Reader discretion: this story contains details of violence some readers may find distressing.
On the afternoon of June 30, 2011, a young man with a huge mane of curly brown hair stood outside an apartment complex on Georgia Avenue in Macon, Georgia, and talked to a TV reporter.
Behind him, yellow police tape stretched across the parking lot. In a car with its door open, a young woman sat with her hand over her face.
“Lauren was my neighbor,” he said. “We’re just trying to find out where she is at this point. I mean, no one has seen her since Saturday.”
His name was Stephen McDaniel. He was 25. The woman he was talking about, Lauren Giddings, had lived next door to him for almost three years.
The girl next door
Lauren Giddings was 27. She grew up in Maryland, the eldest of three sisters and the first in her family to go to college. In May 2011 she graduated from Mercer University’s law school in Macon. She wanted to be a defense attorney.
She lived at Barristers Hall, a small two-story complex across the street from the law school, popular with law students. Stephen McDaniel, from suburban Atlanta, had lived in the apartment beside hers since the fall of 2008. They had been classmates. In their first year they had both joined Mercer’s chapter of the Federalist Society, Lauren as its president and McDaniel as its vice president.
That June, Lauren had just come back to Macon from her sister’s wedding. She told her family she was going to shut herself away and study for the bar exam.
So at first, nobody worried when she went quiet.
“She was just gone”
By June 29, her silence had gone on too long. A friend called her sister, Kaitlyn, to ask if she had heard from Lauren. She hadn’t. Lauren’s phone went straight to voicemail. None of her friends could reach her either.
Kaitlyn called Macon police and woke their father, who drove down to Macon to file a missing person report.
That night, around midnight, a group of Lauren’s friends went to her apartment. One of them had a spare key. McDaniel came out and joined them. Together they went inside and looked around. Her purse, her ID and her phone were there. There was no sign of a struggle and no sign that anyone had broken in. Then they walked across the street to the law school library to see if she was studying there. She wasn’t.
The next morning, June 30, police were combing the complex. At about 9:40 a.m., officers noticed a terrible smell. It was coming from a trash can outside the building.
Inside, they found part of a woman’s body, wrapped in plastic. It was Lauren.
“I think I need to sit down”
Before noon, McDaniel went to the police station with the neighbors and Lauren’s friends to give a statement. His neighbors had agreed to let police search their apartments. He had not.
“It’s the lawyer in me,” he told the detective. “I’m just always protective of my space.”
Later he agreed to let the detective walk through his apartment, as long as he was there the whole time.
He spent the rest of the day hanging around the complex while police worked. That is where the WGXA reporter found him.
He was calm and helpful. Lauren was “as nice as can be,” he said, “very personable, very much a people person.” He had no idea who would want to hurt her. “The only thing we can think,” he said, “is that maybe she went out running and someone snatched her.”
He told the reporter about going into her apartment with her friends. He even mentioned the door. Lauren had a security bar for it, he said. “So there’s no sign that anyone broke in.”
He told another story too. Her friends had found an email Lauren sent on Saturday night, he said. In it she wrote that someone had tried to break into her apartment that Thursday, and that she was afraid to stay there.
If only he had known, he said. “I could’ve done something. I could’ve lent her a handgun.”
Then the reporter asked about the parking lot, where police had been working all day.
“We don’t know if this is the same person,” she said. “They took out a body there earlier.”
McDaniel’s face changed. He looked like he might faint.
“Are you okay, sir?” the reporter asked.
“I think I need to sit down,” he said.
The clip has since gone viral.
“I don’t know”
That night, McDaniel was back at the police station, sitting in a small interview room. A hidden camera was recording.
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