The Longest Death Row Case in U.S. History | Richard Jordan Execution | Last Meal And Final Words –
In 1976, Richard Jordan was sentenced to death. Gerald Ford was president. The Vietnam War had just ended and a 34-year-old mother named Edwina Marter was buried leaving behind a husband and two young sons. Richard Jordan would not be executed for another 49 years. Let that number sit with you. 49 years.
A child born the year of his first sentencing would be approaching 50 today. Careers begin and end in less time. Entire generations are raised. Wars are fought and forgotten. And through all of it, through every decade that passed, through every birthday those two young boys had without their mother, Edwina Marter’s family waited.
This is the story of the longest-serving death row inmate in American history to have his sentence carried out. It is a story about a crime, a legal system, a war, and what happens when justice moves so slowly that people begin to wonder if it will ever arrive at all. By the time Richard Gerald Jordan was executed in June of 2025, he was 79 years old, the oldest inmate on Mississippi’s death row, and the longest-serving.
He had received a death sentence not once, not twice, but four separate times. He was a Vietnam veteran, a man with docu- mented post-traumatic stress disorder, a man who, according to prison staff, had spent decades being a stabilizing force inside one of the most difficult correctional facilities in the United States.
He was also the man who kidnapped and m*rdered Edwina Marter on a January morning in 1976, then called her husband and demanded $25,000 for her safe return. She was already dead when he made that call. All of those things are true at the same time. And that is what makes this case so difficult to look away from. Richard Gerald Jordan was born on May 25th, 1946 in Petal, Mississippi, a small town southeast of Hattiesburg.
By most accounts, his early years were unremarkable. He grew up, went to school, and seemed to be on an ordinary path. That path changed when he was a young man and found himself facing criminal charges for check forgery. What is documented is this. He agreed to enlist in the United States Army in part to sidestep prosecution.
It was a decision that would send him to the other side of the world and bring him back a fundamentally different person. Jordan was deployed to Vietnam and unlike many servicemen who completed a single tour and came home, he volunteered to stay three times. Three consecutive tours of duty from 1966 to 1969, 33 months in a combat zone.
He later said he did it so his younger brother, who was also serving, could come home first. For that service, he was awarded the Republic of Vietnam Campaign Medal and the Air Medal with four oak leaf clusters, meaning the Air Medal alone was awarded five times. This was not a man on the periphery of the conflict.
He was in the middle of it repeatedly by choice. When he came home in 1969, he came back changed. Later evaluations would confirm what so many veterans of that era carried alone, severe post-traumatic stress disorder. He received no treatment, no support. He returned to civilian life and struggled in silence the way that generation of veterans largely had to.
By 1976, he was unemployed, 30 years old, and desperate enough to do something that would cost an innocent woman her life. On a January morning in 1976, Richard Jordan made a phone call to Gulf National Bank in Gulfport, Mississippi. He was looking for a target, not a random one. He wanted someone specific, someone connected to money.
The person whose name came up was Charles Marter, Chuck to people who knew him, a commercial loan officer at the bank. Jordan noted the name. Then he did something that seems almost mundane in its simplicity. He looked up the address in a telephone directory. He drove to the Marter home. He posed as a worker from the electric company.
And when the front door opened, he was face-to-face not with Chuck Marter, but with Edwina, 34 years old, a stay-at-home mother, wife of the man he had been looking for. Inside the house, somewhere, were her two boys. Eric, who was 11, and Kevin, who was around four. She had no reason not to trust a man presenting himself as a utility worker. She let him in.
What followed was a kidnapping. Jordan forced Edwina Marter out of her home and drove her to a remote area, the DeSoto National Forest, a sprawling stretch of woodland in southern Mississippi. What happened there is not in dispute. Edwina Marter was shot and k!lled. Jordan then placed a phone call to her husband.
He told Charles Marter his wife was alive. He demanded $25,000 for her safe return. She was already dead. Jordan was arrested the following day in Mobile, Alabama, roughly 200 miles from the scene of the crime while staying at a hotel. The ransom money had never been collected. Edwina Marter was 34 years old.
