Lauren Teresa Giddings was born on April 18, 1984 to parents Bill & Karen. She had two younger sisters, Kaitlyn & Sarah & the family lived in Laurel, Maryland right between Washington DC & Baltimore. In 2006 Lauren graduated from Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia with a major in political science & a minor in religious studies. In 2008, she moved to Macon, Georgia to attend law school at Mercer University.
Lauren’s sister Kaitlyn described Lauren as someone who didn’t truly blossom until she entered college. She was said to be loud, fun & someone who was intelligent, mature & had a good head on her shoulders. She was kind & saw the good in people, she loved animals & adored her Pekingese dog, Butterbean & she was an outgoing girl who never struggled to make friends.
Laruen was in a relationship with David Vandiver who was a lawyer in Atlanta & 20 years older than her. The two met in September of 2007 & the age difference was never an issue with Lauren. They had a similar sense of humor & just clicked & after Lauren passed the bar exam, she planned to move in with David.
In June of 2011, Lauren was 27-years-old & exceptionally excited for her future. She was the first person in her family to attend college & after many long years studying law at Mercer University in Georgia, she had finally graduated. It had been a very grueling time spent focusing on her studies but she had her eyes set on the prize of becoming a public defender. The last hurdle she had to overcome was passing the Georgia bar exam. After graduation, Lauren’s sister Kaitlyn got married in June so she went back home to Maryland to be there. After the wedding, she headed back to Georgia where she lived in Barristers Hall, an apartment complex for Mercer University law students, in order to put her nose to the grindstone & study for the bar.
Lauren decided to stay in Macon, Georgia over the summer rather than moving back to Baltimore so that she could focus without distraction. She stayed in her apartment that was directly across from Mercer University. She warned her family ahead of time that they likely wouldn’t be hearing from her very much since she would be wrapped up in studying. Her sister Kaitlyn recalls talking to Lauren for the last time on Friday, June 24 via text but didn’t notice until days later that Lauren never responded after this.
The last time anyone saw Lauren was Saturday morning, June 25. The previous evening, Friday, the 24th, she & friends went out for drinks & listened to music downtown. She spent the night at her friend’s house & left in the morning. From there, she went to a Macon country club to swim & relax by the pool since David gave her his pass to use while he was out of town for the weekend. At about 6:30 pm, she got fast food & went back to her apartment.
One of Lauren’s best friends since elementary school, Katie O’Hare, who lived in Maryland, became concerned when she hadn’t heard from Lauren for four days. She knew she was busy, but it wasn’t like her friend not to reply to even one of her messages. On Wednesday, June 29, Katie called around to Lauren’s friends & family to see if anyone had heard from her, but they hadn’t. Katie got a hold of Kaitlyn who then contacted one of Lauren’s friends & classmates, Ashley Morehouse. She asked Ashley if she could go over & knock on Lauren’s door. When Ashley arrived, she saw Lauren’s 2004 Mitsubishi Galant in the parking lot, but Lauren didn’t answer the door.
Since Ashley knew where Lauren kept her spare apartment key, she & a couple of friends let themselves in & were surprised to see how normal everything looked. Her ID, purse, laptop & books sat on the table; nothing appeared out of place. They plugged in her cell phone that was out of battery & saw that the last calls & texts she had made were on Saturday, four days earlier. Ashley called 911 at this time & in the meantime, from Maryland, Kaitlyn got in touch with Macon police & woke her dad up to tell him that Lauren was missing. Lauren’s dad drove to Macon to file a missing person’s report & her mom planned to fly down later that day.
When police arrived at 12:52 am in the early hours of Thursday, June 30, they found no signs of forced entry, no items appeared to be stolen or missing & nothing appeared to be amiss. Police left the complex at 3 am after finding no sign of Lauren.
