Mississippi carried out the execution of Richard Gerald Jordan, a 79-year-old Vietnam veteran who had spent nearly five decades on death row for the 1976 kidnapping and murder of Edwina Marter. Jordan was the longest-serving inmate in the state’s history to receive capital punishment.

A man who spent decades on death row was executed yesterday after kidnapping and killing a banker’s wife in the 1970s. Richard Gerald Jordan, 79, was a Vietnam veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder. He died by lethal injection at Mississippi State Penitentiary, becoming the longest-serving man on death row in the state.