Keith Morrison and Josh Mankiewicz sit down to talk about Keith's episode "The Watcher." In 2011, when law student Lauren Giddings vanished in Macon, Georgia, investigators knew they didn't have an ordinary missing person’s case. After finding Lauren’s remains, detectives zeroed in on someone close by who had been watching Lauren all along. Keith and Josh discuss the latest updates in the case, including a surprising courtroom twist when Lauren's killer appealed his conviction. Plus, they answer your social media questions. Listen to the full episode of “The Watcher” on Apple: https://apple.co/4gNGYIyListen to the full episode on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/37zCx09jSAHmewSqm9hNLA
Chapter 1: What is the episode 'The Watcher' about?
Hi everybody, it's Josh Mankiewicz, and we're talking Dateline. Today we're talking about an episode called The Watcher, and we're here with the correspondent who is, let me see, I have that here somewhere. Oh, it's Keith. Yeah, hi Keith. You know, that's a good title, don't you think? It is. It is a good title.
Although, although one could argue that it gives it away because when I, there were points in this where I thought like, oh yeah, it's called the watcher. So yeah.
Yeah, that's true. It's true.
This is a very good episode. I thought now if you have not seen it, This is the episode right below this one on your Dateline podcast feed. So go there, listen to it, or you could stream it on Peacock and then come back here. So just to recap, in 2011, Georgia law student Lauren Giddings vanished. Investigators were pretty certain that this wasn't an ordinary missing persons case.
Chapter 2: Who was Lauren Giddings and what happened to her?
And then in what really amounted to some very lucky happenstance, investigators found some dismembered remains at Lauren's apartment, and then they knew what had happened. What they did not know was who had committed that crime. And it turned out that someone who was the watcher, her next door neighbor, had actually done it.
Now, for this Talking Dateline, we have the very latest developments in this case, because the man who ended up pleading guilty to the murder of Lauren Giddings tried to appeal his conviction. One of his defense attorneys revealed some significant details of the murder that his client may not have wanted to make public. So let's talk Dateline.
The sense that I get from Lauren Giddings is that she was a lot of fun. She was really smart. She was really interesting. And she was, you know, maybe the glue that held all her friends together. They all seemed to sort of coalesce around her.
Yeah, you've got it right. She was that person. She certainly struck me as being a very smart woman. Additionally, she felt she had a calling. And that was one of the ironies of this story. Her goal in life... was to be a defense attorney who would represent the very kind of person who wound up killing her.
Chapter 3: What were the key developments in Lauren's case?
And ironically, again, her professor, who was teaching her the techniques of representing such people, went ahead and represented him. And the feeling among her friends and compatriots at law school was, had she survived this attack somehow, She would probably have defended them anyway.
She was just that kind of person. I think that's probably unusual as people who come out of law school wanting to work for the PD's office. I mean, some people want to do defense work, but wanting to work for, you know, essentially people who can't afford lawyers is something else.
Yeah, it's a rare thing, and it doesn't pay a lot compared to other kinds of legal work.
No, and it's underfunded, and every time you go to court, the deck is very heavily stacked in favor of the prosecution because they have the police department, and you have maybe an investigator who's working on a bunch of different cases. You're starting off behind the eight ball a lot of the time, and you're juggling a zillion cases. So you have to really want to do it.
Chapter 4: What did Lauren Giddings aspire to be in her career?
Some of the loveliest people I know do that kind of work. They tilted windmills their whole lives and don't make very much money for it. Anyway, that's one of the aspects of this story that appealed to me.
And there's also a MacGuffin in it in the sense that they probably wouldn't have discovered so easily what happened or at least gotten on the right trail to find out what happened had it not been for the fact that it was in Macon, Georgia and it was hot as hell that day. The torso was creating an odor.
Yeah. And, like, literally, like, if the trash had been picked up a day sooner, if the police had gotten there three hours later, you know?
Yeah. The trash truck was on the way. I mean, it was. And I think that probably the killer had expected and planned for that trash truck to be there before there was any hoo-ha about what happened next. And that moment in the story that really stuck out to me, this guy, he's a terrible, terrible person, but also not terribly bright.
And when he is confronted with the recognition that somebody announces that they have found the body and his reaction to that.
It's in the middle of that TV interview. Now, yes, you've got to be prepared if you're the killer or you would think you'd be prepared for, you know, when you're told that she is dead because you're the only person that knows that she is dead at that point. So when somebody says, hey, we found her and she's no longer with us, you should be. Well, I can't believe it. That's the worst news.
But instead, he's he's like, wait, they found the body. body, he says. Yeah, that was, that's not the way.
I should laugh, but I mean, that was.
No, but I mean, it's astonishingly telling is what it is.
