The Murder of Lauren Giddings — Talk Murder With Me

Listen to my podcast episode on this case:

For privacy information about data collected from using this player, click here.

“A body?”

Stephen McDaniel certainly appeared stunned by what the reporter told him. The expression on his face, barely visible behind the mass of untamed curls, suddenly changed. He looked like he had seen a ghost. He blinked several times, shaking his head slightly. Opening and closing his mouth, he was clearly lost for words.

“I think I need to sit down,” he told the reporter, before turning and slowly walking away.

Was he stunned into silence because his neighbor was dead? Or was it because they had discovered her body, despite his best efforts to hide it?

A Beautiful Person

Lauren Giddings' family were extremely proud of her; they had good reason to be. Lauren was the first in the family to attend college. She was driven, enthusiastic and ambitious, so going into the legal profession made a lot of sense.

Born April 18, 1984, in Takoma Park, Maryland, Lauren was the first child born to Karen and Bill Giddings. She had two younger sisters, Kaitlyn and Sarah. She loved animals, especially her beloved Pekingese dog, Butterbean.

Lauren was popular and never had any trouble making friends. She was always good at staying in touch. In her last year of law school, at 27 years of age, and thousands of miles away, she and her two best friends from elementary school, Lori and Katie, stayed in close contact.

She was also athletic, playing softball and field hockey in high school.

Initially, Lauren planned to go to medical school, but after a change of heart, she set her sights on studying law. She specifically wanted to become a public defender.

Lauren had always been drawn to the southern United States. So when it was time to pick where she would attend college, Lauren chose Agnes Scott College, a small, women’s liberal arts school in Decatur, Georgia, right outside of Atlanta. She graduated in 2006, with a major in political science and a minor in religious studies.

In August 2008, 24-year-old Lauren enrolled at Mercer University in Macon, GA, to earn her law degree.

But there was a lot more to Lauren than her academic achievements. She was an incredibly kind, thoughtful and caring person.

It was in her nature to always see the good in people.

The Neighbor

Lauren’s neighbor at Barrister’s Hall, an apartment building which specifically catered to Mercer law students, was a man named Stephen Mark McDaniel. Stephen was born Sept. 9, 1985 to Mark and Glenda McDaniel. He grew up in Lilburn, a suburb of Atlanta.

Stephen was extremely intelligent, and had a range of interests as a boy. He enjoyed puzzles, Lord of the Rings and Star Wars. Reading was one of his favorite pastimes; particularly history and adventure books. He and his father shared a passion for Samurai films.

Stephen was obsessively neat, even as a small child. So much so that his family referred to him as “Mr. Clean”. This obsession with neatness and cleanliness never let up; throughout his teenage years and into adulthood, Stephen was always careful to keep everything in order.

Until he was 13-years-old, he sang in the Atlanta Boys Choir as an alto. After leaving the choir, his dedication to church and religion endured. Stephen wanted others to have the same opportunities to practice their faith as he did, so he joined a group which travelled around Georgia, restoring places of worship.

From a young age, Stephen admired the likes of Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson. He considered himself to be very conservative politically.

Stephen worked hard in high school, and it paid off. When he graduated in 2004, he earned a presidential scholarship to Mercer University. As an undergraduate, he majored in business. After graduation, he enrolled in Mercer Law School, in the same starting class as Lauren Giddings. Stephen aimed high, hoping to one day become a federal judge.

In college, Stephen mainly kept to himself, working hard and spending a lot of time in his room. He was pretty shy and awkward around other students. He almost never went out, and very rarely drank alcohol.

His mother insisted that Stephen was “not a hermit”, just very focused on his work; he had to be, taking a full course load every year during university. In his first year, he joined Mercer’s chapter of the Federalist Society, which Lauren was also a part of. The Federalist Society describes itself as:

“An organization of 60,000 lawyers, law students, scholars, and other individuals who believe and trust that individual citizens can make the best choices for themselves and society. It was founded in 1982 by a group of law students interested in making sure that the principles of limited government embodied in our Constitution receive a fair hearing.”

Stephen and Lauren remained a part of the Federalist Society at Mercer throughout their time at law school. In fact, in their final year, Lauren was elected the president of the society, and Stephen the vice president.

