White/Caucasian, female, age 52, Mindy Lorin Schloss vanished from her Anchorage home on August 3, 2007, after failing to arrive for work in Fairbanks. The psychiatric nurse practitioner's sudden silence set off alarms among friends and colleagues, and detectives soon found signs of intrusion at her house and evidence that her red Acura Integra was missing.
Financial records showed a string of withdrawals using her ATM card; surveillance images captured a man at the machine, a clue that would later point investigators toward a next-door neighbor. Six weeks after she disappeared, a passerby discovered human remains in a wooded area off West Murray Road near Wasilla. Dental records confirmed they were the remains of the 52-year-old, and her death was ruled a homicide.
Attention centered on Joshua Alan Wade, 27, who lived beside the 52-year-old and had a violent history known to Anchorage police. He was arrested on September 2, 2007, after investigators linked him to Schloss's stolen car and to ATM activity using her card. Detectives recovered Wade's DNA from the victim's vehicle and, during the investigation, found a photograph on his phone of a handgun that matched the ballistics of the round used to kill her, reinforcing the case being built from surveillance images and financial records.
Prosecutors pursued a dual-track case: state charges for murder and related crimes, and federal charges that included carjacking resulting in death, a count that carried the possibility of a federal death sentence. In February 2010, Wade pleaded guilty in federal court to the 2007 carjacking and murder of the 52-year-old and, in the same proceeding, admitted responsibility for the earlier killing of Della Brown. He received life imprisonment in the federal case and a 99-year state sentence, eliminating any chance of parole. The federal judgment closed the case against the neighbor who had abducted and murdered the 52-year-old before abandoning her body near Wasilla.
Years later, authorities disclosed that Wade had confessed to additional killings as part of a broader agreement, and in June 2024 he died in custody at Indiana State Prison. By then, the prosecution of the case had long since established what happened on August 3, 2007: a 52-year-old nurse practitioner was seized from her Anchorage home by the man living next door, forced to provide her bank card and PIN, driven north, and murdered—an investigation resolved through a combination of forensic evidence, surveillance images, and the suspect's eventual admissions.
