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Hi, everybody. It's Josh Mankowitz, 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. It's an old guy. Oh, it's Keith. Yeah, my Keith.

That's a good title, don't you think?

It is a good title, 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.

Which means there's somebody else watching. Yeah, it'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 Dateland 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 Gettings vanished. In Investigators were pretty certain that this wasn't an ordinary missing person's case. 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. 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 Gettings, 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. Let's talk dateland. The sense that I get from Lauren Gettings is that she was a lot of fun.

She was really smart. She was really interesting. She was maybe the glue that held all her friends together. They all seemed to 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. That was one of the ironies of this story. Her goal in life was to be a defense attorney who would represent the very person who wound up killing her. Ironically, again, her professor, who was teaching her the techniques of representing such people, went ahead and represented him. 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 person.

I think that's probably unusual as people who come out of law school wanting to work for the PD's office. Some people want to do defense work, but wanting to work for, 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 kinds of legal work.

No, and it's underfunded, and you don't have... Every time you go to a 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 bazillion cases. So you have to really want to do it.

Some of the loveliest people I know do that 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 Maken, Georgia, and it was hot as hell that day. The torso was creating an odor.

Yeah. And literally, if the trash had been picked up a day sooner if the police had gotten there three hours later.

Yeah, the trash truck was on the way. I think that probably the killer had expected and planned for that trash truck to be there before there was any hoohah about what happened. That moment in the story that really stuck out to me, this guy, he's a terrible, terrible person, but also not terribly bright. When he is confronted with the recognition that somebody announces that they They have found the body and his reaction to that is amazing.

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 when you're told that she is dead because you're the only person that knows that she is dead at that point. 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 like, Wait, they found the body? Body, he says. Yeah, that's not the way.

I shouldn't laugh, but I mean, that was- No, but I mean, it's astonishingly telling is what it is.

Yeah.

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. 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. Why do you the condoms? 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 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. I know my neighbor is to say hello to. I certainly Sure. Beyond that, I couldn't tell you much.

And you've lived there for quite a while.

I have. I 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, something we talk about all the time here is how you need to listen to your instincts. She had this sense that somebody was stalking her, following her, something was up. She did. Her friends just chalked that up to, Well, men are always interested in her. This is probably not a big deal.

It's one of the things that women have to put up with a lot is having men look at them whenever they possibly can, including 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 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 the 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 were covered. 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.

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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 barely mentioned the neighbor. 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 David. Yeah, and then David, the current boyfriend, right? Yeah. You're thinking, if you're the audience, Okay, it's one of them. Then you throw in the maintenance man. I'm like, Okay, well, that's clearly who it is.

It'sprobably the maintenance guy.

It's neither Joe nor... It's the maintenance man, obviously. Then it turns out, of course, it's somebody else entirely. From a Dateland storytelling point of view, I thought that was great.

Well, that's very 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. We're not going to say the maintenance man was a suspect if he wasn't a suspect. Exactly. 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. But then there's a scripted series that comes along that takes a point of view. Therefore, we'll fudge on certain details and we'll reduce the effect of some things and increase the effect of some other things. In other words, they're manufacturing the 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 Boogie Man. Boogie Man exists. They're very, very rare, but they do exist, and they get all the attention.

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. Sometimes I think I worry that we might put a little too much fear into an audience, that there are those people out there in numbers and they're targeting and watching and scary.

Look, I'm going to say upwards of 90% of dateland stories involve some relationship between the killer and the victim. Of course, yeah, sure. They're not unknown to each other.

I think that probably mirrors to some degree the statistics in murder investigations.

I mean, the person who leaps out of the bushes and attacks someone and rapes them, that's the least common rape. That's right. Almost always, it's somebody that the victim knows. That's overwhelmingly likely. But that's 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.

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 to be does.

Generally speaking, yeah.

Yeah. But in 2018, he claimed his constitutional rights were violated, asked for a new trial. He represented himself 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 had never been able to tell anybody until that opportunity came along.

What Steven McDaniels 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. 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. 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.

Coming up next, your questions from social media.

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Hey, it's Josh Mankowitz from Dateland with a question for you true crime fans. How do you catch a killer whose motive is simply unimaginable? Investigators give us a fascinating look inside a very twisted mind as his secrets are finally uncovered. If you think you've heard every Dateland story, think again. Listen to Motive for murder and a dozen other riveting series when you follow the Dateland Originals podcast. Let's take your questions from social media. Good idea. A lot of people wrote to us saying that they lived in Maken at the time. They remembered the coverage of this case.

I will I'll say this. I had not been before doing this story. I had not been to Maken, Georgia, before. What a lovely place it is.

That's great.

It has a history, I realize. It is 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. I was in Maken in other parts of Georgia back then a lot. You loved Maken when you were there. Did people love you back? Were they nice to you?

They were very nice to me, yes, absolutely. But, come on, A TV guy. People are not going to 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, 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.

Dogs are very important to a lot of people. And in nearly every Dateland episode that I've done that involves a dog, there are social media questions about what happened to the dog.

Of course. And in this case, the dog went to live with Lauren's family.

And if it had been there that night, it might have woken her up.

Well, it might have because she had She left the dog with him, given the fact that they were writing their bar exams and there's a lot going on.

Another piece of bad luck. On the other hand, it may also have been that he waited until the dog wasn't there anymore.

That's also possible.

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 locker 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 thinking about the ramifications of what happens. I'm going to get caught. I'm going to end up in prison. My family will be ashamed of me. I'll impoverish them because they had to hire an attorney. Not part of the thought process. I'll wreck somebody else's family's life by taking away this person.

Right. I gather the 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.

That guy, presumably, went into law for some reason. He thought he could help people, or he could help himself, or he could help his family. 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. He can go to murder and get away with it. I'm reminded of Brian Kauberger in Idaho facing those charges there. Of course, he's still facing charges. He hasn't been convicted of anything yet. But he He wanted to join a police force because he was 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. That's the thing we were talking about earlier in which this is not a traditional dateland defendant in which they're involved with or close friends with or married to somebody in the case.

They stand out because they're so unusual, so rare. I remember them, you remember them, we all remember them because they are monsters. The monster, I'm not saying Brian Kauberger is a monster. We don't know yet. He's not been convicted of anything. But the people who do these things are monsters. So They 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 on.

Yes, exactly.Thanks.

Keith.yeah..

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. Just for the audience's benefit. None of that was true. Keith, Happy New Year.

Happy New Year to you, too, Josh.

One more thing. Yeah. What? I have a new podcast out called Deadly Mirage. You know, I heard that.

Is it 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. 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 Dateland as a TV episode Friday at nine o'clock Eastern.

Isn't that interesting? That's 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 Dateland.

And I hear it's pretty good, Josh. So congratulations on that.

Thank you very much. One more thing for Dateland premium subscribers, we have a new After the Verdict that will be available on January ninth. If you have any questions for us about our stories or about Dateland. You can reach us on social media at datelandnbc. See you Fridays on Dateland on nbc. Rob and Sabrina Limón were just one of those magical couples. They never fought.

It's happy, happy, happy.

Sabrina and Rob settled in Silver Lakes. Wholesome, anywhere, Main Street, USA. But it turns out, behind some of these doors, there are secrets about religion, about friendship, about sex, and about murder. And I told them, I bet my life she's not involved. I prayed she wasn't, but would I bet my life on it?

No. Don't miss the true crime mystery that inspired Dateland's hit podcast, Deadly Mirage, Friday at 9:8 Central on NBC.