At 9 am, an official investigation began & police brought in a crime lab tech team to use Luminol inside the apartment to check for any traces of blood, but initially, found nothing. When they reached the bathroom, however, the room lit up like a Christmas tree. Blood covered the bathtub, smeared across the floor & sprayed up the walls. At this point, police considered this a homicide case. At the time, there were no witnesses & no suspects so police began to interview anyone who lived in her apartment complex or anyone who knew Lauren.
As detectives remained outside Lauren’s apartment, they began to smell a foul odor that they quickly determined to be the smell of decomposition emanating from a garbage bin. The detective 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.” There, they found a human torso, dressed only in a pair of pink jogging shorts. The body had been wrapped in black trash bags & the head, legs & arms were missing. It was later confirmed through DNA results that the body sadly belonged to Lauren.
Sarah & Kaitlyn had dropped their mom off at the airport around this time but had to turn around & pick her back up after hearing the horrific news that a body was found. They didn’t want their mom to hear the devastating news while she was by herself.
Police extended their search to an area of the neighborhood ten blocks from the apartments to look for clues that would help them solve this case. The following week, they searched in & around the apartments as well as along the Ocmulgee River, a Macon landfill & in the drains & sewage system around the sixteen buildings of apartments where Lauren lived.
When local media learned of the case, they swarmed the area of Lauren’s apartment complex & as they did, they interviewed Lauren’s nextdoor neighbor, Stephen McDaniel after noticing him standing around the area. As they spoke with Stephen, who was a fellow law student who had been in class with Lauren, he seemed like a concerned local who was worried about his missing neighbor. The man seemed eccentric but genuinely concerned for Lauren as he was interviewed & described her as nice as can be & very much a people person.
At the time he was speaking with the media, it was his belief that police were still searching for Lauren in hopes that they would find her alive, but it stood out to viewers that he continued to speak of Lauren in the past tense, for example, saying “Lauren was my neighbor.” He said he had been with her friends when they entered Lauren’s locked apartment the day before which prompted the investigation. He speculated that someone could have “snatched” her when she was out running. As they continued to speak, the reporter made mention that a body had been found in the parking lot area. This was when Stephen’s demeanor immediately flipped & he became basically speechless, only managing to mutter the question, “body?” At that point he told the reporter that he needed to sit down & he wandered off by himself & sat on a nearby curb, seemingly in a daze.
When he regained his composure & managed to come back to the interview, Stephen was visibly distraught, saying he couldn’t imagine who would hurt Lauren since she was such a nice person. He mentioned that Lauren had actually intended to move out of her apartment that very day. He breathed heavily & began crying, though no tears were visible, as he continued to speak about Lauren, but seemed to be able to quickly shift to answering questions more calmly & clearly. He also said that when her friends checked her computer, they found an email that Lauren had sent & in it, she mentioned that she was scared & someone tried to break into her apartment on Thursday night & she was afraid to stay there.
Stephen was born on September 8, 1985 & was raised near Atlanta, Georgia to parents Mark & Glenda & he had an unremarkable childhood. In college, he mostly kept to himself & was shy & awkward around others. At the time of Lauren’s murder, Stephen only had two more weeks on his apartment lease & planned to move back in with his parents.
Stephen was a six foot tall, lanky guy with an unruly mane of frizzy brown curls & while many found him odd, Lauren had always been kind to him. The two had each moved into Barrister Hall in the same week of August of 2008, three years earlier. Being a generally nice person, Lauren was friendly in her interactions with Stephen & was very polite when refusing his offers to take her out. Both Stephen & Lauren had been members of Mercer’s chapter of the Federalist Society throughout their time in law school & Lauren had been elected president while Stephen served as vice president. He was described as dependable, obsessively neat, even as a small child & very intelligent.
Before his interview, police spoke with Lauren’s neighbors & each agreed to have their apartments searched except for Stephen. He claimed, “It’s the lawyer in me, I’m just always protective of my space.” He eventually allowed one detective to walk through but only if he could be there at the same time. Police did the walk-through of Stephen’s apartment at 1:40 pm & took note of a large knife, a samurai sword, a rifle & two handguns.
