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Joshua Wade, Who Confessed to Five Alaska Killings, Dies in an Indiana Prison at 44

Serving life for the 2007 murder of Mindy Schloss, Wade was found unresponsive in his cell at Indiana State Prison on June 14, 2024, the state corrections department said.

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Illustration: stainless steel morgue cooler doors in a medical examiner's office

Joshua Wade, who confessed to killing five people in Alaska, the first when he was 14, died in an Indiana prison on Friday, June 14, 2024. He was 44. "On June 14, Wade was found unresponsive in his cell at the Indiana State Prison," said Brandi Pahl, a spokesperson for the Indiana Department of Correction. "Despite life-saving measures being performed, he was pronounced dead." An autopsy was being performed. The department gave no cause of death.

His death closed the file on a man Anchorage had already let go once. In 2000, at 20, Wade killed Della Brown, whose body was found in a shed in the Spenard neighborhood. He had shown the body to several acquaintances, but a jury acquitted him of her murder and of sexual assault and convicted him only of witness tampering. The case came to be seen as a mark of the injustices done to Alaska Native crime victims.

In 2007, having just finished his probation in that case, he kidnapped and murdered his neighbor in the Sand Lake neighborhood, Mindy Schloss, a nurse practitioner. She was missing for more than a month before her body was found in Wasilla. Prosecutors said he tortured her before he shot her. "The fact that he chose to kill again, and kill quickly, demonstrates his indifference to human life, his inability to be rehabilitated, and his omnipresent danger to society," they wrote in court papers at the time.

He was charged in both state and federal court for Schloss's death, and he took a plea agreement. In it he also admitted, at last, that he had murdered Della Brown. On February 17, 2010, he was sentenced in state court to 99 years and in federal court to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Four years later he bargained again. In exchange for a transfer out of Alaska to a maximum security federal prison, he told Anchorage police detectives and FBI agents about three more killings. Law enforcement said he was referring to the unsolved murders of John Michael Martin, 38, in 1994, and Henry Ongtowasruk, 30, in 1999. Both men were mentally ill. He also said he had killed a man on the same night he killed Brown in 2000, a man whose name was never made public. Announcing the confessions on June 20, 2014, state and federal authorities said they were still working to determine whether his claims were truthful and accurate.

He was sent to the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana. When, or why, he was moved from there into the Indiana state prison system was not publicly explained.

Wade was convicted of one murder, Mindy Schloss's, and admitted Della Brown's as part of the same plea; he had been acquitted of Brown's murder at trial. The three other killings rest on his own 2014 confessions, which the authorities said they were still checking at the time, and he was never charged with them. The FBI release says he pleaded guilty in 2009; his sentencing was on February 17, 2010.

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