Police search Giddings' next-door neighbor's apartment again
A lone candle flickered on Lauren Giddings’ front balcony Tuesday night as Macon detectives again combed her next-door neighbor’s apartment for clues until after midnight.
The apartment of her Mercer University law school classmate Stephen Mark McDaniel has been one of the focal points of the nearly two-week investigation into Giddings’ disappearance, slaying and dismemberment. The torso of Giddings, a 27-year-old Maryland native, was found outside the apartments June 30.
Sporting blue, slip-on crime-scene booties, the detectives and crime scene technicians appeared to scour the unit Tuesday evening rented by McDaniel, 25, at the Barristers Hall apartment complex at 1058 Georgia Ave.
As forensic investigators left the scene they placed a "do not enter" sign on the apartment door and the crime scene tape was removed from the front of the complex.
A Macon police squad car stood guard on the scene. Law enforcement officials arrived at the scene sometime around 7 p.m. and entered McDaniel’s apartment about an hour later while executing a search warrant. Investigators took still photographs and video inside his apartment and later removed some brown paper bags from the unit. Police didn’t comment about the bags’ contents.
District Attorney Greg Winters also was on the scene, but neither he nor police would say what they were looking for. Winters wouldn’t comment on what led to the new warrant Tuesday.
The FBI is testing 74 pieces of evidence previously taken from the apartments, including those belonging to McDaniel and Giddings, but Winters said he did not have a timetable for when the results of those tests might be back from FBI headquarters in Quantico, Va.
“Obviously, I wish we had (the results) back,” he said. “But this isn’t TV so it doesn’t happen within an hour. It’s done when it’s done.”
A bond hearing for McDaniel, who has been held at the Bibb County jail for nearly two weeks on two burglary charges from two winters ago, is scheduled for Thursday in Bibb County Superior Court. Winters said that hearing has no bearing on the speed of the Giddings investigation.
“We’re following where the evidence leads,” he said. “We’re tracking it down.”
Macon police said they would return to the apartments as often as necessary to close the case.
“You’re liable to see us out here anytime. We’re working day in and day out,” said Macon police Sgt. Scott Chapman.
Police spoke briefly with two members of Giddings’ family from north Georgia who were in front of Giddings’ apartment building Tuesday evening when police arrived.
Meanwhile, police reports obtained Tuesday by The Telegraph reveal some details regarding McDaniel’s alleged burglary of the two apartments.
The reports, completed hours apart during the early hours of July 1 when McDaniel was arrested, say McDaniel stole a pair of condoms -- one from each of the dwellings he is suspected of entering. No other items are listed as stolen.
McDaniel and Giddings, members of the school’s Class of 2011, graduated in May and were on track to take the state bar exam. The two shared a common, awning-covered upstairs balcony that overlooked Mercer University’s Walter F. George School of Law.
The alleged burglaries happened at Apartment Nos. 5 and 9, in back of and down a terraced hillside from McDaniel’s. The alleged victims of the late 2008, early 2009 burglaries, fellow 2011 law graduates whose doors are believed to have been left unlocked when they were supposedly entered, declined to comment Tuesday.
Since the slaying, police in squad cars have, in shifts, kept watch outside Giddings’ apartment.
Telegraph staff writers Phillip Ramati and Amy Leigh Womack contributed to this report.
This story was originally published July 13, 2011 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Police search Giddings' next-door neighbor's apartment again."