The Lost Women Of Alaska

Alaska is the largest state in the union. It is also one of the deadliest places in America to be an Indigenous woman. Alaska Native people make up roughly one-fifth of the state's population but account for more than sixty percent of its recorded homicide victims. Four of the ten American cities with the highest per-capita rates of missing and murdered Indigenous women are located in Alaska.

And for decades, a quiet, unspoken policy within the Anchorage Police Department — known internally as NHI, or "no human involved" — ensured that the women most at risk received the least protection.This episode is the story of what that policy made possible, and what a community of determined women did about it. In 2017, Brian Steven Smith — a South African national living in Anchorage — was arrested after a woman brought a memory card to police containing footage of him torturing and murdering thirty-year-old Kathleen Jo Henry, an Alaska Native woman he'd picked up near a Walmart and brought to a midtown hotel where he had maintenance access.

During his interrogation, Smith voluntarily confessed to a second murder — that of Veronica Abouchuk, fifty-two, an Alaska Native woman from the village of Stebbins whose remains had been lying near Earthquake Park for more than a year. He was convicted in February of twenty-twenty-four on all fourteen counts and sentenced to two hundred and twenty-six years in July of twenty-twenty-four.But the case didn't end there.

Photographs recovered from Smith's devices showed a third woman — appearing dead or unconscious, with blood visible, a man's foot standing over her body. Those photographs sat in a case file for five years. It took a community advocate digging through sentencing documents to find them and publish them. Within hours, the family of Cassandra Boskofsky, missing since August of twenty-nineteen, recognized her. Smith was never charged in her death. Her remains have never been found.

In September of 2024, her family held a presumptive death hearing and a civilian jury of six ruled her death a homicide — the only official acknowledgment her family has ever received.Also discussed in this episode: the NHI designation and the testimony of former APD officer Michael Livingston, who spent twenty-eight years on the force and is now a full-time MMIP advocate; the missed opportunity when a woman named Alicia Youngblood told police in 2019 that Smith had confessed a murder to her, and police did nothing; the question of Ian Calhoun, a man prosecutors believe probably knew about at least one of Smith's murders and who has never been charged; and the HBO and Investigation Discovery documentary series "Lost Women of Alaska," executive produced and narrated by Octavia Spencer, which premiered February twenty-fifth, twenty-twenty-six.

There are two rewards currently outstanding. Five hundred dollars for information leading to the recovery of Cassandra Boskofsky's remains, and five hundred dollars for information leading to the arrest of Ian Calhoun. If you have information, contact the Anchorage Police Department or reach out through MMIP advocacy networks in Alaska.

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