When is it that a murder victim realizes that she is going to be executed? At what point does she understand that she— burned, gagged and bound at the wrists, wearing only her bathrobe — is being marched into the woods not just be left, but to be killed and left for dead? Do hope and denial keep her from running or is it fear that paralyzes her? Are those final moments of life so precious, even though her heart seems to pump only terror and nausea through her veins, that she accepts those precious few minutes rather than trade them for an escape attempt likely to hasten her death? We will likely never know the answers to these questions, even though we ask them each time we hear of yet another maimed and murdered innocent.
Alaskan nurse Mindy Schloss met such a singular and terrifying fate in the late summer of 2007. An accomplished professional in the prime of life, who became the prey of a violent, habitual killer, whose purposeless needs ended her life. We will never know if Mindy Schloss felt the pine needles press into her bare knees as she knelt in the soft, aromatic Alaskan forest or if she felt the chill of the wind and the muzzle of the handgun pressed against her skull at the end, but we can tell her story.
***
Mindy Schloss was a popular, ambitious nurse psychologist. The 52-year-old nurse was attractive — her shoulder length dark haired accentuated her infectious grin, and when she smiled her eyes reflected her happiness. In the weeks prior to her murder, she had been making good on plans for the next stage of her career. After spending the majority of her working life laboring for others — and commuting long distances to Fairbanks, Alaska — she had recently signed a lease for an office in Anchorage. She was going to start her own practice and become her own boss, accomplishments that would have also benefited the citizens of Fairbanks. People with her expertise were, after all, rare in those parts. Sadly, Mindy Schloss would not live to realize her longtime dream of professional independence.
Her killer, Joshua Wade, resided at 6902 Cutty Sark Road, the house next door to her own. He was already, in his own mind, living intimately with her, watching her, fostering a sexual rage and waiting to take that intimacy to the next, deadly level. His bedroom window allowed him voyeuristic access to Schloss’ kitchen and, as a result, it’s safe to assume that Joshua Wade’s watched Schloss going about her daily domestic routine as his life spun ever more wildly out of control, and that his sexual frustration, anger, and violent, lethal rage settled on Schloss. One August evening Wade broke into Schloss’ house, tortured and abducted her. When he was through, all that was left of Schloss was decomposing in the woods near Wasilia, Alaska.
Joshua Wade was, in many respects, the opposite of Mindy Schloss. In photos Schloss projects a calm confidence and friendliness. Wade appears to be nothing other than a thug who demands “respect,” or, more precisely fear.
Wade, who spent much of his adolescence in a juvenile detention center after a series of drug convictions, could best be described as a repeat loser. According to documents introduced into evidence by the prosecution, Wade “has demonstrated violent and aggressive behavior from on or about the age of 10 and continuing into his adult life, and between 2000 and 2007, has violently killed two women.”
Wade’s first brush with the law was at age 12. At 16 he was caught carrying a handgun, and by 19 he was an accused-but-acquitted felon. Unfortunately Wade’s criminal career was only getting started.
The next year, at age 20, Wade violently raped and murdered Della Brown, a 33 year-old Native American woman by bashing her head in with a rock. During the trial the coroner testified that Brown’s skull was so damaged it resembled a “bag of ice.” Brown’s hair had either been cut or ripped out; and burnt matches littered the shed’s floor near her body. Brown’s body had been found by unsympathetic gawkers who paraded through the shed for days, lighting matches to see her battered corpse. No one called 911. Although initially Wade confessed to the murder, he soon recanted. His lawyer claimed that Wade had merely been trying to impress his associates.
The jury was swayed by his defense, and Wade was acquitted of Della Brown’s murder. He was, however, convicted of evidence tampering in the case.
After the acquittal, Wade, who has the unfortunate tendency to grandstand, stated, “Even though 12 people said I’m not guilty, everyone believes I am guilty…. I just want to say thank you to my jury for being fair.”
He added, “The only thing at all in this case that I’m sorry for is I did not call the police whenever I found that lady’s body,” clearly showing no remorse for the crime of which he had been convicted.
