Pod Insights Criminology Lauren Giddings About this episode In 2011, 27-year-old Lauren Giddings was studying for the bar exam. She had told friends and family that she would be out of contact during this time so she could give her full attention. For this reason, it took everyone in her life longer than it normally would have to realize she was missing. Join Mike and Morf as they discuss the murder of Lauren Giddings. Police eventually began to zero in on one of Lauren's neighbors, Stephen McDaniel. Stephen was a 25-year-old law student who was described as odd and a loner. What police uncovered would shock everyone. You can help support the show through Patreon. We'd love to connect with listeners on social media. We are available on the following platforms: Facebook - Facebook Discussion group - Instagram - Threads - X Formerly Twitter - Blue Sky - Twitch - Tik Tok Criminology is an Emash Digital production hosted by Mike Ferguson and Mike Morford.
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1:31 Speaker 03 Hello, everyone, and welcome to episode 367 of the Criminology Podcast. I'm Mike Ferguson. And this is Mike Morford. Morf, how you doing, buddy? I'm doing pretty good. How you doing? I'm doing really well. I'm enjoying this fine weather that we're having up in Ohio. My wife and I are getting out. We're taking walks. It's just nice, man, not to, not to be cooped up in the house all the time.
1:57 Speaker 04 Yeah, it's funny. We're in rainy season. This is the time of year where it rains every day and then it usually does it in the morning, the afternoon, and all of a sudden it's nice the rest of the day. As soon as we hit the record button now, it started pouring. I can hear it outside. So more of those days.
2:12 Speaker 03 Well, that's the thing about Florida. Every time I've gone to Florida, you have like these five minute rain showers. Seems like, but they'll happen a couple of times, but they don't seem to last that long. At least the times that I've been down there.
2:26 Speaker 04 Yeah, we need it because we've been in a pretty bad drought.
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2:48 Speaker 03 We definitely want to give a shout out to one of our listeners, Allison Bell, who suggested this week's case. And this is one of those cases that even if you don't remember all the names in the case, you may remember hearing about the case at some point. We're talking about the 2011 murder of Lauren Giddings. There are some videos related to the case, including a candid interview with the murderer, as well as the interrogation footage, and they've gone viral at different points online. Lauren did everything right. You'll hear about the safety measures she took to protect herself that apparently just didn't work. It's part of what makes this case so terrifying.
3:31 Speaker 04 In 2011, 27-year-old Lauren Giddings was doing very well for herself. She had already worked for the National Center for Public Policy in Washington DC and had decided to focus on a law career. In 2008, she moved to Macon, Georgia to attend Mercer University's Walter F. George School of Law. She thrived there socially and academically. Lauren was the president of the Federalist Society until her graduation on May 14, 2011. She obtained a Juris Doctorate degree. The work wasn't over, though. She was interested in becoming a public defender and still had to pass the state bar exam to be able to actually practice law and put her degree
4:13 Speaker 04 to good use. Her sister Caitlin got married right in the middle of the chunk of time that Lauren had to study and prepare for the bar exam. The wedding was in Maryland, Lauren's home state, so Lauren had to take some time off to attend, especially because she was the maid of honor. When she got back to Macon, she decided to extend her time off a bit before she really started focusing on the bar exam.
4:35 Speaker 03 And more if I've never taken it. I didn't go to law school, anything like that. But, you know, I have heard from some people I know that the bar exam is really tough. I mean, you know, we've all studied for tests before. Usually, for me, I would cram the night before. That's not something you can do for the bar exam. It is a very extensive, very hard test, from what I hear.
5:01 Speaker 04 Yeah, I've heard the same thing, and I guess it has to be because, you know, you have people's freedoms on the line. You have property rights, money at stake for people. So whatever the different type of law is that somebody is practicing, there's a lot of repercussions if they don't know their facts and details and how to be an attorney.
5:24 Speaker 03 On June 24, Lauren met up with some friends at a bar. She and her friend Ashley Muller went to the home of Lauren's ex-boyfriend, Joe. Lauren spent the night there. The next day, Saturday, June 25, she went to the country club to swim. And around 6:00 PM, she picked up some food from Zaxby's. Since Lauren had already taken so much time off when she was supposed to be studying, she really had to buckle down. No distractions. She warned everyone that she was going to be focused. She wouldn't be going out or even answering the phone. She wouldn't really be online at all. The heads up was also probably a polite request for no one to bother her while she was studying.
6:08 Speaker 03 She even left her dog with her parents so that she wouldn't have to take any breaks. So at first, when people close to Lauren didn't hear from her for a few days, no one thought anything of it. They just figured that she would get back to them when she took a break or after the exam. But one by one, those closest to Lauren began to notice that they hadn't heard from her at all since June 25th.
6:35 Speaker 04 On Wednesday, June 29th, Lauren's sister got a call from Katie, one of Lauren's friends, asking if she had heard from her. Caitlin tried to call Lauren, but it went straight to voicemail, which was extremely odd. Even if Lauren was just studying, she would have just put her phone on silent. She wouldn't let it die or turn off completely. Lauren's friends asked for a welfare check to be done. Police officers went to Lauren's apartment, but it was locked. Her car was outside, but she didn't answer their knocks. From the outside, though, everything looked fine and the police left. Katie then went over to her apartment in the Barrister's Hall apartment complex near the university and used a spare key that Lauren kept outside to open the door.
7:17 Speaker 04 Everything looked pretty normal inside, but what stood out to her friends was that while Lauren wasn't there, her laptop, identification card, her purse, and her keys were.
