McDaniel's online posts describe torture, violence

Internet postings written by Stephen McDaniel as recently as the three days before Lauren Giddings’ dismembered torso was discovered in late June provide a glimpse into the thoughts of the man accused of killing her.

Using the nickname “SoL,” the poster wrote of being “desensitized” to violence and gore. He also made mention of movies depicting people being disemboweled and dismembered alive. His posts also explain how drugs such as chloroform can be used to incapacitate someone.

The author of the writings has been independently verified by The Telegraph as McDaniel. The newspaper relied on multiple unpublished details gleaned from reporters’ interviews related to the Giddings case as well as a Thursday interview with a man who met “SoL” online and later in person. He confirmed “SoL’s” identity as McDaniel.

A law enforcement source close to the murder investigation declined to say how long authorities had been aware of the posts, but did say the discussion boards were “being looked into.” On Aug. 2, McDaniel was charged in Giddings’ death. Then, this week, Macon police charged him with seven counts of sexual exploitation of children after they said child porn was found on a computer flash drive in his apartment.

Hours after the new allegations, revelations of McDaniel’s Internet posts surfaced.

“It can’t help him,” the law enforcement source said. “Let’s just put it that way. ... It’s not a shock that he might have posted stuff.”

Calls to McDaniel’s attorney and mother were not returned Thursday.

Upon learning of McDaniel’s discussion-board posts, Giddings’ sister Kaitlyn Wheeler questioned why no one was alarmed by McDaniel’s writings.

“Even his parents, or someone in school? It’s just scary. It could be your neighbor. It could be your friend,” Wheeler said. “Obviously, there were signs.”

Online posts depict death, torture

“SoL” described his numbness to violence in a 2010 post as part of a chatroom discussion about a movie released in 2007 called “The Girl Next Door.”

The Web site imdb.com bills the film as one that “follows the unspeakable torture and abuses committed on a teenage girl.”

“Girl Next Door,” “SoL” wrote, “is one of the few films I’ve seen in the last decade that” he could appreciate.

He goes on to write that a movie titled “Grotesque” didn’t make him cringe:

“It was just ... ‘eh.’ Driving nails through a man’s testicles, cutting off a woman’s nipples with a pair of scissors, severing fingers and making a necklace out of them. ... None of that does anything for me. It was fairly good imagery, but it failed to resonate with me.”

The post continues, “Yes, I can watch a man disemboweling himself by crawling across a room while his intestines are clamped to a hook and not feel even the slightest disgust. I am that desensitized to gore and torture.”

In a June 2010 post, “SoL” said the following about illegal immigrants and the Mexican drug cartel:

“If you have to send a message, cut off a head, cut out a heart, shove the heart in the mouth, and send it back to the cartel with a guy whose hands you cut off, eyes you gouge out, and tongue you rip out. Every time they send someone else, you bury the corpse.”

In a September 2010 post, “SoL” describes the merits of chloroform and other inhaled drugs as ways to incapacitate someone.

“You want to select a compound that will act quickly once inhaled at rendering someone unconscious or at least compliant, last for a long enough period of time that you can secure them for your work, and not cause them to either feel nothing for extended time or to suffer catastrophic organ failure before you can do your work.”

He added that “blunt force trauma to the head could knock her out, but it could also cause brain damage or kill her.”

In another discussion thread, “SoL” posts a link to a YouTube musical parody of the 1982 Arnold Schwarzenegger film “Conan the Barbarian” with lyrics that include “chopping up bodies, hacking and slicing,” and the refrain “hear the lamentation of the women.”

In another post from 2010, “SoL” wrote of how he’d kill religious demonstrators planning to attend the funeral of a fellow message-boarder’s brother, a fallen U.S. soldier.

“I’d go outside, grab my kit out of the car, pop in a fresh mag, and proceed to slaughter the entire, bigoted group, never once doing so much as uttering a sound. When they are all dead (and they do need to all be DEAD), I’d sit down on the ground, with my gun several paces away from me, and just rock back and forward on the ground, eyes wide and blank.”

He goes on to write, “Afterwards, I’d remain in this state for at least a day -- no talking, no communication, blank, unfocused stares. I do not fall asleep, either. Eventually, when some new stimulus is introduced (a family member I haven’t seen, a picture of my brother, or something like that), I shake my head from side to side, blink rapidly, and look around in a panicked manner, asking where I am, what’s going on, if my family is okay, why I’m there, and when they ask, I’d say I had no memory of anything that happened after I arrived at the service.”

Near the end of the post, he wrote, “They’ll probably initiate charges, at which point the family will need to get a lawyer to argue that I had no knowledge of my actions and were not acting of my own volition when I acted. Keep the story consistent, and whenever I am asked about what happened, I look down and put a sad look on your face, relating what I was TOLD happened (as you have no memory of it). I might end up institutionalized for a while so they can try to figure out what caused the blackout, and they may take my guns from me as well as the ability to purchase more, but if I stuck to the story, it’s doubtful I’d end up in prison.”

The post ends with the line, “Of course, this is all hypothetical.” The last word is typed in bold.

‘SoL’s’ identity confirmed

McDaniel’s mother, Glenda, in a recent interview with The Telegraph, told of her son’s admiration for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and of a photograph taken of Stephen and the justice while Stephen was in Washington for a Federalist Society gathering.

In the photo, McDaniel is standing beside Thomas dressed in a gray, pin-striped suit, and McDaniel is wearing a silver ring on his left index finger. He has worn the same ring in family photos.

A post by “SoL” on July 12, 2010, is accompanied by that same picture with Thomas but with McDaniel’s face whited out. In the photo, his message-board handle, “SoL,” is printed in bold where his face would be.