A fellow member of the society described Stephen as:

“Dependable as hell. If we needed a cooler full of ice, the cooler was full of ice. If we needed fliers put up, they got put up.”

Lauren and Stephen moved into Barrister’s Hall in the same week in August, 2008. Other students considered Stephen to be eccentric and a bit weird, never making much of an effort with him.

He was 6 feet tall and lanky, with a wild, unkempt mane of mousy brown curls and a shadow of a mustache and beard. He did not put a lot of thought into his appearance, always looking a little tired and disheveled.

Regardless of what others thought, Lauren was always nice to Stephen, even if she did find him strange. While they weren’t friends, they were friendly, and she always chatted to him when they saw each other in the hall.

Stephen Asks Lauren Out

After moving into the apartment complex in 2008, Stephen asked Lauren out several times. Each time she declined, but was always nice about it and let him down gently.

Lauren had a boyfriend, David Vandiver, who was a lawyer in Atlanta. In 2007, the pair met when Lauren was interning at the law firm where David worked. Lauren was 23 at the time, and David was 20 years older than her.

In Sept. 2007, they began dating. The age difference did not bother Lauren; she really liked David. They just clicked right away. They had a lot in common, and a similar sense of humor. Their 4 year anniversary would have been in the fall of 2011. After she passed the bar exam, Lauren planned to move in with David in Atlanta. David would later say of Lauren in an interview after her death:

“I thought she was beautiful. Intelligent, very level-headed, very laid-back, very unassuming, very sharp-witted, and always could make me laugh. And I could always make her laugh.”

On June 26, 2011, David was in California on a golf trip. He was the last person Lauren communicated with before she disappeared. On the evening of June 25, 2011, she wrote him an email, which covered a range of topics.

According to David, the email started with the line “I just had an awkward conversation” referring to a conversation Lauren had with a friend who was asking probing questions about their (Lauren and David’s) relationship.

One part of the email that was rather alarming was Lauren’s mention that she thought someone had tried to break into her apartment on Thursday night. But from the way she wrote it, she did not seem all that concerned, referring to whoever it was as “Macon hoodlums”.

David was on the way to the airport to fly back to Georgia from California when the email came through, and he did not reply. He said he wanted to talk to Lauren about these issues in person.

But Lauren would never be heard from again.

Lauren Is Missing

In May 2011, Lauren and Stephen both graduated from Mercer Law School. All they had to do was pass the Georgia bar exam, and they would officially be certified to practice law.

Law students at Mercer spent much of that June barricaded in their rooms, their noses buried deep in their books. Lauren told her friends and family that she would be studying pretty much constantly, therefore they shouldn’t worry if she didn’t always answer their phone calls and text messages right away.

Katie O’Hare, who I mentioned previously, was one of Lauren’s best friends from elementary school. Katie was still living in Maryland, employed as a healthcare worker. By Wednesday, June 29, she was concerned that she hadn't heard anything from Lauren for four days. She knew she was busy, but Katie was sure that she would have replied to at least one of her messages by that time. This wasn’t like Lauren at all.

It was Katie who sounded the alarm about Lauren's uncharacteristic silence. And she was right to do so - she began contacting other mutual friends and Lauren's family, asking if anyone had heard from her. But nobody had; not since the email Lauren sent to David on Saturday evening.

The last time friends had seen Lauren was Saturday morning. The previous evening, Friday the 24th, she and several friends had gone out for some drinks and to listen to music downtown. After the night out, Lauren crashed at a friend’s house and left in the morning.

After leaving her friend’s house, Lauren went to the Macon country club to swim and relax by the pool for a while. David gave her his pass to use while he was in California that weekend. At around 6:30 p.m., she bought some food from a fast food restaurant and headed back to her apartment.

Lauren’s sister, Kaitlyn Wheeler, called a law school classmate and good friend of Lauren’s, Ashley Morehouse. Kaitlyn asked if Ashley could go knock on Lauren’s apartment door. Ashley agreed, but when she went to Lauren's apartment, there was no answer. The door was locked. She did, however, see Lauren's car, a 2004 Mitsubishi Galant parked outside. Ashley called Kaitlyn back, telling her that there was no answer at her sister’s apartment.