7:28 Speaker 03 So there's a couple of things that stand out to me here. The first is something that you and I talk about in a lot of cases. Someone appears to be missing, but yet all of the things that you think they would normally have with them or take with them if they were going to go somewhere are left behind. You know, in Lauren's case, it was her laptop, her ID, her purse, or keys. I mean, that, those are just things that, especially the last three, people take with them on a routine basis when they leave their, their, their place.
8:09 Speaker 04 Yeah, those things, even if you're just running to the store, you figure you're gonna need your purse, you need your keys to drive unless you're going someplace very close, but her car is there too. So it is a, a very strange situation. I can't think of any reason she'd go out with all, without all of this stuff unless it was maybe going for a jog or something like that and just coming back in a little bit, but this had to alarm her friends.
8:36 Speaker 03 And then the second thing is this very kind of specific point in Lauren's life. You know, she has this upcoming bar exam, she has to buckle down and study. And so, you know, she's telling people, hey, I'm gonna be incommunicado for, you know, a period of time. And, you know, Lauren is young, so she's like people her age, I'm sure, online a lot and communicating a lot, but not during this period of time. And so my thought is people didn't realize that something was wrong as quick as maybe
9:19 Speaker 03 they normally would, because she had warned everyone in advance, hey, I'm not going to be answering the phone, I'm not gonna be online.
9:28 Speaker 04 And I think that presents a problem to them because now, although they think something's wrong, they don't really have an idea of when something might have happened to her because they haven't been in contact with her for four days now.
9:41 Speaker 03 Lauren's friends decided not to wait for investigators to figure things out. They did their own sleuthing and found an interesting email that Lauren sent to her boyfriend, David Van Dever, on June 25th at 10:13 PM. According to oxygen.com, in this email, Lauren mentioned that she thought someone had been trying to break into her house on the 24th. This seemed suspicious and they now feared they were dealing with an abduction. They officially reported Lauren missing. On June 30th, investigators decided to search inside Lauren's apartment. While outside the property, the wind picked up.
10:22 Speaker 03 Macon Police Crime Scene Investigator Steve Gatlin noticed a very bad smell. It was coming from the trash cans outside the complex. Now, that's not too unusual in and of itself. Apartment trash can get pretty nasty with so many people using the same trash cans or dumpsters, especially right around trash pickup, because everyone knows it's their last chance to get rid of any gross kitchen trash. Also, some of that trash has probably been sitting around for days and days. The trash company was actually planning to empty the trash that day, but couldn't because the property was blocked off by police.
11:04 Speaker 03 The police had arrived just minutes before the garbage truck, and their vehicles were blocking the path to the trash cans.
11:13 Speaker 04 This turned out to be a very lucky break in the case for police. As Macon Police Detective David Patterson told 13 WMAZ News, "If that trash had been picked up, we'd still be working a missing persons case." Around 9:40 that morning, an officer opened one of the trash cans and saw something large, wrapped in five black plastic bags. To his suspicious eye, it looked like the outline of body parts in the bags. When he peeked inside one of them, he saw a shoulder. It was a human torso. The rest of the investigative team swarmed the dumpster to retrieve the bags. Inside, they found the partial remains of Lauren Giddings. To be precise, just her torso. Her head and limbs were missing.
11:56 Speaker 04 DNA from her hairbrush and toothbrush would later confirm that it was her. The case had jumped immediately from a missing persons case to a murder investigation.
12:05 Speaker 03 And more, if I often think about the difference between solved cases and unsolved cases. And I think in many instances, it can be a break for investigators. It can be, you know, what seems like something small. And in this case, I don't think there's any doubt that there's timing involved. If the garbage truck gets there before police and is able to empty the dumpsters at that apartment complex, does it change everything about this case? And the answer to that question could be yes.
12:50 Speaker 04 Yeah, I think sometimes the timing is important in cases. Sometimes there needs to be a little luck involved. Because as you mentioned, that trash truck is a little earlier that day, or police are a little later getting out there, that can make a huge difference. Although that garbage truck wasn't able to retrieve trash from the dumpster at Lauren's apartment, it did pick up nearby trash from other residences in the area. And that's going to be significant.
13:21 Speaker 03 Shortly after the body was discovered, one of Lauren's neighbors was being interviewed by a reporter. Stephen McDaniel, a 25 year old law student who lived next door to Lauren, still had no idea that any human remains had been discovered. That news was actually broken to him during that interview. When the reporter mentioned a body had been recovered, the video of his reaction to the news later went viral. And this is one of the things listeners may have seen or heard about, even if they didn't remember the names in this case. We'll talk a little bit more about the video in just a minute. Lauren's apartment was immediately searched as a crime scene with investigators using
14:05 Speaker 03 luminol to search for any sign of what happened to her. Crime scene investigator Steve Gatlin told oxygen.com, "It was like a light switch." I mean, the whole bathroom glow, explaining that the whole tub, all the way up to almost two inches from the top, had the same glow. And this is a heck of a morning for investigators. Human remains are discovered in the trash. They already have a concern for Lauren because she's been reported missing. And then you can picture the way that investigator Gatlin describes the scene.
14:50 Speaker 03 The glow of luminol, it would have been, you know, so very obvious to them instantly. The amount of blood in that bathroom had to have been immense.