Police noted his bizarre behavior & the fact that he was hanging around the frenzy of activity that day & after he gave his infamous interview with the local news station, police were more interested in speaking further with Stephen.
Despite the talkative person Stephen presented himself as to the media, when he was brought into the police station for questioning that same day, he sat in a trance-like state, barely speaking for two hours while denying any involvement & answering, “Yes,” “No,” or “I don’t know” to most questions asked of him. While alone in the room, he would sit as still as a statue & stare straight ahead. During his interrogation, Detective Carl Fletcher mentioned that condoms had been found in Stephen’s apartment. Since Stephen had previously told detectives that he was a virgin who was saving himself for marriage, they questioned why he would have condoms if that was the case. He told detectives that he’d previously entered a few of his classmates’ homes while they were gone & took the condoms then. With this information, he was arrested on burglary charges while police continued to gather evidence against him to prove his involvement in Lauren’s murder.
On July 1, police obtained a search warrant & searched Stephen’s apartment & found packaging for a hacksaw & when they entered the building’s laundry room, they found the hacksaw that matched the packaging. Forensic examination found traces of Lauren’s DNA on the saw. They also found a sheet that was covered in blood that was later confirmed to belong to Lauren, as well as a pair of her underwear. They also found a master key for the apartment complex.On his computer, they found he had posted on a number of blogs & forums, discussing violence & torture toward women. Investigators also found 52 images of child pornography on a flash drive.
He also had a flash drive full of Lauren’s personal photos since he frequently visited her social media pages. His search history indicated that while he looked at Lauren’s photos, he watched violent pornography at the same time. The police even managed to retrieve video footage that had been deleted that showed Lauren’s apartment that Stephen secretly filmed while peeping through her windows from the outside. Stephen later admitted to hoisting a six foot wooden stick with a camera duct taped to the end while standing on the ground floor outside Lauren’s window, peering into her second floor apartment. The video footage police had found was taken on the night of Lauren’s murder. More than two-hundred pieces of evidence were reportedly gathered that indicated that Stephen was Lauren’s murderer.
The police also found a master key for each apartment unit within the complex. It was very clear that Stephen had been stalking Lauren for some time & had taken many photos of her without her knowledge as well as video footage within the apartment & traces that he had religiously searched her Facebook & Linkedin pages.
Lauren had been suspicious that something was going on within her apartment. A year before her murder, Lauren had spoken with her sister about the fact that she swore things had been moved inside her apartment & questioned if someone had been inside her home.
Before her murder, Lauren’s fears were growing & the last email she sent was to her boyfriend. She emailed David on June 25, 2011 while he was away on a golf trip in California. She told him that she believed that someone had tried to break into her apartment on Thursday night & referred to whoever it was as “Macon hoodlums.” David said when he got the email, he was on his way to the airport to fly back to Georgia & hadn’t responded since he wanted to talk to Lauren in person about these issues.
On August 2, 2011, Stephen McDaniel was charged with first-degree murder &, maintaining his innocence, he pleaded not guilty. On August 23, he was charged with seven counts of child sexual exploitation for the child pornography found in his apartment & in December, he pleaded not guilty to those charges. He was unable to post his $850,000 bond & remained in jail, awaiting trial. On February 21, 2013, it was announced that the death penalty would not be pursued which was something that Lauren’s family wanted in order to allow the case to proceed at a faster pace since in some cases, these can take up to seven years to go to trial. One week before his trial was due to begin, he changed his plea to guilty on April 21, 2014 which avoided a trial.
As part of his plea deal, Stephen recounted the events of what happened during Lauren’s murder on the condition that the child pornography & burglary charges against him would be dropped.
In his written confession to the court, Stephen said that he had waited until Lauren fell asleep before letting himself into her apartment at about 4:30 am on Sunday, June 26, using his master key. He walked through her apartment, wearing a mask & gloves & stood in her bedroom, watching her sleep for a while. As he walked closer to her bed & when he stepped on a squeaky floorboard, Lauren woke up. He said that when Lauren saw him, she calmly told him to “Get the fuck out.” He said at that point, he lunged at her & grabbed her around the throat & they tumbled from the bed to the floor. Lauren struggled to get away, but in her struggle, the bottom half of her body went under her bed which prevented her from kicking at Stephen or trying to run away.
