BREAKING: Veteran Richard Jordan Executed After 50 Years on Mississippi Death Row

On June 25th, 2025, after spending almost 50 years on death row, Richard Gerald Jordan was executed by lethal injection in Mississippi. In this video, we’ll uncover what happened, his last meal, and his last words. [Music] On the morning of January 12th, 1976, 34year-old Edwina Martyr kissed her kids goodbye and started her day like it was any other.

 But what she didn’t know was that someone had already picked her family out. A stranger was watching her house, tracking her movements, and waiting for the right moment to strike. That stranger was 29-year-old Richard Gerald Jordan, a Vietnam veteran who had returned from three tours overseas with scars no one could see.

 By 1976, he was broke, unemployed, and buried in debt. He needed money and fast. So, he made a decision. He would kidnap someone from a wealthy family, demand a ransom, and disappear with enough cash to start over. He left Louisiana and headed for the Mississippi coast. But before crossing state lines, he stopped at a pawn shop in Baton Rouge and traded in his shotgun for a 38 caliber revolver.

That was the last piece he needed. And when his parents asked where he was going, he lied. Told them he was taking a physical for an offshore job. But he wasn’t looking for work. He was hunting for a target. Once in Gulfport, he called the Gulf National Bank and asked for the commercial loan officer.

 They gave him a name, Charles Martyr, also known as Chuck. And with that, Richard hung up, flipped through the phone book, and found Chuck’s home address. That afternoon, he drove straight there. He waited outside until most of the cars had left the driveway. Then he knocked on the door and when Chuck’s wife Edwina answered the door, Richard posed as a utility worker who needed to check the circuit breakers.

 Edwina’s three-year-old son was asleep in the house, and her other son, who was 10 years old, was already at school. Edwina let him in, not knowing that this would be her final act of kindness. Once inside, Richard pulled the gun and forced Edwina into the car. He made her leave her toddler behind alone in the house and then ordered her to drive deep into the Dotto National Forest where the roads narrowed and help was nowhere in sight.

 Once in the forest, Edwina, desperate to survive, tried to run, but Richard wasn’t planning on letting her go just yet, and she didn’t get far. Richard chased her down and made her stop. He warned her not to try that again, then led her a few steps deeper into the trees to a quiet patch of dirt under the pines. There, he told her to kneel.

 The ground was wet. Pine needles clung to her hands as she braced herself in the dirt. The forest around them was silent, holding its breath. Then Richard raised the gun, and without a word, he pulled the trigger. The shot entered at the base of her skull and exited just above her left eye. It was over in seconds. Edwina collapsed onto the forest floor and died right there.

After the shooting, Richard tossed the revolver into the Big Boxy River. Then, without a second thought, he called Chuck Martyr at the bank and told him that he kidnapped his wife, but she was alive and well, that if he ever wanted to see her again, he needed to pay $25,000 in ransom. Richard told him to wrap the money in brown paper and leave it on a blue jacket near Highway 49.

But after he hung up, Chuck immediately contacted the FBI and they came up with a plan. Chuck would follow Richard’s instructions to the letter and when Richard would show up to collect the money, agents would move in. So Chuck did exactly as told. He wrapped the cash in brown paper and looked for the blue jacket near the highway, just like Richard had said.

 But when he got there, there was no jacket. The drop was a bust. Richard wasn’t stupid. He had been watching Chuck. He expected him to make a move, and the unmarked cars trailing him only confirmed his suspicion. So, he decided not to leave the jacket on the location and called the whole thing off. But Richard wasn’t done.

 He still wanted the money. So, the next morning, he called again. His voice was calm, measured. Again, he told Chuck that Edwina was still alive. Claimed she was asking about their sons. the 10-year-old at school and the toddler she had left sleeping in the house. He made it sound like she was okay, like there was still hope that she would return home.

Then came the new instructions. He planned a different drop. Off the I 10 this time, and this time it came with a warning. No games, no tricks. If the FBI showed up, Chuck would never see his wife alive ever again. Richard thought that threat was enough to keep law enforcement away. And this time he did place the jacket.

But Chuck didn’t hesitate. He called the FBI again and laid everything out. Richard’s new plan, the drop location, the timeline, and agents moved fast, trying to beat Richard there to catch him before he panicked and vanished again. But Chuck didn’t wait. He drove out alone, just like before. And when he got there, the jacket was already there, just like Richard promised.

 Chuck didn’t hesitate. He placed the bundle, $25,000, sealed tight, and walked away without looking back. Nearby, two agents were already waiting. They watched Richard show up, grab the cash, and take off. The chase was on in seconds. Richard swerved through traffic, forced the officers off the road, and somehow escaped while he was under fire.

 He ditched the car in a crowded shopping center, and buried most of the money in the woods. Then he kept just enough to buy new clothes. He changed outfits, called a taxi, and tried to disappear, but he didn’t get far. A roadblock stopped the car near the highway, and one of the officers recognized him right away. Richard didn’t fight, and he was arrested without a single word of protest.

 In the hours that followed, he confessed to everything. He admitted that he had lied from the start, that Edwina had already been dead by the time he made the first ransom call. He told them where to find her body, where he had buried the weapon, the buried cash, the car, and the clothes he wore that day.

 He gave it all up. But how did it come to this? Richard was born in Hattisburg and raised just down the road in Pedal, Mississippi. He was adopted into a working-class family, one of several kids in a small, modest house. By most accounts, nothing about his childhood stood out. After high school, Richard joined the Army and didn’t just serve.

He volunteered for one of the most dangerous jobs in the Vietnam War. He worked as a helicopter mechanic during the day. And when they went into combat, he took on one of the war’s most dangerous roles, door gunner. He was firing from above, killing from the sky. And he saw everything. Villages on fire, bodies in rice fields, friends who didn’t come back.