15:05 Speaker 04 Yeah, I think it really helped investigators determine where the attack on Lauren, or at least where the dismembering of her body happened, that it was very likely in that tub. So that probably helped them a little bit get a head start on the investigation and how things unfolded. Authorities searched the grounds of the apartment complex and found a hacksaw inside a locked closet in the building's laundry room. It appeared that there was still blood on the blade. Steve Gatlin told Oxygen, obviously someone had rinsed it off, but didn't do a thorough job. Further testing will reveal the DNA of Lauren Giddings on the blade. Police knew that her killer had dismembered her body in the bathtub and then disposed a part of her body in a trash can,
15:50 Speaker 04 but they only found her torso. They theorize that the killer had disposed of the rest of her remains in neighboring trashcans, the ones that had been picked up. So authorities searched the Wolf Creek landfill in Twigs County, where trash from the Mercer Law area would ultimately end up. Investigators combing through the trash did find mail from addresses close to Lauren's and from the right timeframe, but sadly, to this day, they have not been able to recover the rest of Lauren's body. We talked about police sort of getting a lucky break earlier that they had gotten there just in time to prevent the garbage truck from picking up Lauren's trash. But now luck was sort of against them because.
16:32 Speaker 04 As it turns out, that trash, that garbage truck got there early enough that it still took everybody else's trash in the area before police knew that it was a crime scene. And had they known that before that garbage truck got there, they probably wouldn't have allowed the garbage truck to remove any of the nearby trash.
16:51 Speaker 03 But when you think about the timing, you know, they, they knew fairly quickly or had an idea, but they still couldn't find her remains. I mean, I think that speaks to just the volume of trash that ends up in a landfill and how hard it is to find something in an area like that.
17:16 Speaker 04 It's like the proverbial needle in a haystack.
17:19 Speaker 03 Police set out to talk to people who were closest to Lauren and naturally as her boyfriend, David Vandiver was one of the first people police wanted to question. And they learned quickly that he had a solid alibi. He was in California on a golf trip. Lauren's neighbor, Stephen McDaniel, the one who did the interview with reporters, had no problem with investigators entering his apartment and gave permission for the search. Despite this, he stood out as very suspicious to them. It was just a gut feeling they had.
17:53 Speaker 04 McDaniel was supposed to be in class that morning, but he didn't go. According to a neighbor and classmate, David Whitmer, in an interview with Macon.com News, this was very unusual for Stephen because he never missed class. The class could apparently help improve your score on the bar exam by up to 20 points. So it was a very important class. When authorities searched Stephen's apartment, they found a master key that opened the locked closet in the laundry room where the hacksaw was found. And that's not all. They also found that the key would open Lauren's apartment door too. In fact, it opened every door in the complex. Additionally, Stephen had a standalone key specific to Lauren's door. The finding of these keys elevated Stephen McDaniel as a suspect.
18:38 Speaker 03 And my thought is, how could, you know, this finding not elevate Stephen McDaniel as a suspect? The other thing I was thinking is, how scary is this? That, you know, living in an apartment complex, someone, just a regular resident, has a standalone key to someone's door, but also has a master key that would open any door in the complex. I mean, you want to talk about a safety nightmare?
19:10 Speaker 04 Yeah, that's pretty alarming. I mean, you would expect that the landlord, maybe the superintendent, you know, the maintenance people, somebody like that will have access to those keys because they need to come in and do work or maybe exterminating, whatever the case is. But for someone that just lives there and has no connection to the apartment complex, that's frightening.
19:32 Speaker 03 66-year-old Evelyn Spencer, who lived directly below Stephen McDaniel, recalled how detectives came to her door just hours after Lauren's body was discovered. They informed her that Stephen had a master key and they also tried it in her locker. She saw the key unlock her door with her own eyes. She was in shock. Evelyn Spencer didn't hear anything the night that Lauren was killed, but she did recall hearing Stephen cursing while playing video games quite often. She said he never had a visitor in over three years. Police did an even closer examination of Stephen McDaniel's apartment and found more damning pieces of evidence.
20:15 Speaker 03 One of these things was a pair of green and white women's underwear in one of his dresser drawers. These would later be confirmed to have belonged to Lauren Giddings because her DNA was on them. The packaging for the bloody hacksaw found in the laundry room was found in his trash. Losing weight on your own can feel like a fight you keep losing. Weight loss by Hers offers access to the FDA-approved Wegovy pill and the Wegovy pen. Wegovy is the first ever GLP-1 weight loss medication available in a pill, and it also comes as a pen. So you've got options. With Wegovy, you can lose up to 20% of your body weight. People lost an average of 14% body weight at 64 weeks in a clinical trial of
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21:54 Speaker 04 There were two deep scratches on Stephen's side. He claimed that he had scratched himself in his sleep. Stephen told investigators at some point during his interrogation that he was still a virgin despite being 25 years old and that he was saving himself from marriage. This seems irrelevant, but detectives searching his apartment had found some condoms. They probably asked themselves, why would a virgin with no plan to have sex need condoms? When they asked Stephen about them, he admitted that he had stolen them one at a time from other units in the complex and that he had stolen other personal belongings too.
22:28 Speaker 03 And this goes back to how scary that thought is of someone having a master key. Just think about a resident just popping in and out of other people's apartments, rifling through drawers, stealing, you know, this and that. I mean, it's, it's obvious that at some point he had stolen a pair of Lauren Gidding's underwear. That probably occurred. Before this murder even took place.
23:01 Speaker 04 Yeah, there's a real creep factor to this guy, just based on what they found. You know, her underwear, he admits that other things had been taken from people's apartments. So he's not just going into Lauren's apartment. He had been going into other people's apartments, too. So that had to be quite troubling, I'm sure, when the residents found that out.