Her son, Eric, was 11 at the time. Her son, Kevin, was around four years old, young enough that as the years passed, his memories of her would become harder and harder to hold on to. They would both grow up without their mother. Eric Marter would eventually become the family’s public voice in this case, a role no child should ever have to grow into, and yet one he would carry with him for the next five decades.
It is worth pausing here, not to dwell in the horror of what happened, but to acknowledge what is sometimes lost when cases like this one become defined entirely by their legal complexity. A woman died. A family was broken apart. And for 49 years, two sons and an extended family had to find ways to live alongside that loss year after year while the legal process ground forward at its own unhurried pace.
This is where the case becomes unlike almost any other in American legal history. Richard Jordan was tried, convicted of capital m*rder, and sentenced to death. It was straightforward in the way that first trials often are. The evidence was compelling. The jury deliberated and returned with the most severe sentence available.
But shortly after, the United States Supreme Court, in a series of landmark rulings, found that mandatory and automatic death sentences were unconstitutional. Jordan’s sentence was one of those swept up in the legal aftermath. His first death sentence was overturned. A new sentencing hearing was required. The second trial in 1977, Jordan was sentenced to death again.
This time, challenges emerged on constitutional procedural grounds. His attorneys pursued appeals and once again the sentence was overturned. Two trials, two death sentences, both gone. The third trial in 1983, a third jury sentenced Jordan to death for the third time. And for the third time, his legal team found grounds to challenge the outcome.
This sentence, too, was eventually overturned. At this point, something unusual happened. Prosecutors, perhaps exhausted by the cycle, perhaps calculating that certainty was better than endless repetition, offered Jordan a deal. If he dropped all appeals and agreed to stop pursuing legal challenges, they would take the death penalty off the table.
He would spend the rest of his life in prison, but he would not be executed. Jordan accepted. Then, almost immediately, he appealed the plea agreement itself. His argument was a technical, but significant one. Life imprisonment without the possibility of parole had not been a legally available sentence in Mississippi at the time his crime was committed.
Therefore, he argued, the plea was improper and rather than enforce it, the court should reduce his sentence to life with the possibility of parole, which would have made him eligible for eventual release. Courts examined the argument. They agreed that the plea agreement was improper, but they did not reduce his sentence to what he had asked for.
Instead, they granted a new sentencing hearing. The fourth trial in 1998, 22 years after he first stood trial, Richard Jordan sat in a courtroom again and listened as a fourth jury sentenced him to death for the fourth time. He had, in a very real sense, argued his way back to death row. He had accepted a deal that would have kept him alive, then dismantled that deal himself through the courts.
Whether that reflects a man of profound legal conviction or a man who for reasons we may never fully understand could not bring himself to stop fighting regardless of the consequences is impossible to say from the outside. What can be said without any uncertainty is this. Edwina Marten’s family, who had been waiting since 1976 for some kind of finality, now face the very real possibility that they might wait forever.
In the years following his fourth death sentence, Jordan’s legal team continued to press the argument they believed sat at the very heart of his case, that no jury, not one of the four, had ever been given a complete picture of who Richard Jordan actually was. Three separate psychological evaluations, conducted at different points across the decades, confirmed a diagnosis of severe post-traumatic stress disorder.
His attorneys argued that 33 months of combat in Vietnam, three voluntary tours, years of witnessing the kind of violence that leaves marks no amount of time erases, had fundamentally altered Jordan’s mental landscape. They argued this was precisely the kind of context, the kind of mitigation, that a jury must be allowed to weigh when deciding whether a man should live or die.
The jury was forced to make a decision for life or death. “One of his attorneys said, based on a very, very incomplete story of who Richard Jordan is.” The response from Edwina Marten’s family was equally clear and equally human. Eric Marten, who had been 11 years old when his mother was taken from him, who had grown up carrying that absence through his adolescence, his adulthood, into middle age, did not accept that framing.
