Kaitlyn Wheeler will never forget the sacrifices her sister Lauren made to ensure her wedding day was special.
‘She was in her last year of law school and studying for exams, but she still took the time to organise my bachelorette party and bridal shower,’ Kaitlyn, who was then 24, tells me.
‘That was a huge sacrifice at that time in her life. That’s what stands out the most.’
Lauren, then 27, acted as maid-of-honour on the big day, and made a memorable speech about the ‘village’ it had taken to raise her beloved younger sister, before she met her fiancé Daniel.
‘Everyone in this room was invited for a reason and because they played a significant in making Kaitlyn the woman she is today,’ Lauren said.
‘We’re blessed to have her in our lives.’
It’s a cherished memory for Kaitlyn, from Baltimore, Maryland, one she has on video and watches often.
Growing up, Kaitlyn had idolised her big sister. ‘She was a go-getter, a typical first child,’ Kaitlyn says. ‘She was good at school and I wasn’t… I wanted to be like her. When she joined the field hockey team, I joined too. Then it was softball.’
Kaitlyn (left) with her sister Lauren on her wedding day. Lauren was maid-of-honour and made a beautiful speech
Kaitlyn (left) and Lauren when they were children
As the girls grew older, they got closer. When Lauren went off to college in another state, Kaitlyn would join her on the 12-hour drive to campus in Macon, Georgia.
‘We’d burn a CD and listen to Green Day, Counting Crows and country music all the way there,’ she says.
As a child, Lauren was ambitious and spoke about becoming a vet or a doctor. Ultimately, though, she decided to attend law school after graduating college.
‘She was the first one in our family to do something like that,’ Kaitlyn says. ‘She really pursued it.’
Kaitlyn, who was by then starting college herself, remembers visiting Lauren on campus in May 2011, along with her parents Karen and Bill, and her younger sister, Sarah.
‘She took us to a bar in town and there was this guy playing darts by himself,’ Kaitlyn says. ‘I remember Lauren saying, “I can’t believe he came”.’
The man in question was Stephen McDaniel, then 25, a fellow law student who lived next door to Lauren and her dog Butterbean.
With his ‘big hair’ and unusual clothing (‘He’d wear chainmail vests, like he thought he was a knight,’ Kaitlyn recalls), he was a ‘loner’ who mostly kept to himself – but Lauren had kindly mentioned her family was in town if he wanted to meet them at the bar for drinks.
Lauren with her beloved dog, Butterbean
After Lauren was murdered, Butterbean went and sat beside a pair of her shoes
Kaitlyn recalls Lauren mentioning him in catch-up phone calls too.
‘He’d asked Lauren on a date once, but she’d turned him down,’ Kaitlyn says. ‘But she was always kind to Stephen even though he was definitely strange.’
Kaitlyn even remembers her sister saying, ‘If he ever does anything, I’ll be safe because he likes me.’
‘I took it as a joke because she’d always just said he was a bit weird,’ Kaitlyn adds.
It was shortly after that campus visit that Lauren came home for Kaitlyn’s bachelorette party, and then her wedding. She left Butterbean with her parents after that so she could focus on her upcoming exams.
‘We hugged goodbye and she said we wouldn’t hear from her as much because she needed to study and I thought nothing of it,’ Kaitlyn tells me.
That is until she was back from her honeymoon in late June 2011 and received a call from one of Lauren’s friends who was struggling to get hold of her.
‘That’s when it suddenly occurred to me I hadn’t received any emails from her,’ Kaitlyn says.
Kaitlyn (centre) with sisters Lauren (right), Sarah (left) and parents Karen and Bill
Lauren was always ambitious and was the first in her family to pursue further education when she went to law school
In the run-up to the wedding, the sisters had been emailing daily about arrangements for the big day, but now Lauren had gone quiet.
Kaitlyn reasoned that she was busy studying and there was less to talk about now the wedding was over.
But she put in a call to her sister, anyway. It went straight to voicemail.
‘That was strange,’ Kaitlyn says. ‘Because who lets their phone die, even when they’re busy?’
Kaitlyn tried reaching out to some of Lauren’s other law school friends, but they hadn’t heard from her either. Nor had her parents, or sister Sarah.
After logging into her sister’s emails and back accounts, a chill ran down Kaitlyn’s spine when she realised there had been no activity on either for four days.
Kaitlyn called the first of Lauren’s friends she’d spoken to. They had a spare key and agreed to go over to the apartment to check on her.
There was no sign of Lauren but inside the apartment were her keys, wallet and bag.
‘That was my panic point for sure,’ Kaitlyn says.
As Kaitlyn’s father began to the long drive to Lauren’s law school, Kaitlyn stayed home, ringing around hospitals, desperately searching for her sister.
She also called her uncle Robert, who was a police detective in another state. He promised to reach out to the local police and keep her informed.
While the family waited for news, local media interviewed those who lived closed by.
Stephen McDaniel gave an interview to one TV station: ‘She’s as nice as can be. Very personable. Very much a people person…
‘We don’t know where she is. The only thing we can think is that maybe she went to running and someone snatched her.’
