White / Caucasian Richard Wayne Robinson was 27 when the quiet of a South Fairbanks afternoon broke on June 30, 2018. Fairbanks police answered a call to the South Fairbanks area at 4:22 p.m., where they found that the young man known to many as Richard Wayne Robinson III had been shot. By the time police arrived, the promise of his late twenties—friends, family, and the workaday routines of Fairbanks life—had been cut short.
Through the night and into the next day, detectives worked the case as word spread that a suspect might be on the move. On July 1, 2018, Anchorage Police located 38-year-old Joshua Vos at the Backpackers Inn on Eagle Street in Anchorage. Officers with the Investigative Support Unit took him into custody as a suspect in the Fairbanks homicide, a swift arrest that pulled the investigation from the immediate chaos of a shooting into the steadier march of the courts.
Years later, the case reached a final turn. In 2025, Joshua Vos entered a guilty plea to felony second-degree murder in connection with the killing of 27-year-old Richard Wayne Robinson. With that plea, the scattered facts gathered since the day of the shooting—police calls, the overnight search, the arrest far from the South Fairbanks block where it began—were fixed into the record, and the man accused from the start became the man legally responsible for the death that shook a Fairbanks summer day.
