A Mississippi man, Richard Gerald Jordan, was executed on Wednesday after nearly 50 years on death row for the murder of a bank loan officer’s wife involved in a ransom scheme. The 79-year-old Vietnamese veteran, who struggled with PTSD, received a lethal injection at a Mississippi prison.
The U.S. Supreme Court dismissed his final appeals without providing any comments, while Governor Tate Reeves declined Jordan’s request for clemency.
Jordan had been sentenced to death in 1976 for the killing of Edwina Mater, a mother of two young children. He is one of only 22 individuals across the country who were still on death row from the 1970s.
Eric Mater, Edwina’s son, noted that neither he, his brother, nor their father would witness the execution, expressing that it “should have happened a long time ago” and that he wasn’t inclined to offer any sympathy.
In January 1976, Jordan contacted Gulf Coast National Bank to speak with a lender and later tracked down Edwina Mater’s address. He lured her into the woods and fatally shot her, subsequently calling her husband to demand a ransom of $25,000. Jordan’s path to execution included four trials and numerous appeals. He maintained that he hadn’t received adequate legal representation.
Jordan’s defense claimed that a mental health expert, independent of the prosecution, had never assessed his case properly, pointing to failures in considering his Vietnam experience during earlier trials.