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Chapter 5: How did the killer's actions lead to his arrest?
One was you just sort of barely mentioned the neighbor. Like he was, we wanted to help and he had some thoughtful things. You just mentioned that there's a neighbor who wants to help, but then clearly you've got it down to Joe, the ex-boyfriend and, and David and the, Yeah. And then David, the current boyfriend. Right. And so you're thinking if you're the audience, OK, it's one of them.
And then you throw in the maintenance man. And I'm like, OK, well, that's clearly who it is. Like, it's nearly probably the guy. It's neither Joe nor it's the maintenance man, obviously. And then it turns out, of course, it's somebody else entirely. And so from a Dateline storytelling point of view, I thought that was great. Well, that's very kind of you to say, Josh. Thank you.
when we're telling these stories, when we're writing them, is we have to do the storytelling in a way that it's not obvious from the get-go what happened, but we also have to stay completely faithful to the truth. Like, we're not going to say, you know, the maintenance man was a suspect if he wasn't a suspect.
We're not going to say the cops were looking at Joe and they were looking at David if they weren't. But they were.
Yeah, which brings up another little piece of advice for people who may be listening to this, which is if you're – pay careful attention to whether you're watching – A program that is journalistically sound and you tell all the facts as best you possibly can. Right.
But then there's a scripted series that comes along that takes a point of view and therefore will fudge on certain details and will reduce the effect of some things and increase the effect of some other things. In other words, they're manufacturing a story out of raw material, which may be true in the first place, but stops being true as you're telling it.
Anyway, this character reminds me of a lot of other people we've done stories about. He is the boogeyman. And boogeymen exist. They're very, very rare, but they do exist, and they get all the attention.
And I mean, usually, almost always... the person who ends up being the culprit is the Joe of the story or the David of the story. Well, it's almost never the random guy who was not on police radar, but sometimes it is.
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Chapter 6: What role did the video evidence play in the case?
Those random psychopathic killers are, are, are very, very unusual. So sometimes I think that I worry that we might put a little too much fear into an audience that there are those kinds of people out there, uh, in numbers and they're targeting and watching and, you know, yeah.
I mean, look, look, I mean, I'm going to say upwards of 90% of dateline stories involve some sort of relationship between the killer. They're not, they're not unknown to each other.
And I think that probably mirrors to some degree the statistics in, you know, murder investigation.
I mean, the person who leaps out of the bushes and attacks someone and rapes them, That's the least common kind of rape. Almost always it's somebody that the victim knows. That's overwhelmingly likely. But that's sort of not widely known. And so people fear one maybe more than they should and fear the other maybe less than they should.
Exactly the point, yeah.
So since this happened, Steve McDaniel has tried to appeal his case in Georgia state courts.
To interject only slightly, he tried to appeal the case even though he pleaded guilty to what he did.
Which usually means you give up any right to appeal. That's what a guilty jury does.
Generally speaking, yeah.
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Chapter 7: What insights do the hosts share about crime and justice?
Sure.
Chapter 8: What can we learn about knowing our neighbors?
Which means the attorney can now say anything that the defendant said to him during a time when that was privileged.
And that attorney undoubtedly had stored all this stuff up for a long time, thinking he'd never be able to tell anybody. Yeah, well. Until that opportunity came along.
What Stephen McDaniel's defense attorney, Floyd Buford, said when he could speak freely about what his client had shared with him, in other words, outside lawyer-client privilege, well, it's like something out of a horror movie. He testified that McDaniel had admitted to decapitating Lauren, cutting her fingers off, and flushing them down the toilet. Really awful stuff. And he also said...
that McDaniel possessed some of the worst child porn that the attorney had ever seen. This normally would have been protected by privilege, but in this case, it wasn't. And it's not what you want your defense attorney revealing in court. That appeal didn't go anywhere.
Well, yes. I guess he has a possibility after 30 years of getting out, but it seems unlikely somehow.
So coming up next, your questions from social media. Let's take your questions from social media. Good idea. So a lot of people wrote to us saying that they lived in Macon at the time. They remember the coverage of this case. I will say this.
I had not been before, before doing this story, I had not been to Macon, Georgia before. And what a lovely place it is. That's great. It has a history. I realize that it's complicated, but it is, my gosh, some of those wonderful homes and And the atmosphere is really quite delightful. Well, that's nice. Yeah.
Just thought I'd add that. I like going places like that. I used to live in Atlanta. This was like 40 years ago. So I was in Macon and other parts of Georgia back then. A lot. You know, you loved Macon when you were there. Did people love you back? Were they nice to you?
They were very nice to me. Yes, absolutely. But, you know, I... Come on. A TV guy. Right. People are not going to be mean, I don't think.
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