McDaniel’s mom: Police focused on fiber evidence in Lauren Giddings case

The mother of murder suspect Stephen McDaniel thinks police have scoured her son’s belongings in search of blue and gray fibers, the same colors of trace evidence she says may have been found on his alleged victim’s body.

Glenda McDaniel said she has seen copies of search warrants police left behind when they combed her 25-year-old son’s apartment in recent weeks, sifting for clues in the slaying of Lauren Giddings.

Giddings’ plastic-wrapped torso was found stuffed inside a flip-top, roll-away garbage can next to her apartment building June 30.

The 27-year-old Maryland native was a law school graduate classmate of Stephen McDaniel. She lived next door to him.

In jail for weeks on unrelated burglary charges, he was charged Aug. 2 with her murder. Authorities have yet to say if they know of a motive in the killing. They have not found the rest of Giddings’ remains.

Glenda McDaniel said Tuesday that she has deduced that detectives are apparently hunting items “consistent with the color of fibers on (Giddings’) body.”

“I am assuming that based on the fact that when the police went back in Stephen’s apartment later -- because they were communicating with the FBI -- they went back in and they collected articles of clothing and towels that all had blue or gray fibers,” Glenda McDaniel, 56, told The Telegraph in a telephone interview.

“I’m assuming or suspect that that would be the reason for them zeroing in on those colors. I don’t have somebody at the FBI telling me that, but that would be a logical conclusion,” she said.

She says the search warrants indicated that detectives seized “articles of clothing and towels and other items in (Stephen’s) apartment that had blue or gray fibers. And they took quite a list of items. He wears a lot of blue. ... Blue happens to be my favorite color, and if I buy a gift for him, frequently it’s blue.”

Glenda McDaniel thinks such fibers may be present in a car driven by a former resident -- the true culprit, she claims -- at the Barristers Hall apartments.

Stephen McDaniel and Giddings were living there in the weeks after graduation from Mercer University’s law school across the street.

The attorney for another apartment neighbor, David Dorer, issued a statement late Monday clarifying Dorer’s status in the case after Macon police questioned him last week.

Attorney Brett Steger wrote that allegations that Dorer was on Giddings’ balcony on one of the days before she disappeared are false.

“At no time in the days leading up to Ms. Giddings’ disappearance and death was David on her balcony, and numerous people have provided investigators with information and evidence that fully corroborates his whereabouts,” Steger said.

Steger said Dorer isn’t a person of interest or a suspect in Giddings’ death.

“David is in no way involved in the death of Ms. Giddings,” he said.

Dorer, also a Mercer law student, has “completely cooperated with detectives in their efforts to apprehend and to bring to justice Ms. Giddings’ killer,” Steger wrote.

Dorer briefly met with homicide detectives Friday. The attorney said the meeting was in response to the accusations against Dorer.

“David was completely responsive to the questions asked by the detectives,” he said.

On Wednesday, meanwhile, Mercer’s first-year law students will be introduced to the school where Giddings and McDaniel earned their degrees in May. Administrators don’t plan to discuss the slaying, but they are ready to answer questions, law school spokeswoman Billie Rampley said.

“Their focus will be on getting the students ready to start law school,” she said.

Giddings and McDaniel had stayed in town, and continued being neighbors at the Georgia Avenue apartments, after graduating so they could study for the Georgia bar exam.

Giddings was last heard from on the night of June 25, a Saturday. Her tan, mid-2000s-model Mitsubishi Galant sat apparently unmoved beneath her second-floor residence until her remains were discovered five mornings later.

Stephen McDaniel, from Lilburn, drove a black, decade-old Geo Prizm.

His mother isn’t sure why police still have it, and they aren’t telling.

Nor is Bibb County District Attorney Greg Winters, who on Tuesday said, “We’re not commenting on what evidence we are or are not looking at at this point. ... We’re just still waiting on stuff from the FBI. Haven’t gotten anything else back yet. I wish we had but we haven’t.”

Investigators recovered a hacksaw with what the FBI says is Giddings’ DNA on it inside a locked maintenance closet at the apartment complex.

Police have said they also found packaging for the saw, a master key to the complex and a separate key to Giddings’ residence in McDaniel’s apartment.

His car is being kept behind the Macon Police Crime Lab on Houston Avenue, between Charles and Crisp streets, a couple of blocks south of Eisenhower Parkway.

The car is tucked in the corner of an impound lot, parked facing away from a fence that is shrouded in brush, and can be seen from a Crisp Street resident’s backyard.

It has a small fish logo, symbolic of Christianity, stuck to its trunk and bears an “In God We Trust” sticker on the area of the Georgia license plate once reserved solely for county identification.

The car once belonged to his mother and had a vanity license plate that said “PRAAAY.”

About a mile and a half from the lot, up Second Street at the Bibb jail, Stephen McDaniel’s family last visited him Sunday.

It was the day after Giddings’ funeral in her Laurel, Md., hometown.

Glenda McDaniel said, “We did not discuss Lauren. We did not discuss the case. We discussed how we were praying and hoping for the truth to come out. ... The only thing that was mentioned about Lauren was that we did want justice for Lauren and justice for the person who did kill her.”

During the McDaniel family’s 30-minute stay, his folks were not allowed to make physical contact with him. That’s been the rule since he was jailed July 1. They talk to him via telephone through a reinforced-glass window inside the county lockup’s visitation hall.

During their face-to-face meetings, Glenda McDaniel and her son have made something of a pact.

“I have a big hug for him when he gets out,” she said, “and he has one for me.”

To contact writer Amy Leigh Womack, call 744-4398. To contact writer Joe Kovac Jr., call 744-4397.

This story was originally published August 10, 2011 at 12:00 AM with the headline "McDaniel’s mom: Police focused on fiber evidence in Lauren Giddings case."