Despite being in different parts of the country, Lauren’s friends and family simultaneously got the feeling that something just wasn’t right.

On Wednesday evening, Lauren’s other childhood best friend, Lori Suspic, who was living in Chicago and had also been trying to get in touch with Lauren for several days, called Macon police to enquire about filing a missing persons report.

A Search Ensues

In response to Lori’s call, an officer went to Barrister’s Hall around 11 p.m. There was no sign of forced entry at Lauren’s apartment and everything seemed secure.

Ashley, who knew where Lauren kept her spare key, decided she would use it to enter the apartment. She and a small group of friends who also lived in Barrister’s Hall went inside. They found all of Lauren’s personal items in the apartment, including her keys, purse, cell phone and laptop, but no Lauren.

At some point, while Lauren’s friends were looking around her apartment, Stephen McDaniel appeared. The others found his presence in the apartment weird.

Lauren’s cell phone was out of battery, so they plugged it in. They discovered that the last time she had made any calls or sent text messages was Saturday.

The group in Lauren’s apartment decided to call 911 (bear in mind, it had become clear to everyone that Lauren had not been heard from for 4 days at that point, so they had good reason to be worried).

Two Mercer University police officers arrived and spoke to the students who had been inside the apartment. The university police were alarmed, so they called for Macon PD to assist. An officer from Macon PD arrived at 12.52 a.m. on June 30. Together, the officers and students searched the apartment complex, the surrounding area, and the library. There was still no sign of Lauren. At around 3 a.m., the Macon police officer left.

The Investigations Begins

At 9 a.m. on June 30, an official investigation into Lauren’s disappearance was launched. Dozens of police descended on Barrister’s Hall, searching the area and interviewing all residents, including Stephen McDaniel.

Less than an hour after the investigation was officially launched, two detectives entered the area to the left of the apartment complex where the trash bins were kept. Before they had much chance to look around, they noticed a foul odor coming from one of the bins.

Being experienced detectives, they knew that smell. In a later interview for the Oxygen documentary in Ice Cold Blood, one of the detectives said:

“While we were standing there, the wind started to turn. Immediately, I smelled an odor that I was very familiar with. We all smell things in life that smell bad. And that of a body, or a decomposing body, is one of the worst things you’ll smell. But it has a very distinctive smell.”

The detectives began searching through the trash bin where the smell was emanating from. The bin was, of course, full of trash. But it didn’t take long for them to find the source of the smell, and it was horrifying. There, wrapped in black trash bags and dressed only in a pair of jogging shorts was a woman’s torso. The detective added:

"They did not find the head, legs or arms in either one of the trash cans. I had never seen anything like that before. Who could have done this? Because truthfully, only a monster could do something like that. It was absolutely horrible.”

Stephen McDaniel’s Media Interview

Here is a video of Stephen’s interview with reporters on the morning of June 30. Around the 1:29 mark, the reporter tells him that detectives have recovered a body - this is the scene I described at the very beginning of this article. McDaniel’s demeanor changes drastically after he is informed of the discovery of a body. While it is not confirmed that it’s Lauren’s, from the way he acts in the interview, it’s obvious that he assumes it is. He tells the reporter he needs to sit down.

About 20 minutes later, he comes back and his interview with the reporter resumes. He gives her several pieces of information, including what he and the other residents of the apartment building found when they entered Lauren's apartment the night before. He tells the reporter what he knows of Lauren’s activities on the evening of Friday the 24th and the following day (he does not explicitly say he saw her on either of these days).

He also says that Lauren had mentioned in an email that she thought someone had broken into her apartment the previous Thursday night - Stephen says this was sent to a “friend in Atlanta” (her boyfriend, David Vandiver). It’s not really clear how Stephen saw this email - perhaps the group of friends in the apartment opened her computer and her email was open, or maybe one of them knew her password.

Throughout the interview, Stephen speculates about what might have happened to Lauren. He says that she went jogging a lot, and he wondered if she was snatched while out on a run.

