How a 'trans panic' defense changed the outcome of two murders

The year 2026 marks the 40th anniversary of the murders of D. F. McLaughlin and Lorean Quincy Weaver, who were killed by the same man in Syracuse, New York. While Ted Botha’s The Girl With the Crooked Nose (2008) and Michael Capuzzo’s The Murder Room (2010) chronicle the forensic work that solved Weaver’s case, McLaughlin’s homicide remains overlooked—even though her death played an important role in bringing the killer to justice.

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D. F. McLaughlin was a trans woman who relied on survival sex in a time just before the groundbreaking civil rights victories that transformed trans life in America. While McLaughlin enjoyed a supportive relationship with her family—who accepted her gender expression—there was little mainstream awareness of trans people in 1986. Soon, the public would flock to movie theaters to watch Paris Is Burning, elect the first trans politician in Massachusetts, and demand justice following the 1993 murders of Brandon Teena, Phillip DeVine, and Lisa Lambert. While McLaughlin’s murder received minimal attention in 1986, her tragic killing remains a salient case study of the dangers of transphobia.

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In the early hours of October 1, 1986, Roland Patnode, a 23-year-old construction worker with a prior soliciting arrest, left a Syracuse bar at 3:00 a.m. and drove to a downtown red-light district. McLaughlin, one of three women working that night, signaled Patnode by raising her arm. As Patnode stopped, his brake lights illuminated his red 1973 Chevrolet pickup, distinguished by a black hood stripe and “CHEVY” in reflective lettering across the top of the windshield.

McLaughlin climbed into Patnode’s truck and directed him to an empty parking lot. Patnode would later claim that when he “discovered” McLaughlin was trans, he “got real mad.” He began punching her, grabbed a gravity knife from her purse, and stabbed her three times. To escape, McLaughlin flung open her door and leapt out of the parked truck.

The other women, Rosemary Scott and Melissa Cox, heard McLaughlin screaming and ran to the parking lot. They witnessed Patnode shoving McLaughlin into his pickup and sprinted. Patnode jumped into his truck and locked the doors. Inside, McLaughlin slumped in her seat, soaked in blood. As Patnode sped off, Scott and Cox jotted down the license plate and flagged down a police officer.

Patnode sped east into the farmland of Madison County. With McLaughlin dead beside him, he stopped to nap in his truck. When he woke, he was near a farm where he had installed roofing and siding. Patnode drove onto the property and removed McLaughlin from his truck. He took her wallet from her purse, kept her credit card, and buried her beneath the barn floor. Then he dropped her wallet in a nearby field. Anticipating a police investigation, Patnode left for North Carolina, but used McLaughlin’s credit card on the drive south, leaving a trail of receipts.

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Six days later, a man walking his dog found McLaughlin’s blood-stained wallet. Syracuse police—following McLaughlin’s credit card purchases—sent a teletype description of Patnode to southeastern states. Charlotte police arrested Patnode as he was using the credit card.

Back in Syracuse, the district attorney charged Patnode with second-degree murder and criminal possession of a weapon. With an eight-page confession and evidence linking Patnode to the murder, the case seemed indisputable. However, defense attorney James Meggesto turned the tables on the prosecution by raising a “trans panic” defense. (The trans panic defense is an antiquated legal strategy that “heterosexual” men continue to use in courtrooms that claims that a victim’s gender provoked their lethal violence.) Meggesto had used a gay panic defense in 1979 to claim that a defendant’s killing of a Catholic bishop was spurred by a “homosexual advance.” Meggesto, who took a more aggressive approach in this case, claimed Patnode killed McLaughlin in self-defense after she bit his hand and refused to leave the truck.

However, Meggesto’s argument seemed implausible. Patnode was 6-foot-4 and 230 pounds—a foot taller and 100 pounds heavier than McLaughlin—and a former high school wrestling and football star. Moreover, McLaughlin’s screaming refuted the claim that she bit Patnode’s hand. Finally, Patnode was not in immediate danger. Despite the claim that McLaughlin refused to leave the truck, both Patnode and McLaughlin’s friends described how she desperately tried to escape, only to have Patnode drag her back into the pickup.

