Richard Gerald Jordan

Richard Gerald Jordan (May 25, 1946 – June 25, 2025) was an American convicted murderer who was executed for the 1976 murder of 34-year-old Edwina Marter, the wife of a bank executive, in Mississippi. For years before his execution, Jordan was the state's oldest and longest-serving death row inmate. Though he admitted to the crime and his guilt had never been seriously called into question, Jordan filed multiple successful legal challenges to his sentence, and because of this, he was re-sentenced to death three times. Jordan was unemployed and desperate for money when he devised a plot to break into the home of a bank executive. He called Gulf National Bank in Gulfport and learned the name of the commercial loan officer, Chuck Marter. He looked up the man's address in a telephone directory, then drove to the home and kidnapped Edwina Marter. He fatally shot her in the De Soto National Forest before calling her husband and attempting to collect ransom money from him. After Jordan's 1976 guilty verdict and death sentence were vacated because automatic death sentences were determined to be unconstitutional, he was convicted again and re-sentenced to death the next year. After Jordan successfully appealed this sentence on constitutional grounds, he received another death sentence. After this third death sentence was again overturned on appeal, prosecutors offered Jordan a plea deal in which he would drop his appeals in exchange for life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Jordan accepted the plea deal, then violated the agreement by appealing his new sentence on the grounds that life imprisonment without parole was not a permitted sentence in Mississippi at the time of the crime. Instead, he asked courts to reduce his sentence to life imprisonment with the possibility of parole (an available sentence in 1976). Courts found the plea agreement improper and granted a new sentencing hearing, which occurred in 1998, when he was again sentenced to death. Subsequent appeals were filed in Jordan's case related to whether the lethal injection procedure could be considered cruel or unusual. Jordan was executed by lethal injection at the Mississippi State Penitentiary on June 25, 2025.