Many people online have commented on how after Stephen is told a body has been found, he appears to put on quite a show of being upset and crying (although you never actually see any tears), but then seems to be able to quickly switch back to coherently answering questions.

The Investigation Continues

Thursday was garbage day, but there were so many police cars at the Barrister's Hall apartment complex, as well as an RV-type vehicle set up as a sort of headquarters for the search, that the path for the garbage truck was blocked. If the garbage had been transported to landfill when it was supposed to be, it’s likely that investigators never would have found the torso.

"If that trash had been picked up, we'd still be working a missing persons case," said Det. David Patterson of the Macon PD told the local media.

*I’m skipping ahead here briefly, but at a conference police held on July 6, they announced that DNA testing confirmed that the torso did belong to Lauren Giddings.

Detectives began asking residents of the apartment complex if they could do walkthroughs of their apartments. These were voluntary, and residents could say no, but they all agreed to let the police in. When they asked Stephen, however, he was hesitant. Detectives told him that everybody else in the apartment complex had allowed them entry. On hearing this, Stephen let them in.

At 1:40 p.m., after conducting their walkthrough, they took note of the following items they saw in Stephen’s apartment: a large knife, a samurai sword, a rifle and two handguns. While not illegal for Stephen to own any of these items, they did catch the attention of the detectives.

Cadaver dogs were brought into the apartment complex and walked all around the building. The areas they alerted on included outside Lauren’s apartment and in her bathroom, outside Stephen’s apartment and in his bedroom, the vacant apartment below Lauren’s and the building’s shared laundry room.

Stephen Is Arrested

Now this is really strange, and I’m not 100% sure how it came to be, but Stephen ended up being arrested and charged later that day after he admitted to police that he had stolen condoms (?!) from neighboring apartments several weeks (or months) earlier.

At this point, detectives were suspicious of Stephen, given the array of weapons found in his apartment, and the cadaver dogs hitting on scent in his room.

While at the police station for his burglary charge, Stephen was interviewed about Lauren. This was just after 11p.m. on June 30. Here is the video of the interview:

It lasts 2 hours, and you definitely don’t need to watch it all, but I recommend watching just a few minutes to get an idea of how different Stephen is here compared with his interview that morning with the reporter.

You’ll notice that during his police interview, Stephen acts like a lost little boy, barely able to answer questions. With the reporter, he answered questions with ease, giving long and detailed responses. It’s as though he is in some kind of daze. He sits completely still and stares straight ahead. He looks like a zombie.

The interviewing detective gets sick of Stephen answering “I don’t know” to every question. He compares Stephen chatting with ease to the reporter that morning with the way he is acting during their interview. The detective does become hostile with Stephen. He is convinced he is hiding something.

The following day, July 1, Stephen appears in court for his burglary charge. He is charged with two counts of burglary and is denied a request for bail.

Stephen McDaniel, Person of Interest

The same day, July 1, the police serve Stephen with a warrant to search his apartment. Here is a list of the items they seize (found here):

two handguns
a rifle
Rope
four baseball bats
a bayonet
a chain mail vest
a camera
A laptop
a cell phone
an external card drive and a memory card reader
receipts (including one from Walmart dated June 23, 2011)
a green scrub sponge
two keys
a journal

They also searched Stephen's car (a black 1997 Geo Prizm), taking fabric samples from the back seat (there were dark stains on it that looked like dried blood).

At the jail, they served a search warrant on Stephen himself, taking hair samples, cheek swabs, fingernail scrapings and photos of him.

In Hot Water

By July 20, Stephen was still in jail for the burglary charge (it was coming up on three weeks at that point). Everything goes quite quickly from here with regards to the investigation. Between July 12 and July 21, the police search Stephen’s apartment several more times. They seized more items during these subsequent searches, including:

a Sony Playstation 3 and PS2
a Microsoft Xbox gaming system and accessories
compact discs
memory sticks and memory cards
a laptop (I’m assuming this was an additional laptop, different from the one seized during the previous search)
a camera
two adult magazines
a pair of women’s underwear (which were found to have Lauren’s DNA on them)
packaging for a Stanley hacksaw

The memory sticks seized were examined by a forensic computer specialist from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI). In another sickening twist, they were found to have 52 indecent images of children on them.