Wade managed to illegally obtain a handgun, a Glock .45 with a laser sight, despite his multiple felony convictions. Never one for subtlety, Wade took the gun home and proceeded to brandish it for his friends. He even took photographs of himself posing with the gun, the menacing red pinpoint of the laser sight resting on the wall. In mere days that red pinpoint would come to rest on the back of Mindy Schloss’ head before Wade ended her life.
On August 3, 2007, the night of the murder, Wade and his housemates threw a party. This was the end of a long, difficult week at work for Wade. He had had several combative exchanges with his supervisors, and had even gone so far as to walk off of the job. The day of the party Wade arrived at his job only to be sent home for his argumentative and aggressive behavior.
Sometime around 1:30 a.m. Mindy Schloss signed out of her email and shut down her computer. According to the timeline established by investigators, she then went to sleep. Not long after, Wade made his way into Schloss’ home, subdued her, and painfully bound her arms and legs with plastic restraints, zip ties commonly used by law enforcement. With Schloss immobilized, Wade returned to his house, retrieved his Glock and returned to abduct Schloss in her own vehicle. They stopped at several locations, including at least one ATM where Wade withdrew cash from Schloss’ checking account.
After her disappearance when police canvassed the neighborhood, a neighbor reported hearing a woman’s screams in the early morning hours of August 4. According to court documents, this “witness observed a small red car matching generally the description of the victim’s car in the parking lot of a bank, and heard a woman’s voice in that area screaming loudly ‘Rape!’ and ‘Call the police!’ or words to that effect.” Although the court documents do not specify, it seems, sadly, that no witnesses contacted police that night with this information.
After Wade was done robbing Schloss, he drove her nearly an hour away to Wasilia, Alaska, where he marched an abused and tortured Schloss into the woods and unceremoniously executed her.
It took nearly a month before her decomposed remains were discovered.
Authorities targeted Wade as a person of interest almost immediately. His record, his temper and his proximity to Mindy Schloss’ home made him a good suspect for the murder. Schloss had already been the vocal object of Wade’s attention, though she didn’t know it. In the days leading up to her murder, as Wade’s situation worsened, he mentioned wanting to have sex with Schloss.
The critical evidence against Wade was discovered after police dogs detected his scent in Schloss’ car. According to the Anchorage Daily News, “Investigators used the dog evidence, which linked Wade to the ATMs, Schloss’ house and her car found near the airport, to get a search warrant for Wade’s house.” Portions of the killer’s chosen restraint, zip ties, were found both in Schloss’ bedroom and in Wade’s house.
During the subsequent search investigators discovered an abundance of evidence linking Wade to the killing, including similar zip ties and one of Wade’s jackets that contained an ATM receipt for a withdrawal from Schloss’ checking account.
Wade was put behind bars, but he wasn’t done yet.
Love, it seems, can be gullible as well as blind, as it was in the case of Lisa Andrews, then 46, who fell for Joshua Wade. Following his arrest and incarceration, Wade married Andrews in a hastily arranged telephone ceremony. True love, hoping to claim something for itself before the lovers are sent into an exile of unknown length? Hardly. It was more a case of evil seducing stupidity. Andrews had been subpoenaed by the prosecution to testify against Wade, and the jailhouse marriage was a ham-handed attempt to circumvent the law requiring her to testify. Wade and his attorneys argued that as his wife, she could not be forced to testify against him. Thankfully their arguments did not sway the judge.
When voiding the marriage, judge Ralph Beistline wrote, “A marriage that has been secretly and hastily carried out, solemnized in manner that casts doubt as to the validity of marriage at all, and conducted on the eve of a trial between a defendant and a key witness, in circumstances such as exist in this case, would not likely merit protection at the expense of justice.”
The sham marriage wasn’t the last bit of legal maneuvering on Wade’s part. A month later, his attorneys petitioned the court, claiming that solitary confinement was having an adverse effect on Wade. They argued unsuccessfully that Wade’s increasing mental crisis threatened the trial’s legitimacy.
“He is confined to his cell 23 hours a day,” argued his lawyers, “with no radio and no television. He has no opportunity to take classes, attend religious services, or interact with other prisoners.” As they wrote, according to the Anchorage Daily News, the point at which Wade was incompetent to stand trial had not yet been reached, “but that point is not that far off if the conditions of confinement remain unchanged.”