“I’m going to brag a little,” “SoL” posted. “I met Justice Clarence Thomas on Saturday. He was immensely kind.”

On Aug. 5, Glenda McDaniel, in a telephone interview with The Telegraph, revealed intimate details of her daughter’s -- Stephen’s sister’s -- private life.

A web posting from “SoL” dated June 22, three days before authorities say Giddings was last heard from, the author mentions “my waste-of-space sister” and makes mention of details that Glenda McDaniel revealed.

In the same post, “SoL” mentions there are people close to him who suffer from neurological disorders, which is consistent with information that Glenda McDaniel shared with The Telegraph about her family.

McDaniel was known to sign his name and put “true-born ‘Son of Liberty’’’ next to it, as he did in a testy message-board exchange with other Mercer University students during his first year at the Walter F. George School of Law.

In other Web posts, “SoL” writes that he lives in Macon and that he is a law student.

Last Halloween, “SoL” posted an online request for “two volunteers” to participate in a practice trial, a mock murder case, in November.

“SoL” later explained to others in a post that his Internet handle was “an abbreviation of my old moniker: Son of Liberty.”

Josh Long, a 27-year-old from Dublin and a regular on the message board that “SoL” frequented, volunteered to help with the mock trial. The site where they met caters to military types and weapons aficionados.

“SoL” had promised any assistants a free dinner, his treat.

“SoL” added: “There are plenty of law students that I could probably get to come and be jurors even without the offer of free food. The problem is that the professor explicitly stated that we cannot have law students as jurors. ... I’ve kept such poor contact with the few people I knew in undergrad that I probably couldn’t reach them if I tried. This is the problem of being a social recluse. My level of human contact is negligible. Most of the time, that suits me well, because that’s what my personality is like. This is one of those instances where it creates problems.”

Long showed up at Mercer on the evening of Nov. 11. He helped in the trial and was rewarded with a meal at Outback Steakhouse.

Long, who hadn’t connected “SoL” to the Giddings case until a couple of weeks ago, said Thursday, “I didn’t even remember ‘SoL’s’ name, his real name, until another person on the (message) board was tracking the news articles about it and he asked me to confirm whether or not that was actually (McDaniel). And, lo and behold, it was. His face is just kind of unforgettable. ... He acted kind of nervous all the time.”

Before they headed to eat, they dropped by McDaniel’s apartment on Georgia Avenue, across from the law school.

Long said McDaniel showed him a handgun, a Kimber model 1911 pistol.

McDaniel, still dressed in a suit, then rode with Long to the restaurant.

While they ate, they talked pistols and politics. McDaniel ordered steak.

“I think it was well-done. He struck me as sort of a germophobe,” Long recalled. “He’s very anti-Obama. ... One of those ‘Birthers,’ I think you call it.”

Long said the message-board posts from “SoL” didn’t necessarily strike him as bizarre.

“That’s the thing about the Internet. Everybody has at least semi-anonymity. You expect people to say things that they normally wouldn’t in person, when someone can get within arm’s reach of you and hurt you,” Long said. “You don’t really take stuff like that seriously. When people say off-the-wall things like, ‘Oh, my God, I’m gonna kill you,’ or, ‘Let’s go assassinate some people,’ if they said it in public it would cause issues.”

Insight into “SoL’s” high school days, psyche

In a 2009 post, “SoL” wrote of being picked on in high school, how he grew long hair for three years and began wearing a leather jacket all the time.

When a fellow student from the wrestling squad picked on him, “SoL” stabbed the student in the wrist and face with a pen, he said on the site. No teachers or administrators saw the attack, and he was not punished.

He discussed applying for a permit to carry a concealed gun.

“I keep on trying to get myself motivated enough to get my (permit), but always end up rationalizing myself out of doing it,” “SoL” wrote.

Among his rationales were his feeling of paranoia about not wanting anyone to have his fingerprints on file.

The post ends with “SoL” writing, “The good part is that, since I have no life, I am almost never anywhere other than my apartment (where I have a gun in reach most of the time) or school.”

In response to a post about defending his home, “SoL” wrote, “My gun is closer than my phone, and it’s a lot quicker than police would be.”

In a July 2010 post, “SoL” wrote of buying a four-pound “chain link shirt” in high school that he said he had worn for years. He also discusses buying a bullet-proof vest.

“Unless there’s either an invasion, a revolution or a gang war, it’ll probably go unused, but I’d rather have it, just in case,” he wrote.

Among “SoL’s” other comments are discussions about silencing gunshots, handguns, cannibalization, long fingernails and the TV show “Dexter,” which features a serial killer.

In a February 2010 post, “SoL” turned his attention to romance.

“The problem with being a social recluse with a fundamental disability to connect on a romantic level,” he wrote, “is that we want so much to find that one, special person with whom we want to grow old with, raise children with, spend the rest of our lives with ... and yet we’re incapable of going out and finding her.”

With his comments, he posted a link to the song “Broken” by the alternative band Seether from “The Punisher” movie soundtrack.

Wrote “SoL”: “Makes me think of a person who has found that special person and wants to protect her against any pain she could ever feel, who is willing to endure any hardship to keep it from (her), willing to fight against anything that would hurt her, but who can’t because he’s so mentally broken that he can’t tell her how he feels and can only watch from a distance.”

Telegraph writer Mike Stucka contributed to this report. To contact writer Amy Leigh Womack, call 744-4398. To contact writer Joe Kovac Jr., call 744-4397.

This story was originally published August 26, 2011 at 12:00 AM with the headline "McDaniel's online posts describe torture, violence."