How a Stolen Phone Led to the Arrest of a Potential Serial Kîller

In September 2019, Valerie Casler, a Native Alaskan woman, stole a phone from the truck of a man who had picked her up.

When she went through the phone, she was astounded by what it contained: tens of graphic photos and videos of a woman being tortured before she was brutally mûrdered. Casler turned the phone to the police.

The owner of that phone was Brian Steven Smith.

Image: Smith and his victims.

Two days later, the police linked Smith to the body of the woman in the video, a 30-year-old Native Alaskan woman, Kathleen Jo Henry. They recovered her body from Seward Highway in Anchorage.

He was arrested and during his interview, he revealed that he had kîlled another missing woman, a 52-year-old Native Alaskan woman, Veronica Abouchuk, and led investigators to her body.

Smith was born in South Africa and migrated to the United States in 2014 after he married a citizen. He was arrested just a month after he became a naturalized citizen.

INVESTIGATIONIn August, the corpses of four men were found along the banks of the river in Val-de-Marne, just outside Paris. Le Monde traced the timeline of these homicides and the suspect's arrest.

The pink and white train cars crossed the arches of the bridge spanning the A86 highway that goes around Paris. On the right, there was an urban jumble of dilapidated factories, houses with windows blocked by cinder blocks, and outdated billboards. On the left, looking out from the window of the RER C commuter train coming from Paris toward Choisy-le-Roi (a suburb southeast of Paris), the translucent gray of the Seine reflected scattered bushes. Despite being tired from waking up at dawn for his shift at a Paris hotel, Karim (his first name has been changed) always made sure to sit on the right side to watch the river from the train. Pierre (who did not wish to give his last name) also liked coming to see the water. On August 13, this engineer was working from home and wanted to walk along the riverbanks to get some fresh air between noon and 2 pm.

At 12:15 pm, Karim was the first to notice the body. "The back, the arms a bit broad, the head of a man who is balding." He could not believe it, so he got off at Choisy-le-Roi station, took the RER C back in the opposite direction to the previous stop, then boarded again on the train running alongside the Seine. A corpse was floating. He called the police around 1 pm.

At the same time, Pierre spotted what he initially thought was a mannequin near the boat launch ramp, just before the highway bridge, between the RER train tracks and the river. As he got closer, he saw it was a man's body, dressed in a blue and white T-shirt. He dialed 17, the emergency police number, on his mobile phone. Get the best deals here!