A homeless madman who butchered UCLA student Brianna Kupfer in 2022 recorded of the horrifying attack in which he stabbed her 46 times and left her to bleed out, prosecutors said.
Shawn Laval Smith, 34, was “hunting for a woman alone” when he ambushed 24-year-old Kupfer at the boutique furniture store where she worked, according to Los Angeles County district attorneys.
He then left an audio recorder that he used to document the attack and a filet knife — bent in the frenzied attack and smeared in Kupfer’s blood with Smith’s DNA on the handle — at the scene cops reveled.
The jury convicted Smith, who has a lengthy criminal record, of murder on Tuesday – agreeing he attacked her with a knife after “lying in wait.”
LA County Deputy District Attorney Habib Balian described Smith as a Hannibal Lecter-style sicko who got his kicks from the idea of slaughtering women.
Smith talked about wanting to murder women on recordings taken a month prior to his grizzly attack, according to evidence presented at his trial in Los Angeles, where he was found guilty of first-degree murder.
“This man hated women,” Bailan said in his closing argument, according to NBC LA. “It’s easier probably to sleep at night to think something is wrong with him rather than face the truth that this man was on a crusade to hunt, to destroy and to kill for the mere fact that she was female.”
Defense attorney Robert Haberer argued that Smith’s butchery wasn’t premeditated.
“It sounds like he was blowing off steam, probably because he was pissed off about something in that moment. Who the hell knows what it was?” ABC 7 quoted him as saying.
Kupfer had been in graduate school for architecture.
In closing arguments, Bailan said Smith “used her kindness against her,” ABC7 quoted him as saying. “When he was close and he was safe and her guard was down…left her bloody on the floor.”
He faces a sentence of life in prison without possibility of parole. However, first a judge must determine whether he was sane at the time of the attack.
