The Mississippi Supreme Court displayed total unity on Tuesday in rejecting the appeal of a Hattiesburg man sitting on death row for nearly 50 years.
Richard Gerald Jordan, 78, was given the death penalty back in 1976 after being found guilty of kidnapping and killing Edwina Marter, the wife of a bank executive, on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. The high court unanimously denied his most recent attempt at post-conviction relief.
Jordan, who was unemployed and strapped for cash, orchestrated a plan to break into a wealthy person’s home back in 1976. The now-inmate called Gulf National Bank and asked to speak with someone in charge of divvying out personal loans. Once informed that Chuck Marter was over commercial loans, Jordan used a telephone directory to find the banker’s home address.
He later showed up at the Marter residence posing as an electric company worker needing to check on the circuit breakers in the home.
That’s when Jordan is reported to have kidnapped Edwina Marter and taken her to the DeSoto National Forest in Harrison County where he fatally shot her. Following the gunfire, the death row inmate called Marter’s husband, told him his wife was alive, and sought $50,000 in ransom before settling on $25,000 as a sufficient figure.
The husband ultimately left the funds at a location off I-10 and Canal Road in Gulfport. Federal agents and local police waited near where the cash had been dropped off. Officers made a move on Jordan when he attempted to retrieve the money. The subject led law enforcement on a chase and successfully evaded police, later ditching his vehicle.
Hours after the chase, a Gulfport police officer spotted Jordan in a taxi cab and took him into custody. Jordan fessed up to killing the victim and pointed officers to the body and murder weapon. He later claimed to a psychiatrist that a bystander had killed Edwina Marter, but that was neither deemed credible nor used by Jordan’s defense in court.
Since he was sentenced to death, the inmate has filed multiple successful appeals and has prolonged what seems to be the inevitable result of his death at the hands of the state. Jordan is one of the death row inmates who has challenged the state of Mississippi’s plan to use midazolam, among two other drugs, to execute inmates sentenced to death.
Per the Associated Press, U.S. District Judge Henry Wingate has not made an ultimate decision on the usage of the drugs in executions. However, he did not prevent the state from taking Thomas Loden’s life back in 2022 — the most recent execution of a death row inmate in Mississippi.
In the meantime, Mississippi’s Attorney General’s office has not announced any plans to set Jordan’s execution date. Jordan’s attorneys plan to have his case reheard.
