Brittanee Drexel

Case background and investigation

Brittanee Marie Drexel was a 17-year-old high school student from Chili, a suburb of Rochester, New York, when she disappeared in the spring of 2009. In April of that year, Brittanee traveled to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, with a group of friends for a spring break trip. Her mother, Dawn Drexel, had not given permission for the journey, and Brittanee reportedly told her she would be spending the weekend at a friend's house in New York rather than driving roughly 800 miles south. That deception meant several crucial days passed before the full circumstances of her trip were understood by her family.

On the evening of April 25, 2009, Brittanee left the Bar Harbor Hotel in Myrtle Beach, where she was staying with friends, and walked about a mile and a half to visit an acquaintance at another hotel, the Blue Water Resort, where surveillance cameras recorded her arriving and then leaving at about 8:45 p.m. Surveillance footage captured her leaving, and she exchanged text messages with her boyfriend back in New York, telling him around 9:15 p.m. that she was heading back. She was never seen again. Her boyfriend alerted her mother after her phone went silent, and law enforcement launched an urgent search along the Grand Strand. Her cellphone last pinged near Georgetown, South Carolina, some 30 miles south of Myrtle Beach, before going dark.

The case drew national attention and stretched on for more than a decade with numerous false leads and dead ends. Investigators identified Raymond Douglas Moody, a registered sex offender, as a person of interest as early as 2012. In June 2016 the FBI publicly declared Brittanee a homicide victim and offered a reward, and later that year a prison informant named Taquan Brown gave a graphic account alleging she had been abducted, sexually assaulted, and killed in the Georgetown area. Despite these claims, no charges were filed for years, and the family endured a long period of uncertainty about what had happened to her.

The breakthrough came in May 2022. Investigators had refined their analysis of cellphone and surveillance data, tracking the point at which Brittanee's movements shifted from walking speed to vehicle speed, which helped focus attention on Moody. On May 5, 2022, Moody confessed during an interview and led authorities to Brittanee's remains, which were recovered from a wooded, buried site near Georgetown in mid-May and confirmed through DNA and dental records. Moody was arrested and charged with murder, kidnapping, and criminal sexual conduct.

In October 2022, Raymond Moody pleaded guilty to murder, kidnapping, and first-degree criminal sexual conduct in the death of Brittanee Drexel. In court he stated, "I was a monster," acknowledging responsibility for the killing. A Georgetown County judge sentenced him to life in prison without the possibility of parole for the murder, plus consecutive 30-year sentences for the kidnapping and sexual assault charges. The guilty plea and sentence closed one of South Carolina's most prominent cold cases after more than thirteen years. Brittanee's family, including her mother Dawn, addressed the court, and the case is now considered resolved with Moody serving his life sentence.