Supreme Court sets December execution date for Itawamba County man
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Nov. 17—JACKSON — The Mississippi Supreme Court said an Itawamba County man who has been on Death Row for two decades should be executed in four weeks.
In an order filed Thursday, the state's highest court ruled 7-2 that Thomas Edwin "Eddie" Loden, 58, should be put to death Dec. 14 at 6 p.m.
"After due consideration the court finds that Loden has exhausted all state and federal remedies for purposes of setting an execution date," wrote Chief Justice Michael Randolph. In addition to Randolph, justices Dawn Beam, Robert Chamberlain, Josiah Coleman, Kenneth Griffis, David Ishee and James Maxwell voted to set the execution date. Justices Leslie King and James Kitchens voted to deny.
After years of inactivity in the case, on Oct. 4, Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch asked the court to proceed with setting a date. Loden's attorneys countered, saying because Loden was part of a joint federal lawsuit challenging the state's lethal injection protocol, the high court should not set an execution date.
Fitch noted that the federal lawsuit did not contest Loden's conviction or death sentence, only the three-drug cocktail used in lethal injections.
Loden pleaded guilty more than two decades ago to capital murder, rape and four counts of sexual battery in the June 22, 2000, death of Leesa Marie Gray, a 16-year-old waitress at a Dorsey restaurant. Following his plea, Circuit Court Judge Thomas Gardner sentenced Loden to death plus an additional 150 years for the other felony counts.
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 and visiting his invalid grandmother's Dorsey farm when he visited Comer's Restaurant on Highway 178 on June 22.
After spotting the waitress, he allegedly flattened a tire on her car and waited for her to leave work after 10:30 that Thursday night. He 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.
When Gray didn't return home from work, her family contacted authorities, and a massive search kicked off Friday morning. Police found the customized Ford van Loden had been driving around noon 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, Loden was found 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.
After an Itawamba County grand jury indicted Loden, he pleaded not guilty to all charges at his arraignment. Because of the extensive local coverage of the case, Judge Gardner approved a change of venue and said he intended to move the trial to Rankin County.
About a month before the trial was set to begin, Loden changed his mind and pleaded guilty. He did not challenge any of the state's witnesses and was sentenced to death.
Over the last two decades, Loden has tried to appeal both his conviction and the death sentence. Each bid for post-conviction relief has been denied.
Mississippi resumed executions last fall after a nine-year hiatus. David Neal Cox, who was convicted of killing his estranged wife and sexually assaulting his step-daughter, died by lethal injection Nov. 17, 2021. Before Cox, the last execution was Gary Carl Simmons Jr. in June 2012, for the murder and dismemberment of Jeffery Wolfe over a drug debt.
