Do you know who murdered Henry Ongtowasruk? On November 29, 1999, Native American / Indigenous, Henry Ongtowasruk, a 30-year-old male, was found dead in his small room at the Budget Motel in Anchorage after the manager checked on him. Police determined he had been strangled. The discovery ended a brief period during which he had been living at the motel, and detectives preserved the physical evidence from the scene, as is standard in Anchorage homicide investigations.
For years, there were no arrests.
Then, in early 2014, investigators said that convicted killer Joshua Wade told them he had killed Henry Ongtowasruk, age 30, and provided information about that crime while also claiming responsibility for two other murders from the 1990s. Authorities publicly described their effort to corroborate those claims, noting that evidence from the 1999 case would be re-examined with newer forensic tools. At the time, officials emphasized that Wade was already serving life for separate murders and that their priority was to verify his statements against the preserved evidence.
The confession did not lead to new charges in the death of Henry Ongtowasruk, male, age 30. Wade was kept behind bars for life and transferred to a federal prison outside Alaska, but the Anchorage case involving Ongtowasruk remained without an arrest specific to that homicide as investigators worked to test Wade's account against the existing record. Family members, who had lived for years with the uncertainty of an unsolved killing, voiced anger that a confession could be used as a bargaining chip without delivering a trial for the 1999 murder.
Today, the public record on the homicide of Henry Ongtowasruk, male, age 30, reflects a grim outline: a strangulation in a downtown motel room; no immediate suspects; a later confession by a known killer; and continuing efforts by law enforcement to connect that confession to the physical evidence saved from the original scene. The Anchorage Crime Stoppers notice for the case still asks for information from anyone who might have seen whom he was with before his death, underscoring that no arrest has ever closed the file on his killing.
