Wade to change plea, face sentencing

Just what Wade will admit to is unclear from the brief paperwork entered into U.S. District Court on Friday. Federal prosecutors had pushed for his to be the first capital punishment case in Alaska since before statehood.

Prosecutors say Wade planned and executed an offense that was "heinous, cruel, and depraved" in connection with the murder of Mindy Schloss, a nurse practitioner who lived alone next to the house Wade had just moved into in 2007. What he is actually accused of doing to her has never been made clear in the documents filed publicly by prosecutors in the case. He apparently had no relationship to her other than that they were neighbors.

Wade, 27 years old at the time, was out of prison only eight months and off parole a month when the 52-year-old disappeared in August 2007. He had been living in Anchorage again after serving time for evidence tampering in the 2000 beating death and rape of Della Brown. A jury had acquitted him of killing her.

Because Friday's court document was filed by federal prosecutors, the implication is that Wade worked out a deal with them, likely avoiding the death penalty he faced if convicted in a trial.

Normally, someone accused of murder is charged in state court. But police and prosecutors took Wade to federal court, where the law allows the death penalty. Alaska doesn't have capital punishment.

Since first charged, Wade had said he was innocent of the federal charges, which included the killing and carjacking. The government also charged him with bank fraud and identity theft -- prosecutors accused him of using Schloss' ATM card after he shot her, partially burned her body, then dumped it in a patch of Wasilla woods.

Prosecutors had planned to call a witness who would say Wade was a violent sexual predator, although they never directly accused him of rape in the charges.

Wade's lawyers declined to comment on the plea deal.

"I'm sure the reason he decided to take this deal is to save his life," Wade's father, Greg "Bubba" Wade, said in an interview. "I'm proud of him for taking responsibility for his actions."

The elder Wade was glad when a jury returned an innocent verdict on the 2000 murder charge, largely because it meant his own suspicions about his son's guilt must have been wrong, he said. But when his son was charged a second time with murder under circumstances similar enough to the first, he began to think the Della Brown jury got it wrong.

Schloss' sister-in-law, Mary Schloss, said the family feels good about the deal. She would not elaborate on what she knew of it for fear of jeopardizing it before it was official on Wednesday, she said in an interview from her home in upstate New York, where Mindy Schloss grew up.

Mary Schloss said the family was looking forward to the admission of guilt -- for the closure it might provide -- but they were not holding out hopes for Wade feeling guilty. "If 'sorry' came out of his mouth, I'd be flabbergasted," she said. "I think he's only sorry he got caught."

Schloss had no relatives in Alaska but had a boyfriend who friends say was shattered by her death.

Greg Wade said he's never talked about the case with his son in his jail visits or phone calls because the conversations were never private. But the questions on his mind are similar to those on a lot of people's minds. He wants to ask his son: "Why did you kill somebody? So that you could go to the freaking store and buy a coat and a bunch of CDs?"

"I don't know what kind of person is that empty," he said. "The person that I know that did this stuff is a complete stranger to me."

He no longer trusts his son, he said. He worries about his own family's safety - his grandchildren, his mother.

Joshua Wade's sister, Amanda, said she was shocked to hear from her brother's lawyers that he was changing his plea. "Shocked because it means he did it," she said. She declined to say more.

The case against Wade was largely under seal, but what can be gleaned from the documents publicly available is that federal investigators had evidence including Wade's pubic hair in Schloss' house, a witness who said Wade made an obscene remark about wanting to have sex with Schloss in the days before she vanished, and that his DNA was found on the steering wheel of her car.

In the lead up to the trial, prosecutors had been trying for court permission to present evidence that Wade should have been convicted in the Brown slaying. It would have been part of their arguments in sentencing for the death penalty.

After Wade's Wednesday court appearance, he will likely be moved from the Anchorage Jail, where he has spent most of his time awaiting trial, to a federal prison in the Lower 48.

If that happens, Greg Wade said he might follow his son. He still loves him, he said, even though it's become clear to him that he should be behind bars, away from society. "I don't want him free if he's incapable of living among us."

Find Megan Holland online at adn.com/contact/mholland or call 257-4343.