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Meggesto overcame inconsistencies in his defense by appealing to the jurors’ transphobic biases. First, he portrayed McLaughlin as a “sleazy transvestite” who dressed in a black and white gown to purposefully deceive a “poor country boy.” Next, he characterized Patnode’s lethal violence as a normal and understandable masculine response to his feelings of “anger” and “revulsion” at having “engaged in a sexual act with a man.” In a final blow, Meggesto blamed the “wretched, confused” McLaughlin for the murder, telling jurors that “when this slimy, seamy side of society continues to ply its trade in that fashion, it is their own doing that precipitates … [these] … violent acts.”

Meggesto’s trans panic defense succeeded. The jury acquitted Patnode of second-degree murder and convicted him of second-degree manslaughter, finding that he had acted recklessly, but without intent to kill. The judge sentenced Patnode to two to six years in prison, far less than the fifteen-year maximum.

In press interviews, McLaughlin’s mother denounced the verdict. Rejecting the trans panic defense, she stated that Patnode was “not better than my … [child].” She emphasized that Patnode would rejoin his family in a few years, while she had lost her child forever.

However, the justice system would have a second chance to confront Patnode for an earlier murder. Approximately four weeks before killing McLaughlin, Patnode picked up Lorean Quincy Weaver, a 26-year-old cisgender woman, in the same red-light district. After their “date,” Patnode demanded a second sex act. When Weaver refused, he tried to rape her. “She kept trying to fight me off, but I was much bigger than her,” Patnode later confessed. “I … grabbed her around the neck … and started squeezing. I couldn’t stop … I was feeling so angry. She was trying to get out of my grip … I don’t remember how long I squeezed her neck … but she slowly stopped moving, and she went limp.” When Weaver regained consciousness, Patnode caved in her face with a framing hammer. He drove to a rural area, sexually assaulted her corpse, and buried her.

Eleven years later, in 1997, a hunter found skeletal human remains. Cold-case detectives enlisted a forensic artist and criminal profiler to identify the victim, but five years passed before they confirmed the body was Weaver, reported missing by her family on September 8, 1986. Reviewing the 1986 missing-person investigation, the detectives discovered Patnode was a suspect in her disappearance.

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While Patnode served less than three years in prison for the McLaughlin killing, he was being held at the Downstate Correctional Facility in 2002. After his release from prison in 1990, Patnode married and fathered four children, but he absconded from parole. At the time detectives met with Patnode, he had been recently arrested for his parole violation from a decade earlier. When detectives showed him a photograph of Weaver, he began to cry, calling her “his ghost,” and confessed.

At the 2002 trial for Weaver’s murder, prosecutors sought to include McLaughlin’s killing as evidence of Patnode’s dangerousness—identifying 22 similarities between the killings—but the judge barred any mention of McLaughlin. However, McLaughlin’s friends, Rosemary Scott and Melissa Cox, provided valuable testimony. Scott and Cox had also worked alongside Weaver, and they were the last to see her alive as she climbed into Patnode’s pickup. In an echo of the first trial, defense attorney Paul Carey argued Patnode killed Weaver in self-defense. Carey, referencing Patnode’s police confession, claimed that Weaver had stabbed Patnode in the arm with a small knife as he attempted to rape her. This time, the jury convicted Patnode of second-degree murder. At sentencing, prosecutors were allowed to discuss McLaughlin. They described how Patnode, a month after murdering Weaver, returned to the red-light district and killed McLaughlin. The judge handed down the maximum sentence: 25 years to life.

As Patnode’s parole eligibility—set for March 29, 2027—rapidly approaches, trans and non-binary individuals find themselves facing a hostile climate of increased attacks. Despite decades of legal and social science analysis exposing the bigotry of the trans panic defense, President Trump revived the antiquated anti-trans tropes underlying this legal strategy and repackaged them in his January 20, 2025, inauguration speech and a flurry of executive orders. Following the blueprint of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, several state legislatures have also aggressively sought to eradicate trans people through draconian laws that roll back fundamental civil rights protections. While this resurgence of hate is devastating, trans people have a documented history stretching back thousands of years. It is worth remembering that, as in the cases of McLaughlin and Weaver, the arc of justice—however slow—is inevitable.

Dr. Warren Carsten Andresen is an associate professor of criminal justice at St. Edward’s University who studies the homicides of gay and transgender people, including the use of gay and trans panic defenses in U.S. courts.

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