Alsaka man gets 99 years for killing Anchorage neighbor, avoids death penalty

Alaska man sentenced to 99 years in nurse’s murder

ANCHORAGE, Alaska — An Anchorage man avoided the death penalty Wednesday when he acknowledged in court that he killed his neighbor in 2007 and another woman in 2000 — for whose murder he was acquitted.

Joshua Alan Wade, 29, was sentenced to 99 years in prison for the August 2007 first-degree murder of Mindy Schloss, a 52-year-old nurse practitioner who lived next door to Wade. Judge Phillip Volland placed a restriction on the state parole board to make Wade serve at least 66 years.

If Wade were released after that, at age 95, he would be handed over to federal authorities to serve out the remainder of a federal sentence for murder during a carjacking, a sentence expected to be delivered later Wednesday in U.S. District Court.

“He will spend the rest of his life in jail,” said Bill McAllister, a spokesman for the Alaska Department of Law.

Wade, wearing a yellow jumpsuit, addressed the packed courtroom, apologized for what he had done and said spending his life in prison would not bring the two women back to their loved ones.

“I deserve much worse. I’m sorry,” he said tearfully as he turned and looked at the families.

Wade said his statement in court was not an excuse but offered it as an explanation for why he chose to reject the help that people offered and embark on a path of “destruction and failure.”

He said he was raised by a single mother who left him in someone else’s care when he was a boy so she could work. That person sexually abused him beginning when he was 5, he said.

“I didn’t have a childhood to brag about, but I was loved. My mother did the best she know how to,” Wade said.

Instead of dealing with his feelings of being abused, he buried them and became addicted to marijuana. Wade had a failed romance. He stopped going to church.

“I chose not to deal with those issues, with those abuse issues, chose instead to bury them and allow for it to fester and build into a murderous rage which ultimately resulted in a lot of pain and suffering for others,” Wade said.

“I am a product of one who decided not to overcome the past and succumb to a fate I created for myself,” he said.

In a signed plea agreement for the Schloss slaying, Wade also acknowledged that he killed another Anchorage woman, Della Brown, 33, in September 2000 by hitting her in the head with a large rock. Her battered, partially-nude body was found in an abandoned shed.

An Anchorage jury in 2003 acquitted Wade of murdering Brown but convicted him of tampering with evidence, for which he served 6½ years in prison.

Months after his release for that crime, Wade bound, gagged, kidnapped and shot Schloss in a wooded area near Wasilla.

During Wednesday’s sentencing, Volland said he could not remember another time when two murders left such an open wound on the community of Anchorage.

While some may feel that the justice system failed to work in Wade’s first trial, it actually did — as evidenced by Wednesday’s sentencing, the judge said.

“Now we have come full circle,” he said. “We, too, can begin to heal.”

Volland said the sentence should be particularly comforting to Brown’s family members, who had to wait so long for justice. Brown’s mother, Daisy Piggott, attended the sentencing wearing a white T-shirt with her daughter’s face printed on the front.

Piggott said she was too emotional to speak after the sentencing.

With the plea agreement, Wade won’t go to trial and avoids a possible death sentence if he were convicted. Alaska doesn’t have the death penalty, but Wade was indicted in federal court with shooting and killing someone during a carjacking — and federal law allows capital punishment.