Amber McLaughlin, The First Transgender Execution in U.S. History | Last Meal —Missouri Death Row
After spending approximately 17 years on death row, Amber McLaughlin was executed by lethal injection on the evening of January 3rd, 2023 inside a quiet prison chamber in Bon Terre, Missouri. She was 49 years old. At exactly 6:51 p.m., she was pronounced dead. And with that, history was made.
Not for the reason you might expect. Not for the crime. Not for the victim. But for something far more controversial. Because in that moment, Amber McLaughlin became the first openly transgender person ever executed in the United States. But here’s what almost nobody talked about. The jury, the 12 people who sat through every piece of evidence, every witness, every detail of what happened, did not vote to give her the death penalty.
So, how did she end up on that gurney? That is the story we’re telling today. To understand what happened on January 3rd, 2023, you have to go back all the way back to the beginning. Because the story of Amber McLaughlin doesn’t start with a crime. It starts with a childhood that, by almost any measure, was a nightmare. Amber McLaughlin was born on January 13th, 1973.
Her biological mother was a prostitute. Her father was an alcoholic. By the time she was a toddler, she had already been placed into the foster care system. At the age of five, she was adopted by a family, the McLaughlins. On paper, it seemed like a fresh start. A new home. A new name. A chance. It was not that.
The adoptive father was a police officer. And according to court testimony and the clemency petition filed decades later, he’d beat the children with a paddle and a nightstick. He used a taser on them. The cabinets in the house were locked, so the children couldn’t access food. A foster parent reportedly rubbed feces in Amber’s face when she was a toddler.
Amber and her childhood friends had a name for the house they lived in. They called it the house of horrors. By the age of eight, an elementary school counselor was already writing that Amber’s psychological situation was, quote, extremely serious. By nine years old, she had been tested and found to have an IQ of 82 and had been diagnosed with ADHD.
Her clemency petition, filed in the final weeks before her execution, would later reveal diagnoses of borderline intellectual disability, brain damage, and fetal alcohol syndrome. Conditions that her legal team argued were never properly presented to the jury during her trial. And layered beneath all of this, quietly, secretly, painfully, was something else entirely.
Amber McLaughlin knew, from around the age of 12, that she was a woman. She would wear women’s clothing in private, hidden from her adoptive parents, knowing that if she was discovered, there would be consequences. In her own words, years later, “I knew then this is what I wanted to be. But I had to always do it secretly.
” She kept that secret for decades. And in the meantime, the trauma of her childhood began to show up in other ways. In 1992, when Amber was 19 years old and still living as Scott McLaughlin, she was convicted of sexual assault against a 14-year-old girl. She was placed on the sex offender registry. It was a serious crime, one that would follow her for the rest of her life and color how authorities, juries, and judges viewed everything that came after. Now, fast forward to 2002.
Amber, still living as Scott at this time, began a relationship with a woman named Beverly Gunther in St. Louis County, Missouri. Beverly was 45 years old. She had recently gone through a painful divorce. According to her family, she had been rebuilding her life, finding her independence, establishing herself professionally, rediscovering who she was.
By the spring of 2003, that relationship with McLaughlin had ended. And that is where this story turns dark. After the relationship ended, McLaughlin began showing up at Beverly Gunther’s workplace, a suburban St. Louis office building in the area of Earth City, Missouri. Court records show that she would sometimes hide inside the building waiting.
Beverly was frightened enough to obtain a restraining order. Police became involved. Officers began escorting Beverly to her car at the end of the work day. Beverly Gunther was trying to feel safe. She was trying to get back to normal. On the night of November 20th, 2003, she didn’t come home. Her neighbors noticed. They called the police.
Officers went to her office building and found what no one wanted to find, a trail of blood, a broken knife handle near her car, physical evidence in the parking lot consistent with a violent struggle. McLaughlin was located. And she led police to a spot along the Mississippi River in St. Louis where Beverly Gunther’s body had been dumped in the underbrush.
Prosecutors laid out what they believed happened that night. McLaughlin had driven to Beverly’s office and waited for her to leave work. She had forced Beverly to the ground in the parking lot. She had raped her. She had stabbed her repeatedly with a steak knife. She had dragged her body to her car, placed it in the back seat, and driven to the river.
