Dunlop, the prosecutor, didn’t go so far as to say Smith had killed the woman. When police confronted Smith about the images, he told them he’d left a woman he picked up passed out outdoors, she said. The encounter happened shortly after Henry’s killing. But “certainly she was harmed,” Dunlop said at the sentencing.

Antonia Commack, an advocate for missing and murdered Indigenous people, attended the Smith trial and had delved into her own investigation after the trial ended when she discovered a mention of photos found on Smith’s phone of a potential third victim.

Commack was horrified that the photos had been released, and felt they were dehumanizing and too graphic to be available to the public. But she and other advocates recognized the woman.

“We saw the photos and were just floored,” Commack said. As an MMIP activist, Boskofsky’s disappearance had been on Commack’s radar, she said. She’d wondered if Smith had been involved. And as soon as she saw the photos, she felt sure — the woman in the pictures and Boskofsky both had a distinctive tattoo of a butterfly on their neck, in faded black and blue ink.

Meanwhile, Boskofsky’s family went on thinking Cassandra was missing. They heard only vaguely of Brian Smith, and the two Alaska Native women he was charged with murdering.

Then, nearly five years later, in July of this year, the Boskofskys got a call from an Anchorage Police Department detective.

“He asked if I had seen a side-by-side picture of Cassandra and what an FBI sketch artist drew,” Marcella Boskofsky-Grounds said in a phone interview.

The family members believe she was killed by Smith.

“Her pictures are on his phone,” Boskofsky-Graves said. “And he did it to two other women.”

The family says they are angry and confused about why the photos weren’t brought to them much earlier. They have lived with the uncertainty of having a missing loved one for years, they said.

The family planned to participate in a protest Friday outside Anchorage police headquarters, organized by Commack and other advocates.

Prosecutors and police still consider the investigation into the identity of the woman in the photos open. But the Boskofsky family feels certain that the woman pictured is Cassandra, and that she is likely dead.

This week, they walked along a stretch of Chester Creek looking for her remains. They will continue to search, her aunt said.

“Cassandra deserves justice,” her aunt said.