Vietnam didn’t just change him. It broke something inside. And when he came home, he carried the weight in silence. He didn’t talk about it. He couldn’t. He was closed off, paranoid, and always scanning the room. He didn’t sleep well, and didn’t trust anyone. Classic signs of PTSD.

 But in those days, no one called it that and no one helped. Still, his loyalty to his country and family never wavered. When his tour in Vietnam ended, he volunteered to stay behind so his younger brother could go home in his place. By the mid70s, Richard was back in the States, married and raising three kids. But civilian life didn’t feel right.

 He struggled to find purpose outside the structure of the military and preferred being near bases where things still made sense. This created friction as his wife wanted to return home to Mississippi, but he didn’t and the marriage began to crack. He was broke, out of work, drowning in debt, and that’s when everything collapsed.

In 1976, Richard was arrested for the kidnapping and murder of Aduina Martyr. But his life turned into a legal loop that wouldn’t quit. At first, the trial in Harrison County moved fast. The jury didn’t hesitate. They found him guilty and sentenced him to die. But his case landed in the middle of changing death penalty laws.

 The courts threw out his sentence, calling the process unconstitutional. And for a brief moment, his life was spared, but not for long. A year later, Richard went back on trial. The evidence hadn’t changed, and neither had the outcome. This time, the process was split. First, the verdict, then the punishment.

 But the jury came to the same conclusion both times. He was found guilty again and sentenced to death, a second time. Then came 1982 when the US Court of Appeals stepped in. They ruled that the jury in his second trial never got proper instructions during the sentencing phase and that the penalty phase had been flawed.

 Again, the court overturned his death sentence and ordered a new hearing, another hearing, another shot at life. But the result in 1983 was the same. Death row round three. The state affirmed it in 1985, but by the next year, the US Supreme Court was back in the picture. A new ruling required juries to consider more about a defendant’s background during sentencing.

 And because they hadn’t, Richard’s sentence was vacated again. Tired of the cycle, Richard took a deal. He agreed to life without parole if the state skipped another penalty trial. But that too didn’t hold. In 1994, the Mississippi Supreme Court ruled that life without parole wasn’t even a legal option when Edwina was murdered.

 So that sentence, like all the others, was thrown out. Richard was sent back to court again. In 1998, more than 20 years after Edwina’s death, he faced a jury for the fifth time. And this time, prosecutors didn’t hold back. They said Richard had used the system for decades, dodging justice at every turn. that he deserved to die for what he had done.

And this time, the jury didn’t need long, just 35 minutes before handing him his fourth death sentence for the same crime. But even then, Richard kept fighting. He filed more appeals, chasing one last chance. But the court reviewed everything and ruled that his claims had no merit. And that was it.

 This time, the sentence stood. But even then, it would take another 27 years before it was carried out. For decades, Richard sat in a cell while the world outside changed. He grew old behind those walls and became the oldest, longest serving death row inmate Mississippi had ever seen. But time didn’t stop for him. He wrote short stories, took on prison jobs, and lived long enough to see the state’s execution method change from gas chamber to lethal injection.

 But in the end, nothing stopped the clock. Right before his final day, Eric Martyr spoke up. Eric, now 60 years old, was just 11 when his mother was taken from him. Eric, his brother, and their father said they wouldn’t be there to witness the execution. It should have happened a long time ago, he said.

 I’m not really interested in giving him the benefit of the doubt. Other family members chose to attend, but for Eric, the chapter had already closed. In the weeks leading up to the execution, a clemency petition was filed on Richard’s behalf. It argued that his time in Vietnam had left deep psychological scars, that the trauma from three combat tours had changed him, and that the man who returned wasn’t the same one who left.

Franklin Rosenblat, a military justice expert who helped prepare the petition, said that Richard’s war history had never been fully considered in court. His war service, his war trauma was considered not relevant in his murder trial. Franklin said, “We just know so much more than we did 10 years ago and certainly during Vietnam about the effect of war trauma on the brain and how that affects ongoing behaviors.

” But this didn’t matter for the court or for Eric. I know what he did. He wanted money and he couldn’t take her with him. So, he did what he did. None of it changed what was coming. The sentence had been signed. The date set and the final steps were already underway. On June 25th, 2025, after spending nearly 50 years on death row, Richard’s final day came.

 But the process had already begun 48 hours earlier. Like every scheduled execution in Mississippi, an inmate is quietly moved from unit 29, known as death row, to unit 17, a smaller holding area just steps from the execution chamber. And from that moment on, the clock started ticking. For Richard, those last two days were a blur of final moments.

 On the day of his execution, he spent time with the last people still standing by him. His lawyers, a handful of family members, and spiritual advisers. During the day, a prison official shared, “He’s talking and appears to be in a good mood.” He continued, “He’s been telling stories.

 I’ve been with him a lot of the time and so he’s talking about his past and his history and things like that. The Mississippi Department of Corrections allowed his loved ones to stay with him until 400 p.m. the cutoff before the preparations began. That’s when he was offered his final meal for which he requested chicken tenders, fries, strawberry ice cream, and a root beer float.

At 6:00 p.m., Richard was strapped to the gurnie. The room was still. Observers sat behind the glass as staff moved through the final steps. Richard’s wife, Marsha, witnessed the execution along with his lawyer and a spiritual adviser. His wife and lawyer dabbed their eyes several times. When asked if he had any last words, Richard spoke 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 also thanked his lawyers and his wife and asked for forgiveness. His last words just before the drugs flowed were, “I love you very much. I will see you on the other side, all of you.” After the first injection, a staff member checked his consciousness.

 Once they confirmed he was no longer responsive, the rest of the process moved forward. By 6:16 p.m., he was pronounced dead. Richard Gerald Jordan was 79 years old.