Talking Dateline: The Watcher

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Speaker 3 Hi, everybody. It's Josh Maykowitz, and we're talking Dayline.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Oh, it's Keith.

Speaker 3 Yeah. Hi, Keith.

Speaker 3 You know, that's a good title, don't you think? It is, it is a good title.

Speaker 3 Although, one could argue that it gives it away. Because when I,

Speaker 3 there were points in this where I thought, like, oh, yeah, it's called The Watcher. So

Speaker 3 now I know that's watching. Yeah, it's true.
It's true.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Investigators were pretty certain that this wasn't an ordinary missing persons case.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Now, for this talking date line, 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.

Speaker 3 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 Dayline.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 I mean, they all seemed to sort of coalesce around her.

Speaker 3 Yeah, you've got it. You've got it right.
She was that person. She certainly struck me as being a very smart woman.

Speaker 3 Additionally, she felt she had a calling.

Speaker 3 And that was one of the ironies of

Speaker 3 this story.

Speaker 3 Her goal in life was to be a defense attorney who would represent the very kind of person who wound up killing her.

Speaker 3 And ironically, again,

Speaker 3 her professor, who was teaching her the techniques of representing such people, went ahead and represented him. And

Speaker 3 the feeling among her friends and compatriots at law school was: had she survived this attack somehow, she would probably have defended him anyway. She was just that kind of person.

Speaker 3 I think that's probably unusual: people who come out of law school wanting to work for the PDA's office.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Yeah,

Speaker 3 it's a rare thing, and it doesn't pay a lot compared to other kinds of legal work. So it's.

Speaker 3 No, and it's underfunded, and you don't have, I mean, every time time you go into court, there's a, you know,

Speaker 3 the deck is very heavily stacked in favor of the prosecution because they have the police department and you, you know, you have maybe a, you know, an investigator who's working on a bunch of different cases.

Speaker 3 It's just not,

Speaker 3 you're starting off behind the eight ball a lot of the time and you're juggling a bazillion cases. So you have to really want to do it.
Some of the loveliest people I know do that kind of work.

Speaker 3 They tilted windmills their whole lives and don't make very much money for it.

Speaker 3 Anyway,

Speaker 3 that's one of the aspects of

Speaker 3 this story that appealed to me.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 The torso was

Speaker 3 creating an odor.

Speaker 3 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 you know yeah the trash truck was on the way i mean it was uh

Speaker 3 and i think that that probably the killer had 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 it this guy is he's a terrible terrible person uh but but also not terribly bright when he is confronted with the the recognition that somebody announces that they have found the body and his reaction to that and he's 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

Speaker 3 you know

Speaker 3 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 prepared 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 uh yeah that's not the way you should laugh but i mean that was no but i i mean it's it's astonishingly telling is what it is.

Speaker 3 Yeah. So the other thing, besides the hot day, as they're looking around, they found those.

Speaker 3 He had insisted that he was a celibate guy, he was waiting for marriage, and then they found those condoms.

Speaker 3 And he was so determined to retain the idea that he wasn't, you know, messing around and therefore he couldn't have attacked her and had sex with her.

Speaker 3 So why do you have the condoms?

Speaker 3 And he, rather than, you know, give up his story, he then confesses that he stole them from a neighbor which which allows them to arrest him to arrest him and hold him well they can

Speaker 3 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 uh

Speaker 3 you never really know who's living next door you know i mean i mean i mean i know my neighbors to say hello to i certainly you know um sure

Speaker 3 you know beyond that i couldn't tell you much much. And you've lived there for quite a while.
I have. I have.
And I don't think anybody's spying on me.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And she had this sense that somebody was stalking her, following her, something was up.

Speaker 3 She did.

Speaker 3 And,

Speaker 3 you know, her friends just kind of chalked that up to, well, you know, you know, men are always interested in her. You know, this is probably not a big deal.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Now, let me ask you this.

Speaker 3 I don't know the answer to this.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 You don't ever actually see her, but you see him

Speaker 3 attempting to see her. You see his activity.
I mean,

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 But, you know, 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.

Speaker 3 Steve McDaniel pleaded guilty, but years after confessing to the crime, he made a bunch of attempts to appeal his conviction.

Speaker 3 When we get back, the details revealed during his appeals and the surprising person who reveals them.

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Speaker 3 A couple 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

Speaker 3 you just sort of barely mentioned the neighbor, like he was, we wanted to help, and he had some thoughtful things.

Speaker 3 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, uh, and uh, and

Speaker 3 then, yeah, and then David, the current boyfriend, right?

Speaker 3 Uh, 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

Speaker 3 the maintenance guy, it's neither Joe nor it's the maintenance man, obviously. And then it turns out, of course, it's somebody else entirely.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 When we're telling these stories, when we're writing them, is

Speaker 3 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,

Speaker 3 you know, the maintenance man was a suspect if he wasn't a suspect.

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 for people who may be listening to this, which is if you're pay careful attention to whether you're watching

Speaker 3 a program that is journalistically sound and you tell all the facts as best you possibly can.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Anyway, this character reminds me of a lot of other people we've done stories about. He is the boogeyman.
And boogeyman exist.

Speaker 3 They're very, very rare, but they do exist and they get all the attention.

Speaker 3 And I mean, usually, almost always,

Speaker 3 the person who ends up being the culprit is the Joe of the story or the David of the story. Well, yes,

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 I worry that we might put a little too much fear into an audience that there are those kind of people out there

Speaker 3 in numbers and they're targeting and watching. And, you know,

Speaker 3 I mean, look, look, I mean, I'm going to say upwards of 90% of dateline stories

Speaker 3 involve some sort of relationship between the killer of the victim.

