Father of Lauren Giddings’ killer wants ‘truth,’ says cops may have wronged son

One of the strangest and most macabre murders in modern Macon history took another twist Wednesday as the father of confessed-and-convicted dismemberment killer Stephen McDaniel spoke to reporters about how cops, prosecutors and defense lawyers may have wronged his son.

Mark W. McDaniel, 64, stood before reporters from a pair of Macon television news outlets and laid out his son’s case for an appeal in the 2011 slaying of fellow Mercer University law graduate Lauren Giddings.

The senior McDaniel, who in the past has worked as a house painter, has rarely, if ever, talked publicly about the case against his son. But on Wednesday, for half an hour or so, Mark McDaniel detailed the contents of his son’s habeas corpus petition, a form of appeal, that his son filed Tuesday.

“We’re hoping that the truth will come out,” the father said in a news conference streamed by TV stations WMGT and WGXA, noting alleged “improprieties and misconduct” by the authorities who jailed and convicted his son.

Meanwhile in Giddings’ native Maryland, her sister, Kaitlyn Wheeler, watched some of Mark McDaniel’s news conference. By phone later, speaking of Stephen McDaniel, Wheeler told The Telegraph, “It sounds like he’ll be bugging us forever. … As long as he’s still alive.”

At the news conference outside Atlanta, where the McDaniel family is from, Mark McDaniel declined to discuss his son’s guilt or innocence, focusing rather on how the authorities may have overstepped their bounds in bringing Stephen McDaniel to justice.

Habeas filings are not uncommon avenues for convicted criminals to pursue. Even so, for Stephen McDaniel, now 32, who pleaded guilty and provided a written statement of how he claims to have killed Giddings, such a maneuver is at best a long-shot.

Though he may well be granted a hearing on the matter, a civil proceeding, the chance of his getting the trial he never had is slim.

He apparently contends, however, that some of the evidence that sunk him was ill-gotten through improper or tainted searches and that it should never have been gathered.

Some of that evidence may well include items the police found in his apartment: panties with Giddings’ DNA on them and hacksaw packaging that matched a saw with Giddings’ blood on it in the apartment complex’s tool closet. (Not to mention other damning evidence found on his computers and a camera: Internet searches for when Macon’s garbage trucks picked up trash, how to disable a burglar bar on a doorknob, and video clips of him the night of Giddings' death, peering into Giddings’ living room using a camera mounted on a stick.)

Though Stephen McDaniel now claims his rights were violated — that improper searches were conducted and his due process was denied — a judge could hear the claims and reach a conclusion that McDaniel will have a hard time overcoming.

In essence, “You pleaded guilty based on evidence you now say should not have been in play?”

On the eve of trial in April 2014, nearly three years after his arrest, McDaniel admitted strangling Giddings, cutting up her body and throwing the pieces in the trash. He was sentenced to life, but with a chance for parole.

Giddings’ torso was the only part of her that was ever found. It was found in late June 2011, days after she vanished, in a flip-top garbage can next to the Georgia Avenue apartments where she and McDaniel were next-door neighbors.

Soon after the discovery, McDaniel, along with others close to Giddings, became a suspect. But within days, he was the prime suspect.

The bar now is high for McDaniel, who faced a four-year deadline to file for habeas relief, to prove that his constitutional rights were violated.

Speaking on Wednesday on behalf of his son, Mark McDaniel said Tuesday’s legal filing contends that communications were intercepted and “stolen” by Bibb County officials while Stephen was in jail here to “obtain direct insight” into his defense strategy while he was incarcerated.

“I’m very concerned about what’s been going on,” Mark McDaniel said, “and what Stephen’s gone through. … We feel bad about what’s going on, but we see some hope in the future.”

Later in the day at a news conference of his own, Bibb District Attorney David Cooke shot down Stephen McDaniel’s contention regarding the theft of McDaniel’s legal strategy. Cooke said such “interceptions” had no bearing on the case, and that McDaniel’s lawyers agreed.

Cooke said that in January 2013, he learned that McDaniel’s legal research requests from the jailhouse law library were being forwarded to the DA’s office while Cooke’s predecessor was district attorney.

“As soon as I learned of this practice, I ordered that the interceptions stop immediately, and the staff write detailed descriptions of what had occurred so that Mr. McDaniel’s attorneys could seek whatever remedies they felt necessary,” Cooke said Wednesday.

Cooke added that “any claims that Mr. McDaniel’s research was read or utilized ... are baseless, and we stand by the evidence that led to Mr. McDaniel’s guilty plea.”

This story was originally published February 21, 2018 at 3:25 PM with the headline "Father of Lauren Giddings’ killer wants ‘truth,’ says cops may have wronged son."