Instead of the robust social life his lawyers evidently wanted for him, Wade spent much of his time in solitary reading books, including the ultimately confiscated Hacksaw, a tale about a talented convict who repeatedly escapes from prison.
Wade’s legal team made no mention of the altercation with another prisoner that had caused Wade to be placed in solitary confinement in the first place. Instead it seemed that they were trying to use the fact of his solitary confinement, not to get him placed back in the general prison population, but to get him entirely off the hook by arguing that his right to a fair trial was being violated.
Wade was not a discreet prisoner, though in a certain light he was a model one. While incarcerated, Wade kept a jail diary, a seemingly innocuous blue Mead notebook. In the days following his arrest for Schloss’ murder Wade chronicled the murder, from the perspective of his victim. He’s no Tolstoy, but it’s bracing how he tried to inhabit Mindy Schloss’ frame of mind as he relived the crime.
“I am being ripped from my bed,” Wade wrote, “and tossed to the ground. Arms stretched behind my back and legs pulled up behind me so oddly angled I thought they’d snap and then the burning pain from the zip ties being put on way too tight.”
Literary criticism is often an overwrought enterprise, but a “close read” of this passage is particularly eye opening. Wade imagines Schloss’ comprehension of his abuse. Wade intended to affix the restraints too tightly, to contort her body so that she felt unbearable pain. This physical abuse wasn’t due to an amateur robber too amped up on adrenaline to control himself. Quite the opposite: it was a calculated bit of torture, and Wade enjoyed pretending to be inside Schloss’ mind as she registered the torment.
This wasn’t the first time that Wade had felt compelled to disclose the details of his crimes.
During Wade’s 2003 trial for the murder of Della Brown, it was revealed that Wade had taken several of his friends to see Della Brown’s body, which he had left to rot in a ramshackle storage shed in Spenard, Alaska. Wade left her there after raping and beating her to death. While at the shed Wade regaled his friends with details of Brown’s murder, details that would later be revealed during the final stages of the Mindy Schloss murder trial.
Wade’s boasts were used as ammunition for his defense. Why, his lawyers argued, would a murderer take his friends to the scene of his crime? Only an innocent person, they argued, could so stupidly brag about killing someone. Wade’s legal team argued that he was bragging to elevate his status in the group.
Wade was sentenced for the lesser crime of evidence tampering. Six months after he was released from prison, Mindy Schloss was dead.
Over the years Wade had held fast to his claims of innocence in the Brown murder. Now, the prosecutor would use Wade’s guilt in the Schloss murder to garner a measure of justice for Della brown. Since Alaska does not have the death penalty, Prosecutors told Wade they would try him in federal court, therefore opening the possibility of a death sentence were he found guilty. In a plea agreement Wade confessed to the murder of Mindy Schloss in order to avoid the death penalty. He also confessed to the murder of Della Brown. The details of his confession to the Brown murder were as grisly as those of the Schloss murder.
According to the Anchorage Daily News, “A decade ago… Wade found Brown passed-out drunk, then murdered her in a rage after robbing and raping her.”
During his confession, Wade set the grisly scene. After coming across the unconscious Brown in the filth and garbage of the shack, he looted her of her possessions, tore off her clothes, and raped her. After the sexual assault, Wade took a large rock and crushed Della Brown’s skull, leaving her half-naked body amidst the refuse of the shack.
After tearfully sputtering out a pro forma apology in court, Wade became defiant. According to reports, U. S. District Court Judge Ralph Beistline called Wade “a heartless, selfish human being.”
“Don’t push it, man,” Wade told the judge, according to the news reports. “I don’t give a [expletive] about you. Don’t sit there and push it.”
Wade’s father was stunned by his outburst. When reached for comment, Greg Wade said, “I was so impressed, I thought there was real remorse with my son. Then he opened his mouth. Then he showed his true face.”
Ultimately, given his opening comments, Wade should have been happy, or at least relieved with the verdict. Earlier in the trial, when Judge Beistline inquired about Wade’s desire for his trial to commence, Wade responded with similar eloquence. “I’d like to know,” he had sputtered according to the Anchorage Daily News, “if these [expletives] are trying to kill me. I don’t want to be left in suspense here, man.”
Wade is expected to spend the remainder of his life in prison.