The longest-serving death row inmate in Mississippi’s history, Richard Jordan, is scheduled to be executed Wednesday evening at the Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman.
Jordan, 79, was convicted and sentenced to death for the Jan. 12, 1976, kidnapping and murder of Edwina Marter, who was a stay-at-home mother of two young sons.
Tonight’s schedule execution would occur about six months short of Jordan’s 50th year in prison, and his attorneys continue seeking a stay of his execution.
Jordan was a veteran of three combat tours in Vietnam, where he at times was a helicopter door gunner, earned several medals and an honorable discharge.
“Like other veterans, Vietnam forever changed Richard,” his most recent clemency petition says.
It says Jordan was “traumatized” by his 33 months in combat with the 1st Cavalry Division from 1966 to 1969 after joining the service when he was 18.
The petition says he helped to prevent violent prison escapes and has worked with banks to help prevent the targeting of their employees in a manner similar to that for which he was sentenced to death.
The petition was filed on June 16 and is one of many legal filings that delayed his execution date for several decades.
Jordan is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection at the prison facility that commonly is referred to as Parchman Farm.
Jordan kidnapped Edwina Marter from her family home in Mississippi City after he learned her husband, Charles Marter, was a Gulf National Bank executive.
He shot and killed Edwina in a remote area of the DeSoto National Forest some 35 miles from her home.
After murdering her, Jordan called Charles Marter to demand $25,000 for her safe return.
Charles Marter reported the kidnapping, and the FBI and local law enforcement investigated the case.
Local news outlets agreed not to report the story for 24 hours while Charles Marter made the money drop.
Law enforcement watched Jordan retrieve the money and initiated a high-speed chase, but he briefly escaped.
Police discovered Jordan in the back of a taxi at a police roadblock.
After being convicted of murder and sentenced to death in 1976, a change in the death penalty law required a second trial in 1977, which again resulted in the death penalty.
Jordan challenged that ruling, which an appellate court vacated due to improper instructions to jurors, but a 1983 resentencing hearing produced the same outcome.
The U.S. Supreme Court vacated that death penalty, which resulted in a sentence of life imprisonment.
The Mississippi Supreme Court in 1994 overturned that agreement, and Jordan was sentenced to death for the fourth and final time in 1998.
