Kidnapper of Bank Exec's Wife Faces Execution Day

Mississippi's longest-serving death row inmate is set to be 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, is scheduled to receive a lethal injection at the Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman, per the AP. He is one of several people on Mississippi's death row suing the state over its three-drug execution protocol, which they claim is inhumane. Jordan would be the third person executed in the state in the last 10 years; the most recent execution was in December 2022. His execution comes a day after a man was executed in Florida in what is shaping up to be a year with the most executions since 2015.

Jordan will be 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 is one of 22 people across the country sentenced for crimes in the 1970s who are still on death row, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Eric Marter, who was 11 when his mother was killed, said neither he, his brother, nor his father will attend the execution, but other family members will be there. "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. (More execution stories.)