JUST IN: The FIRST Transgender Ever EXECUTED In U.S. History — R*ped & Murdered Her Girlfriend

January 3rd, 2023. Inside the Eastern Reception Diagnostic and Correctional Center in Bonne Terre, Missouri, a 49-year-old woman is walked into an execution chamber. A spiritual advisor moves quietly to her side. A needle is prepared. The room is still. The warden asks if she has any final words. She does not speak them out loud.

Instead, she has left a written statement. Two sentences, 12 words. The lethal dose of pentobarbital is administered. She breathes heavily. Once, twice. Her eyes close. At 6:51 in the evening, she is pronounced dead. >> Tonight, shortly after 6:00, Amber McLaughlin became the first transgender person in the country to die by lethal injection.

>> Here is what makes this story impossible to look away from. The jury assigned to decide her fate could not agree that she deserved to die. They were deadlocked, split, divided. In 48 other states across America, that deadlock means life in prison, not death. Yet, she was still walked into that chamber.

 On this night, Amber McLaughlin became the first openly transgender person executed in the history of the United States. Only the 18th woman put to death since 1976. But, the most gripping part of this story has nothing to do with that chamber. It goes back 20 years to a quiet Earth City parking lot, the end of a relationship, and what a broken protective order could not prevent. Welcome to Red Mark Files.

Hit that subscribe button and like this video because this channel does not shy away from the cases that matter. And this one? This one absolutely matters. Today, we are going deep. Childhood, courtrooms, and death row. Stay with me because what comes next will shake you. Let’s talk about who Beverly Guenther.

She was 45 years old. She lived in the St. Louis, Missouri area. She had a job she showed up to every single day. She had a routine. She had a life that was entirely her own. Beverly worked at an office in the Earth City area, just outside St. Louis. She was professional. She was dependable. The kind of person who kept her head down, did her work, and went home.

Nothing about her life was chaotic. Nothing about it was complicated until someone else made it that way. People who knew Beverly described her as grounded, stable, a woman who did not need drama and did not go looking for it. She had no children. Her world was built around quiet, everyday living, and for a long time, that was exactly what she had.

 In 2002, a person named Scott McLaughlin entered her life. At that time, Amber had not yet transitioned and was living as a man. The two began a relationship. From the outside, it looked like any other couple finding their way, but by spring of 2003, Beverly had seen enough. She ended the relationship. That was her right. She made a clean decision and she stood by it.

 What she could not have known was what that decision would cost her. Beverly did not want trouble. She did not go looking for conflict. She simply wanted her life back, and that should have been the end of the story. Beverly did everything the system told her to do. She filed reports. She got the order. She went to work every day. And that That last part is exactly where everything went wrong.

 Amber McLaughlin was born on January 13th, 1973 in Missouri. At birth, she was named Scott A. McLaughlin and lived as a male for most of her life before her incarceration. From the very first day, life dealt her a brutal hand. Her biological mother was a sex worker. Her father battled alcoholism. Before she was old enough to understand any of it, she was abandoned and placed into the foster care system.

 What happened next is documented, not alleged, in court records and her clemency petition. In one foster placement, a caregiver rubbed feces in her face. She was a toddler. At age five, she was adopted by the McLaughlin family. A couple who also took in other children. It should have been a fresh start. It was not. Amber and her childhood friends had a name for that house.

 They called it the house of horrors. Her adoptive father was a police officer. He used a taser, a nightstick, and a paddle on the children. The kitchen cabinets were locked so the children could not access food freely. By age nine, Amber’s struggles at school had become impossible to ignore. She underwent intelligence testing.

 The results were alarming. A full-scale IQ of 82, diagnoses of ADHD, mild neurological brain damage, and learning disabilities. Doctors also noted early depressive features in a nine-year-old child. Later evaluations added fetal alcohol syndrome and chronic depression to that list. She attempted to end her own life more than once.

 Then, in 1992, Amber was convicted of sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl. She was placed on the sex offender registry. That conviction was not a minor detail. It was the first documented act of sexual violence, 11 years before Beverly Gwenther. Every system that was supposed to catch this, child protective services, the courts, the pipeline that should have treated her, failed at every turn.

 And Beverly Gwenther would pay the price for every single one of those failures. By spring of 2003, Beverly was done. She had ended the relationship cleanly and completely. For most people, that would have been the end of it. For Amber, it was just the beginning. Amber did not walk away. She kept showing up, uninvited, unwanted.