On searching Stephen’s laptop, they came across some deeply disturbing internet searches Stephen had made. Some were specifically about Lauren - he had searched all over the internet for her name, visited her Twitter account countless times and searched “nude Lauren Giddings”. There were other searches that were just generally perverted and disgusting, for example, “molest sleeping girl”.

They also found that Stephen had visited porn websites which featured cannibalism and dismemberment.

On the day Lauren’s body was found, he searched “how to permanently erase search history”.

Stephen Is Charged With Lauren’s Murder

On August 2, 2011, police issued an arrest warrant, charging Stephen McDaniel with the murder of Lauren Giddings.

Here are some of the pieces of evidence they referred to in the warrant:

Investigators recovered a hacksaw at Barrister’s Hall which had been hidden in the laundry room at the apartment complex. Forensic examination of the saw would reveal that it had traces of Lauren’s DNA on it. The packaging for the saw was found in Stephen’s apartment.
One of the keys they seized from Stephen’s room turned out to be a master key for the apartment complex, which would have given him access to every apartment, including Lauren’s.
Shortly after Lauren’s torso was found, investigators received a call from a roommate of Stephen’s during his undergraduate days at Mercer. Thad Money told police that when they lived together, Stephen would often tell him about how he could commit the “perfect murder” and never get caught.

The following day, August 3, Stephen appeared in court for the murder charge. He pleaded not guilty.

On August 23, he was charged with seven counts of child sexual exploitation for the child pornography found on the memory stick in his apartment. In December, Stephen pleaded not guilty to these charges. Stephen’s bond was set at $850,000, which his family could not pay. He remained in jail awaiting his trial.

On February 21, 2013, prosecutors announced they would not pursue the death penalty in the case.

In regards to this development, Bibb County District Attorney David Cooke put out a statement saying:

“Recently I met with the family of Lauren Giddings, and discussed the case with them at length. At the close of the meeting, Lauren’s mother and father asked me to withdraw the death notice. Although they believe that Mr. McDaniel deserves to be punished to the fullest extent of the law, they recognize that withdrawing the death notice will allow the case to proceed in a more timely fashion, and will result in the State achieving justice for Lauren at a sooner date. In the interests of avoiding further delays, my office will not seek the death penalty for Mr. McDaniel.”

A Shock Move From Stephen

In an unexpected move, Stephen pleaded guilty to Lauren’s murder on April 21, 2014, just one week before his trial was due to begin.

"We felt like Stephen thought that he was smarter than everyone else, that he was going to win until the end," said Bibb County Sheriff's Office Investigator David Patterson, expressing his surprise at Stephen’s decision to plead guilty and not go to trial.

As a part of the plea deal, Stephen had to give a statement detailing exactly what happened to Lauren the night she was murdered. The prosecution agreed to drop the burglary and child sexual exploitation charges in exchange for Stephen accepting the deal.

Cooke explained that the deal was made partly as a result of the prosecution taking the death penalty off the table. Death penalty cases can, in some cases, take up to seven years to go to trial. By withdrawing the death penalty and offering Stephen McDaniel the plea deal, the case, which had already dragged on for 3 years at that point, was put to rest much faster. Lauren’s family would not have to endure wait years for a painful trial.

"It feels good to finally get justice for Lauren, her family and the community, but considering the great tragedy, nothing can bring happiness," Cooke said.

Stephen, 28-years-old at the time, was sentenced to life in prison. The earliest possible year he will be eligible for parole is 2041, but Cooke said that the possibility of Stephen being released from prison is unlikely.

So What Did Happen To Lauren?

According to Stephen’s written statement, this is what happened that night:

On Sunday, June 26 at around 4:30 a.m., Stephen put on a mask and a pair of gloves. He used the master key found in his room to enter Lauren’s apartment. He insisted that he did not “sexually accost” her. He watched her sleeping for a short while, but she woke up when she heard the floor creak. When she saw him, she told him to “get the fuck out”.

Stephen jumped onto the bed, put his hands around her neck and began strangling her. The two struggled and fell off the bed. On the floor, Stephen strangled Lauren to death.

