Five People Were Killed by Joshua Wade in Alaska. He Dies in Prison in Indiana at the Age of 44

Joshua Wade told police that he killed five people in Alaska between 1994 and 2007. He has now died in jail. He was 44 years old.

Someone from the Indiana Department of Correction told PEOPLE on Sunday, June 23, that Wade died on June 14 at the Indiana State Prison in Michigan City.

A spokesman for the Department of Correction told PEOPLE that Wade was “found unresponsive in his cell.”

“Despite life-saving measures being performed, he was pronounced dead,” Pahl said. He also said that there would be an autopsy.

The cause of death was not made public. The sheriff for LaPorte County could not be reached right away for comment.

This week, Alaska Public Media stated that Wade was found guilty of both state and federal crimes in Alaska. However, in 2014, he was sent to a prison in Indiana after making a deal with both state and federal prosecutors.

According to a news release from the FBI in June 2014, Wade admitted to killing Della Brown in the Anchorage area in 2000, when he was 20 years old. Her body was found in a shed. The Associated Press stated that Wade was found not guilty of murder or sexual assault but only of tampering with a witness that same year. He was charged with killing Brown by hitting her over the head with a big rock.

Alaska Public Media says that Wade kidnapped and killed Mindy Schloss, a nurse practitioner who lived next door to him in the Sand Lake area of Anchorage, soon after he finished his probation for tampering with a witness in 2007. Investigators in that case said he abused Schloss and then shot her to death. Her body was found more than a month after she was reported missing, about 40 miles outside of the city, the news source said.

In 2009, Wade admitted to stealing Schloss’s car and killing him. As part of his conviction, he also said that he had killed Brown almost 10 years before.
The FBI says Wade later told Anchorage police and FBI agents that he had killed three other men before Brown in 2000. These deaths happened in 1994 and 1999, and on the same night, Wade killed Brown. According to a press statement from the FBI, the men he killed in the 1990s were 38-year-old John Michael Martin (when Wade was 14 years old) and 30-year-old Henry Ongtowasruk.

As reported by the AP, Wade was given 99 years in prison by an Alaska state court and life in prison without the chance of release by a federal court. Wade said sorry at each sentence. When the judge gave him his sentence, he told the families of the two women, “I deserve much worse.” “I’m sorry.”
Wade also got into a fight with U.S. District Court Judge Ralph Beistline when he tried to say sorry again in federal court.

AP reports that Beistline told them at the time, “What a bad thing you’ve done.” “What kind of person could take pleasure in the random destruction of another life?”

The judge told Wade he was selfish and a coward, so Wade told him, “Don’t push it, man,” according to AP.

Alaska Public Media says Wade was born in Great Falls, Montana, but the family moved to Alaska when he was a kid. During his teenage years, he lived with his father in Anchorage and went to youth jail. The news source also said that many experts have used his killings as an example of the large number of violent crimes committed against Alaska Natives.
In 2014, the FBI asked the public to report any information about Wade’s murders, including the guy he admitted to killing in 2000 but did not name.