While Eastern Cape-born Brian Smith faces a looming murder trial in Alaska, his childhood friends told of a meek man who was loved by all.
The 48-year-old IT technician, who was raised in Queenstown and lived in Port Elizabeth, was arrested in Anchorage on Tuesday.
He is accused of the brutal beating and murder of Kathleen Henry, whose body was dumped near the roadside on a secluded stretch of highway south of the city.
Three days earlier Alaskan police were called by a woman who, while walking on a busy Anchorage street, picked up a memory card which contained a trove of pictures and video footage showing a naked woman being strangled to death in a hotel room.
The footage, according to reports in the Anchorage Daily News, showed a man with an "English-sounding" accent strangling a woman.
The footage purportedly shows the man stomping on her neck, with the pictures showing her covered in a sheet on a hotel baggage trolley being moved through a parking lot, and another with her face down on the back of a bakkie.
"Through the course of the investigation, detectives determined the crime took place in Anchorage during the first week of September. They identified Smith as the suspect and believe the human remains are of the adult female in the video," a police report on Wednesday said.
Days later Henry's body was found, and with police connecting the dots, Smith was arrested and hauled to court.
The paper reported that crime scene technicians descended on a house Smith shares with his wife, Stephanie Bissland, and seized a black Ford bakkie they co-own.
Putting Brian and violence in the same breath was beyond the realm of possibility for me
— Smith's cousin Jacques Engelbrecht
"His wife is not implicated in the slaying," the paper wrote.
Jacques Engelbrecht, Smith's cousin, told the Sunday Times he was shocked to hear the "quiet and kind" man was implicated in the brutal killing.
He said they had been inseparable during his time spent as a child in Queenstown, with the pair reconnecting after they both served in the army.
"We got back in touch when we both lived in Port Elizabeth and we actually lived really close to one another," he said.
Friend Debbie Driessel described Smith as a caring and meek man who was never quick to anger. "I spent so much time alone with him and I never felt threatened by him. I would phone him in a tizz about the computer and he was unflappable."
Smith is due to appear in court again on October 21.
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