The following day, the day after the murder, McLaughlin cleaned the inside of her car with bleach. Then, according to reports, she became increasingly agitated and asked a friend to take her to a hospital, citing a mental disorder. It was Beverly’s neighbors who noticed her absence first. It was the police who found the blood trail.
And it was McLaughlin who led them to the body. Beverly Gunther was 45 years old. Her brother Al Wetpol later described her as, in his words, “The best sister anybody could ask for, a charismatic woman, an animal lover, someone who paid her bills and easily won over friends. A woman who had been through the depression of a divorce and was finally starting to bring herself back on track.
” Her family’s grief did not stop on the day of McLaughlin’s execution. It had been going on for 20 years. McLaughlin was tried in 2005 and convicted in 2006 of first-degree murder, forcible rape, and armed criminal action. The conviction itself was not in dispute by the time appeals were filed. The evidence was overwhelming.
But what happened next is where this case becomes something else entirely. After finding McLaughlin guilty, the jury was asked to do one more thing, decide the sentence. Life in prison without parole or death. They could not agree. The jury deadlocked. Now, here’s where a critical legal detail comes in, one that shaped everything that followed.
In the vast majority of US states that have the death penalty, a deadlocked jury on sentencing means one outcome, life in prison. The jury’s inability to reach a unanimous verdict for death is treated as a de facto vote against it. Missouri is not one of those states. Missouri, along with Indiana, is one of only two states in the country where a judge has the legal authority to step in and impose the death sentence themselves when a jury cannot agree.
It is a rare provision. It is controversial. And in Amber McLaughlin’s case, it is the provision that determined whether she lived or died. Judge Steven H. Goldman handed down the death sentence on November 3rd, 2006. What makes this detail even more striking is this. Before becoming a judge, Goldman had worked as a prosecutor.
And according to reporting, he had helped draft the very statutory language that gave him the authority to override a deadlocked jury and impose death. There was another issue that McLaughlin’s legal team would spend the next decade fighting over. During the sentencing phase of the trial, McLaughlin’s defense attorney had promised in his opening statement that the jury would hear expert mental health testimony.
They would hear about the childhood abuse, the intellectual disability, the brain damage, the trauma that shaped every year of McLaughlin’s life. That testimony was pulled at the last minute. A decision was made above the trial attorney’s level to cancel the expert witness. The jury never heard it. In 2016, a federal district court judge ruled that this failure constituted ineffective assistance of counsel.
The death sentence was vacated. It was called a grievous error, one that the court found had prejudiced the outcome. For a moment, it appeared McLaughlin’s sentence might be changed to life in prison. Then the US Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit reversed that ruling and reinstated the death penalty. The US Supreme Court declined to hear the case and so more than 15 years after the crime, the execution was back on schedule.
While the legal battles played out over the course of a decade and a half, something significant was happening inside the walls of Potosi Correctional Center in Washington County, Missouri. Amber McLaughlin, who had spent her entire life suppressing who she truly was, began to transition. It started approximately 3 years before her execution.
She began receiving hormone therapy, which became available to transgender inmates in Missouri following a landmark 2018 lawsuit filed by another transgender prisoner named Jessica Hicklin. Hicklin had challenged the state’s refusal to provide gender-affirming care, arguing it constituted cruel and unusual punishment. She won.
That victory opened a door for McLaughlin. Hicklin, who became McLaughlin’s friend in prison, described the moment she was first introduced to Amber, not Scott. Now, this makes sense, Hicklin recalled thinking. I’ve known you for a long time. You didn’t necessarily seem very comfortable in your skin and now you’re smiling. McLaughlin, for her part, had said she knew she wanted to be a woman from the time she was 12 years old.
Decades of hiding, of fear, of abuse, of shame. And at the very end of her life inside a prison cell, she finally allowed herself to be who she had always been. Hicklin described her as a vulnerable person, someone who feared being victimized inside the prison system. A fear, she said, is unfortunately more common for transgender inmates.
