Landfill searchers ‘doing all we can’ to help Lauren Giddings' family
It has been two and a half months since the eldest of Karen Giddings’ three children was slain.
Her 27-year-old daughter’s death has become a front-page, top-of-the-newscast mystery that is as chilling as it is disheartening.
A gregarious, aspiring attorney, she was found dead on the last morning of June.
And yet in the harshest of ways she was not found at all.
The disturbing details of Lauren Giddings’ death -- how her body was dismembered, her limbs discarded or somehow disposed of by a killer who went to savage extremes to make her disappear forever -- prompted an ambitious effort this week that led police and landfill-combing experts from the FBI against the longest of odds, to try and unearth her remains.
If, that is, those missing parts of her were thrown away and hauled to the landfill a dozen miles southeast of downtown Macon that is being searched. And if, nearly 80 days after Lauren Giddings’ torso turned up in a trash can outside her apartment, those remains are even recognizable.
If no traces of her are found -- and through Thursday, day four of the hunt, none had been -- the search will wrap up just before noon Friday.
Asked midweek what it would mean to her and her family if the search proved successful, Karen Giddings said, “It certainly will make a difference. ... Is it something that I can go on living without? Yes.”
No word on FBI tests
Prosecutors had been preparing to face the man accused of killing Lauren Giddings in a Friday morning Bibb County Magistrate Court hearing related to charges that investigators -- in the course of scouring his apartment for clues -- found images of child pornography on a computer flash drive. The hearing was canceled Thursday.
The suspect, Stephen Mark McDaniel, who turns 26 on Tuesday, was charged with murder Aug. 2.
That charge came a month after the torso of Giddings, who’d last been seen alive on June 25, was discovered June 30, about 10 hours after her friends alerted police that she was missing.
McDaniel, a Lilburn native, had been Giddings’ next-door neighbor at the 16-unit Barristers Hall apartments across Georgia Avenue from Mercer University’s Walter F. George School of Law, from which they’d both graduated in May.
McDaniel has been in jail since July 1 when, after being questioned into the night by detectives, he was booked on a pair of burglary charges not related to Giddings’ death.
McDaniel, a 6-footer who weighed 150 pounds when he was first jailed, appeared skinnier, pale and glazed over at a preliminary hearing late last month. According to his lawyer, Floyd Buford, McDaniel had shed 17 pounds, possibly the result of illness or stress.
Earlier this week, Buford said his client’s health seemed to be improving, that McDaniel was gaining weight and that the color was returning to his face.
Also, Buford, who has declined to identify the private investigator hired to help with McDaniel’s defense, said the investigator is making “significant progress.”
As of Wednesday, Macon police still were awaiting results of FBI tests on more than 200 pieces of potential evidence.
Search not a dig for evidence
Lauren Giddings grew up southwest of Baltimore.
Her funeral was Aug. 6.
The portion of her remains that was found was cremated and buried in her home state.
“I think because we had a funeral and we have had a burial that my heart and my mind think of that as closure,” Karen Giddings, 50, said by phone this week. “But then, ... I think about the fact that it was just a torso.”
She paused, then said, “You think of her beautiful face and hair and her hands -- I want her hands -- and that’s very hard. But I know that her body isn’t who she is.”
Back in Georgia, the quest to find the remains has been fueled not so much by a need for evidence that might put away her killer, but rather by compassion.
“Nobody conducted this search for investigative purposes,” Macon police Sgt. Scott Chapman said. “We don’t need remains to prosecute. We already had a case on the subject in custody. That’s how we were able to make an arrest. There is nothing that says that we had to conduct this search to better our case.”
A dozen or so miles southeast of downtown Macon, the scene at Wolf Creek Landfill in Twiggs County over the past four days has been one of methodical examination of wave after wave of rubbish. All of it happening beneath a beating, late-summer sun, amid an ocean of odor.
“The smell is horrible,” Chapman said.
The searchers -- who’ve donned papery, lightweight coveralls and rubber boots during their painstaking task -- include nearly two dozen FBI employees from Georgia and Virginia, many of them volunteers from the bureau’s Emergency Response Team.
Not all are gun-toting agents. Some have ventured to the midstate from desk jobs.
“Whenever the ERT team gets called out,” Chapman said, “they stop whatever their job with the FBI is and they turn to the task at hand.”
Though it is among the grimmest of undertakings, there has been at least one moment of levity.
Chapman, digging through rubbish at midweek, stumbled upon a 2004 tax return that belonged to a friend of his, a local businessman.
The detective said, “I called him and said, ‘Hey, man, I found your taxes.’ He said, ‘What year?’ I said, ‘’04.’ He said, ‘I need ’em.’ I said, ‘Dude, what would make me think to keep them if you threw them away?’”
Something of a crusade
Chapman, who is 37 and one of two lead detectives in the Giddings case, said trash dug up from a 20,000-square-foot plot at the dump has been trucked to a hilltop there and spread out.
Searchers have waded into load upon load for upwards of 10 hours nearly every day.
“There’s times when you feel like, ‘Man, I just can’t take another step.’ But you find that motivation because you’re hoping that that very next pull with the rake is gonna be what you’re looking for,” said Chapman, a Southwest High School graduate who was in the Army before becoming a Macon cop in 1999. “The driving force behind this is the driving force that brought everybody here: to try to find those remains.”
Chapman likened the weeklong effort to something of a crusade for Lauren Giddings’ loved ones -- Macon’s way, perhaps, of saying, “We’re doing all we can.”
“The loss was so tremendous to (her) family,” he said. “We can never give it all back, but anything that we can do to bring just a little bit of peace to them, it just makes it worth it.”
To contact writer Amy Leigh Womack, call 744-4398. To contact writer Joe Kovac Jr., call 744-4397.
This story was originally published September 16, 2011 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Landfill searchers ‘doing all we can’ to help Lauren Giddings' family."