He had watched the legal process stretch across four full decades. He had attended hearings. He had waited. He had kept waiting. His position was not complicated by legal theory. “I know what he did,” he said. “He wanted money. He couldn’t take her with him.” Inside the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman, Jordan had spent those decades building a particular kind of life.
He held tier worker status, a designation given only to inmates with long, consistent records of good behavior. He mentored younger inmates navigating the prison system. He helped prison staff with daily tasks. He mediated conflicts. He was, by the accounts of the people who worked alongside him, someone who made a difficult place slightly more bearable for those around him.
A prison chaplain called him a force for good. He had also, at some point during his decades inside Parchman, reconnected with a woman he had known in his youth. The prison commissioner permitted the two to marry inside the facility. In his final years, Jordan had a wife, people who cared for him, and a defined role within the only community he had known for most of his adult life.
None of that changes what happened on a January morning in 1976 in a forest in southern Mississippi, but it is part of the complete picture, a picture that four juries never received, and that the public rarely gets to see. The legal road finally ended in June 2025. Every appeal had been filed. Every argument had been heard.
No court was going to intervene. The date was set. On the morning of June 25th, 2025, Richard Gerald Jordan was 79 years old. He had spent more of his life on death row than most people spend in entire careers. Gerald Ford, the president at the time of his very first sentencing, had been dead for nearly 20 years.
The Vietnam War, the experience Jordan’s attorneys had argued for decades was the key to understanding everything that followed, had long since passed into history books. At around 4:00 in the afternoon, his final meal was brought to him. He had requested chicken tenders, French fries, strawberry ice cream, and a root beer float.
He shared that meal with members of his family. Those present described him as composed, reflective, even warm, spending those last hours sharing memories, talking about his life, the people he had known, the places he had been. A 79-year-old man eating comfort food with the people he loved for hours before his execution. Whatever conclusions one draws about the 49 years of legal proceedings that brought him to that room, that image is not easy to sit with. It wasn’t meant to be.
At 6:02 in the evening, the process began. Jordan lay on the gurney in the execution chamber at the Mississippi State Penitentiary. His mouth was slightly open. He took several slow, deep breaths, and then he was still. At 6:16 p.m., he was pronounced dead. Before the procedure began, he was given the opportunity to speak his final words.
He took a breath, and he spoke quietly and clearly. “First, I would like to thank everyone for a humane way of doing this. I want to apologize to the victim’s family.” He then thanked his attorneys, the people who had spent decades fighting for him in courtrooms he had long since stopped being present in. He looked toward his wife and told her he loved her.
And then, the last words Richard Gerald Jordan ever said to anyone in this world, “I will see you on the other side, all of you.” After the execution, a representative of the Marten family spoke outside the facility. “This man has been on death row for 49 years,” they said. “Yet today is not about Jordan. It’s about Edwina Marten and justice being served.
” Edwina Marten’s sister, who had waited 49 years for this day, said what many people say when a moment they have anticipated for decades finally arrives. It did not fill the void. These things rarely do. The absence of a person you loved does not resolve itself when someone else is gone. Grief does not close like that.
It never has. Eric Marten, who was 11 years old when his mother was kidnapped and m*rdered, who is now in his late 50s, who has spent more of his life without her than he spent with her, had said before the execution simply, “It should have happened a long time ago.” So, what do you do with a case like this one? Richard Jordan committed a premeditated, calculated crime.
He planned it step by step. He made the phone call. He drove to that house. He made another call afterward knowing exactly what he had done asking for money for a woman he had already k!lled. Four separate juries across four separate decades heard all of it and reached the same conclusion every single time.
A woman named Edwina Marten deserved to live out her life. She deserved to watch Eric and Kevin grow up. She deserved to grow old. She deserved all the ordinary, unremarkable things that were taken from her on a January morning in 1976 before her youngest son was old enough to hold onto her memory. That did not happen.
And no amount of time, not 49 years, not a lifetime, changes it. Richard Gerald Jordan was executed on June 25th, 2025. He was the longest-serving death row inmate in American history to have his sentence carried out. He was 79 years old. Edwina Marten was 34.