23:24 Speaker 03 On July 1st, Stephen was charged with two counts of burglary. It was all authorities could do to hold him at the time, despite what appeared to be strong evidence linking him to Lauren's murder. Stephen's computer had damning evidence on it, but not all of it related to Lauren's murder. Investigators found 52 images of child sexual assault material on one of his thumb drives. He had also looked up violent pornography. There were interesting searches, like how to disable the same brand of burglar bar Lauren used to brace her front door, the trash collection schedules in the area of their apartment complex,
24:07 Speaker 03 and the query molesting a sleeping girl, as well as a story about a man who kills and dismembers his wife. And we talk about, you know, search histories on computers a lot. You know, if people looked at our search histories, they might think they were very odd. If they didn't know that you and I did, you know, true crime podcasts, because, you know, as you're researching a case, you might Google, how long does it take to strangle someone? Well, that's very suspicious as far as a search goes.
24:46 Speaker 03 But if you're trying to get an understanding of how it relates to a true crime story in the context of doing a podcast, okay, well, that explains it. Without that, though, these types of searches are very damning.
25:04 Speaker 04 And it seems like the more police dug, the more layers they pulled back from this guy, the more troubling things they found that I'm sure.
25:15 Speaker 04 You know, their senses, their intuition really jumped up that they had their, their guy here with this guy because it's just very disturbing. You know, each thing they found as they dug further into them. Investigators also found some pretty unsettling home videos on Steven's camera. He had been filming into Lauren's window after dark, the night before a murder. He duct taped a long wooden pole to his camera so that he could hold it up high and get the right angle without getting too close to the window. In the videos, you can see Lauren's living room and front door through slits in the blinds. Lauren isn't in the video. She wasn't home at the time. She was out with friends and spent the night at Joe's house.
25:58 Speaker 04 A bracing device to help prevent break-ins can be seen in the video, and it's something Steven mentioned in his interview. Lauren was obviously safety conscious. Steven was exactly the kind of person she was worried about and trying to keep out of her apartment.
26:13 Speaker 03 And I think if you live in an apartment, these, these braces that are meant to keep the door from being opened while you're inside, they're a good thing. You know, I, I have purchased a couple of different types for my daughters who are in college. They live in, in apartments. I mean, you can't be too safe, right? Now, it doesn't mean that you can prevent everything, and that's just a fact. If someone is intent on doing someone harm, they're going to figure out a way. And that's a scary thought. A lot of scary thoughts go through my mind more,
26:55 Speaker 03 especially with, you know, my girls off at college. And every time we do a case like this that involves someone in college, it makes me even more nervous.
27:08 Speaker 04 Yeah, you just have to hope they don't have neighbors like this guy because he clearly had a lot of time on his hands to try and do creepy, creepy shit. There's no other way to put it. He's, you know, sneaking into apartments, stealing stuff, stealing her underwear, figuring out how to film into her apartment without being seen, you know, Googling all the stuff, trying to figure out how to do stuff. Very troubling stuff.
27:35 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah, no doubt about it. Authorities also seized the refrigerator from the unit directly underneath Lauren's. The unit was mostly empty because the tenant was almost done moving out. We know now that Steven had a key to every apartment. A very good way to keep evidence out of your own unit would be to use one that you knew was empty. According to Macon.com news, the owners of the building said that the refrigerator was only taken in for evidence because there were two relatively long hairs caught on the side that appeared to match Steven's in color, length, and consistency.
28:15 Speaker 04 Finally, on August 2nd, authorities were able to formally charge Steven McDaniel with Lauren's murder. They felt they had a strong enough case. David Cook, who was then the district attorney for the Macon Judicial Circuit, told Oxygen.com, "I was worried that unless we had more, that this would be a case where everybody knew that he did it, but nobody could prove it." Once Steven was charged with Lauren's murder, his reaction to the discovery of a body in the interview video takes on a completely different meaning. In the video where he was interviewed by the reporter, he wasn't shocked that his neighbor had been killed. He was worried that he hadn't disposed of enough evidence. You can find this video online, and to put it bluntly, as soon as the reporter mentions body,
28:59 Speaker 04 Steven looks like he's about to pass out. You can almost literally see the color drain from his face.
29:05 Speaker 03 During the interview, after he composed himself, after initially asking for a break, Steven revealed that he was aware that Lauren was moving out. She would have been moving out on June 30th to live with her boyfriend David in Atlanta, but instead, her apartment had become a crime scene. Steven himself was also scheduled to move out. His lease would have been up in two weeks, and he was going to move back in with his parents in Lilburn. Dissecting that video a bit more, it's interesting to note that one of the first things Steven said in that interview was, "Lauren was my neighbor." He didn't say, "She is my neighbor."
29:47 Speaker 03 During the rest of his interview, he refers to her in the present tense. But in that very first mention, it seems as though he slipped up. She was missing at the time and hadn't moved out yet. And more of this interview that did go viral, I mean, a lot of people will probably instantly picture Stephen McDaniel as we're talking about this case. For one thing, he had a very distinct look during this interview. You know, I can remember it very vividly. He was kind of a squirrely, mousy guy.
30:28 Speaker 03 And he had this, this hair that was kind of wild and unruly. It was, um, I don't know. He had a very interesting look about him, but it's really his demeanor during the, the interview. I think that stands out to most people. Now it's easy to look back on it after everything is finalized. Right? But there are some cases where people very early on, look at an interview from someone and they're sure that something is going on with this person.