During his attack, Lauren managed to pull the mask from his head & when she saw his face, she said, “Stephen? Please stop.” He indicated that he strangled Lauren for fifteen minutes until she stopped moving & when she did, he dragged her body from the bedroom, into the bathroom, placing her body into the bathtub. He left her apartment & returned to his own just next door. He claimed he hadn’t gone into her apartment with the intention of killing her & only did so because she woke up & recognized him.
He then logged onto his computer & spent the whole day Sunday online until he returned to Lauren’s apartment that evening where he dismembered her in her bathtub. He placed her body parts in black garbage bags & scattered them in various dumpsters. Sadly, a few of the dumpsters had already been emptied & some of Lauren’s remains were unable to be recovered. He placed Lauren’s torso in the trash bin at the apartment complex on June 28.
Normally, the garbage would have already been removed from the apartment complex when police discovered Lauren’s torso in the bin, but waste management just so happened to be running late that day. When Stephen gave his interview, it was his belief that the evidence had already been removed & he was in the clear.
It was discovered that Lauren was set to move out of her apartment that week so Stephen took his opportunity to make his attack, knowing his chance was coming to an end. He had been spying on Lauren for months, using his camera on a stick & was devastated that he would never see her again since they both graduated. He claimed that as he helped Lauren’s friends search for her & spoke with reporters, he was ‘in a dream-like delusional state’ & convinced himself that she was still alive.
Lauren’s dad indicates that he believes about one-third of things Stephen has said since he had ample time to put his story together.
On April 21, 2014, Stephen McDaniel was found guilty & sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole after 30 years. In 2018, he tried to appeal his sentence but this was denied by the Richmond County Superior Court. He remains at Hancock State Prison & will not be eligible for parole until 2041 when he’s 55-years-old. District Attorney David Cooke fully expects Stephen to spend the rest of his life behind bars.
In 2018, Stephen argued for a retrial, claiming that his rights had been violated at the time of his arrest. Using what he’d learned in law school, he accused the police of using improper interrogation techniques & intimidation. He also claimed he had been insulted, yelled at & denied medical care. In 2022, he filed a petition arguing that the district attorney had stolen some of his defense documents & requested that the court vacate his conviction & release him from prison.
In 2021, as the ten year anniversary of Lauren’s brutal murder approached, her family reflected on all that she missed in those passing years; graduations, weddings, babies & birthdays within her family. Lauren’s sister Kaitlyn said that they still picture her as a 27-year-old woman vs. the 37-year-old woman she would have been. The family indicated that despite the fact that they began to heal after the nightmares & fear of what happened to Lauren faded, they will never forget her.
They often talk about her bubbly personality, her passion for life & what a go-getter she was. Sarah & Kaitlyn share memories with their children about their Aunt Lauren to keep her spirit alive. Kaitlyn named her daughter Lauren in honor of her sister. They keep a tradition alive that Lauren started called “pink Wednesdays” where Lauren would wear pink to work & eat cake that day. They’re especially thankful that they had the time together as a family during Kaitlyn’s wedding, a week before Lauren died. They think of the good memories the most, rather than the tragic way that Lauren was taken from them.
References:
- Medium: The murderer whose victim was found on live TV
- Ati: The chilling story of Stephen McDaniel, the murderer who gave himself away during an interview on live TV
- WGXA News: The girl next door: Lauren Giddings’ family remembers her 10 years after brutal murder
- Talk Murder with Me: The murder of Lauren Giddings
- Daily Mail: Student admits to donning mask & creeping into room of female classmate before strangling her to death after watching her via web cam
- The Crime Wire: Why Lauren Giddings’ murderer cried for the cameras