Later, Kaitlyn’s uncle Robert turned up at the house. ‘Have you seen the news?’ he asked.
Kaitlyn hadn’t.
‘They’ve found a body,’ Robert said to her. ‘It might not be her…’
But when Robert revealed the body had been in found in the bin in front of Kaitlyn’s house, she remembers nothing but ‘screaming’.
She recalls phoning her dad, who was still on the road, asking him to pull over.
She felt ‘sick’ telling him the news, she says. ‘It was total guttural screams.’
What followed next was a blur but Kaitlyn remembers learning the ‘body’ that had been found was just a torso. The other parts were missing.
She remembers FBI coming to their home to take a DNA sample from her mother. Then finally, the terrible news: it was a match to the body found.
Lauren had been murdered. ‘It was beyond horrifying,’ Kaitlyn says.
Immediately, the family travelled to Lauren’s home. While police began an investigation, the family had the heartbreaking task of clearing out the apartment, and holding a memorial for her with her law school friends.
Meanwhile, cops had zeroed in on a suspect. Lauren’s next-door neighbour, Stephen McDaniel.
Kaitlyn saw the footage of his interview with local journalists, and was shocked to her core. After his initial comments, the interviewer had revealed to him in real time that the body had been found.
His face went blank, he stuttered and then sat down on the street.
McDaniel sounded close to tears as he asked: ‘Why would anyone do this? If I saw something, maybe I could have helped.’
‘We later learned that was him putting on a little play. It was ridiculous,’ Kaitlyn says.
Despite feigning concern, McDaniel was the only resident in the apartment block who had refused to let police search his apartment.
‘When they got a warrant to go in, they found the packaging from a hacksaw inside. They also found a pair of Lauren’s underwear and a USB with photos and footage he’d taken of her from outside her window,’ Kaitlyn adds.
Police also found a stolen master key to every apartment in the building.
Eventually, McDaniel was charged with Lauren’s murder, but pleaded not guilty.
While they awaited his trial, the family held Lauren’s funeral – despite the fact the rest of her remains had not been found.
Recalling the speech she’d made at her wedding, Kaitlyn called on Lauren’s ‘village’ to make speeches about her – friends from kindergarten all the way through to law school.
‘It was beautiful,’ Kaitlyn says. ‘And the longest funeral ever because so many people wanted to speak.’
Back home, Butterbean saw a pair of Lauren’s cowboy boots in the hall that Kaitlyn had brought home after clearing the apartment.
‘He went and sat right next to them,’ Kaitlyn says.
The close-knit family clung to each other throughout the two-year wait to see justice for Lauren.
It was a harrowing time.
‘I was a newlywed and some nights my little sister Sarah was sleeping in our bed, she was so scared,’ Kaitlyn says.
Right before the trial, McDaniel changed his plea to guilty to malice murder, a crime in the state of Georgia that means a murder has been committed with deliberate and malicious intent.
He did so to avoid the death penalty. It also spared the family a harrowing trial.
In court, the family heard McDaniel’s account of what happened on the morning of Lauren’s murder. He said he’d entered her apartment at 4.30am using a master key he’d stolen from the landlord while talking to her in the garden.
He’d startled her awake. Then, as she had recognised him and began to scream, he strangled her for 15 minutes, before dumping her in the bathtub where he dismembered her with a hacksaw.
After dumping her torso in the bin outside, he placed her other body parts in various bins around the college campus.
Police were never able to locate them.
McDaniel told the court: ‘It’s difficult for me to explain why I killed Lauren. I am not without all morals or decency.’
Stephen McDaniel plead guilty to malice murder and was sentenced to life in prison – but said it was ‘difficult to explain’ why he had killed Lauren
A TV reporter had told McDaniel in real time that detectives had just found a body. His bizarre reaction immediately made him suspicious
McDaniel, by then 28, was called ‘truly evil’ by the judge, and sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole until 2041.
‘My mom gave a really moving speech in court,’ Kaitlyn recalls. ‘She spoke about how Stephen’s darkness could never cover up Lauren’s light.’
In the years that have passed, Lauren has missed key events in Kaitlyn’s life.
‘I have five children now,’ she says. ‘My firstborn daughter I named after Lauren. She is strong-willed like her, has a great personality and likes to live it up.’
Kaitlyn wishes her children got to meet their brilliant aunt.
Her parents missed out on the joy of more grandchildren, and Sarah got married and graduated without her sister there.
‘It’s those key moments she missed, but it’s also the everyday life things,’ she shares.
‘Before she died, we’d email every day and share silly videos. I’d get her opinion on things. I miss that.’
Kaitlyn says she ‘owes it’ to her sister to keep telling her story.
‘I know everyone says this when someone they love dies, but she was that person, that special person who should have got to live her life, instead of having it taken from her at 27.
‘When McDaniel has his day in court asking for parole, I hope I’ve shared Lauren’s story enough that the whole world is with me to say a resounding “no”.’
