Remembering Our Dead

Grayce Baxter

Grayce was strangled by a corrections officer. Her killer then dismembered her body with a hacksaw and dumped parts of it down a garbage chute.

Grayce was 27 when she was murdered in December 1992 by a corrections officer named Patrick Daniel Johnson. She was a sex worker, and Johnson was her client. When newspapers began covering her disappearance, Grayce’s work was just about the only thing journalists could focus on. Described as a “high-priced call girl,” a “prostitute,” and a “transsexual,” reporters conjectured that she was involved with hard drugs, and disclosed both the status of her transition and her former name.

She was painted as a caricature, and was assumed that Grayce’s murder was connected to a sensationalized depiction of what was supposedly a risk-taking, drug-using, party-girl lifestyle. Accozzaglia writes: “Ms. Baxter was murdered by a member of law enforcement. His motive was not drug-related. It related to his own impotence: his purchased time with Ms. Baxter expired before he could climax. So he strangled her to death, cut her into pieces, and dumped the pieces down the apartment tower’s trash chute.”

Community memory runs deep. Grayce’s murder at the hands of law enforcement and her case’s treatment by the police department and media set the tone for what trans women, especially those in sex work, could expect from cisgender institutions and the criminal justice system.

Her remains have never been found.

And Grayce Baxter? She doesn’t even have a grave. Despite months spent scouring the Pickering landfill, Toronto Police could never find any trace of her.

https://this.org/2018/06/14/each-death-is-a-preventable-tragedy/

https://ententasmagic.wordpress.com/2013/05/03/10-dead-trans-women-in-toronto/#grayce

https://www.walnet.org/csis/news/toronto_93/torsun-930112.html

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/10_JeZ7LEIRhvewTCoL5mVkH6MQJzf7fSXl4-P6QJ0v0/edit#gid=0

Report added: 21 Sep 2025

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