Dateline NBC - Talking Dateline: The Watcher

Episode Date: January 8, 2025

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 

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. Some old guy. 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 there were points in this where I thought like, oh yeah, it's called The Watcher.

So yeah, and now I know who it is. Which means there's somebody else watching. 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. 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 deadline,

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 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. I mean, they all seem 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. And ironically, again, her professor, who was teaching her the techniques of representing such people, went ahead and represented him.

And she, 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. So it's a no, and it's underfunded and you don't have, I mean, every time you go to court, there's you know, 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. It's just not, you're starting off behind the eight ball all the time and you're juggling a zillion cases. So you have to really want to do it. 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.

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, 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 real. 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, um, yeah, that was a, 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. Yeah. So the other thing besides the hot day, as they're looking around, they found those... He had insisted that he was a celibate guy, he was waiting for marriage, and then they

found those condoms. And he was so determined to retain the idea that he wasn't messing around and therefore he couldn't have attacked her and had sex with her. So why do you have the condoms? And he, rather than give up his story, he then confesses that he stole them from a neighbor, which gave him- Which allows them to arrest him.

To arrest him and hold him. Well, they can continue their investigation. Because there certainly wasn't enough to arrest him for her murder at that point. Right, exactly. So he talked himself right into the jailhouse. I think one of the lessons here is you never really know who's living next door. Right.

I mean, I know my neighbors to say hello to. I certainly, you know. Sure. Beyond that, I couldn't tell you much. And you've lived there for quite a while. I have, and I don't think anybody's spying on me. I think most people who get spied on don't think anybody's spying on me. I think most people who get spied on don't think anyone's spying on them.

What's interesting, you know, something we talk about all the time here is how you need to listen to your instincts. And she had this sense that somebody was stalking her, following her, something was up. And, you know, her friends just kind of chalked that up. Well, you know, men are always interested in her. You know, this is probably not a big deal.

Yeah. And it's one of the things that women have to put up with a lot is having, you know, men look at them whenever they possibly can, including, you know, some creep peeping in the window once in a while. Now, let me ask you this. I don't know the answer to this. That video that they come up with creep peeping in the window once in a while. Now, let me ask you this. I don't know the answer to this.

That video that they come up with that closes the case essentially, that is taken obviously by him looking in her window. She's not in that video, right? You don't ever actually see her. You don't ever actually see her, but you see him attempting to see her. You see his activities outside her window. It's clearly her apartment that he's looking into through the blinds, but he doesn't actually

get any video of her, at least not that they recovered. That's right. But his whole setup was exposed by that. Would they have got a conviction without it? I suspect they might have, but that certainly sealed the deal. Steve McDaniel pleaded guilty, but years after confessing the crime, he made a bunch of attempts to appeal his conviction. When we get back, the details revealed during his appeals and the surprising person who reveals them.

A couple of interesting things in this story, particularly from a storytelling point of view that I thought you did very well, as you always do. 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 then David, the current boyfriend, right? And so you're thinking if you're the audience, okay, it's one of them.

And then you throw in the maintenance man. And I'm like, okay, well, that's clearly who it is. Like it's nearly, 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 who've done stories about. He is the Boogeyman and boogeyman exists. 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, yes, usually. It's almost never the random guy who was not on police radar, but sometimes it is. Those random psychopathic killers are very, very unusual. So sometimes I think of the, I worry that we might put a little too much fear into an audience that there are those kinds of people out there in numbers and they're targeting

and watching and you know, scary. Yeah. I mean, look, I mean, I'm going to say upwards of 90% of Dateline stories involve some sort of relationship between the killer and the victim. They're not unknown to each other. And in fact- I think that probably mirrors to some degree the statistics in 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. That's right. 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. Yes, and 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. 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 does.

