Brittanee Drexel disappeared 13 years ago. What trail did police follow to Raymond Moody?

Sean Lahman
Rochester Democrat and Chronicle

The announcement of an arrest brought some clarity to the enduring mystery of what happened to Brittanee Drexel. 

The Chili teen went missing during a spring break trip to Myrtle Beach in April 2009. Police in South Carolina announced Monday they had recovered Drexel's remains and charged Raymond Moody, a 62-year-old sex offender, with kidnapping, raping, and killing her.

News of the arrest brings some measure of closure to Drexel's family and friends, who say they are making plans for a memorial service in Rochester. But it leaves many questions unanswered.

Among them: What happened in recent weeks to lead police back to Moody? Police had questioned him early in their investigation, but in recent years had pointed to another suspect and a theory of the crime which, in retrospect, appears to have been a red herring.

More:Remains of missing teen Brittanee Drexel found; man charged in death

10 years later:Brittanee Drexel disappearance still a mystery

Police charge Raymond Moody with murder

Brittanee Drexel.

Investigators have said nothing about what led them to break the case after 13 years.  Law enforcement officials took no questions at the press conference announcing Moody's arrest, and did not share any information about the accused killer's background, recent breakthroughs in the case, or the crime itself.

South Carolina television station WBTW reported Tuesday that Moody allegedly confessed to the crime and led police to the location of Drexel's body.

Moody was charged with murder, kidnapping, first-degree criminal sexual conduct, and obstructing justice. 

The arrest warrant says Moody kidnapped and sexually assaulted Drexel and then killed her "by means of manual strangulation," but offers no other details about what happened or where the crimes occurred, other than within Georgetown County, about 35 miles south of Myrtle Beach. The warrant charges all of the crimes occurred "on or about April 25, 2009."

That's the same day Drexel was last seen leaving a hotel in Myrtle Beach.

Moody, a registered sex offender, has been considered a person of interest in the teen's disappearance for years, since he was stopped by police for a traffic violation in a beach town near Myrtle Beach one day after the teen disappeared.  

Moody spent 21 years in prison stemming back to a 1983 abduction and rape case of a 9-year-old California girl, and was considered the suspect in a number of similar rapes, but was never charged.

A signal from Drexel's cell phone initially prompted searches in the Georgetown County area. Dozens of searches occurred there in the first few years. The trail eventually went cold.

Did false leads delay justice?

FILE - Dawn Drexel, mother of Britanee Drexel, listens during a news conference in McClellanville, S.C., on Wednesday, June 8, 2016.

Seven years after Drexel's disappearance, officials announced that they had a working theory of what had happened to the missing teen and who might have been involved

At a June 2016 press conference, David Thomas, special agent in charge of the FBI in South Carolina, revealed that investigators had concluded Drexel was dead.

He said investigators believed Drexel had been taken to the town of McClellanville, about 60 miles southwest of Myrtle Beach — more than 20 miles south from the location where Drexel's body was eventually recovered.

"What we've come to discover through the course of this investigation is that Brittanee Drexel did leave the Myrtle Beach area. We believe she traveled to the area around McClellanville and we believe she was killed after that," Special Agent Thomas said.

Months later, court documents revealed an informant told investigators Brittanee was abducted, gang-raped, shot to death and thrown into an alligator-infested swamp near McClellanville.

The informant, a South Carolina inmate named Taquan Brown, told investigators he went to a "stash house" where he saw Brittanee being "sexually abused" and "pistol-whipped" when she tried to escape. Brown said he later heard two shots and assumed Brittanee had been shot.

FBI Special Agent in Charge David Thomas speaks to reporters during a news conference in McClellanville, South Carolina, on June 8, 2016. He said that the case of Brittanee Drexel of Chili is now being investigated as a homicide and the agency is offering a reward of $25,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of those responsible. Drexel was 17 when she was last seen at a hotel in nearby Myrtle Beach, S.C., in April 2009.

Brown, now serving 25 years in prison for an unrelated manslaughter conviction, claimed he saw another man, Timothy Da'Shaun Taylor, "sexually abusing" the teen.

Taylor was questioned by federal authorities about Drexel and failed a polygraph in which he claimed to have never seen the Chili teen. He grew upset and ended the examination when told the polygraph showed he was deceptive on questions about her disappearance, court records show.

Taylor was the getaway driver in a 2011 robbery, and he pleaded guilty to the crime in state court. In 2016, federal prosecutors decided to charge Taylor in federal court for the crime — an unusual decision but one authorities acknowledged was partly motivated by a belief that Taylor had information on Drexel's disappearance. 

The arrest of Moody makes clear the informant was lying and Taylor likely had  never seen Drexel. But what's not clear is the extent to which the pursuit of this theory caused investigators to shift their focus away from Moody.

It's also unclear what caused Moody to reappear on investigators' radar 13 years after he allegedly killed Brittanee Drexel.

Prosecutors have not announced when Moody will next appear in court. Charging documents will have to be presented at some point with more details of what led police to turn their attention back to Moody.

Includes reporting by staff writers Gary Craig and Victoria Freile

Contact staff reporter Sean Lahman at slahman@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter @seanlahman