The murders of two Alaskan Native women, Kathleen Jo Henry and Veronica Abouchuk, at the hands of serial killer Brian Steven Smith, are centered in ID’s Lost Women of Alaska.
The three-part series narrated and executive produced by Octavia Spencer lays out the vulnerabilities that allowed Smith, who is serving a 226-year sentence for the killings, to prey upon Henry, Abouchuk and countless other native women he and other men are suspected of harming, from remote terrain to racism and biases against sex workers.
“Amplifying these stories is our duty,” said Spencer, who’s nominated for an Emmy for best narrator for her work on the series, during a taping of THR Presents powered by Investigation Discovery. “These women had lives, they have loved ones, and they are human. We are human.”
Right from the beginning, the series lays out the disproportionate number of missing persons in Alaska—roughly 1,300, with only 100 being actively worked on. Were you aware of the situation in Alaska prior to this project?
As a Black woman, I know that our stories here are not prioritized. So it was not shocking, sadly, to me, that these indigenous women were going missing at alarming rates. It’s a systemic failure within our culture to disregard people who are Black and brown.
