Mississippi Executes Kidnapper of Bank Executive's Wife

Mississippi's longest-serving death row inmate was executed Wednesday, nearly five decades after he kidnapped and killed a bank loan officer's wife in a violent ransom scheme. Richard Gerald Jordan, a 79-year-old Vietnam veteran who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, received a lethal injection at the Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman, per the AP. Jordan apologized to the victim's family and thanked the people involved for handling his execution humanely. He was one of several people on Mississippi's death row suing the state over its three-drug execution protocol, claiming it's inhumane. Jordan became the third person executed in the state in the last 10 years; the most recent execution was in December 2022.

Jordan was the 25th to be executed in the US this year. He was sentenced to death in 1976 for killing and kidnapping Edwina Marter, a mother of two young children, earlier that year. As of the beginning of this year, Jordan was one of 22 people across the country sentenced for crimes in the 1970s who were still on death row, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Eric Marter, who was 11 when his mother was killed, had said that neither he, his brother, nor his father would attend the execution, but that other family members would. "It should have happened a long time ago," he said of the execution. "I'm not really interested in giving him the benefit of the doubt."

Mississippi Supreme Court records show that in January 1976, Jordan called the Gulf National Bank in Gulfport and asked to speak with a loan officer. After he was told Charles Marter could speak to him, he hung up, looked up the Marters' home address in a telephone book, then kidnapped Edwina Marter. According to court records, Jordan took her to a forest and shot her to death before calling her husband, claiming she was safe and demanding $25,000.

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The execution ends Jordan's decades-long court process that included four trials and numerous appeals. On Monday, the Supreme Court rejected a petition that claimed he was denied due process rights. Supporters note the jury never heard about Jordan's three back-to-back tours in Vietnam and related PTSD, which could have been a factor in his crime.