Serial killer who murdered five including ‘two in single night’ found dead in cell aged 44 as probe launched at max jail
SERIAL killer Joshua Wade has died in prison after being found unresponsive in his cell last Friday.
Wade, who was sentenced to 99 years in prison, confessed to killing at least five people from 1994 to 2007.
Brandi Pahl, a spokesperson for the department, told The U.S. Sun that Wade was “found unresponsive in his cell at the Indiana State Prison.”
“Despite life-saving measures being performed, he was pronounced dead,” she said.
The 44-year-old serial killer had been transferred to an Indiana federal prison in 2014 after a deal with prosecutors moved him out of Alaska.
Wade was originally convicted of two separate murders in 2000 and 2007.
But seven years after those initial convictions, he confessed to three additional murders dating back to 1994, when Wade was just 14 years old, as part of a plea deal in exchange for a transfer to a federal prison.
This included a murder of which he had previously been acquitted in 2000 where he killed an Alaskan Native, 33-year-old Della Brown.
Brown suffered from drug and alcohol abuse issues.
After attempting to rob her, a struggle ensued and Wade smashed a rock against her head, killing her and leaving her half-naked body in a trash-filled shed.
He later brought his friends to show them the body.
But despite this, Wade was acquitted of almost all charges, except evidence tampering.
He received a six-and-a-half-year prison sentence for that charge but was out on probation in just a year.
But in 2009, Wade was convicted of a 2007 carjacking and murder of Mindy Schloss, a 52-year-old nurse who was also his neighbor.
After reportedly having a bad day, he decided to try and rob Schloss.
He broke into her home and used zip-ties to restrain her.
Wade then stole her ATM card and forced her to tell him her info before kidnapping her and driving into a secluded area of the woods, where he shot her in the back of the head and killed her.
After killing Schloss, he then burned her body and left the scene.
Schloss was then reported missing by a friend not long after failing to show up to work or return any calls.
After a month of searching, her burned body was found in September of that year.
Police now investigating a murder, looked in Schloss’ financial records and discovered somebody had been making active withdrawals from her bank account.
They were able to identify Wade from surveillance footage of him taking money from her account at an ATM and later abandoning Scholl’s stolen car at an airport in Anchorage.
After trying to track down Wade, police chased him to an acquaintance’s house where he held the people in the home hostage at gunpoint.
But after several hours of negotiating, he surrendered.
Wade was charged with Schloss’ murder in state court and faced additional federal charges of carjacking, theft, and bank fraud.
The state of Alaska has no death penalty, but the inclusion of the carjacking charge made him eligible for the death penalty on the federal level.
In an attempt to avoid the death penalty, Wade accepted a plea 99-year plea deal and a federal life sentence in exchange for a confession of Schloss’ and Brown’s murder.
At his sentencing, the judge called Wade a “coward” for murdering women the way he did.
But Wade did not like that and yelled back at the judge, “What about the men I’ve killed?”
In 2014, Wade contacted authorities and offered his confession of three additional murders, a 38-year-old man in 1994, a 30-year-old man in 1999, and an additional man on the same night he killed Brown.
This new deal was accepted and he was transferred to Indiana, where he spent the next 10 years before his death this month.
Serial Killer Joshua Wade Confessed to 5 Murders
Joshua Wade's five victims:
- May 1994 – John Michael Martin, 38. An unemployed man who was suffering from schizophrenia was shot to death along a bike trail in Anchorage, Alaska. Wade was just 14 years old when he killed Martin.
- December 1999 – Henry Ongtowasruk, 30. Suffered from mental illness and was shot to death in a motel he was living in.
- September 2000 – Della Brown, 33. Alaska Native woman with a drug and alcohol addiction who Wade tried to rob and take advantage of, killing her with a rock and hiding her body in a shed. He later showed his friends the body but was ultimately acquitted in court.
- September 2000 – Unidentified Male. On the same night as Brown’s murder, Wade confessed to killing another unidentified man after he led him to the shed where Brown’s body was hidden. Wade knocked the man out, locked him in the trunk of his car, and went for some drinks before coming back and killing him
- August 2007 – Mindy Schloss, 52. Wade’s neighbor, who he decided to rob, kidnap, and murder after reportedly having a bad day.