 The people around Beverly began to notice. The behavior was not subtle. It was persistent, targeted, and deeply unsettling to those who witnessed it. Then came October 27th, 2003. Amber broke into Beverly’s home. Court records confirm the arrest. This was not a misunderstanding. This was not a mistake.

 This was a criminal act against a woman who had already said goodbye. Beverly moved fast. She went to court and obtained a protective order against Amber. It was now a legal matter. It was on record. Amber was not allowed near Beverly, and Beverly had the paperwork to prove it. but the order did not stop her.

 Amber began appearing at Beverly’s workplace, not once, multiple times, in direct violation of an active court order. Beverly reported every incident. The paper trail grew thicker with each filing. Here is what makes that so devastating. Beverly’s workplace was supposed to be the one place she was safe. It was structured. It was public. It was surrounded by colleagues and routine.

 It was her professional ground, the one space where her personal nightmare could not follow her. Amber followed her there anyway. A protective order is a civil document. It carries weight on paper, but enforcement depends on action. And in cases where a person refuses to stop, that gap between paper and protection can cost someone everything.

 Beverly had the restraining order. She had filed the reports. She had done everything right. What Amber did next, right outside Beverly’s office, is something that still shocks the people who worked that case. Let us be very clear about one thing. Amber acted alone. There were no accomplices. No one else involved. No outside help. What happened to Beverly Gunther was the work of one person, planned, targeted, and carried out in cold blood, according to prosecution arguments at trial.

 The plan was straightforward and devastating. Wait outside. Intercept Beverly when she was alone. Strike when she had no way out. There was no money involved. No insurance policy. No third party with something to gain. This was about one thing only, a woman who had chosen to leave, and a person who refused to accept that choice.

Prosecutors called it depraved. The evidence agreed. All right, let us take just a breath here. If this case is already hitting hard, drop a comment below. I read every single one. And if you have not subscribed yet, now is the time, because we are just getting into the heart of this story. Let us keep going. November 20th, 2003, a Thursday.

Beverly Gunther finishes her shift at the Earth City office and gets ready to leave. It is after hours. The office complex is winding down. The parking lot is quiet. Most people have already gone home. Beverly walks out. She heads toward her truck. She does not know that Amber is already there.

 Court records establish that Amber was positioned outside Beverly’s workplace that night. She had not stumbled upon the location. She had not shown up by chance. She was there because she had chosen to be there. She was waiting. Beverly steps into the parking area. The encounter begins. What follows is documented in court records and laid out in detail by prosecutors at trial.

 Amber attacks Beverly in or near the parking lot. She stabs her repeatedly. The violence is not brief. It is sustained. Blood spatters are found across the parking area. More blood is found inside Beverly’s truck. Evidence of a brutal and extended assault in a place where Beverly should have been completely safe.

 Prosecutors also established at trial that Amber raped Beverly that night. Forcible rape was among the three charges she was ultimately convicted on. This was not a moment of sudden rage. According to the prosecution, it reflected something far more deliberate. Something the jury would later describe using one specific legal term, depravity of mind.

 That evening Beverly’s neighbors grow worried. She has not returned. Something is off. They contact the police. Officers respond and head to Beverly’s workplace. What they find stops them cold. A broken knife handle near Beverly’s car. A trail of blood running through the office building. Blood in the parking lot. Blood inside Beverly’s truck. No Beverly.

 Detectives begin processing the scene immediately. The crime scene is preserved. The evidence is documented piece by piece. Officers work through the night trying to understand what happened and where Beverly is. She is not there because Amber had moved her. At some point after the attack, Amber transported Beverly’s body away from the scene.

 And here is the detail that would become one of the most significant facts in the entire case. When police needed to find Beverly, it was Amber who led them to her. Court records confirm it. Amber directed police to a location near the Mississippi River in St. Louis. That is where Beverly’s body had been dumped. She knew exactly where Beverly was because she had put her there.

 That single fact, Amber leading police to the body, became part of the permanent legal and factual record of this case. What happened in that courtroom 2 years later, the verdict, the jury, the sentence, is something legal scholars still talk about today. And once you hear it, you will understand exactly why.