31:04 Speaker 03 You know, think Chris Watts and some of his early, uh, videoed interviews with the police. People had a feeling right away that there was something wrong with that guy. And I think the same thing goes for Stephen McDaniel. He was over the top with his emotions.
31:25 Speaker 04 And I think from watching the video, it seems like he's probably surprised that they've already found her body and that the news, that there's been a body found when the reporter tells them that he's sort of shocked because maybe he was expecting to have more time, or maybe he thought that garbage truck would take her remains away. And then if the police showed up later, it wouldn't be as big a deal because she'd now be gone from the scene. And he was probably. You know, just caught off guard and totally in shock that the police were already there and the garbage truck hadn't come at that point and taken that trash out of the dumpster.
32:06 Speaker 03 And I, and I think one of the things that stands out to people, you know, him being as emotional as he was in this interview. Yeah, you, you're, you're going to have some emotions just hearing that a body was found in the apartment complex where you live. But again, to me, it, it, it seemed over the top about someone with whom he didn't really have much of a relationship. And I think a lot of other people have, have mentioned that as well. I mean, it wasn't like, you know, they were great friends or, or anything like that. I don't even know how much they really even knew each other at all.
32:50 Speaker 04 Yeah, I think it would be one thing if he was upset and emotional because he had learned that someone he knew or was close to had been found in the dumpster. But all he knew was that it was, you know, a body. He wasn't told anything else about it, but yet he's reacting like this. So I think looking back on it, it's easy to see, you know, when you know the circumstances, know what really unfolded. And then you watch him on that video, things definitely jump out to you. In November 2011, Stephen was also indicted on 30 charges of sexual exploitation of children due to the images found on this thumb drive.
33:34 Speaker 04 Stephen faced the death penalty if he were to be convicted of Lauren's murder. There was an interesting potential for a conflict of interest in this case, though, as Stephen had once worked as a law clerk at the district attorney's office, earned credit for one of his law courses. In the end, just one week before trial, he decided to plead guilty. And this apparently surprised both of his attorneys, but it was a huge relief for them. One of his attorneys, Franklin J. Hoag, admitted to the Macon Telegraph that the evidence in the end was overwhelming. And he added, I'm glad we didn't have to try it for a jury.
34:10 Speaker 03 And I, I think that's just a guy being honest. You know, as a defense attorney, I'm sure he was prepared to do his best. To defend Stephen McDaniel, but you know, sometimes the evidence is so overwhelming that you know, some of these defense attorneys have to go into it thinking, I got little to no shot here. And I think he was, he was being honest in saying, I'm glad that this thing didn't go to trial.
34:44 Speaker 04 Yeah, there's a lot of big things that were going against Stephen. I mean, he had those keys to get into her apartment. He had the, her underwear. He had the video that he'd taken of her apartment. And then I think probably the most damning thing was he had the hacksaw wrapping paper in his apartment from the actual hacksaw that was used to dismember Lauren. So that would be pretty hard to get around, I think, in the minds of, of a jury.
35:13 Speaker 03 Yeah. And then you go back to some of the, the internet searches. Some of them were very specific. You know, one of them was about the exact brand of kind of door brace that Lauren had about how to disable it. Not just generic door brace, but the exact brand that she had. In exchange for his plea, prosecutors dropped the child exploitation charges and also removed the death penalty from the table. As part of the plea, Stephen McDaniel had to describe what he did to Lauren. The following details are what he laid out in court. The
35:56 Speaker 03 night before the murder, Stephen watched pornography and read stories about Japanese mythology. Around 4am, just before breaking into Lauren's apartment, Stephen was on his computer browsing Craigslist personal ads. Stephen admitted to putting on gloves and a mask and breaking into Lauren's apartment around 4:30 in the morning while she was sleeping. There were no signs of forced entry because he didn't need to force his way into the unit. Somehow he had those keys that we talked about.
36:33 Speaker 04 Steven stood over Lauren as she slept, just watching her. Eventually, she woke up, shocked that she wasn't alone in her apartment. He then suddenly began to strangle her. In the struggle, Lauren grabbed at his mask and apparently recognized him. She screamed out, Steven, please stop. After he strangled her to death, he moved her body to the bathtub. This is where he dismembered her with the new hacksaw. But he didn't do that right away. After leaving Lauren's body in the bathtub, Steven went back to his own apartment. It wasn't until that night that he went back to her apartment with the hacksaw. By 5:42 a.m., he was back at his computer, looking up information about a certain type of blade. After that, he watched The Hangover 2.
37:19 Speaker 03 Now, The Hangover 2 is a good movie. It's funny, maybe not as good as the original Hangover. But how does someone sit down and watch this movie? Kind of in the middle of a murder slash cover up of a murder? The murder's already happened. He has strangled Lauren to death. Her body is laying in the bathtub. And then he just goes back and plops on the couch and watches a movie? I mean, I think this really tells us a lot about what was going on in the mind of Steven McDaniel.
37:58 Speaker 04 Yeah, to me, this screams that he's not living in reality. Maybe what had just happened, he didn't even know was real. Yeah, I mean, I could see if this was like a crime movie where someone gets away with a crime and he's watching it to get some tips about how to cover something up. But this is a comedy with no real plot, other than making people laugh. So why he's watching The Hangover 2 in the middle of this murder and cover up is just, it's just further bizarre behavior on his part.
38:32 Speaker 03 At 11:18 p.m. on the 26th, Steven looked up the Bibb County garbage collection schedule. There was no activity from about midnight until 12:35, when Steven started watching cartoons on YouTube. So, again.
