Boyfriend indicted for murder

ANCHORAGE — When she heard that Simon Smith had been charged with murder, Andrea Borsetti said the emotions hit her “like a tidal wave.”

“At first I was jumping up and down really, really happy, and then for the rest of the night I cried,” she said.

Smith, 34, is charged with the murder of Borsett’s sister, Nichole Millsaps.

An Anchorage grand jury on Wednesday saw fit to charge Smith with the murder. Millsaps, who was 26 when she went missing in 2010, vanished nearly four years prior the discovery of her body in February in a wooded area off the Seward Highway.

Smith’s name came up in numerous court documents dealing with the disappearance. He and Millsaps were dating at the time she disappeared. Witnesses reported the couple left for a ferry trip, never got on the ship, and that only Smith returned.

Borsetti described her younger sister as active and athletic. She said she played softball and was on a swim team.

“She loved the outdoors. She loved to go fishing, she always rode four-wheelers and snowmachines,” Borsetti said by phone from Mississippi. “In her teenage years, you couldn’t get her off of one of those without a pry-bar.”

She said she and her sister were raised mostly in Phoenix, Ariz., and moved to Alaska when Millsaps was 12. They first started visiting the state with their mother, but later moved up to live with their father, who was then managing the general store in Point Hope.

“You can imagine going from Phoenix to Point Hope. It was like the biggest shell shock of our lives,” she said.

But, Borsetti said, she and her sister thrived in Alaska.

“When she finally got her driver’s license she actually started rebuilding cars with my dad,” Borsetti said. “She had one VW Beetle that ran that she actually drove around and they had another in the garage that they were rebuilding from the ground up.”

With her father, Millsaps worked all over the state, Borsetti said. Her father’s company would buy and operate hardware or auto parts stores.

“Nichole worked with my dad in Kotzebue and in Nome working at different stores,” Borsetti said.

For a time, Millsaps left Alaska and went back down to Phoenix. Just a few years before her disappearance — Borsetti thinks it might have been 2008, but she’s not sure — Millsaps returned to Alaska. She moved to Wasilla, and that’s when things started going south.

“I never lost track of her, but kind of figuratively speaking I lost track of her,” Borsetti said. “She just started leading this totally different type of life.”

Millsaps got mixed up in the Valley’s drug scene, Borsetti said, and then she started dating Smith.

“Once she met him I didn’t see her again, but I did talk to her over the phone a lot,” Borsetti said. “She would have to sneak his phone to call me and a lot of our conversations I would have to listen really closely because she would have to whisper.”

Sometimes Smith would let her sister call, Borsetti said, but it was only when they needed to borrow money — something that would also benefit Smith. She said in their last conversation she knew something was wrong. It was right around Millsaps’ birthday, which is in early April.

“By Mother’s Day, I knew she was gone because we never miss holidays, we always talk to each other on holidays, especially something like Mother’s Day,” Borsetti said.

She reported her sister missing. Alaska State Troopers eventually pulled Smith over and during the traffic stop found Millsaps’ belongings in his car, but no sign of Millsaps.

Investigators tried to get a friend of Millsaps’ to lead them to her without success. That friend, Joe Reese, was facing charges stemming from a Valley meth lab. Troopers offered to let him walk if he could lead them to Millsaps. Reese’s information didn’t pan out. Prosecutors pressed forward with charges and he died before his case reached a resolution.

Smith went to jail and wound up facing federal charges for manufacturing methamphetamines. Investigators got an informant put in his cell. The informant tried to get him to talk about Millsaps. Those efforts likewise didn’t bear fruit, according to federal court filings.

Borsetti said she did her own investigation. She traveled to Sutton to talk to people who knew her sister. It didn’t take long for her to learn that her sister was dead.

In one conversation, she said, a man told her that “if I was a better sister and had given her money when she needed it she wouldn’t be dead now.”

It was a hiker who eventually found Millsaps’ remains south of Anchorage along the Seward Highway in an area off of Boretide Road.

Prior to his indictment for Millsaps’ murder, Smith was charged in federal court with 14 counts relating to manufacturing meth. That case is still pending.

Sometimes, Borsetti said, it can seem like the world of drugs — the dealers, the users, the manufacturers — is a world apart from her own.

“It’s like this whole huge secret society out there that’s not so secret and a lot of bad things happen for a lot of really stupid reasons,” she said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at 352-2270 or andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com.