An unlikely combination of people took the stage at the Alaska Press Club’s annual banquet on Saturday, April 12.
Four activists for Missing and Murdered Indigenous People (MMIP) received the Press Club’s First Amendment Award, one of its highest honors for their work to identify a third murder victim in a high-profile crime.
The First Amendment Award is named in memory of Howard Rock and Tom Snapp, who founded the Tundra Times Newspaper in the early 1960s to champion Alaska Native rights.
Since 2007, the Alaska Press Club Board has taken nominations from its members, made the final selection and presented the award at the conclusion of the Press Club’s annual statewide journalism conference.
Almost all the recipients have been reporters, selected because their work exemplifies the core values of the First Amendment. But increasingly, in our fast-paced world of social media, bloggers and activists play a role in exercising First Amendment freedoms.
Sometimes they tell stories that reporters don’t cover – activists like Antonia Commack, who has 90,000 followers on TikTok -- Amber Batts, a blogger who advocates for the safety of sex workers -- Michael Livingston, a retired police officer, active in the MMIP movement -- and Marcella Boskofsky-Grounds, who is legally blind and has struggled with homelessness.
All are Alaska Native, with the exception of Batts, who grew up in Juneau.
This group was responsible for uncovering the identity of a woman that Anchorage police kept secret for five years – that of Cassandra Lee Boskofsky, an Alutiiq woman originally from Kodiak Island. She is believed to be a victim of Brian Smith, a serial killer convicted last year of murdering two other Indigenous women from Southwest Alaska.
Police said they kept Boskofksy’s death quiet because they had no physical evidence to make a positive identification. They also said the risk of mistaken identity, which could also traumatize families, was too high.
Batts followed the case on her blog. She said police did have images of a battered and lifeless woman who looked like Boskofsky, which they found on the killer’s cell phone.
“They are gruesome and deeply heart breaking,” Batts told journalists at the Press Club banquet. “We could not get anybody interested in writing these stories, so we told these stories.”
Smith targeted vulnerable Native women, who struggled to survive on the streets of Anchorage.
In videos posted on Facebook and TikTok, Commack complained that police did not work hard enough to identify the images in the Boskofsky case. She also raised questions about the ethics of keeping Boskofsky’s family in the dark and whether police would have approached the case differently, had the victim been of another race, or someone with a place to call home.
Commack also blamed the news media for not giving the case more attention. One of the ironies: There were several standing ovations from a crowd of journalists when Commack and Batts leveled criticism at them.
“Cassandra Lee Boskofsky may not have been the perfect victim, but she was a victim,” Commack said. “She was a human. She was loved by many people, despite her struggles.”
Commack and Batts regularly dig into court records and have spent hundreds of dollars of their own money to get copies of police reports. Last March, they blogged about a document they uncovered, which revealed for the first time that Smith had a third possible victim, based on pictures that were found on one of his cell phones. The images had been deleted, but police were able to recover them.
The photos were not released at that point, so Commack and Batts turned to Livingston, who asked police to get a forensic artist to make a sketch that could be used to help identify the woman.
In July, the sketch turned up in a sentencing memo, along with the cell phone images. Commack and Batts cross-checked them with other photos of missing and murdered women and identified the victim as Boskofsky within an hour.
The forensic artist’s sketch of the woman ultimately connected them to Marcella Boskofsky-Grounds, who had filed a missing person’s report for her cousin, Cassandra, in 2019.
With Livingston’s help, Boskofsky-Grounds petitioned the court for a presumptive death hearing, a procedure with a judge and jury that is almost like a trial. But instead of having lawyers oversee the process, the family is allowed to call witnesses to the stand.
Livingston says the tables were suddenly turned on police when Boskofsky-Grounds got to question one of the lead investigators in the case, who was compelled to testify under oath. For the first time, she got answers about what police knew — and when they knew it.
“Within a very short time, the jury determined Cassandra died in a violent homicide, something the Anchorage Police denied for over five years,” Livingston said.
The testimony revealed that a safety patrol officer had identified Cassandra not long after the photos were discovered -- yet when police released them five years later before Smith’s sentencing, they maintained that the woman was still unidentified. Technically, without any physical remains, they were correct, but the activists claimed the investigators intentionally misled the public.
Boskofsky-Grounds says she was intimidated at the prospect of conducting the death hearing for her cousin. But at the awards presentation, she told reporters she realized Cassandra no longer had a voice and needed someone to stand up for her First Amendment rights.
Smith was never charged with Cassandra Boskofsky’s murder, but police have said if more evidence becomes available, they might consider it. Smith, a South African immigrant, is currently serving a 226-year sentence. In a letter to the court that Smith filed on his own behalf without the assistance of an attorney, he asked for an appeal, a decision that is still pending.
From the police and prosecution’s perspective, there were many reasons to withhold aspects of of their work. Given the horrific nature of the killings and the tremendous resources poured into the investigation, Smith’s murder trial was a case they couldn’t afford to lose. And they didn’t. Despite all the challenges they faced in the trial, and there were many, the jury reached a guilty verdict in less than two hours.
To win their case, they had to triangulate massive amounts of evidence such as cell phone and GPS data. There was also the national media, which descended on the trial and dubbed it the “Memory Card Murders,” because of the video evidence in the case. At the start of the trial, the judge apologized to the jury for the traumatic images they would see of Smith torturing and killing his victims.
The trial also exposed the underbelly of Anchorage and its tolerance, if not appetite, for violence. Smith apparently bragged about his exploits and had no fear of drawing others into his dark world.
Prosecutors introduced text messages exchanged between Smith and a friend named Ian Calhoun as evidence. The texts suggest that Calhoun might have known about Smith’s murders. Currently under Alaska law, the penalty for having knowledge of a violent crime and failure to report it, is violation that only draws a $500 fine. The activists held several protests around Anchorage to call attention to this gap in the law, a story that did not get much coverage from the news media, most likely because police never charged Calhoun in the case.
For this year’s First Amendment honorees, the work goes on.
In the state legislature, Batts has been pushing for Kathleen’s Law, a bill named after Kathleen Jo Henry, a woman whose murder Smith recorded on his cell phone. After the killing, Smith messaged Calhoun, “I have something to show you. Something I can’t keep for too long.” Cellphone records show that the two men met in a park later that day.
If Kathleen’s Law is passed and signed into law, Batts says it would hold those with knowledge of violent crimes accountable with mandatory reporting laws and harsher penalties for failure to report.
As for Michael Livingston...
He was recently appointed to the state’s Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons Review Commission, which tracks unsolved cases.
Antonia Commack continues to exercise her First Amendment rights with zeal. Almost every day, she updates MMIP cases on her Facebook page. Commack recently created a new MMIP logo with the trademark red handprint -- but Alaska-fied, with an Aleutian Chain and Southeast Panhandle extending from the hand.
Boskofsky-Grounds has already had the logo tattooed on her leg. She visited Smith’s jail cell last year and pleaded with him to help her find Cassandra’s body. She says Smith only toyed with her and left her in tears, yet this hasn't stopped her efforts to find her cousin’s remains. She and her family have already been out several times this year searching for signs of Cassandra.
Free speech doesn't always make the world a better place. In these turbulent times, we are so inundated with sound and fury, we forget our First Amendment is still a set of valuable tools — kind of like a Leatherman or a Swiss Army Knife — that whether in the hands of a journalist or an activist, can be applied in many ways to make a difference.
In interest of full disclosure: KNBA’s Rhonda McBride nominated the MMIP activists for the Alaska Press Club’s First Amendment Award, because their work raised serious questions about how the criminal justice system deals with cases involving Native victims.
