Joshua Wade, a serial murderer who confessed to killing five people in Alaska between 1994 and 2007, died in prison. He was 44. On Sunday, June 23, Wade died on June 14 in the Indiana State Prison in Michigan City.
According to Brandi Pahl, a representative for the Department of Correction, Wade was “found unresponsive in his cell.”
“Despite life-saving measures being performed, he was pronounced dead,” Pahl said later. He said that an autopsy would be performed.
The cause of death was not revealed. The LaPorte County coroner was not immediately available for comment.
According to Alaska Public Media, Wade was convicted on state and federal offenses in Alaska before being transported to an Indiana jail in 2014 after agreeing to a plea deal with both state and federal authorities. According to a June 2014 press statement from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Wade admitted to murdering Anchorage-area lady Della Brown in 2000 when he was 20 years old, and her body was discovered in a shed. Wade was charged with killing Brown by smashing her over the head with a heavy rock that year, but a jury found him only guilty of witness tampering and acquitted him of murder and sexual assault, according to the Associated Press.
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Shortly after finishing his sentence for witness tampering in 2007, Wade kidnapped and murdered Mindy Schloss, a nurse practitioner and neighbor in Anchorage’s Sand Lake neighborhood. Investigators in the case stated that he tortured Schloss and shot her to death, and her body was discovered more than a month later, around 40 miles outside of the city, after she was reported missing, according to the source.
Wade pleaded guilty to carjacking and killing Schloss in 2009, and as part of the sentence, he admitted to killing Brown over ten years earlier.
According to the people, Wade later informed Anchorage police and agents that he murdered two more men in 1994 and 1999, as well as another man on the same night he murdered Brown in 2000. According to the FBI’s press release, the men he murdered in the 1990s were 38-year-old John Michael Martin and 30-year-old Henry Ongtowasruk. Wade was 14 at the time of the crimes.
An Alaska state court sentenced Wade to 99 years in jail, while a federal court condemned him to life in prison with no possibility of parole, according to the Associated Press. Wade apologized during each sentencing. During the state sentencing, he addressed the families of the two ladies, “I deserve far worse. “I am sorry.”
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Wade also had a tense interaction in federal court with U.S. District Court Judge Ralph Beistline when he attempted to apologize again. “What an evil thing you’ve done,” Beistline said at the time, according to the Associated Press. “What kind of person could take pleasure in the random destruction of another life?”
Wade told the judge, “Don’t push it, man,” after Beistline called him selfish and a coward, according to the Associated Press.
Wade was born in Great Falls, Montana, but relocated to Alaska as a child, according to Alaska Public Media. He lived in Anchorage with his father and spent time in juvenile detention institutions as a teenager. Many experts have pointed to his killings as an example of the high incidence of violent crimes committed against Alaska Natives, according to the source.
In a 2014 press release, the FBI requested that the public share any information about Wade’s murders, including the unidentified man he admitted to killing in 2000.