A Missouri inmate was executed Tuesday for the 2003 murder, in what is believed to be the first execution of a transgender woman in the United States.
Amber McLaughlin, 49, was convicted of stalking her ex-girlfriend to death and then dumping her body in the Mississippi River in St. Louis. McLaughlin’s fate was sealed earlier Tuesday after Republican Gov. Mike Parsons denied a clemency request.
McLaughlin spoke quietly to a spiritual advisor at her side as she injected the lethal dose of pentobarbital. McLaughlin took two heavy breaths, then closed his eyes. He was pronounced dead a few minutes later.
“I’m sorry for what I did,” McLaughlin said in a final, written, statement. “I am a loving and caring person.”
A database on the website of the Death Penalty Information Center against the Death Penalty shows that 1,558 people have been executed since the death penalty was reinstated in the mid-1970s. All but 17 of those executed were men. The center said there are no known cases of an openly transgender prisoner being executed. McLaughlin began his transition nearly three years ago at the state prison in Potosi.
The clemency petition cited McLaughlin’s traumatic childhood and mental health issues, which the jury never heard about during his trial. A foster parent smeared feces on her face when she was a baby and her adoptive father used a stun gun on her, according to the petition. It cited severe depression that resulted in several suicide attempts, both as a child and as an adult.
The petition also included reports citing diagnoses of gender dysphoria, a condition that causes pain and other symptoms due to a disparity between a person’s gender identity and the gender they were assigned at birth. But McLaughlin’s sexual identity was not the “main focus” of the pardon request, said his attorney, Larry Komp.
In 2003, long before the transition, McLaughlin was in a relationship with Beverly Guenther. After they stopped dating, McLaughlin would show up at the suburban St. Louis office where the 45-year-old Guenther worked, sometimes hiding inside the building, according to court records. Guenther obtained a restraining order, and police officers sometimes drove to his car after work.
Guenther’s neighbors called the police on the night of November 20, 2003, when he failed to return home. Officers went to the office building, where they found a broken knife handle and a trail of blood next to her car. A day later, McLaughlin led police to a location near the Mississippi River in St. Louis, where the body had been dumped. Authorities say she was raped and stabbed repeatedly with a steak knife.
McLaughlin was convicted in 2006 of first-degree murder. A judge sentenced McLaughlin to death. Komp said Missouri and Indiana are the only states that allow a judge to sentence someone to death.
A court ordered a new sentencing hearing in 2016, but a federal appeals court panel reinstated the death penalty in 2021.
“McLaughlin terrorized Ms. Guenther during the final years of her life, but we hope her family and loved ones will finally find some peace,” Parsons said in a written statement after the execution.
McLaughlin began transitioning about three years ago, according to Jessica Hicklin, who spent 26 years in prison for drug-related murder before being released a year ago. Hicklin, now 43, sued the Missouri Department of Corrections, challenging a policy that prohibited hormone therapy for inmates who did not receive it before being incarcerated. She won the case in 2018 and became an advocate for other transgender inmates, including McLaughlin. McLaughlin did not receive hormone treatment, however, Komp said.
Hicklin described McLaughlin as a painfully shy person who came out of his shell after he decided to transition.
“He always had a smile and a dad joke,” Hicklin said. “If you talked to him, it was always with a dad joke.”
The Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates that there are 3,200 transgender inmates in the nation’s jails and prisons. Perhaps the most famous case of a transgender prisoner seeking treatment was that of Chelsea Manning, a former Army intelligence analyst who spent seven years in federal prison for leaking government documents to WikiLeaks until her sentence was commuted by President Barack Obama in 2017. The army agreed. Paying for hormone treatment for Manning in 2015.
In 2015, the U.S. Department of Justice wrote in a court filing that state prison officials must treat an inmate’s gender identity status the same way they treat other medical or mental health conditions, regardless of when the diagnosis was made.
The only woman executed in Missouri was Bonnie B. Headey, who was executed on December 18, 1953, for the kidnapping and murder of a 6-year-old boy. Heidi was killed in the gas chamber along with another kidnapper and murderer, Carl Austin Hall.
Nationally, 18 people were executed in 2022, including two in Missouri. Kevin Johnson was executed in November for the ambush killing of a Kirkwood, Missouri, police officer. Carman Deck was executed in May for the murders of James and Zelma Long during a robbery at their home in De Soto, Missouri.
Another Missouri inmate, Leonard Taylor, is scheduled to die on February 7 for killing his girlfriend and her three young children.