INSIDE THE MEMORY CARD MURDERS

A WOMAN WHO STOLE A MAN'S PHONE WHILE ON A DATE LEADS POLICE IN ALASKA TO A GRUESOME DISCOVERY

- CHRISTINE PELISEK

With nothing else to do for the evening, Valerie Casler was hanging out near a grocery store in Anchorage on Sept. 19, 2019, when a man with a foreign accent pulled up in a black Ford Ranger and asked her if she wanted to go for a drive. Casler, who was homeless and addicted to drugs at the time, climbed into the truck for what became an hours-long cruise through the city streets.

When the driver pulled over at a gas station and went inside to withdraw cash, she reached across the center console and pocketed his phone. Later that night, back at the tent where she was staying, she opened the phone and was horrified by what she discovered: dozens of graphic photos and videos of a naked woman being beaten and strangled in a hotel room that looked familiar to Casler.

"I had been up drinking and getting high for, like, two weeks straight," Casler, 52, testified about seeing the images in an Anchorage courtroom on Feb. 7. "And then I turned it on, and I was sober in less than five minutes." Casler downloaded the disturbing images on a memory card, which she later admitted she had stolen from a department store, and labeled it "Homicide at midtown Marriott."

Ten days later she turned the data over to police, unleashing an investigation that led to the arrest of a South African immigrant on suspicion of murdering two Native Alaska women. Investigators had analyzed the footage of a man boasting and taunting his victim. "In my movies," he says in one chilling sequence, "everyone dies. What are my followers going to think of you? People need to know when they are being serial-killed."