38:52 Speaker 03 He has a body in the bathtub in Lauren's apartments, Lauren's body. He's in his apartment, watching comedy movies and cartoons on YouTube. I mean, I think he's really out there at this point. All the while, Morph, knowing that he has to go back and deal with Lauren's body. And finally, Steven did go to work, cutting up Lauren's body. He didn't just chop her body up into manageable sized pieces. He admitted to cutting off all of her fingers and flushing them down the toilet in her apartment.
39:33 Speaker 03 That wasn't something he needed to do in order to fit her body into multiple trash bags. He didn't move her body to the trash until the morning of June 28. He told detectives that he put the rest of Lauren's body in the dumpsters outside of Mercer Law School, across the street. Since investigators hadn't been searching the property there, the garbage truck wasn't blocked. The trash in the dumpsters at the law school had been picked up and taken to the landfill.
40:04 Speaker 04 Knowing that Steven had a key to Lauren's apartment, there are definite signs that he had been breaking in and stalking her for much longer than just the night of the murder. In May 2011, Lauren's sister Caitlin was in town to see her graduate from law school. In Lauren's apartment, Caitlin found a set of Lauren's keys, keys that Lauren had been complaining about losing. They were right on the floor near the front door. And Caitlin teased her about this because they were hard to miss. But it seemed that somehow Lauren had missed them. Caitlin recalled Lauren joking, saying, "I swear, stuff gets moved around in this apartment."
40:41 Speaker 03 And I think all of us misplace stuff, right? You can't find your keys, you can't find your wallet. You don't know where the, the TV remote is. But that would be extremely frustrating if it was happening because someone was breaking into your apartment and actually moving stuff around. Again, also extremely scary.
41:04 Speaker 04 And this once instance that Caitlin was recalling, these keys turned up right there on the floor in front of the door. So it's not like they fell down behind a shelf or something like that. You know, I think that is a sign that it was likely because Steven had dropped them or had come into her apartment at some point and returned these keys possibly. Some reason that they were there right in that spot and not, you know, behind a couch cushion or behind a shelf or something like that.
41:39 Speaker 03 In his own words in a confession letter, Stephen McDaniel wrote, "It's difficult for me to explain why I killed Lauren." Stephen McDaniel was sentenced to serve life in prison, but he was given the possibility of parole. And I want to take on both of those things. You know, him saying or him writing, "It's difficult for me to explain why I killed Lauren." Okay, can you try? Or it's just unexplainable? I'm a little unsure about that. And then, you know, this sentence more, you know, we go from a possible death penalty to that being
42:22 Speaker 03 taken off the table and then it coming all the way down to life, but with the possibility of parole. That seems like not the worst deal in the world for Stephen McDaniel. I get it, life in prison is life in prison, but if you could possibly get out at 25, 30 years, that's a heck of a long way from the death penalty.
42:48 Speaker 04 Yeah, a lot of times when the prosecution takes the death penalty off the case, it's because maybe they don't have an overly strong case and, you know, they're willing to risk it, but they'll usually knock it down to life in prison without parole. And to go all the way down where he's got a chance of parole at some point, 25, 30 years down the road, whatever it is, he's a- Young guy when this happened. So, I mean theoretically, he could be in his 50s when he gets out. So that's, that's pretty frightening that they would allow that to happen. And I'm not sure how Lauren's family felt about that sentence, but it just, it seems like it's, it's
43:30 Speaker 04 pretty light for what he did. You know, in my opinion, he should be in prison for the rest of his life for this.
43:37 Speaker 03 Yeah, I agree with you. And just because there is a possibility of parole doesn't mean he will, you know, actually get it, or at the very least, you know, get it when he comes up the first time. But, but I think as, as a family, that has to be tough. Because there is some finality with certain sentences. Life in prison without the possibility of parole. Think about the finality of that for the victim's family. You don't have to worry about this person ever, you know, setting foot as a, a free man again. But that's much different when the possibility
44:22 Speaker 03 of parole exists.
44:24 Speaker 04 And it also opens up the possibility that maybe Lauren's sister or other family members are going to have to attend his parole hearings or court proceedings decades from now to try and keep him behind bars if that, if it ever comes to that. So that'll be a whole nother ordeal they have to go through.
44:43 Speaker 03 Yeah, that, that's a great point. You know, you, you have that with the death penalty because there are so many appeals. That can be very tough on the victim's family. But parole hearings could also be very tough as well.
44:59 Speaker 04 So Stephen McDaniel had pled guilty and was going to prison. But apparently, his mother Glenda McDaniel was in complete denial. According to her, her son is innocent. She admitted that the hacksaw used to dismember Lauren did indeed belong to Stephen. But according to Macon.com news, she was under the impression that he threw it in the garbage. Her reasoning was that the hacksaw was flimsy and it bent and twisted and did no good at all. It seems Glenda's thinking is that the real killer must have taken it out of the trash and used it on Lauren's body.
45:33 Speaker 03 Glenda McDaniel also claims that her son told her he woke up that night because he heard a loud noise and that when he went to check on things, a different resident of the building was on Lauren's balcony. They made small talk about the man mowing the grass and then Steven went back to sleep. Knowing what he had done, the resident had to eliminate Steven as a witness. So he planted the master key inside his unit. And I get it. It's going to be very tough for a mother to believe that her son is this
46:12 Speaker 03 brutal killer. It doesn't really surprise me at all, Morph, that, you know, Glenda would try to reason this out. And she's also getting information from Steven, right? Saying, hey, I didn't do this. Here's what actually happened. So she's trying to defend him as I think a lot of mothers would.