 After November 20th, 2003, Amber did not run. She did not leave Missouri. She did not turn herself in. She did not call for help. According to the record, she went on while Beverly’s neighbors filed a missing person’s report, while officers processed a blood-soaked parking lot, while detectives worked through the night trying to piece together what had happened to a woman who simply had not come home.

 At the time of the murder and in the immediate aftermath, Amber was still living as Scott McLaughlin. Her gender transition would not begin until years later during her incarceration. Beverly’s family and loved ones were left to absorb an unbearable reality. A woman they loved had been taken violently.

 Her body had been left near a river by someone she had once trusted with her heart. Years later, Governor Mike Parson would reference them directly in his clemency denial. Ms. Guenther’s family and loved ones deserve peace. They had waited a long time for that peace. St. Louis County law enforcement took charge of the investigation immediately.

 The crime scene at the Earth City office complex gave detectives a significant amount to work with. The blood trail began inside the office building, moved through the parking area, and continued into Beverly’s truck. It was extensive. It was consistent. And it told the story of a violent, sustained attack.

 Not a brief struggle. Not an accident. A prolonged assault carried out against a woman who had no way to escape. Amber was not a stranger to this investigation. On October 27th, 2003, less than a month before the murder, she had been arrested for breaking into Beverly’s home. A protective order had been issued directly after.

 Law enforcement already had her name on record as a documented threat to Beverly Guenther. That history made her an immediate person of interest from the moment Beverly was reported missing. But documented history alone does not close a case. Prosecutors from the St. Louis County office took the case.

 At the time, the county’s top prosecutor was Robert McCulloch. office was aggressive in pursuing the most serious charges available. St. Louis County had developed a well-documented as the sixth most executing county in the entire nation. And McCulloch’s office was largely responsible for that record. Amber was taken into custody and formally charged with first-degree murder, forcible rape, and armed criminal action.

 Prosecutors also factored in her 1992 sexual assault conviction and her status as a registered sex offender. This was not her first time in the system, and the system was paying close attention. There was no single dramatic revelation that broke this case open. No surprise witness. No hidden camera. No confession handed to detectives in an interview room.

 What built the case against Amber McLaughlin was something far more solid. A convergence of evidence, each piece connecting directly to the next. Start with the broken knife handle found near Beverly’s car. It was consistent with a weapon used in a prolonged violent stabbing. It did not get there on its own. Then the blood inside Beverly’s truck.

 That evidence established direct violent contact near the vehicle. Combined with the blood trail across the parking area and through the office building, it confirmed what had happened and where it had started. Then there was Amber’s documented history of showing up at Beverly’s workplace in violation of an active protective order.

 That pattern was already on record before the murder. It established targeted, deliberate harassment, not random contact, not coincidence. And then, the body. Amber led police to Beverly near the Mississippi River. In a courtroom, that fact carries an enormous amount of weight. It is called consciousness of guilt.

 It means the person standing before the court knew exactly where the victim was because they put her there. No innocent person walks investigators to a disposal site. The charges were confirmed. First-degree murder, forcible rape, and armed criminal action. All three together. The forcible rape charge alongside the murder charge elevated the severity of the crime significantly, both in the eyes of prosecutors and later in the minds of the jury.

 Amber was held pending trial. The case was tight. The evidence was layered, and it all pointed in one direction. Her defense team had a difficult road ahead. But just how difficult and just how badly they would handle it was a reckoning that still lay years down the line. 2006, 3 years after Beverly Guenther was killed in that Earth City parking lot, Amber McLaughlin finally stood trial.

 The guilt phase was not a close call. The jury convicted Amber on all three counts. First-degree murder, forcible rape, and armed criminal action. The evidence was layered, consistent, and damning. The deliberation on guilt was decisive. There was no ambiguity in that courtroom about what Amber had done. The controversy came next, and it has never fully gone away.

 Missouri law contains a provision that exists in only one other state in the entire country, Indiana. If a jury cannot unanimously agree on the death penalty, the trial judge steps in. The judge alone decides between death and life without parole. The jury deadlocked. 12 people sat through every piece of evidence and could not reach a unanimous decision that Amber McLaughlin should die.

 Half of them, or enough of them, were not convinced. In 48 other states, that deadlock ends the question. The answer becomes life in prison. Not in Missouri. The trial judge imposed the death penalty. The jury had found one aggravating factor, depravity of mind. A legal term meaning the crime was particularly brutal or wantonly vile.

