The state of Mississippi carried out the execution of Richard Gerald Jordan on Wednesday evening, bringing to a close one of the most protracted legal battles in American capital punishment history. Jordan, 79, was pronounced dead at 6:16 p. m.
after receiving a lethal injection at the state penitentiary in Parchman, nearly five decades after he kidnapped and murdered 34-year-old Edwina Martyr.
Jordan had spent almost 50 years on death row, making him the oldest and longest-serving inmate awaiting execution that Mississippi had ever housed. His case wound through the courts for decades, producing multiple trials, several overturned sentences, and endless appeals that tested the limits of the justice system. In the end, the sentence first handed down in the 1970s was finally carried out as family members of the victim looked on.
The crime that put Jordan on death row began on an ordinary January morning in 1976. Edwina Martyr kissed her children goodbye and went about her day, unaware that a stranger had been watching her home in Gulfport. That stranger was Jordan, a 29-year-old Vietnam War veteran who had returned from three tours of duty broken, unemployed, and drowning in debt.
He had decided to kidnap someone from a wealthy family, demand a ransom, and start over with the proceeds.
Before crossing state lines from Louisiana into Mississippi, Jordan stopped at a pawn shop in Baton Rouge. He traded in his shotgun for a . 38 caliber revolver, the weapon he would later use to end Edwina Martyr’s life.
He told his parents he was taking a physical for an offshore job, but he was not looking for work. He was hunting for a target.
Once in Gulfport, Jordan called the Gulf National Bank and asked for the commercial loan officer, receiving the name Charles Martyr. He found the home address in the phone book and drove there that afternoon. When Edwina answered the door, Jordan posed as a utility worker needing to check circuit breakers.
Her three-year-old son was asleep inside, and her ten-year-old son was at school. She let him in.
Once inside, Jordan pulled the gun and forced Edwina into her car. He made her leave her toddler behind and ordered her to drive deep into the De Soto National Forest, where the roads narrowed and help was nowhere in sight. When Edwina tried to run, Jordan chased her down.
He warned her not to try again, then led her into the trees to a quiet patch of dirt under the pines.
He told her to kneel. The ground was wet, and pine needles clung to her hands as she braced herself in the dirt. Then Jordan raised the gun and pulled the trigger.
The shot entered at the base of her skull and exited just above her left eye. Edwina collapsed onto the forest floor and died within seconds. Jordan then tossed the revolver into the Big Boxy River.
After the shooting, Jordan called Chuck Martyr at the bank and claimed he had kidnapped his wife but that she was alive and well. He demanded $25,000 in ransom, telling Chuck to wrap the money in brown paper and leave it on a blue jacket near Highway 49. But Chuck immediately contacted the FBI, and agents began tracking Jordan’s movements.
The first drop was a bust. Jordan had been watching, spotted the unmarked cars, and called the whole thing off. But he still wanted the money.
The next morning he called again, his voice calm, and told Chuck that Edwina was still alive and asking about their sons. He planned a different drop off Interstate 10 and warned that if the FBI showed up, Chuck would never see his wife again.
Chuck called the FBI again, and this time the jacket was placed as instructed. Chuck delivered the $25,000 sealed in brown paper and walked away. Agents watched Jordan grab the cash and take off.
A chase erupted, with Jordan forcing officers off the road and escaping under fire. He ditched the car in a crowded shopping center, buried most of the money in the woods, bought new clothes, and tried to disappear.
He did not get far. A roadblock stopped his taxi near the highway, and an officer recognized him immediately. Jordan did not fight and was arrested without a word of protest.
In the hours that followed, he confessed to everything. He admitted that Edwina had already been dead by the time he made the first ransom call. He told authorities where to find her body, the weapon, the buried cash, and the car.
Jordan’s path to that moment began in Hattiesburg, where he was born and raised in a working-class family. He joined the Army after high school and volunteered for one of the most dangerous jobs in the Vietnam War, working as a helicopter mechanic by day and serving as a door gunner in combat. He saw villages on fire, bodies in rice fields, and friends who never came home.
Vietnam broke something inside him.
He returned home carrying the weight in silence. He was closed off, paranoid, always scanning the room, unable to sleep or trust anyone. These were classic signs of PTSD, but in those days no one called it that and no one offered help.
His loyalty never wavered, though. When his tour ended, he volunteered to stay behind so his younger brother could go home in his place.
By the mid-1970s, Jordan was back in the United States, married and raising three children. But civilian life did not feel right. He struggled to find purpose outside the structure of the military and preferred being near bases.
This created friction with his wife, who wanted to return to Mississippi. The marriage began to crack, and Jordan found himself broke, unemployed, and buried in debt.
The first trial in Harrison County moved fast. The jury found him guilty and sentenced him to die. But his case landed in the middle of changing death penalty laws, and the courts threw out his sentence, calling the process unconstitutional.
A year later, he was tried again. The evidence had not changed, and neither had the outcome. He was found guilty and sentenced to death a second time.
In 1982, the US Court of Appeals stepped in again, ruling that the jury in his second trial never received proper instructions during the sentencing phase. The sentence was overturned, and a new hearing was ordered. The result in 1983 was the same, death row for a third time.
By 1986, the US Supreme Court weighed in, requiring juries to consider more about a defendant’s background during sentencing.
