After a half-century of legal logjam, will killer of Coast banker’s wife face execution June 25?

• Columnist Sid Salter says there is still the unanswered matter of serving justice for the Marter family – for Edwina.

In a family crypt in the storied and elaborate St. Louis Cemetery No. 3 in New Orleans, the remains of murder victim Edwina de Gruy Marter rest alongside those of her parents, Edwin Joseph Dufouchar de Gruy and Emelie Carrie “Tootsie” Melancon de Gruy, and her older sister, Mary Agnes “Myrn” de Gruy. 

The St. Louis Cemetery No. 3 in New Orleans, like Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, is a place of beauty and solitude, but also one of regret and sorrow. In both venues, the ornate crypts inevitably succumb to time and decay. Those feelings are even more profound with the knowledge that the crypts often eternally house families. 

In the findings of several criminal court juries and appeals court judges, it was Richard Gerald Jordan’s fevered plot to kidnap and hold Edwina Marter – the mother of two small boys – that assigned her to the family crypt. 

Investigators say Edwina, then 34 and the wife of successful Gulf National Bank vice president Charles “Chuck” Marter, was kidnapped from their home and later murdered on a rural Harrison County road in the DeSoto National Forest on Jan. 12, 1976 by Richard Gerald Jordan, 29. Jordan, then 29, was an unemployed shipyard worker who had last worked at Morgan City, Louisiana, but he graduated from high school at Petal and was living in Hattiesburg. 

Jordan was a Vietnam veteran who served three tours in the U.S. Army in that conflict, part of it as an Army helicopter “door gunner.” He would later say his military service put his life in trauma. Whatever the cause, Jordan life spiraled and he was by his own admission desperate for money. 

Putting the ransom plot in motion, he called the bank and asked for someone to help him with a loan. The name recommended was Chuck Marter. Jordan testified that after the call, he used a phone book to look up the banker’s address, then went to the house posing as a utility worker when Edwina answered the door. 

Chuck Marter paid a $25,000 ransom for his wife’s release, but prosecutors said the evidence showed that his wife had already been murdered on the National Forest road. Now 49 years after Jordan’s plot disintegrated his life, Mr. Marter is 89 years old. 

Jordan was convicted of capital murder in Mrs. Marter’s death in Jackson County in 1976. That began 49 years of the inmate riding the appellate elevator up and down first in state court and then again in the federal courts. Changes in death penalty law and the normal gave Jordan multiple trials in front of multiple juries on a set of facts in which his guilt or innocence was never seriously called into question. 

Mississippi, after yet another federal appeal, set an execution for Jordan for June 25. His supporters and death penalty opponents are fighting hard on his behalf. There is no certitude that Jordan’s execution will take place on June 25. 

At 79 and after 49 years on Death Row – and taxpayer expenditures for his care, feeding and appeals of millions based on national averages – Jordan makes a sympathetic figure to some. His family and supporters even made a video appeal seeking clemency in which they argue that he should not be executed based on his military service, his status as a contributing prison “trusty” worker, and the positive changes his family sees in him after 49 years behind bars. 

As one who has witnessed executions, there are some certainties. Even the most hardened inmate has someone who loves them and fights for them. I respect that. Jordan served his country. I respect that. People have valid religious and moral objections to the death penalty. I get that. 

But nothing in Jordan’s video changes the fact that Edwina Marter has been dead in her family crypt in New Orleans for as long as Jordan has been alive in his prison cell at Parchman. There has been no “Perry Mason moment” in the appeals process, no piece of evidence or prosecutorial mistake unveiled that changes the facts of the case. 

The death penalty is utilized as a form of criminal punishment in twenty-seven states including Mississippi. There may come a day that Mississippi voters see fit to change the law. But June 25 is not that day, and there is still the unanswered matter of serving justice for the Marter family – for Edwina.