Loden set to die Dec. 14 for 2000 death of waitress
Dec. 10—TUPELO — In four days, an Itawamba County man will be executed for his actions one hot summer night two decades ago when he kidnapped, raped and killed a teenage waitress as she left her family's restaurant in the Dorsey community.
Thomas Edwin "Eddie" Loden, 58, is slated to die by lethal injection on Dec. 14 at 6 p.m. at the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman.
Loden, a 1982 graduate of Itawamba AHS, was a gunnery sergeant and head of the U.S. Marine Corps recruiting office in Vicksburg in the summer of 2000. He was on a 10-day leave on June 22 and visiting his invalid grandmother's Dorsey farm when he stopped by Comer's Restaurant on Highway 178.
Witnesses remembered Loden because the 35-year-old was flirting with 16-year-old Leesa Marie Gray.
That night, he flattened a tire on her car and waited. After 10:30 p.m. that Thursday night, as Gray was leaving work, Loden pulled up next to her stranded car and offered to help, saying he was a Marine and they did that kind of stuff. When he asked if she had ever thought about becoming a Marine, she said it was the last thing she would do, infuriating him.
"And that made me very upset," he later told investigators. "What she said pissed me off so violently, I told her to get in the van."
Over the next four hours, Loden sexually assaulted Gray, videotaping portions of the assault before eventually killing her by a combination of suffocation and manual strangulation.
During a confession a week after the crime, Loden admitted that after raping Gray the first time, he drove to his grandmother's house, leaving her bound inside the van while he went in to get a glass of water for Gray and the comforter off the guest room bed where he slept. He later used the comforter to cover Gray while he stopped to fill up the van with gas. Around 2:30 the following morning, he left her body inside the van and went into the house to sleep, putting the blood-stained comforter back on the bed.
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Loden told investigators he got up the next morning, saw Gray's body in the van, then went back in the house for a cup of coffee. He later went for a walk and when he returned, he saw a deputy sheriff's patrol car in the driveway, so he hid in the woods.
When Gray didn't return home from work, her family contacted authorities that night, and a massive search kicked off Friday morning. Police found the customized Ford van Loden had been driving around noon on June 23, 2000, on the family farm. After securing a search warrant, the van was transported to New Albany so the state crime scene investigation team could thoroughly examine it.
Gray's nude body was found under a folded down seat in the back of the van. Her hands and feet were bound.
Around 6:30 p.m. the same day, authorities found Loden on Charlie Donald Road in the Ballardsville community. According to court documents, Loden had the words "I'm sorry" carved into his chest and apparent self-inflicted lacerations on his wrists. Investigators later found a freshly dug grave in a well-hidden section of the grandmother's 175-acre farm.
Following the arrest, Loden was held in the Union County Jail for security reasons. After meeting with his wife on June 30, 2000, Loden waived his Miranda rights and confessed to a pair of Mississippi Bureau of Investigation officers. He said he killed the youth to preserve his public appearance.
"Looking back now, I wouldn't have released her because I would've lost the image of being the picture-perfect Marine," Loden said to investigators. "When I woke up, I saw the body. I knew I had done it."
An Itawamba County grand jury indicted Loden five months later. Despite the confession, the video tape and a mountain of physical evidence, he pleaded not guilty at his Nov. 21, 2000, arraignment.
Because of the extensive local coverage of the case, the judge approved a change of venue and prepared to move the trial to Rankin County. About a month before the trial was set to begin, Loden reversed his decision and pleaded guilty. He waived his rights to have a jury trial and to have a jury sentence him. He instructed his attorneys not to challenge any of the state's witnesses. Following the plea, Circuit Court Judge Thomas Gardner sentenced Loden to death plus an additional 150 years for the other felony counts.
Over the last two decades, Loden has repeatedly appealed both his conviction and the death sentence. Each bid for post-conviction relief has been denied. After years of legal inactivity, Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch asked the state supreme court to set an execution date in early October.
That prompted a flurry of activity by Loden's legal teams before both the Mississippi Supreme Court and in U.S. District Court in Jackson, where Loden was part of a separate lawsuit arguing that the state's lethal injection drugs were unconstitutional. Part of the latter arguments noted the issues Alabama faced in recent lethal injection execution attempts that prompted Governor Kay Ivy to issue a moratorium on all executions
On Nov. 17, the supreme court set Loden's execution for Dec. 14 in a split 7-2 decision. On Dec. 7, federal judge Henry Wingate said in a 31-page ruling, that he would not issue an injunction to delay Loden's execution. Wingate noted that the state did not have any problems in November 2021 when Mississippi executed David Cox.
