In this week’s spotlight minisode we discuss a South African killer in Alaska who filmed his crime as well as the murder of a young mother who was viciously stabbed to death while on holiday.
On the 30 September 2019, in Anchorage, Alaska a pedestrian walking at the corner of Gambell Street and East 13th Avenue found an SD card lying on the pavement. For those who are not aware SD stands for Secure Digital and such a card is used as a storage medium in electronic devices so as not to fill up the device’s memory with large files and also so that you can easily transfer files to other devices. This SD card was labelled, it read: Homicide at Midtown Marriot.
On the SD card, the police found 12 video clips and 39 still images all of which appeared to depict the murder of an unknown female by an unknown male.
There are conflicting accounts of how the man in the videos was identified. One account says that when he spoke on the video police were able to pick up that he had a foreign accent – a South African accent. If that was the case, it wouldn’t have been much more than an admin exercise to narrow down South Africans in Anchorage. Another account, however, has a far more chilling ring to it and that is that it is claimed that police recognised the man in the video because they were dealing with him on another case. The man was identified as 48-year-old Brian Steven Smith.
In September, a young couple, Matthew and Karen Turner and their son were visiting Hluleka Game Reserve while on holiday. They had been travelling to attend a friend’s wedding and had extended the getaway to celebrate Karen’s birthday which fell on Monday the 16th of September. That night the couple was attacked while sleeping in their chalet in the resort.
SHOWNOTES:
Host: Nicole Engelbrecht
Producer: Nicole Englebrecht
Music: Snippet from Prime Circle’s
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