46:36 Speaker 04 No parent wants to know that their child is capable of murdering somebody and then taking the time to dismember their body. It's just so unthinkable, you know, the gruesomeness of that. So maybe it's easier for her to just refuse to believe the truth.
46:57 Speaker 03 And lean into everything that Steven is telling her.
47:02 Speaker 04 Steven McDaniel has tried to appeal several times since being sentenced, but each attempt was unsuccessful. He tried to claim that prosecutors intercepted his legal notes. The deadline for the type of motion he filed on that claim had already passed. So the appeal had to be denied regardless of whether or not it was true. He appealed that ruling, but it was denied too. He has also claimed that the searches and any interrogation should not have happened because at the time, he was experiencing a semi-catatonic state staring off into space, but no one checked his health or his competency. At one point, he tried to argue ineffective counsel, but seeing as how he didn't end up with a death sentence,
47:44 Speaker 04 that's hard to argue, even with a plea. This is very similar to Lori Vallow's Idaho lawyers. They just considered it a win that in such a slam dunk of a case, they managed to spare the life of the defendant. Georgia's State Supreme Court, U.S. Supreme Court, and Richmond County Superior Court had all denied Stevens' motions and appeals by early 2023.
48:07 Speaker 03 Yeah, I think it's, it's a little tough to argue ineffective counsel when the deal he got seems to be pretty good per what he did and what he actually admitted to doing.
48:24 Speaker 04 Yeah, and I don't know what the legal process is. If he felt that some of these things were true, would that mean that he would have to go to trial again or be granted a new trial? Because if that's the case, maybe the prosecution at that point would turn around and say, you know what? We're not offering you a plea deal. So that seems like it could backfire on Stephen McDaniel.
48:47 Speaker 03 And that's happened before in other cases. I have seen where people have been granted a retrial only to end up with a stiffer penalty than what they got the first time. But, you know, I guess he's thinking, what's the harm? Well, the harm is the death penalty could be put back on the table possibly. Stephen McDaniel's former roommate, Matthew Garrison, who lived with him in a dorm room at Mercer Hall for their entire junior year, had a lot of information that refutes any kind of psychotic break. Garrison recalled for Macon.com News, some odd conversations with Stephen, including
49:31 Speaker 03 one that was about the perfect murder. He once asked Stephen hypothetically, how would you commit the perfect murder? It appears that Stephen had a plan. During one of these talks, Stephen said that he would dismember the body in order to conceal the identification of the body. William Ingram, who was friends with one of Stephen's roommates, also recalled that Stephen was odd and says that he admired serial killers like they were movie stars.
50:02 Speaker 03 Ingram claims that Stephen openly talked about his fantasies of knocking a person out, then he would drag them to the bathroom because bathrooms are sanitary and also because most bathrooms are either covered in linoleum or tile to get rid of the body. Stephen told him, you'd want to break it up into small pieces and you'll want to put it in black plastic bags. And then he said, you'd throw the black plastic bags in with your laundry and you'd sneak them out of the building.
50:34 Speaker 04 While Stephen's attorney argued these conversations were the casual conversations of young college students based on curious musings, not deep criminal confessions. The statements seem incredibly specific to what really did happen here. Some of Stephen's comments online also show that this wasn't a momentary lapse in judgment or consciousness. According to 13 WMAZ News, Stephen once posted, "I consider myself to be a true cold-hearted monster."
51:03 Speaker 03 And more, if I remember being in college, what I don't remember is, you know, me and my buddies sitting around hypothetically, talking about how we would commit the perfect murder. I don't remember ever doing that. I'm not saying that, that people don't, but it does seem pretty damning when his idea of how to commit the perfect murder lines up pretty well with how he actually did it.
51:41 Speaker 04 Yeah, this is more of being able to go back and look at Stephen's past and these things that we could see, you know, we talked about the reporter interview he did and his reaction. And now we're talking about these conversations he had that were pretty disturbing and very detailed. And then later on for him to murder someone and use these same techniques he talked about. I think it shows that this was somebody who was disturbed and maybe had thought about this kind of stuff seriously in the past.
52:17 Speaker 03 And I think it's very obvious that Stephen had his issues. And we kind of talked about it before, but he didn't really run in the same circles as Lauren. In his news interview, you can see he's very unkempt looking, but despite all that, Lauren didn't look down on him for being different. Lauren's sister Caitlin told WGXA TV, it seemed like she might have been one of the people who was actually nice to him and gave him some attention, even though he might have been a loner. She talked about how confusing and how senseless the murder was, adding that it's hard to
52:58 Speaker 03 really wrap your mind around something you can't figure out how to prevent. Caitlin explained, there's no story here about telling your kids to lock their car when they get in or don't go to this side of town. There's no, she shouldn't have done this and it wouldn't have happened because you should always be nice to people. You should always be nice to your neighbors.
53:23 Speaker 04 In the spring of 2025, Lauren's family began a push to get authorities to search for her body in Pike County, about 55 miles northwest of Macon, which is in Bibb County. Stephen McDaniel's grandfather, Hallis Browning, owned 63 acres of land at 791 Dripping Rock Road in Pike County, which is known as Browning Place. There's a lake there and a large swath of woods on the property. If Stephen McDaniel didn't dispose of the rest of Lauren's remains in the garbage, as he claimed, this might be a good alternate spot to look.