Tired of the cycle, Jordan took a deal, agreeing to life without parole if the state skipped another penalty trial. But in 1994, the Mississippi Supreme Court ruled that life without parole was not even a legal option at the time of the murder. That sentence was thrown out as well.
In 1998, more than two decades after Edwina’s death, Jordan faced a jury for the fifth time.
Prosecutors argued that Jordan had used the system for decades, dodging justice at every turn. The jury deliberated for just 35 minutes before handing him his fourth death sentence for the same crime. Jordan filed more appeals, chasing one last chance, but the courts reviewed everything and ruled that his claims had no merit.
This time, the sentence stood, though it would take another 27 years to carry out.
During those decades, Jordan grew old behind the walls of Parchman. He wrote short stories, took on prison jobs, and lived long enough to see the state’s execution method change from the gas chamber to lethal injection. But time did not stop for him.
As his final day approached, the family of Edwina Martyr made clear they would not be there to witness it.
Eric Martyr, now 60 years old, was just 11 when his mother was taken from him. He spoke out right before the execution, saying it should have happened a long time ago. He said he was not really interested in giving Jordan the benefit of the doubt.
Other family members chose to attend the execution, but for Eric, the chapter had already closed.
In the weeks leading up to the execution, a clemency petition was filed on Jordan’s behalf. It argued that his time in Vietnam had left deep psychological scars and that the trauma from three combat tours had changed him. Franklin Rosenblat, a military justice expert who helped prepare the petition, said Jordan’s war history had never been fully considered in court.
Rosenblat noted that we know so much more now than we did during Vietnam about the effect of war trauma on the brain and how it affects ongoing behaviors. But the argument did not move the court or the victim’s family. Eric Martyr dismissed it, saying he knew what Jordan did, that Jordan wanted money and could not take his mother with him, so he did what he did.
On June 25, 2025, Jordan’s final day came, but the process had begun 48 hours earlier. Like every scheduled execution in Mississippi, he was quietly moved from Unit 29, known as death row, to Unit 17, a smaller holding area just steps from the execution chamber. From that moment, the clock started ticking, and the final preparations were underway.
Jordan spent his last two days with his lawyers, a handful of family members, and spiritual advisers. A prison official said he was talking and appeared to be in a good mood, telling stories about his past and his history. The Mississippi Department of Corrections allowed his loved ones to stay with him until four in the afternoon, the cutoff before preparations began.
His final meal was chicken tenders, fries, strawberry ice cream, and a root beer float. At 6:00 p. m.
, Jordan was strapped to the gurney. Observers sat behind the glass as staff moved through the final steps. His wife, Marsha, witnessed the execution along with his lawyer and a spiritual adviser.
Both his wife and his lawyer dabbed their eyes several times.
Asked if he had any last words, Jordan spoke clearly. He thanked everyone for a humane way of doing this and apologized to the victim’s family. He thanked his lawyers and his wife and asked for forgiveness.
His final words before the drugs flowed were simply, “I love you very much. I will see you on the other side, all of you.”
After the first injection, a staff member checked Jordan’s consciousness. Once they confirmed he was no longer responsive, the rest of the process moved forward. At 6:16 p.
m. , he was pronounced dead. Richard Gerald Jordan was 79 years old.
More than 49 years after Edwina Martyr knelt in the pine needles of the De Soto National Forest and lost her life, the state of Mississippi finally closed the case.
The execution caps a legal saga that spanned nearly half a century and raised persistent questions about the length of time inmates can be held on death row. Jordan’s case bounced through state and federal courts more times than almost any other in American history, surviving multiple Supreme Court rulings that reshaped capital sentencing law across the country.
For the Martyr family, Wednesday evening brought a measure of closure that had been deferred for decades. Edwina’s sons, now grown men with families of their own, have spent their entire lives without their mother. Eric Martyr’s words captured the sentiment of a family that had waited a lifetime for justice, even as the legal system repeatedly delayed its final verdict.
Jordan’s execution was the first in Mississippi in years, and it drew attention from both supporters of capital punishment and advocates who argued that his case exemplified the cruelty of extended death row confinement. His lawyers maintained to the end that his severe PTSD from Vietnam was never properly considered and that the system failed him long before he failed Edwina Martyr.
The state, however, maintained that Jordan’s guilt was never in question and that his repeated appeals were nothing more than a strategy to delay the inevitable. The jury that sentenced him to death in 1998 deliberated for just 35 minutes, a sign of how overwhelming the evidence remained even after two decades of legal challenges. That sentence was upheld through years of subsequent appeals.
Mississippi’s execution chamber at Parchman has now seen its first inmate put to death in nearly a decade. The state used a single-dose protocol of lethal injection, the same method that has faced scrutiny and legal challenges across the country in recent years. Jordan was confirmed unconscious before the full dose was administered, and the execution proceeded without reported complications.
The nearly 50 years that Jordan spent on death row will likely be studied for years to come. His case became a touchstone in debates over the death penalty, with some pointing to it as proof that the system is broken and others arguing it demonstrates the thoroughness of American appellate courts. Either way, the saga has ended, and the final chapter was written on a Wednesday evening in June.
Edwina Martyr was laid to rest in 1976, but her memory has been carried by her sons, her husband, and a community that never forgot what happened in the pine forest. On the day of Jordan’s execution, her family chose not to attend, saying the time for bearing witness had passed. The state carried out the sentence on their behalf, ending a story that had stretched across five decades.