He placed her in the bathtub in her apartment and went back to his apartment across the hall. He stayed there for the entire day on Sunday. Around midnight, he returned to Lauren’s apartment and dismembered her body using the hacksaw the police found in the laundry room with her DNA on it.

He then disposed of her remains, putting them in black trash bags and dumping them in trash bins on the law school campus, across from Barrister’s Hall.

On June 28, he disposed of her torso in the trash bin at the apartment complex.

Stephen Argues for a New Trial

In February 2018, Stephen filed a petition for a new trial. He represented himself (because Stephen thinks he’s smarter than everyone else), claiming that his constitutional rights were violated throughout the investigation and before the trial.

Stephen argued that investigators documented in their report that he (Stephen) was verbally unresponsive, “staring off into space” and showed little evidence that he was “mentally engaged” with officers, but they did not wait for him to be cleared health-wise by medical staff before they asked him for consent to search his apartment.

If this seems a little confusing, he was basically arguing that he was not mentally fit to consent to a search. He went on to say that his attorneys failed to pursue that line of defense.

The judge rejected his bid for a new trial.

I actually think that Stephen got an excellent deal, considering he was convicted of murdering his roommate, cutting her up and literally dumping her body parts like trash around the campus.

Personally, I think Stephen knew he had no chance of getting a new trial and he knows he got a good deal. He just wanted to play lawyer for a while and strut around the courtroom like he had some kind of authority…because he knows he’s never going to be a lawyer now.

As of March 2021, Stephen is 35-years-old. In 2041, when he will eligible for parole for the first time, he’ll be 55-years-old. He is currently serving his sentence in Hancock State Prison in Sparta, Georgia.

Lauren’s Legacy

On August 6, 2011, a funeral service was held for Lauren at St. Mary of the Mills Church in Laurel, Maryland. Hundreds attended, paying their respects to Lauren, who was so loving and shone so bright throughout her short life.

While the pain of losing their daughter will never disappear, Karen and Bill Giddings have said that they always try to focus on the fun-loving and ambitious woman Lauren was. They do not let the horrific manner in which she died take away from their memories of her. Karen said of her daughter:

"She never lost sight of what life is really about. She lived more in her 27 years than most people do in 100,”

In a card fellow law students at Mercer gave to the Giddings, one student wrote that “Lauren was the glue that held us all together”.

A year after Lauren’s death, David Vandiver spoke to local news station 13WMAZ in Macon. He said:

"It's been hell. Nothing's really changed. Time, as some people say, heals all wounds. If it does, it hasn't even begun yet. It's just been a mix of heartache and anger.”

Having been together for four years, Vandiver had made plans to propose to Lauren. He loves and misses her very much, he told the reporter.

The Giddings family have set up the Lauren Teresa Giddings Scholarship, which provides tuition support to students who are strong academically, but would struggle to pay college fees. The scholarship favors students who are first in their family to attend college, as Lauren was, and those who hope to go on to careers in law or special education.

Every year since Lauren’s death, Agnes Scott College has hosted the Lauren Giddings Memorial Walk and Softball Tournament. All of the money goes towards the scholarship. In 2017, they reached their goal of $25,000, which they needed to find the scholarship for years to come.

"If they could just enjoy and pursue their dreams a little bit in the way that Lauren did, we would be so happy."

Sources

Above The Law Blog - This blog was super helpful in my research for this case, and very cleverly written. The Macon Telegraph has a paywall, so I could only access 3 articles, but this blog really helped me get around that.

The Plot Thickens: Say Hello to ‘Hacksaw McDaniel’

Hacksaw McDaniel Accused of Child Pornography Possession

Stephen McDaniel’s Ex-Roommate Speaks: Say Hello to Thad Money

A Creepy New Claim About Stephen McDaniel in the Lauren Giddings Murder Case

Lauren’s life

McDaniel's first media interview

Md. family's journey into heartache

Lauren Giddings and the man whose heart she won

Lauren Giddings' boyfriend talks about relationship, a future disrupted

Lauren Giddings Obituary - Macon, GA

Hundreds Attend Funeral For Md. Woman Slain In Georgia

Family remembers Lauren Giddings