Giddings-case apartments come back to life after slaying
On a steamy Friday morning earlier this month, the scene outside a patch of snug apartments tucked along a stretch of historic houses on a downtown hillside had already become something of a community spectacle.
And for the most grim and hurtful reasons.
Even so, the setting bore the feel of sacred ground.
In many ways, it still does.
No matter that the flowers, plastic and real, adorning the fence by the sidewalk are gone. Or that the memorial wreath on the railing by the dead woman’s front door and the white ribbon dangling from her porch lamp have been taken down. Or that locals paying their respects and gawkers alike may not ride by as slowly as they once did.
Three weeks ago, as a mourning family was sifting through the personal effects of a slain daughter and sister whose life had been stolen in the cruelest of ways, the mystery surrounding her death was a swirl of speculation that lingers today.
Even among those who had never heard of a Maryland-raised woman named Lauren Teresa Giddings.
Her grieving mother had, on that second Friday of July, sat on her lost daughter’s balcony, one that peeks out at Macon and the clock-tower spire of the law school Giddings had just graduated from.
Eight mornings earlier, Karen Payne Giddings’ eldest daughter’s dismembered body had been found maybe 25 feet away. She spoke of how being there, so close to where her daughter had lived and studied and made so many friends, put her at ease.
Now, a month after the 27-year-old’s torso was found wrapped in plastic in a 95-gallon garbage cart just down a flight of stairs on the side of her residence, the police are gone, a slaying suspect has yet to be identified or charged, and repairmen are doing their best to make the place livable again.
In a hurry.
For while justice may be on hold, law school starts soon.
* * *
The first wave of tenants moved in Saturday.
More will follow. The Barristers Hall complex at 1058 Georgia Ave. will again be home to attorneys in the making.
In all, 11 first-year Mercer University law students are scheduled to move in this semester.
Of the three streetside apartments where detectives have foraged for evidence that they hope will lead to Giddings’ killer, two of the apartments will belong to new residents -- the one below Giddings’ and the one next door to hers, where fellow 2011 law school graduating classmate Stephen Mark McDaniel lived.
Police have dubbed McDaniel, 25, a “person of interest” in Giddings’ death. He has been held in the Bibb County jail on unrelated burglary charges since the predawn hours of July 1, the night after Giddings’ friends, who hadn’t heard from her in a few days, called police and started searching for her.
At the complex Friday morning, plumbers worked to replace pipes in the bathrooms of the apartments where Giddings and McDaniel lived, as well as in the first-floor residence beneath Giddings’.
Meanwhile, Boni Bush, who owns the complex with her brother, prepared other apartments for incoming tenants.
Wearing a paint-stained tank top, Bush sat on the side of a bathtub and told of her plans to move into Giddings’ old place.
Bush doesn’t think anyone else would want to live there this year.
“I get a sad feeling every time I walk in Lauren’s apartment,” Bush said. “People ask me if I’m going to be OK to live there, and I’m, you know, gonna have to be.”
Bush has plans to spruce it up, to give it some touches Giddings might’ve appreciated.
“Lauren had a nice apartment. She had the little scarves on the windows and she took pride in it,” Bush said. “I think if I can go in there and do that, Lauren would like that.
“Lauren would not expect somebody to live in there and cry themselves to sleep every night.”
* * *
So far, four Barristers tenants have broken their leases.
One of the four, Bush says, dropped out of law school entirely.
Four current tenants have told her they’ll be staying.
The complex will be full before long.
On Friday, though, Giddings’ former home, apartment No. 2, stood empty. It exuded the bleak aura of a crime scene, of a site strip-mined for every incriminating shred.
The painters with their buckets of peachy beige latex had yet to make their way upstairs.
Many of the walls remained coated in a charcoal dusting of fingerprint powder. The two-bedroom, roughly 650-square-foot space wore a haze of gray.
Imagine the graphite of 1,000 pencils ground up and spread over most every surface in the living room, kitchenette and especially the bathroom.
On the sinks. On the yellow-tiled tub enclosure. On light switches. On countertops and cream-colored cabinet doors. On knobs and doors leading to bedrooms. On the refrigerator handle and door. On the blond wood-laminate floors. On the bathroom mirrors.
Ordinary mopping and wiping has proved no match for the staining, grainy mess.
“We went and bought a 12-pack of paper towels because you couldn’t wring out the sponges and the mops,” Bush said. “It wouldn’t come out.”
