WASHINGTON - In early October, Anchorage police found the body of Kathleen Henry, a native of the Yupik village of Eek in southwestern Alaska, along a stretch of highway south of town. Her alleged killer might never have been arrested had someone not found video of her slaying contained in a lost digital memory card.
Brian Smith, a naturalized U.S. citizen from South Africa, has been charged not only with her murder but that of another Yupik woman, Veronica Abouchuk, from the western Alaska village of Stebbins. Now, Anchorage is wondering whether it has a serial killer on its hands.
It’s a question many American Indians and Alaska Natives (AI/ANs) have asked, given the epidemic of missing and slain indigenous people across North America. Many of these cases go unsolved.
Thirty years ago, the FBI launched the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (ViCAP), a database of unsolved violent crimes, allowing police agencies around the country to report violent crimes, analyze existing data and find patterns that could lead them to the perpetrators.
But as in 2015, out of about 18,000 law enforcement agencies across the country, only about 1,400 participate in the system. This led investigative journalist Thomas K. Hargrove to create the (MAP), a database that tracks unsolved killings across the United States. It includes not only FBI data but also information from police agencies that do not use ViCAP.
Hargrove developed an algorithm to detect and map homicide clusters — geographic locations where multiple victims have been killed separately but in similar ways — that suggest the presence of serial killers. The data and maps are available to both law enforcement and the general public.
Canadian criminologist Michael Arntfield, who serves on MAP’s board of directors, said Washington, D.C., for example, has one such cluster. So does the Northwest, a region stretching from Oregon north along the Pacific coast that is home to hundreds of thousands of Native, First Nations, Metis and Inuit peoples whom law enforcement often overlooks. It is a region with enough wilderness that makes hiding a body easy.
“Serial killers prey on marginalized populations, and indigenous women make up a disproportionate number in the victim pool,” Arntfield said.
Notorious examples include:
• Robert Pickton, a Vancouver, British Columbia, pig farmer who, from the mid-1990s to early 2000s, butchered 33 known victims, at least 13 of whom were indigenous.
• Joshua Wade, active in Alaska between 1999 and 2007, confessed to killing at least two Alaska Natives: Henry Ongtowasruk, a 30-year-old man from the Kingikmiut village of Wales, and Della Brown, 33, in Anchorage in 2000 (her tribal affiliation is unknown).
• Robert Hansen admitted to killing 17 women between 1979 and 1984, often hunting them down in the Alaska wilderness. At least one of his victims, an unidentified woman dubbed "Eklutna Annie," is believed to have been an Alaska Native.
In the early 2000s, the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation noted a pattern in a string of women’s bodies that had been dumped along Interstate 40 in four states. This prompted the FBI to establish a Highway Serial Killings Initiative, which tracks known and unknown killers. The program initiative noted that suspects included predominantly long-haul truck drivers.
Today, the FBI has collected profiles of as many as 400 truckers who may still be active serial killers, Arntfield said.
Trucking, he explained, is an ideal profession for serial killers, as it gives drivers both mobility and anonymity.
"It also provides a veneer of legitimacy to serial killers being on the highway or at truck stops in the middle of the night,” he said. “Truck stops are known hotbeds of the sex trade, and truckers with nefarious motives can exploit that.”
Native women are at particularly high risk of commercial sexual exploitation, according to a by the Minnesota Indian Women’s Sexual Assault Coalition, which blamed historic trauma, poverty, alcohol or substance abuse, domestic violence and homelessness.
Native women and girls may be exploited into trafficking by force, fraud or coercion. Others may turn to prostitution as a means of economic survival.
Many Native women and girls, lacking cars or access to public transportation, are forced to rely on hitchhiking to get from place to place, making them easy prey for killers.
Thousands of truck drivers today, however, are working to combat human trafficking.