Do you believe in premonitions? How about mother's intuition? I am a mother and a grandmother and trust me, both of those things are real. Brittanee's mother had that intuition when in April 2009, Brittanee asked her mother to allow her to go with friends and her boyfriend to Myrtle Beach, SC for Spring Break. Her mother denied the request because she didn't know any of the other teenagers who would be going on the trip and was made aware that no adults would be going as well. Brittanee argued with her mother for days over the decision and on April 22nd, Brittanee's mother Dawn, agreed to let Brittanee spend a couple of days with her friend to calm down. Unfortunately, that would be the last day Dawn would see her daughter alive. Brittanee, against her mother's wishes, left for Myrtle Beach that day never to be seen or heard from again.
Brittanee was born on October 7th, 1991, to two teenage, unwed parents, John and Dawn in Rochester New York. Dawn and John did not stay together and Dawn's husband Chad Drexel, adopted Brittanee and raised her as his own. Brittanee was born with persistent hyperplastic primary vitreous in her right eye, which required several surgeries and rendered the eye blind. To cover the eye's tendency to wander, she wore contact lenses that gave her a distinctive appearance.
Brittanee called her mother a few days after leaving for the beach and told her she was at "a" beach. Her mother assumed it was a local one but didn't ask. On April 25th, Brittanee left the hotel that she and her friends were staying at, The Bar Harbor Hotel, at about 8 pm to walk about a mile and a half down S Ocean Blvd to meet up with a friend that was staying at another hotel. The cameras at that resort showed Brittanee coming in and then ger leaving about 8:45 that night. Brittanee had been texting her boyfriend who we later found out was unable to go to the beach due to work. According to John Grieco, her texts stopped coming in or being replied to about 9:15 PM. After calling Britanee's friends there at the beach and with no one having seen her since earlier in the evening, John called Brittanee's mother Dawn. Dawn and Chad Drexel began trying to reach Brittanee but calls and texts to her phone were not answered. Myrtle Beach police began looking for Drexel the following morning. They located the security camera footage from the Blue Water Resort and found the friends whom she had visited. The last person who had reported seeing Drexel before she had left was identified as Peter Brozowitz, a 20-year-old nightclub promoter whom Brittanee had known from the Rochester area and who was also vacationing in Myrtle Beach. They had apparently met at a local nightclub the night before.
When police searched Britanee's room, they found everything but her purse and cell phone. Tell me that is not suspicious as hell. The phone's network pings were tracked on a path leading 50–60 miles south of Myrtle Beach, in an area along U.S. Route 17 near the Georgetown–Charleston County line. The pings had stopped abruptly early on the morning of April 26. Areas near there and around Myrtle Beach where a body might have been disposed of were then searched for eleven days.
In June 2016 the FBI held a news conference during which they stated that they believed that Drexel had been murdered shortly after her disappearance. She had been abducted from Myrtle Beach and taken to somewhere in the vicinity of Georgetown, near where the cell phone pings had ended, before being killed there.
Two months later, the Charleston Post and Courier reported new developments from a bond hearing for Timothy Da'Shaun Taylor, an inmate then serving time in state prison on an unrelated charge. FBI agent Gerrick Munoz testified that earlier that year Taquan Brown, another South Carolina inmate who had begun serving a 25-year sentence for manslaughter, told them that in 2009, shortly after Drexel disappeared, he had gone to visit a McClellanville "stash house" to give money to Taylor's father.
As he walked through the house, Brown had told Munoz, he saw Taylor sexually abusing Drexel with others present. He continued to the backyard, where he found Shaun and made his payment. As they talked, Drexel ran from the house but was soon recaptured. Brown said he saw Taylor pistol-whip Drexel, then take her back inside. He then heard two gunshots, which he assumed were the sounds of the young woman being killed. Brown claims to have seen a wrapped body being removed from the house, then dumped in one of many alligator ponds in the area.
Brown's statement to investigators, Munoz said, was partially corroborated by information received from another informant who was not identified but was described as having been incarcerated at the Georgetown County jail at the time he had talked to authorities. According to the second inmate, Taylor had picked up Drexel in Myrtle Beach and taken her to McClellanville, where he showed her off to friends and tried to sell her to them for trafficking purposes. Brown said that when the case drew heavy media attention Taylor decided to kill Drexel to avoid arrest.
In early May 2022, Raymond Moody, 62, a registered sex offender, turned himself in to the Georgetown County Sheriff's Office, on the basis of an obstruction of justice charge. Police had first considered Moody a person of interest in the Drexel disappearance as early as 2012. Moody confessed to the crime on May 4 and provided a location of potential remains. The FBI excavated them over the next three days. By May 11, human remains were located, buried in the woods off a gated private drive outside Georgetown, about four feet into the ground; they were identified as Drexel's through DNA and dental records on May 15. The arrest warrant alleged she had been strangled and then buried by the morning of April 26, 2009.Georgetown County Sheriff's Office, along with Drexel's family, made the information public the following day, May 16, along with the announcement of Moody's arrest.
Moody was arrested again and charged with murder, kidnapping and first-degree criminal sexual misconduct, all alleged to have occurred on the day Drexel disappeared. The charges placed upon Moody are currently death-penalty eligible.
This case reminds me of the Heather Elvis case. She also disappeared in South Carolina, but the cases were never related. Just sad stories of beautiful young ladies that were taken from their family's way to soon. It seems that more and more these days, cases like this are popping up all over the world. Please, stay safe. Walk and travel in groups. Look out for one another. I hope Brittanee is resting in peace now.
Sources:
Comments