Searchers find no trace of Lauren Giddings’ remains at landfill

The search of a Twiggs County landfill for the remains of a slain Mercer University law graduate ended Friday morning without success.

Two dozen or so searchers raked through unearthed garbage for the past five days but turned up no traces of homicide victim Lauren Giddings.

“No luck,” Macon police Sgt. Scott Chapman said shortly after noon.

Giddings, 27, was killed sometime during the last week of June.

Her torso -- wrapped in five trash bags and discarded in a curbside garbage cart outside her Georgia Avenue apartment -- was found June 30.

This week’s search for her remains, a combined volunteer effort by police, the FBI and others, was a long shot. Authorities knew that going in and said there were no clues or evidence in the case that so much as hinted that Giddings’ remains might be in the landfill.

Still, in hopes of returning Giddings’ remains to her family for proper burial, they embarked on the grim, methodical task of picking through tons of trash.

Some of the garbage at the Wolf Creek Landfill, about 12 miles southeast of downtown Macon, comes from the Mercer law campus, which is directly across the street from the apartments where Giddings lived.

The man charged with killing her, 25-year-old Stephen McDaniel, a fellow May 2011 law school graduate, lived in the apartment next to hers. Authorities also searched the Macon landfill in the days after Giddings’ torso was found.

The full-scale search at the Twiggs dump, where officials zeroed in on a 20,000-square-foot section where trash from Mercer was hauled around that time, was organized to, if not rule out that the remains were there, at least let investigators and the victim’s loved ones know they had tried.

Deputy Police Chief Mike Carswell, in a news release, noted that crews sifted through some 900,000 pounds of refuse each day.

Dates on dug-up mail and newspapers among the examined rubbish bore dates from around the time Giddings went missing. Also, addresses from the area of the law-school campus were found, which let searchers know they were in “the location they needed to be searching,” Carswell’s release stated.

Chapman, one of the lead detectives in the probe, said he “was just sad” as he drove away from the landfill late Friday morning.

“I was hoping,” he said, “that I could give something back to the family. We all worked hard and did the best we could do.”

This story was originally published September 17, 2011 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Searchers find no trace of Lauren Giddings’ remains at landfill."