 That single finding was enough for the judge to act. But here is what that jury never heard. A psychiatrist named Dr. Caruso had documented evidence that Amber was experiencing a major depressive episode at the time of the murder. That testimony, which could have directly countered the depravity of mind finding by presenting a mitigating explanation for her state of mind, was never placed before the jury.

 Her trial attorneys did not present it. They did not call Dr. Caruso. They left that evidence sitting unused. That failure would define the next 17 years of legal proceedings. In 2016, a federal judge vacated Amber’s death sentence entirely, ruling that her trial attorneys had been constitutionally ineffective for failing to present that psychiatric testimony.

 Then, in August of 2021, the United States Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit reversed that ruling. The death sentence was reinstated. Trial, vacatur, reinstatement, 15 years of legal battles, all circling back to the same question. Not whether Amber was guilty, she was. The jury confirmed that without hesitation.

 The question was whether the process that put her on death row was functioning the way it was supposed to. Robert McCulloch, the St. Louis County prosecutor who handled this case, would later become one of the most controversial figures in Missouri legal history. Under his tenure, six individuals from St.

 Louis County alone ended up on death row. His broader record, and the decisions he made in other high-profile cases, drew sustained public scrutiny for years after this trial concluded. From 2006 to 2023, 17 years. That is how long Amber McLaughlin spent on death row at Potosi Correctional Center, a men’s facility located near St. Louis.

 17 years of legal battles, appeals, reversals, and waiting, all while housed in a prison that did not match who she was becoming. Around 2019 and 2020, approximately 3 years before her execution, Amber began her gender transition inside a men’s prison on death row, in one of the most difficult environments imaginable for a transgender person to navigate, a fellow inmate named Jessica Hicklin became a critical source of support.

 Hicklin had won a landmark lawsuit in 2018 against the Missouri Department of Corrections, successfully challenging a policy that had denied hormone therapy to inmates who were not already receiving it before they were incarcerated. That legal victory opened a door, and Hicklin helped Amber walk through it. She guided Amber through the paperwork, helped her access proper treatment, and offered practical advice about staying safe inside the facility.

 Hicklin described Amber as shy, quiet, deeply afraid of being victimized, a fear that is well documented among transgender people in correctional settings. Amber adopted her name. She began receiving treatment. Advocates recognized her as a transgender woman, but officially, on her death warrant and in every prison record, her name remained Scott A.

McLaughlin. She was never legally transferred to a women’s facility. She remained where she had always been, in a men’s prison, until the very end. Her attorney submitted a clemency petition to Governor Mike Parson. They argued the deadlocked jury, her childhood trauma, her brain damage, fetal alcohol syndrome, depression, intellectual disability, and the failure of her trial counsel to present mitigating psychiatric evidence.

 Attorney Larry Comp called her execution a continuation of every systemic failure that had defined her life from childhood onward. On January 3rd, 2023, the same day as her scheduled execution, Governor Parson denied clemency. He called Amber a violent criminal and stated that Beverly’s family deserved peace.

 That evening, Amber was transferred to the Eastern Reception, Diagnostic, and Correctional Center in Bonne Terre, Missouri. Her last meal was a cheeseburger, french fries, a strawberry milkshake, and peanut M&M’s. A spiritual advisor stood at her side as the lethal dose of pentobarbital was administered. Amber spoke quietly. She breathed heavily a few times.

 Her eyes closed. At 6:51 in the evening, she was pronounced dead. She was 49 years old. Her final written statement contained just two sentences. I am sorry for what I did. I’m a loving and caring person. Amber McLaughlin became the first openly transgender person executed in United States history and only the 18th woman put to death since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976.

 Every headline about this case led with history. The first, the transgender, the execution. Almost none of them led with her name, Beverly Guenther, 45 years old. She worked in Earth City. She had a routine, a life, and a future. It was taken from her in a parking lot by someone she had once trusted.

 Governor Parson promised her family peace. Whether peace and justice feel the same thing, that is a question only they can answer. Amber’s final words claim she was a loving and caring person. Beverly’s empty chair is the only response that matters. A child protection system that looked away, a jury that could not decide, a judge who decided anyway, a governor who said no.

Every single system had a moment to change what happened to Beverly and to Amber. Not one of them did. What moment in this case hit you the hardest? Drop it in the comments. I genuinely want to know. If this story moved you, please like this video and subscribe. Next week we are covering a case that has never been told this way.

 You do not want to miss it.