Eric Marter doesn’t remember much about his mother but her loss is one his family has felt for decades.
On Jan. 13, 1976, he said it felt like any other day when he left for his Catholic school in Gulfport and his younger brother Kevin stayed home with their mother Edwina. Then he remembers he and his brother staying with family friends and being told his parents had to go out of town.
Days later, his father and a priest told them their mother was dead.
When Marter was older, he learned details about his mother’s murder and some about the man responsible for her death: Richard Jordan.
Jordan, 79, the state’s oldest and longest serving death row inmate, has had multiple trials and execution dates set that have come and gone. He has continued to fight his death sentence through appeals and a lawsuit challenging the state’s use of lethal injection drugs. Each time, Edwina Marter’s family has testified in court and endured hearing about details of her death again.
Marter said he hasn’t made Jordan’s legal process a major focus in his life. He doesn’t have interest in witnessing his execution set for June 25 at Parchman, and neither does his father or brother. Instead, Marter’s uncle is expected to attend with his family.
But he still wants to see the sentence carried out and believes it should have happened sooner, not almost 50 years after the fact. He also believes Jordan’s execution would guarantee that he has no chance of leaving prison.
“I don’t want him to get what he wants,” said Marter, who is 59 and lives in Lafayette, Louisiana.
“If you want to spend the rest of your life in jail, then I would rather you not get that, and if that means you get executed, you get executed.”
High school yearbook picture of Edwina Marter, circa 1955. Credit: Courtesy of Eric MarterEdwina Marter grew up in Metairie, Louisiana, with two sisters and a brother. She went to college at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, where she met her husband Charles.
They started their family in Louisiana and later relocated to Gulfport, where Charles Marter worked as a banker. Their next son, Kevin, was born on the Coast.
In 1976, Jordan, a Vietnam veteran whose attorneys say suffers from PTSD, was desperate for money and thought of kidnapping someone and demanding money. He called the bank where Charles Marter was the commercial loan agent, and found the man’s address in the phonebook. Jordan went to their home, impersonating an electric company worker to get 34-year-old Edwina Marter to open the door.
Once she did, Jordan took her and left her younger son unarmed. He had her drive to the DeSoto National Forest where he shot her in the head when she tried to run away. Afterward, Jordan called Edwina’s husband to demand $25,000 in ransom money. He was not successful in getting it and was arrested.
Marter said his family moved back to Louisiana after his mother’s death and did not live in Mississippi again. His father did not mention his mother’s death.
“He did the best he could and the way he knew how to raise two boys by himself was to make sure we didn’t get in trouble,” Marter said.
Milestones like graduations, marriage and children came along. Marter became a banker like his father, and his brother joined the Army. Somewhere along the way, Marter said he wondered what it would be like if his mother were around for them.
“I don’t really try to dwell on it too much,” he said.
In 1976, Jordan went to trial and received a death sentence, only for it to be overturned multiple times due to questions about the legality of Mississippi’s death penalty law. It wasn’t until 1998 and four trials later that the sentence stuck.
Charles Marter, who is now 88, testified in several of the trials. Neither of the Marter sons attended the early trials, and the adults didn’t share much details with them. Once Eric Marter was older, he said he asked for more information about his mother’s death from his aunts and uncle.
With his own sons, Marter told them that their grandmother died when he was young. When they had questions as they were older, Marter shared some basics about what happened.
Over the years, Mississippi and Louisiana reporters have spoken with Edwina’s family members about Jordan’s multiple trials and death sentences, appeals and executions that have not been carried out.
In reflecting after Jordan’s 1998 conviction, Charles Marter told the Sun Herald that his family was elated about the first conviction, only to become less confident after multiple trials.
2001 story in The Sun Herald in Biloxi on the Edwina Marter murder case.Mary deGruy, Edwina’s older sister, praised the work of then-special prosecutor Joe Sam Owen, who worked on Jordan’s case for over 25 years.
“This is just something that stays on your mind forever,” she told the Sun Herald in 2001. “We just hope and pray that one day (Jordan) will die in prison. They just need to follow through with the death penalty.”
DeGruy, a distant relation to Andre deGruy, director of Capital Defense Counsel, died in 2022 at the age of 86.
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