Mississippi has executed a Vietnam combat veteran for murdering a stay-at-home mother of two sons in a failed attempt to flee with ransom money.

Richard Gerald Jordan, the state’s oldest death row inmate at 79, was executed by lethal injection on Wednesday, June 25, and pronounced dead at 6:16 p.m. local time. He became the 25th inmate executed in the United States this year, matching the number of executions during all of 2024.

Jordan’s execution came nearly five decades after he kidnapped and killed Edwina Marter, 35, who was shot in the back of the head many hours before her banker husband − believing she was still alive − paid a $25,000 ransom for her return on Jan. 12, 1976.

“I would like to thank everyone here for a humane way of doing this,” Jordan said in the death chamber as he looked at the ceiling. “I wish to apologize to the family. I ask that you forgive me for what I did. Not forget, but forgive.”

Jordan had been challenging the drugs used in lethal-injection executions and arguing that “Vietnam forever changed” him and left him a “traumatized man,” according to his petition for clemency filed on June 16. The petition stated that Jordan served three combat tours totaling 33 months, often in perilous positions as a helicopter gunner, earning him various medals and an honorable discharge.

Jurors at Jordan’s 1976 trial never heard about his war service and subsequent post-traumatic stress disorder, information that could very well have spared him from the death penalty, the petition argued.

But prosecutors at the trial described Jordan as a greedy, cold-blooded killer, telling them to consider how fervently Jordan demanded a ransom for Marter’s safe return even after he had shot her dead.

“Did you notice how cool and calculated, cold?” then-Jackson County District Attorney Albert Necaise said, according to an archived report in the Daily Herald in Biloxi. “He was the judge, he was the jury… and he was also her executioner.”

Here’s what you need to know about the execution.

More from Jordan’s last words, last meal

Jordan’s last meal was chicken tenders, french fries, strawberry ice cream and a root beer float.

As part of his last words, he thanked his wife, Marsha, who sobbing in the front row of the execution viewing area.

“I love you,” Jordan said to his wife. “See you on the other side, all of you. Thank you.”

Edwina Marter’s kidnapping and murder

On Jan. 12, 1976, Edwina Marter was at home in Mississippi City with one of her two sons, 3-year-old Kevin, while her 10-year-old son Eric was in school, according to court records.

Richard Jordan showed up and kidnapped Marter as Kevin slept. Jordan had found out that her husband, Charles Marter, was an executive at Gulf National Bank and decided to target the couple for ransom money, court records said.

Jordan took Edwina Marter about 35 miles away to a deserted area of the DeSoto National Forest, where prosecutors said he executed her by shooting a bullet into the back of her head as she knelt. Jordan maintained that the fatal bullet was supposed to be a warning shot when she ran away, which prosecutors called a “cock-and-bull story.”

After killing Edwina, Jordan called Charles Marter, told him that his wife was alive and well, and that it would cost him $25,000 to get her back, court records said.

A half dozen law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, deployed when Marter immediately reported the kidnapping, and area journalists made a rare agreement for nearly 24 hours of news silence to allow the frantic husband to make a money drop, according to reporting in the Daily Herald.

After Jordan bailed on several money drops because he spotted law enforcement monitoring nearby, Marter eventually left the cash under a jacket by the side of a road. Jordan retrieved it as authorities watched, this time undetected. Jordan escaped after a high-speed chase but was later arrested when he was spotted in the back of a taxi at a police roadblock.

Richard Jordan had been sentenced to death 4 times

Jordan was sentenced to death in 1976, but that was later vacated over a change in the death penalty law. He was again tried, convicted, and sentenced to death in 1977, but an appeals court later vacated that sentence over unconstitutional penalty-phase instructions.

He again got the death penalty at a 1983 resentencing, but that, too, was later vacated by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Jordan then reached an agreement with prosecutors for a life sentence. But in 1994, the Supreme Court of Mississippi invalidated the agreement, saying it shouldn’t have been an option.

Jordan was sentenced to death for the fourth time in 1998.

Richard Jordan’s PTSD never presented to jury

At no point during Jordan’s legal proceedings did a jury get to hear about PTSD from his Vietnam service in the 1st Cavalry Division from 1966 to 1969, starting when he was 18 years old, according to his clemency petition.

As a door gunner, he protected ground troops by providing “defensive and suppressive fire” with M60 machine guns mounted onto the cargo doors of helicopters, according to one of Jordan’s filings in the U.S. Supreme Court. He was “trained to kill on sight,” the filing said.

Jordan once fired on a small hut suspected of shooting down a U.S. helicopter and later learned that women and children were among the dead inside, a revelation that always haunted him, even though his actions were found to be legal, the clemency petition said.

His base, Phu Bai near Huế in south Vietnam, was attacked in “one of the bloodiest battles during the 1968 Tet Offensive,” during which he “was under constant threat of being killed,” the petition added.

After nearly three years at war, Jordan struggled mentally and emotionally back home in Mississippi and “experienced periods of hypervigilance, suspicion of strangers, and emotional numbness,” according to the filing, which argued that a death sentence was improper.

“Had the jury heard this critical information, Richard might not have been sentenced to death,” according to his clemency petition, which sought a meeting between Jordan and Gov. Tate Reeves, who did not grant it.

In a recent court filing, the state stood behind Jordan’s death sentence, calling his claims “baseless.”

He “executed a young mother after kidnapping her to extort money from her husband. A jury convicted him of capital murder, and he was sentenced to death nearly three decades ago,” the state told the Supreme Court.

Victim’s son laments length of court cases

Edwina Marter’s now 59-year-old son, Eric Marter, told USA TODAY that his family didn’t buy Jordan’s claims that he accidentally shot Edwina or his arguments about PTSD.

“It doesn’t surprise me that you want to try to play whatever game you can so they don’t put you to death,” he said, adding that he was “playing the military card.”

He pointed to how well-planned the crime was. “To say that you’ve got a mental problem, I’m not really buying it.”

He doesn’t have very many memories of his mom anymore, and his brother has none, though they’ve heard some great family stories. His Aunt Norma told the boys about how when she and Edwina were younger, they’d dress up in their nicest clothes, put on makeup, and go crash wedding receptions. “She liked to have fun,” he said.

Edwina not only missed out on his and his brother’s childhoods, but also the lives of three grandchildren and a great-grandchild, he said.

About the execution, he said the family was ready for it to be over with. “It’s been way, way too long.”

It’s not uncommon for veterans to be executed

In 2015, the Death Penalty Information Center identified 300 veterans who had been sentenced to death, or about 10% of death row. Many more had already been executed.

During one four-month period between October 2022 and February 2023, states executed five veterans, including Thomas Loden Jr., who saw combat in the Gulf War and witnessed a close friend get killed, according to the center.

Most recently, on May 1, Florida executed Gulf War veteran Jeffrey Hutchinson for the 1998 murder of 32-year-old Renee Flaherty and her three children.

Contributing: Charlie Drape and Liz Beveridge, Clarion Ledger

Amanda Lee Myers is a senior crime reporter for USA TODAY. Follow her on X at @amandaleeusat.