An attention-grabbing headline – Amber McLaughlin could be the first woman executed by Missouri since 1976. So what crime has she committed? Well, she brutally raped and murdered a woman she used to live with. Raped? Yes indeed. She is, of course, a man:
On November 20, 2003, 45-year-old Beverly Guenther was abducted outside the office where she worked in Earth City, Missouri. She was stabbed and raped, her lifeless body left in the Patch neighborhood in south St. Louis, near the banks of the Mississippi River.
About a month prior, a 30-year-old then known as Scott McLaughlin had been charged with burglarizing Guenther’s Moscow Mills home. The two had been a couple until that summer, but Guenther had told others in recent months that she’d come to fear McLaughlin. She had taken out a restraining order.
Soon after Guenther’s neighbors reported her missing, police interrogated McLaughlin, who led them to Guenther’s body.
After a four-day-long trial in 2006, the jury found McLaughlin guilty of first-degree murder, and the judge ruled McLaughlin’s crime warranted death. McLaughlin is now scheduled to die on Tuesday, January 3 — the second in a trio of St. Louis County defendants receiving execution dates this winter.
A notable feature of the article, from a publicly-funded US website, is the sympathy shown to the killer. While in prison he come out as trans – under the influence, it seems, of a trans campaigner who, in 2018, "won a landmark transgender-rights case against the Missouri Department of Corrections, allowing her and other transgender inmates access to hormone therapy".
In a brief phone interview, McLaughlin says that when she was around 12 years old she started wearing women’s clothing, though she had to do so away from her parents and guardians.
“I knew then this is what I wanted to be,” she says. “But I had to always do it secretly.” …
Over the phone, McLaughlin conducts her side of the conversation in short, soft-spoken replies.
About the death penalty, she says, “It’s cruel and unusual punishment. Nobody deserves to be executed like this.”
About the murder of Beverly Guenther, she says, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for it to happen.”
She adds, “I think if I’d been my true self, I probably would not have been there.”
Hmm. The murdered women had been so scared of this McLaughlin that she'd taken out a restraining order – clearly with good cause. He raped and stabbed her to death, but "I didn't mean for it to happen".
And he's now a nice softly-spoken woman. If only he'd been his true self at the time…
Mick Hartley 
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