Sister speaks out on 10-year anniversary of Lauren Giddings’ killing. ‘He’ll always be evil.’
In the 10 years since Lauren Teresa Giddings was murdered at age 27, her two sisters have started families of their own.
“It’s hard to believe it’s been a decade,” one of those sisters, Kaitlyn Wheeler, said recently. “It seems like yesterday.”
Giddings would now have six nieces and nephews, who even in her absence know her or will come to know her as Aunt Lauren. Her sisters have made sure of that.
“They know who Aunt Lauren is,” Wheeler, a mother of five, told The Telegraph earlier this month. “We celebrate her birthday, we talk about her all the time. We have pictures up in the house, but they don’t know anything other than her dying.”
The nieces and nephews are too young to understand much more, Wheeler said.
But when the day comes for them to learn the grim details of their Aunt Lauren’s death, Wheeler said it will no doubt involve a difficult conversation “about why and how there’s evil in the world.”
A gruesome murder
Giddings died in the predawn hours of June 26, 2011, when she was attacked, killed and later dismembered with a hacksaw by her next-door neighbor and law school classmate Stephen Mark McDaniel.
Her torso was found in a trash can outside her apartment not long after friends reported her missing the morning of June 30, 2011. Her head and extremities have never been found, but McDaniel has said he disposed of at least some of them in other trash bins.
The killing, one of the highest-profile slayings in Macon history, has captured international attention and is often the subject of true-crime television shows.
McDaniel, according to his confession at the hearing where he pleaded guilty to murder in Bibb County Superior Court in April 2014, broke into Giddings’ apartment on Georgia Avenue and strangled her after she woke to see him standing over her. The apartments where they lived sit just across the street from Mercer University’s law school, which they had graduated from in May 2011.
McDaniel, now 38, agreed to plead guilty and divulge details of the killing that only he would know in exchange for a life-with-the-possibility-of-parole sentence.
He could be eligible to be released from prison as early as 2041.
‘He’ll always be evil to us’
McDaniel, who grew up in the suburbs east of Atlanta, had at one point faced a potential death-penalty trial. But prosecutors opted not to pursue capital punishment with the blessings of Giddings’ parents, who said they didn’t want the case to drag on forever.
Wheeler, one of Giddings’ sisters, said by phone the other day from her home in Lauren’s native Maryland that she and her family have “constant” memories of Lauren.
“There are less thoughts of Stephen McDaniel, which is a good thing,” Wheeler, 34, said. “When we think of her, it’s normal memories. It’s not about her death or who killed her.”
Added Wheeler: “But we know who he is. We know he’s still alive, and just knowing about him and how he’s been so far, he doesn’t seem like he’s gonna take (his sentence) laying down. ... He’s gonna fight and he’s gonna try to get out as soon as possible. And, sadly, he has that option to get out eventually, which is totally insane.”
She said the prospect that McDaniel could someday walk free is something that “is in the back of our heads.”
Officials familiar with the case, however, have said that due to the heinous nature of the crime, the chances of McDaniel being released are slim.
“On the one hand,” Wheeler said, “everyone says, ‘He’ll never get out. It’ll never happen.’ But the fact that he even has the option is ridiculous. ... We think that he is a threat to society and always will be as long as he’s living. We have no option but to fight for him to stay in jail. ... He’ll always be evil to us. The whole case, the way it was planned out, how he carried it out. It wasn’t just a random incident.”
‘We try to celebrate her life’
Wheeler, asked what she wishes to pass along to people about her slain sister’s life, said her hope is to show them that Lauren “lives on through our family.”
“We all carry her with us and think about how she lived her life to the fullest and we’re all trying to do the same,” Wheeler said. “We don’t try to stay stuck on how she died. ... We just try to celebrate her life. She was such a great example to us ... and we hope that we’re making her proud and trying to teach our kids to be like her.”
This story was originally published June 25, 2021 at 5:00 AM.