A judge scolded Zarrius Hildabrand for caring about “anyone other than himself” as he handed the former soldier a 59-year prison term for murdering his wife and hiding her body in a storm drain.
Hildabrand, 24, learned his fate Friday in an Anchorage courtroom, five months after a jury convicted him of second-degree murder and evidence tampering in the August 2023 killing of Saria Barney Hildabrand, 21. The couple had been married just seven months when he shot her dead in their apartment.
Judge Peter Ramgren said the defendant acted “intentionally” and called his conduct “abhorrent.” The judge pointed to an “apparent lack of remorse” in the aftermath of the slaying.
Hildabrand will serve 55 years for the murder conviction, with consecutive two-year sentences for evidence tampering adding to the total. He will not be eligible for parole until he has served at least two-thirds of the sentence.
The killing came just hours after Hildabrand’s 21st birthday celebrations. The couple had spent the evening of August 5, 2023, at a Dave & Buster’s with friends and had planned to continue to a nightclub. A bouncer refused Hildabrand entry, believing he was drunk. The pair returned to their Anchorage apartment, where an argument erupted after Saria accused him of infidelity — an accusation he later admitted was true.
“The first thing I was afraid of was having no recollection of the night before, and just not knowing what happened,” Hildabrand testified during his trial. “I was afraid I was gonna lose my family; I was afraid that I was gonna go to jail for something that I had no recollection of. Just, there’s so many unknowns and I immediately assumed the worst.”
His defense team argued Saria had taken her own life. But Kenneth Gallagher of the Alaska State Medical Examiner’s Office testified she died from a “penetrating, indeterminate range gunshot wound,” and investigators found the mattress bloodied.
On the stand, Hildabrand appeared to admit to evidence tampering. He described purchasing hydrogen peroxide to clean “the surrounding areas and mattress.”
“The plan was to hide the body of my wife and then clean up the blood off the mattress and the surrounding area,” he said. “I just didn’t know what to feel… I just knew that the next day was going to be rough – because I had to hide my wife’s body and then clean up the surrounding area in our bedroom.”
He bought a 96-gallon garbage can from Lowe’s to move her body, then dumped Saria in a storm drain 15 to 20 feet deep, where she lay in two feet of water. Emergency crews found her five days later.
Prosecutor Brittany Dunlop said Hildabrand “callously disposed” of his wife and “perpetuated a lie about her being missing.” For more than a day after the murder, he maintained that fiction. He used Saria’s phone to message her coworkers roughly eight hours after the shooting, claiming she would miss work. He took a late-night drive around 10 p.m. On August 5, later telling police he was “worrying about his wife.” He waited about 30 hours after the killing to file a missing persons report, telling officers he thought she might still appear.
During that window, Hildabrand joined search efforts and posted desperate appeals on Facebook. Meredith Barney, Saria’s mother, said he “walked around for hours” pretending to look for the woman he had already killed.
Hildabrand served at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, assigned to the 11th Airborne Division, at the time of the murder.