Generally speaking, yes. But in 2018, he claimed his constitutional rights were violated, asked for a new trial, he represented himself. He called one of his own defense attorneys as a witness in his case. Not the right move. No. No. No. That backfired because to do that, to call your attorney to testify in your appeal, he

had to waive attorney-client privilege. Sure. 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 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 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 the atmosphere is really quite delightful. 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, TV guy. People are not gonna be mean, I don't think. No, a lot of questions about Lauren's dog. What became of Lauren's dog? Everybody wants to know. Well, it's an important thing. The dog was part of her persona,

it was part of her life, and dogs, I don't know if you know this, Josh, but dogs are important to a lot of people. I realize. Dogs are very important to a lot of people, and in nearly every Dateline episode that I've done that involves a dog, there are social media questions

about what happened to the dog. Of course, of course. And in this case, the dog was, you know, went to live with Lauren's family. Right, and if it had been there that night, it might have woken her up. Well, it might have. And because, right, she had left the dog with them, given the fact that they were writing their bar exams and it's a lot going on. Another piece of bad luck.

So, yeah. On the other hand, it may also have been that he waited until the dog wasn't there anymore, you know? That's also possible, yeah. Yeah. Gail Brown Salvo on Facebook. Keith and I are on Facebook all the time. She says that this was such a sad story.

So strange that the man who did this had a promising lockerer ahead of him and would end up destroying his life and the lives of this woman and her family, which is all true. I will say that in most cases, I don't see people who end up being the killers sort of thinking about the ramifications of what happens.

I'm gonna get caught, I'm gonna end up in prison. My family will be ashamed of me. I'll impoverish them because they had to hire an attorney. I'll wreck somebody else's family's life by taking away this person. Right. I gather the desire to kill, to get sexual pleasure from killing a woman, or a man, but generally speaking a woman, is so powerful. It's the only emotion that these folks can feel. They don't feel any compassion for a human being.

No. I mean, that guy presumably went into law for some reason. Like he thought, you know, he could help people or he could help himself or he could help his family and, you know, he's going to be locked up for the rest of his life. Or he would know how the system works so that he could dodge it. Right. So he could commit murder and get away with it. I'm reminded of Brian Coburger in Idaho facing those charges there. And of course, he's still facing charges. He hasn't been convicted of anything yet.

He attempted to join a police force because he was kind of interested to see how the police would work. He wanted to be a lawyer. I must say, I have only followed that case by watching your stories, but that is a weird story. And that's the kind of thing we were talking about earlier in which this is not a traditional dateline defendant in which they're involved with or close friends with, you know, or married to somebody in the case.

And they stand out because they're so unusual, so rare, you know You know, I remember them, you remember them, we all remember them. Oh yeah, I do. Because they're monsters and the monster, I'm not saying Brian Koberger is a monster, we don't know yet. No, we're not. He's not been convicted of anything. But the people who do these things are monsters and so they kind of fit into the template of the scary story we tell ourselves at night

before we go to bed. Well, that's a happy thought to go out on. Yes, exactly. Thanks, Keith. However, I spend my time thinking about you, Josh, and then I drift off to sleep happily. Oh, that's nice. That's a sweet thought.

Yeah. Just for the audience's benefit. None of that was true. Keith, happy new year. Happy new year to you too, Josh. And one more thing. I have a new podcast out called Deadly Mirage. You know, I heard that. What's it, it's called Deadly Mirage or something?

Deadly Mirage. We called it Deadly Mirage because the other like seven or eight titles that we thought of were all taken. My choice was Keith wasn't interested, but that apparently was also taken. But anyway, it's called Deadly Mirage and it's going to run on Dateline as a TV episode Friday at 9 o'clock Eastern. Interesting. That's sort of a clever idea. If you've been listening to this podcast, you can now watch the TV program and you'll

see what all these people look like. Oh, just to see what they look like. And what the places look like. Anyway, so Deadly Mirage, that's this Friday on Dateline. Right. So, thanks everyone. And I hear it's pretty good, Josh, so congratulations on that. Thank you very much. One more thing, for Dateline premium subscribers, we have a new After the Verdict that will

be available on January 9th. If you have any questions for us about our stories or about Dateline, you can reach us on social media at at Dateline NBC. See you Fridays on Dateline on NBC. Music