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Predators in Alaska: White Middle-Class Men and Native Alaskan Women

This passage contains descriptions of violence, murder, sexual assault, and systemic issues that may be distressing to some readers.


Let me take you to Anchorage - the largest city in the far north State of Alaska with roughly 300,000 inhabitants, the first things you notice when you land are the sharp peaks of O'Malley, Williwaw, and Flat Top in the nearby Chugach mountains. In the shadow of the mountains the city spreads out towards the ocean. As you drive north toward Downtown, you see Mount Susitna, or the Sleeping Lady, across the water. The city is surrounded by mountains on all sides, and on clear days you can catch a glimpse of Denali, the tallest mountain in America, in the distance.


The wilderness doesn’t end outside the city. As you get deeper into the downtown area, you might see a black bear raiding a trash can, or catch a glimpse of a brown bear in the woods. In the spring, when the snow gets too deep, the moose come out of the mountains and can be found  everywhere; sometimes they'll be at a bus stop; or munching on the pumpkins that have thawed from last Halloween; sometimes they get into buildings and can't get out again; or sometimes they’ll be wandering down a street with their calves in tow.

In Anchorage, however, just like many other Alaskan cities, the occasional moose, bears, or wolves are not the only types of predators. Another predator was lurking in the shadow of the mountains; Brian Smith. Smith, originally from South Africa, lived in Anchorage and in 2024 was convicted for the murders of two Alaska Native women. Smith was white, married, and middle class. He picked up Veronica Abouchuk - while his wife was out of town - took her to his home and shot her in the head when she refused to take a shower. All they found were pieces of her skull. He also murdered Kathleen Jo Henry, whose shocking death he recorded on video and which was shown to a horrified jury. His charges included murder, sexual assault, and desecration of a corpse.


Smith follows in the footsteps of many Alaskan serial killers; Joshua Wade, Israel Keyes, Robert Hansen. Hanson grabbed women off the street, flew them into the wilderness in his plane, and hunted them down. Keyes grabbed a woman as she was working alone at night in a drive-through coffee stall. Wade prayed on women in Spenard on the exact same streets as Smith. All the men were white, with the vast majority of their victims being Alaska Native, or Indigenous women. 


Why Alaska? What makes this place of such tremendous natural beauty and such rich culture and language a haven for such predators?


During Smith’s sentencing, the Superior Court Judge Kevin Saxby confessed that some people come to Alaska; because it’s an easy place to take advantage of people, people who live on the street’. Despite being one of America’s wealthier States, Alaska has high levels of homelessness and poverty. The state provides limited services, with insufficient snow ploughs, rising healthcare costs, and few homeless shelters. In 2019, the largest homeless shelter in Anchorage, Brother Francis Shelter, faced funding difficulties and had ‘reduce its capacity from 240 to approximately 100 people’. With an average of 2,600 people experiencing homelessness in Anchorage at any time, shelters are not a viable option for most. This leaves many people to fend for themselves in the streets, facing a harsh climate, frostbite, hypothermia, and even bears.


In addition to widespread homelessness, indigenous women encounter additional hardships. Indigenous and Native Alaskan women across the United States face an epidemic of systemic bias, sexual violence, and murder, with cases often neglected by law enforcement. In Alaska, this problem is exacerbated by a colonial infrastructure that controls and punishes the marginalized. Indigenous people in Alaska navigate not a post-colonial framework, but a colonial one. The DA’s office sits on the top of layers of colonial infrastructure that aim to control and punish. The same people whose parents and grandparents were taken to be assimilated in state run religious boarding schools find themselves taken from their parents into the custody of the state and have their own children taken away in turn. While ICWA allows tribal governments to make decisions concerning the children, more is needed to to weed out hundreds of years of entrenched white supremacy and religious fundamentalism within our governing structures’.


Communities are also plagued by substance abuse, sexual abuse, housing shortages, not to mention the very permafrost beneath their feet melting.


The case of Brian Smith brings the complicated, and deep-seated hypocrisy of the Alaska criminal justice system into sharp relief. Just months before Kathleen Jo Henry’s brutal murder, Chief Prosecutor Brittany Dunlop’s office had prosecuted her for a minor assault. Individuals like Henry suffer the collateral consequences of overcriminalization, such as lack of housing, employment, healthcare, and security. The Prosecutor’s office keeps anyone in need of welfare intervention on a conveyor belt of carceralism, and the collateral consequences plunge them deeper and deeper into conditions of social despair, making them perfect targets for men like Smith. Indigenous women live on the worst end of colonial and carceral dehumanization. This case highlights a deeper hypocrisy in the Alaskan justice system, where people like Dunlop perpetrate the harms that they attempt to address. While she calls the victims beautiful lives’ and laments their loss, the Alaska Prosecutor's Office spends most of its power prosecuting indigenous people for minor infractions, while failing to adequately address violence against women; a recent sexual assault case took seven years to reach the court. In Alaska, the social safety net is being replaced by the over-criminalisation of low-level crime that ‘regulates and generates inequality’.


Neoliberal individualisation pathologises male violence as the depraved acts of individual actors, completely ignoring the social and cultural environments that foster such behaviour. Consequently, Brian Smith existed in the perfect social condition to have both the motive and the opportunity to commit his awful deeds. However, Smith’s sentence of 226 years seems positively tame compared to that of his predecessor, Robert Hensen, who received a staggering sentence of 461 years. The pattern is clear: people come to Alaska because it’s easy to take advantage of the vulnerable, and the courts punish them severely. But steep sentences don’t appear to have a deterrent effect on future offenders.


Why should we care? Alaska is a place of extremes: extreme weather, extreme wildlife, extreme crime, and extreme serial killers. Alaska may seem distant and different socially and culturally, but its extreme conditions can reveal the harsh realities of systemic issues.


When homelessness, racism, and carceralism are taken to their logical conclusions, this is the result. The line between criminals and victims is thin, especially for women in Alaska. Both of Brian Smith’s victims had longer criminal histories than he did. Society viewed them as dangerous and deserving of sanctions. The dehumanisation of these women enabled predators like Smith to target them. In the UK, due to the austerity policies of the last decade, homelessness is rising, wealth inequality rising, and rising prison populations will increasingly provide fertile hunting ground for malicious individuals to prey on the vulnerable. While the incarceration of monsters like Smith is not in itself problematic, suggesting that it will have positive consequences in deterring future offenders is. While the evidence suggests that long penal sentences will have no deterrent consequences. Per Amina Srinivasan, When feminists embrace carceral solutions – cops on the street, men sent to prison- it gives cover to the governing class in its refusal to tackle the deepest causes of most crime: poverty, racial domination, borders, caste’.

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