53:57 Speaker 03 Back in 2013, Lauren's parents, William and Karen Giddings, filed a federal lawsuit attempting to gain permission to search Browning Place for the missing parts of her body. The lake, which one neighbor described to 13W M A Z News as real murky, seems like the most likely location of any remains because Stephen was apparently caught on surveillance cameras at Walmart browsing their selection of boat anchors.
54:28 Speaker 03 This sticks out because, well, he didn't own a boat. Was Steven McDaniel dreaming of buying an anchor for a boat he didn't have? Or is it more likely that he was thinking about using something heavy to weigh something down in water? According to 13 W M A Z News, Lauren's family believes that Steven visited his grandfather's property just weeks before the murder to look for locations where he could scatter dismembered body parts throughout the woods in accordance with his murder plot. As far as we know, no searches of the property are planned as of now.
55:10 Speaker 04 In 2016, the Lauren Theresa Giddings Scholarship was created to provide tuition support to students with strong academic credentials or demonstrated need, especially those who are the first in their immediate family to attend college and those who are interested in pursuing careers in the legal profession or special education. The $25,000 scholarship is awarded to students at Agnes Scott College, where Lauren graduated in 2006 with a degree in political science and minor in religious studies. She was the first person in her family to go to college. Since 2017, the Mercer Law Association of Women Law Students has hosted an annual 5K
55:54 Speaker 04 run called the Lauren Giddings 5K. Profits from the race help fund the Lauren Giddings Scholarship, which is awarded to third-year students at Mercer Law, along to the Association of Women Law Students, in order to help them pay for the bar exam fees.
56:10 Speaker 03 Since Lauren was killed, Bonnie Bush, one of the owners of the building she lived in, moved into Lauren's unit so that she wouldn't have to rent it to another student. Lauren's younger sister Caitlin named her firstborn daughter after Lauren, and there is a plaque honoring her at Mercer Law School and a pink bench, Lauren's favorite color, at Washington Park. The Atlanta law firm where she was once an intern still has Pink Wednesdays, where everyone wears pink in her honor.
56:46 Speaker 04 As for Stephen McDaniel, he's currently serving his life sentence at Hancock State Prison in Sparta, Georgia. And despite the heinous nature of his crimes, he'll be eligible for parole in 2041, when he'll be 55 years old. The rest of Lauren Giddings' remains are still missing, and police ask that if anyone happens to have any information about the whereabouts of those remains, to please call the Bibb County Sheriff's Office at 478-751-7500.
57:17 Speaker 03 So Morf, as we wrap this episode up, there's no doubt that the murder of Lauren Giddings was a heinous crime, you know, carried out by Stephen McDaniel. You know, there was the murder. And then we talked about this kind of break where Stephen goes back to his apartment and he's watching, you know, comedy movies and cartoons on YouTube. And then he goes back to Lauren's apartment and dismembers her body in the bathtub. One of the things that, you know, keeps going through my mind is what was going through
58:00 Speaker 03 his while this was all going on? Obviously, there was a lead up to this murder that included him developing some type of fascination with Lauren Giddings. We mentioned it, right? He was videotaping her through her window. He was going into her apartment. He had stolen some of her underwear that he kept in, in one of his drawers. He had become fixated on her.
58:34 Speaker 04 I don't think there's any question at all that he was fixated on her based on all of that. And I'm still left wondering, what was his plan that night? Was it to get in there and watch her sleep? Was he eventually going to try and sexually assault her or abduct her? We just don't know. All we know is that according to him, she woke up and he started strangling her. And after that, disposed of her body. But I wonder in his mind, when he went into that apartment, what was he expecting to happen? Or what was his plan to even have one?
59:09 Speaker 03 And did it change once she realized who he was, right? Cause she did. According to him, she actually said his name. Steven, why are you doing this? The other thing that that really jumped out at me, especially here at the end, as we were talking about Lauren, is how loved she was and how many lives she touched in her short time that she was alive. I mean, look at all the scholarships in her name. People still holding 5K runs in her name to award scholarship money.
59:52 Speaker 03 Obviously her family loved her, but there was a lot of other people whom she had touched during her life, who are still working hard to remember her today. Now, outside of probably Steven's immediate family, there's nobody working hard to remember Steven McDaniel. And you know why? Because he was a monster.
1:00:17 Speaker 04 Yeah, it seems like the only person that's really in his corner is his mom. And that's because she's in denial. And going back to Lauren, you know, she was, had her whole life, had of her entire career as an attorney. And the ironic part is she probably would have defended people, the likes of Steven McDaniel in her career.
1:00:41 Speaker 03 Yeah, that is a sad part of, you know, these types of stories where someone's life is taken before it really even gets started. You know, she had done a lot, but hadn't really got into, you know, her full-time job yet, hadn't married, hadn't started a family. It's impossible not to think, especially if you're her family, about all of the things she would have done and what was taken away from her and ultimately them. But that's it for our episode on Lauren Giddings.
1:01:20 Speaker 03 If you love the show, haven't done so yet, take a minute, go out, give us a five-star rating, leave a review. Also, keep telling your friends. Word of mouth about the criminology podcast really helps us out.
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1:01:55 Speaker 03 So that's it for another episode of Criminology, but Morph and I will be back with all of you next week with a brand new episode. So until then, for Mike
1:02:04 Speaker 04 And Morph.
1:02:05 Speaker 03 We'll talk to you next week.
1:02:06 Speaker 04 Take care, everyone.
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