Minutes before Mississippi\u2019s longest-serving death row inmate was executed, he had some chilling final words for the family of the woman he brutally killed almost 50 years ago.<\/p>\n
On the evening of June 25, Richard Gerald Jordan, 79, a Vietnam veteran turned convicted murderer, met his fate inside the execution chamber at the Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman.<\/p>\n
At exactly 6:16 p.m., Jordan was pronounced dead by lethal injection \u2013 the conclusion of a harrowing 48-year saga that began with a cold-blooded killing that shook an entire community.<\/p>\n
\u2018Shot her in the back of the head\u2019
\nIt was January 1976 when Jordan dialed the Gulf National Bank in Gulfport and asked to speak with a loan officer. When Charles Marter\u2019s name was mentioned, Jordan hung up and used a phone book to hunt down the Marter family\u2019s home address.<\/p>\n
Once he arrived at the banker\u2019s house, Jordan \u2013 posing as an electrician \u2013 kidnapped 37-year-old Edwina, Marter\u2019s wife and the mother of two young boys, 11 and 3 at the time.<\/p>\n
Holding her at gunpoint, he forced Edwina into the vehicle and drove her deep into DeSoto National Forest, where he \u201cshot her in the back of the head when she tried to run away,\u201d according to Mississippi Public Broadcasting.<\/p>\n
Hours later, he called her husband and demanded $25,000, falsely claiming she was still alive.<\/p>\n
Jordan was arrested the next day in a hotel in Mobile.<\/p>\n
Death sentence
\nJordan was sentenced to death in 1977. But what should have been swift justice stretched on for nearly five decades, as he filed appeal after appeal, even suing the state over its lethal injection method \u2013 a lawsuit that delayed the inevitable but didn\u2019t change the outcome.<\/p>\n
In fact, after he was first sentenced in 1976, he received three more death sentences in 1977, 1983, and 1998.<\/p>\n