MACON — The family of Lauren Giddings, a Mercer University law school grad who was strangled and then dismembered with a hacksaw by a fellow law student the month after they graduated in 2011, is launching a new search for her remains.
The case was one of the region’s highest-profile murder probes this century.
After receiving a Facebook message in recent weeks with a tip that her remains might be buried on land near the killer’s grandfather’s farm in rural Pike County, the Giddings family has contacted law enforcement officials in Middle Georgia and, as of Friday, been given the OK for a nonprofit search group to proceed.
Details about when such a search, using cadaver dogs, might happen were not immediately known, though it could be as soon as next week.
Giddings’ extremities and head have never been found. Her torso was discovered by police in a flip-top, roll-away trash can after she vanished in late June 2011 from the apartments, where she and her assailant were neighbors at a hillside complex overlooking downtown Macon. The off-campus apartments known as Barristers Hall sit across the street from Mercer’s Walter F. George School of Law.
Over the years, Giddings’ murder has been featured prominently on true-crime television shows, including “Dateline NBC.”
Credit: Contributed
Credit: Contributed
Her killer, Stephen Mark McDaniel, now 39, pleaded guilty to murder in April 2014 and is serving a life sentence with the possibility of parole. In a written statement made as part of his plea, McDaniel confessed to strangling Giddings after breaking into her apartment. He wrote that he cut off her limbs and head with a hacksaw and then wrapped them in trash bags, tossing them into a dumpster outside the law school.
According to testimony at an appeals hearing in 2018, McDaniel told his lawyers that he had carved off her fingers and flushed them down a toilet.
Giddings, a Maryland native and Agnes Scott College alum, was 27 when she was killed.
Her family and others close to her have never given up trying to find her remains. Authorities have also searched a landfill to no avail.
One of her closest friends from her undergraduate years at Agnes Scott, Kristin S. Tucker, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Friday that the new tip came in a Facebook message to Giddings’ sister, Kaitlyn Wheeler, in Maryland.
The March 4 message was from a woman whose family owns property near where McDaniel’s late grandfather lived. The land lies along the Flint River, just south of the town of Molena, between Macon and LaGrange.
The area is one of interest to the Giddings family because McDaniel was said to have traveled there a week or two before Giddings disappeared, though authorities never searched for her remains there.
Tucker said the tipster claims to have been told that McDaniel’s grandfather and another person supposedly went to Macon in the wake of Giddings’ death and returned with “trash bags.” The owner of some property adjacent to McDaniel’s grandfather’s farm later noticed some disturbed dirt at an old family cemetery on his own property, Tucker said, which is believed to be a focal point of the upcoming search.
No word of any such claims ever surfaced in documents or testimony related to the Giddings case. Neither McDaniel’s grandfather, who died in 2012, nor anyone else was said to have had a role in disposing of Giddings’ remains.
Nonetheless, Giddings’ relatives have long wondered if her remains might be hidden in Pike County, despite McDaniel’s statement that he disposed of the extremities in a Macon trash bin.
Wheeler, Giddings’ sister, said by phone Friday, “I’m not going to say we have the most hope in this, but we’ll leave no stone unturned.”
Said Wheeler: “It’s proof that we’re never going to give up. … My parents, this is their baby, their child. They want her full body back so that they have a peaceful, proper burial.”
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