In Giddings’ bedroom, in the rear of the apartment, the indentations were still there from where the legs on the frame of her bed, situated beneath a squat window that overlooks the AT&T building next door, had mashed into the tan carpet.
Nearby, a 3-inch oval swatch had been carved out, possibly for crime lab, fiber matching purposes. There was a similar carpet cutout in the middle of the next bedroom, which most residents in the complex use as a study.
In the hallway, just outside the bathroom and near the floor, a 2-foot-high hole had been sawed in the wall, apparently so that police could remove pipes for forensic testing.
On Friday, plumber Richard Holbrook glanced down at the opening.
The hole lent him a clear view of a room in the apartment below.
“They done a number on this place,” he said.
* * *
A little more than a decade and a half ago, Barristers Hall did not exist. At least in name.
The terraced complex along the southerly slope of Coleman Hill -- just up from the Hay House and, a block or two farther east, the county courthouse -- was known as Lamar Arms. It was Section-8 housing, in no shape to attract residents bound for law school. It was a drab-green wreck.
“It was truly an eyesore,” Bush said.
But Bush, who is in her mid-50s and who attended Mercer’s law school years ago, bought the property along with her brother in 1995. They aimed to transform the 1960s-era structures by adding balconies, patios and awnings, and let the money the place earned carry them into retirement.
A few years ago, they installed new flooring and put in new appliances. Door locks were replaced in 2008 for that late summer’s new crop of tenants, Giddings and McDaniel among them.
The apartments have steel-framed doors flanked by outdoor lights that can’t be switched off between dusk and dawn. Floodlights are mounted on the corners of the apartment buildings.
Since Giddings was killed, locks on every apartment have been re-keyed, and a video-surveillance system is scheduled to be installed this week.
Each apartment is also outfitted with an alarm system, but Bush said it is up to individual tenants to pay to have the systems monitored. Most, she said, opt not to pay for the monitoring service, but the alarms still sound when the systems are tripped.
Bush said Giddings had an added safety measure inside her apartment: a bar-like device she could wedge beneath her front-door handle and brace against her living-room floor to make it difficult for anyone to get inside when she was there.
Friends searching for Giddings in late June used a spare key that she kept outside to gain access, only to find no sign of her.
Bush said the door-bracing device was behind Giddings’ door, not in use, when Bush herself went into the apartment June 29 to check on Giddings after Giddings failed to answer phone messages regarding her plans to move out.
Though the dwellings scoured by detectives in recent weeks have been cleared to be freshened up for new residents, Bush said police -- who have told her to submit crime scene related repair receipts to the city for reimbursement -- have since returned to the complex to ask questions and look around.
“I’ve told them they can come over anytime,” she said. “I want this solved as much as anybody.”
* * *
While police have revealed little to nothing about their “person of interest,” McDaniel, some who have been inside his apartment in recent days say its contents lent hints about the man who lived there.
“Looked like he was an organize freak,” said a plumber who’d been hammering to repair a tub drain inside McDaniel’s now-vacant apartment No. 4 on Friday.
McDaniel’s relatives removed his belongings last weekend, but in the days before they did, the plumber had been inside briefly and noticed the orderly appearance of McDaniel’s things.
Bush said the cans of food in the kitchen cabinets were lined up just so, “all turned with their labels out.” That said, the apartment, she added, “wasn’t very clean.”
Friday it was barren. It contained no signs of its former tenant, save for a clump of hair beside the toilet that resembled McDaniel’s frizzy chestnut locks.
The apartment still needs wall and plumbing repairs, and it won’t be ready for a new tenant for another week or so. But it has been rented.
As has apartment No. 1 a floor below, beneath where Giddings lived. That apartment’s refrigerator was hauled away by detectives on July 13, apparently bound for a forensic lab, and it will need to be replaced for a new resident, Bush said, because the one taken by police isn’t expected to be returned for six to nine months.
The last person who lived there, a law school classmate of Giddings and McDaniel from Dublin, had moved out by the time the refrigerator was taken. Bush said the resident had left and carried off most of his stuff before Giddings was killed.
But on the day he went back for a final clean out, he was so shaken by what may have transpired there that he asked Bush to stay with him while he picked up.
“He was,” she said, “pretty creeped out.”
To contact writer Amy Leigh Womack, call 744-4398. To contact writer Joe Kovac Jr., call 744-4397.
This story was originally published July 31, 2011 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Giddings-case apartments come back to life after slaying."