Joshua Wade

What the record shows

Joshua Alan Wade was an Anchorage, Alaska, man who in February 2010 pleaded guilty in state court to the 2007 first-degree murder of his neighbor, nurse practitioner Mindy Schloss, and in federal court to carjacking resulting in her death. Under the plea agreements he also admitted killing Della Brown in 2000, a murder of which an Anchorage jury had acquitted him in 2003. In 2014 he told state and federal investigators he had killed three more men in Alaska between 1994 and 2000, bringing the total he claimed to five. Serving a 99-year state term and a consecutive federal life sentence, he died at the Indiana State Prison in Michigan City on June 14, 2024, aged 44.

The earliest killing Wade later claimed was that of John Michael Martin, 38, who was found shot in the back of the head beside a bike trail along Northern Lights Boulevard in Anchorage in May 1994, shortly after leaving a Village Inn restaurant where he regularly had coffee with friends. Wade was 14 at the time. The Anchorage Daily News reported that Martin had schizophrenia and that the detective on the case had exhausted all leads. In December 1999 Henry Ongtowasruk, 30, originally from the village of Wales, was found dead in a room at the Alaska Budget Motel in the Fairview neighborhood of Anchorage; the state medical examiner ruled the death a homicide. Both men were mentally ill and, according to the newspaper, had no known link to Wade.

In September 2000 Della Brown, a 33-year-old Alaska Native woman, was found in an abandoned shed in Spenard. Prosecutors said Wade had struck her in the head with a rock and then shown the body to a series of acquaintances. At the 2003 trial his lawyers portrayed him as a boastful talker, and witnesses who had seen the body were themselves involved in crime. The jury acquitted him of murder, sexual assault and robbery and convicted him only of tampering with evidence, for which he served six and a half years. The Anchorage Daily News later noted that the verdict was widely seen as highlighting injustices against Alaska Native crime victims.

Months after completing probation, Wade lived next door to Mindy Schloss, 52, a nurse practitioner. She was last seen on August 3, 2007, and missed a scheduled flight to Fairbanks two days later. According to court testimony reported by the Anchorage Daily News, Wade entered her home at night, bound her with zip ties, obtained her ATM card and PIN, and drove her in her own car to a wooded area near Wasilla, where he shot her and burned her body. On August 29 police said a security photo showed him using an ATM the weekend she vanished, and the FBI sought him for bank fraud. He was taken into custody on September 2, 2007, after a standoff at a south Anchorage apartment, Alaska Public Media reported. Schloss was found more than a month after she disappeared.

Because Schloss died during a carjacking, Wade faced a possible federal death sentence, although Alaska has no death penalty. On February 17, 2010, he pleaded guilty before Superior Court Judge Phillip Volland, who imposed 99 years and barred parole for at least 66 years, and before Chief U.S. District Judge Ralph Beistline, who sentenced him to life to be served consecutively, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office for Alaska. When Beistline called him a coward who preyed on women, Wade interrupted with a remark about the men he had killed, which officials at the time could not explain.

In 2014, after a failed attempt to withdraw his earlier admissions, Wade offered investigators new information in exchange for a transfer out of the Alaska prison system. At a press conference on June 20, 2014, authorities said he had admitted killing Martin, Ongtowasruk and an unidentified man on the night Brown died, whom he said he beat and then shot in the Matanuska-Susitna Valley. Assistant Attorney General John Novak said not all claims were equally confirmed and that no decision on new charges had been made. Wade had already been moved from Spring Creek Correctional Center in Seward to the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana.

He was later held in the Indiana state prison system. On June 14, 2024, the Indiana Department of Correction said, he was found unresponsive in his cell and could not be revived; an autopsy was ordered. Wade was born in Great Falls, Montana, and, according to the Wikipedia article, on March 18, 1980; he grew up in Anchorage, and in court he described being sexually abused from the age of five. His case is the subject of Monte Francis's 2016 book Ice and Bone.