But she also described McLaughlin as a mentor to other transgender prisoners, someone who used her own experience to help others navigate a system that was rarely built with them in mind. As the January 3rd execution date approached, a growing clemency campaign emerged in support of Amber McLaughlin, drawing backing from some unexpected voices.
A 27-page application filed on December 12th, 2022, detailed her history of childhood abuse, mental health diagnoses, and argued that critical evidence, originally promised to the jury but never presented, could have challenged the basis for her death sentence. The effort gained support from seven former Missouri judges, including retired Chief Justice Michael A.
Wolff, who argued she had effectively been denied a jury decision on her fate. Two members of Congress, Cori Bush and Emanuel Cleaver, also urged clemency, emphasizing that justice and the sanctity of life are not mutually exclusive. An online petition gathered thousands of signatures and dozens of protesters gathered outside the prison on the day of the execution.
But on January 3rd, 2023, Governor Mike Parson denied the request, stating that justice would be carried out. The execution proceeded as scheduled. On the morning of January 3rd, 2023, her last morning, Amber McLaughlin was served her final meal. She asked for a cheeseburger, french fries, a strawberry milkshake, and peanut M&M’s.
Two days earlier, on January 1st, New Year’s Day, McLaughlin had submitted her final written statement to the Missouri Department of Corrections. It read, “I am sorry for what I did. I am a loving and caring person.” She signed it as Scott. Her legal name had never been formally changed. In her death warrant, in the prison records, in the governor’s post-execution statement, she was referred to by her birth name.
Governor Parson’s official statement used that name throughout. Her attorneys and supporters used Amber. At 6:39 p.m. on January 3rd, 2023, the lethal injection process began at the Eastern Reception, Diagnostic, and Correctional Center in Bonne Terre, Missouri. McLaughlin lay in a small, white room on a hospital-style bed.
A strap visible beneath the white linen held her in place. Her spiritual advisor, a woman named Lauren Bennett, sat by her side. Witnesses in attendance included state representatives, members of the media, two individuals representing Beverly Gunther’s family, and two individuals there on McLaughlin’s behalf. None of the witnesses chose to speak to the press afterward.
Five milligrams of pentobarbital were administered. Bennett appeared to speak quietly to McLaughlin, to sing to her. McLaughlin breathed heavily, once, twice. Her eyes closed. At 6:51 p.m., she was declared dead. Amber McLaughlin became the first openly transgender person executed in the United States. She was the 17th woman executed since the US Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976.
She was the second woman executed in the state of Missouri, the first since Bonnie Heady in 1953, who had been put to death for the kidnapping and murder of a 6-year-old child. She was 49 years old. In the weeks and days surrounding the execution, Beverly Gunther’s family watched as the coverage focused almost entirely on Amber McLaughlin, on her identity, on the historic nature of the execution, on the clemency campaign.
Her younger brother, Al Wedepohl, was one of the two people who witnessed the execution, specifically because he wanted someone there to represent Beverly, to be present for her, because in his view, she had been lost in the story. He was right to feel that way. Beverly Gunther was 45 years old when she was killed.
She was rebuilding her life after a difficult divorce. She had been afraid, afraid enough to get a restraining order, afraid enough to need a police escort to her car at night. She had been trying to protect herself. She didn’t make it home on November 20th, 2003. Her family has described the shopping trips they haven’t been able to take with her, the lunch dates that never happened, the phone calls that stopped, the pedicures, the weddings, the holidays, all of it gone.
An absence that has stretched for more than 20 years. One family member said simply that no one should die the way Beverly died. They made clear that while the death penalty doesn’t bring Beverly back, they believed McLaughlin needed to be held accountable. They were relieved when the clemency request was denied. Their grief is not a footnote.
It is the foundation of this entire story. Amber McLaughlin was executed on January 3rd, 2023. She had lived a life marked by severe trauma, serious crime, a historic legal battle, and a personal identity she was only able to fully claim in the final years of her life. Beverly Gunther was murdered on November 20th, 2003.
She had been rebuilding her life, trying to feel safe, trying to move forward. She deserved to make it home that night. The state of Missouri said it delivered justice on January 3rd, 2023. Whether you agree with that conclusion depends on what you believe justice looks like. That’s a question this case will leave open for a very long time.
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