by Mina Corpuz, Mississippi Today
May 1, 2025

Decades after Richard Jordan received a death sentence and went through years of appeals, the Mississippi Supreme Court has scheduled his execution, the oldest and longest serving person on Mississippi’s death row.

The Thursday order comes nearly two decades after the kidnap and murder of a Gulf Coast woman. Jordan, 78, is set to be executed June 25 at 6 p.m. at the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman.

“After due consideration, the Court finds Jordan has exhausted all state and federal remedies for purposes of setting an execution date,” the court wrote. “Accordingly, the Court finds the State’s Motion to Set Execution Date should be granted and a date should be set for execution of the death sentence imposed upon Jordan.”

Eight of the nine justices ruled to grant the execution, and Justice Leslie King was the sole person who ruled to deny Jordan’s execution.

Jordan filed his most recent challenge of his death sentence in November 2024, arguing that it was invalid because the death penalty was not constitutional at the time of the murder of Edwina Marter.

He also asked for the U.S. Supreme Court to hear his case, but that request was denied in March.

The Mississippi Supreme Court rejected Jordan’s post-conviction petition on May 1, the same day it ordered his execution.

Jordan was first convicted in 1976 for kidnapping Edwina Marter from Gulfport, killing her in a national forest and demanding ransom from her husband.

The Hattiesburg native served in the Army after graduating from high school and fought in the Vietnam War. After the war, Jordan married and had three children but found it difficult to adjust to civilian life and experienced symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder related to his combat experience, according to court records.

In 1976 he was desperate for money and made plans to kidnap someone from a wealthy family and demand a ransom. Jordan called Gulf National Bank in Gulfport and found out the name of its commercial loan officer, Chuck Marter.

He found Chuck Marter’s address from the telephone book and traveled from Louisiana. Jordan posed as an electric worker to get into the home, and then he took Edwina Marter to the DeSoto National Forest where he shot her.

It took four trials spanning 20 years before Jordan was successfully convicted and sentenced to death.

Jordan’s appeals have also been tied to legal challenges of the state’s lethal injection protocol.

He and death row inmate Ricky Chase are lead plaintiffs in a federal lawsuit challenging the use of midazolam, a sedative, as one of the state’s three execution drugs.

U.S. District Judge Henry Wingate hasn’t made a final ruling in the case, which he ordered stayed in March pending resolution of a 2023 motion for summary judgment by the prison defendants.

In 2022, Wingate did not block the execution of Thomas Loden Jr., another death row inmate who was part of the lawsuit.
If lethal injection is not an option, the state can put someone to death through other available methods: gas chamber, electrocution or firing squad.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.