Speaker 3 They're not unknown to each other.

Speaker 3 I think that probably mirrors to some degree

Speaker 3 the statistics in murder investigations. I mean, the person who leaps out of the bushes and attacks someone and rapes them,

Speaker 3 that's the least common kind of rape.

Speaker 3 Almost always, it's somebody that the victim knows. That's overwhelmingly likely.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 to what he did.

Speaker 3 Which usually means you give up any right to appeal. That's what a guilty person is.
Generally Generally speaking, yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 3 But he in 2018, he claimed his constitutional rights were violated, asked for a new trial. He represented himself.

Speaker 3 He called one of his own defense attorneys as a witness in his case. Not the right move.
No. No.
No,

Speaker 3 that backfired because to do that, to call your attorney to testify. in your appeal, he had to waive attorney-client privilege.
Sure.

Speaker 3 Which means the attorney can now say anything that the defendant said to him during a time when that was privileged.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And it's not what you want your defense attorney revealing in court. That appeal didn't go anywhere.

Speaker 3 Well,

Speaker 3 yes.

Speaker 3 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.

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Speaker 3 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 remembered the coverage of this case.
I will say this.

Speaker 3 I had not been before

Speaker 3 doing this story, I had not been to Macon, Georgia before. And what a lovely place it is.
It's great. It has a history, I realize.
It is complicated, but it is,

Speaker 3 my gosh, some of those wonderful homes and

Speaker 3 the atmosphere is really, it's 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

Speaker 3 I was in Macon and other parts of Georgia back then a lot.

Speaker 3 You know,

Speaker 3 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,

Speaker 3 come on.

Speaker 3 TV guy.

Speaker 3 People are not going to be mean, I don't think. No.
A lot of questions about

Speaker 3 Lauren's dog. What became of Lauren's dog? Everybody wants to know.
Well, it's an important thing. You know, the dog was part of her persona.
It was part of her life.

Speaker 3 And dogs, I don't know if you know this, Josh. Yeah.

Speaker 3 But dogs are important to a lot of people dogs are really important to a lot of people and in 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

Speaker 3 and in this case the dog was um you know went to live with uh lauren's family right and if it had been there that night it might have uh might have woken her up Well, it might have, and because, right, she had she'd left the dog with them, given the fact that they were writing their bar exams and so I've gone on.

Speaker 3 Another piece piece of

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Gail Brown Salvo on Facebook. Keith and I are on Facebook all the time.
She says that this was such a sad story.

Speaker 3 So strange that the man who did this had a promising long career ahead of him and would end up destroying his life and the lives of this woman and her family, which is all true.

Speaker 3 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. You know, but I'm going to get caught.

Speaker 3 I'm going to, you know, end up in prison. My family will be ashamed of me.

Speaker 3 I'll impoverish them because they had to hire an attorney. You know,

Speaker 3 I'll wreck that process. You know, I'll wreck somebody else's family's life by taking away this person.
Right.

Speaker 3 I gather

Speaker 3 the desire to kill,

Speaker 3 to get sexual pleasure from killing a a woman or a man, but generally speaking, a woman, is so powerful. It's the only emotion that these folks can feel.

Speaker 3 They don't feel any compassion for a human being. No.
I mean, that guy presumably went into law for some reason.

Speaker 3 Like he thought, you know, he could help people or he could help himself or he could help his family. And

Speaker 3 he's going to be locked up.

Speaker 3 Or he would know how the system works so that he could dodge it. It's

Speaker 3 a good thing.

Speaker 3 I'm reminded of Brian Koberger in Idaho facing those charges there. And of course, he's still facing charges, he hasn't been convicted of anything yet.
But

Speaker 3 he

Speaker 3 attempted to join a police force because he was kind of interested to see how the police would work.

Speaker 3 He wanted to be a lawyer. Yeah, I must say, I have only followed that case by watching your stories, but

Speaker 3 that is a weird story.

Speaker 3 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 with or close friends with, you know, or married to somebody in the case.

Speaker 3 And they stand out because they're so unusual, so rare. You know, I remember them.
You remember them. We all remember them

Speaker 3 because they are monsters. And the monster, I'm not saying Brian Coberger is a monster.
We don't know yet. He's not been convicted of anything.

Speaker 3 But the people

Speaker 3 who do these things are monsters. And so

Speaker 3 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.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 However, I, you know, I spend my time thinking about you, Josh, and then I really shift off to sleep happily. Oh, that's nice.
That's a sweet thought. Yeah.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 I have a new podcast out

Speaker 3 called Deadly Mirage.

Speaker 3 It's called Deadly Mirage or something? Deadly Mirage. We called it Deadly Mirage because the other seven or eight titles that we thought of were all taken.

Speaker 3 My choice was Keith Wasn't Interested, but that apparently was also taken.

Speaker 3 But anyway, it's called Deadly Mirage, and it's going to run on Dateline as a TV episode Friday at 9 o'clock. Isn't that interesting? That's sort of a clever idea.

Speaker 3 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're doing.
And what the places look like.

Speaker 3 Anyway, so Deadly Mirage,

Speaker 3 that's this Friday on Dateline.

Speaker 3 And I hear somebody. Thank you very much.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 If you have any questions for us about our stories or about Dateline, you can reach us on social media at

Speaker 3 Dateline NBC. See you Fridays on Dateline on NBC.

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Speaker 9 Check out zinn.com/slash find to find Zen at a store near you.

Speaker 8 Warning: this product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical.