Murder of Brittanee Drexel

Brittanee Drexel was a 17-year-old high school student from Chili, New York, a suburb of Rochester. In April 2009, she traveled to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, for spring break with a group of friends after telling her mother she was going to a friend's house for a few days; her mother had earlier refused to let her go to Myrtle Beach because she did not know the other teenagers involved and no adults were accompanying the group.

On the night of April 25, 2009, Drexel left her friends at the Bar Harbor Hotel in Myrtle Beach and walked about 1.5 miles south to the Blue Water Resort to visit another friend. Security cameras recorded her arriving around 8 p.m. and leaving around 8:45 p.m. She continued texting her boyfriend, who had stayed behind in New York, but her messages stopped abruptly around 9:15 p.m. When he could not reach her or her friends, he contacted Drexel's mother, who had not known her daughter was in South Carolina; the family then contacted police.

Myrtle Beach police began searching the following morning. Officers recovered the clothing Drexel had packed from her hotel room, but not her purse or cell phone. Tracking of her phone's network pings showed it traveling 50 to 60 miles south of Myrtle Beach, toward the Georgetown-Charleston county line, before the signal stopped early on the morning of April 26, 2009. Extensive searches in the days that followed did not locate Drexel, and a 2011 search of an apartment in Georgetown County did not identify a suspect.

The case remained unresolved for years. In June 2016, the FBI publicly stated that it believed Drexel had been abducted and killed shortly after her disappearance, and it offered a $25,000 reward for information. Investigators subsequently pursued an account from a jailhouse informant implicating another individual in her death; that individual was never charged in connection with Drexel's case, and the lead did not result in an arrest at that time.

In early May 2022, Raymond Moody, a 62-year-old registered sex offender who had first been named a person of interest in 2012, turned himself in to the Georgetown County Sheriff's Office on an obstruction-of-justice charge, confessed to the crime, and told investigators where to find remains. FBI investigators excavated the site over the following days; by May 11, 2022, they had located human remains buried in a wooded area outside Georgetown, and DNA and dental records confirmed on May 15 that the remains were Drexel's. Authorities publicly announced Moody's arrest on May 16, 2022, on charges of murder, kidnapping, and first-degree criminal sexual conduct. The arrest warrant alleged that Drexel had been strangled and buried by the morning of April 26, 2009, hours after she was last seen. On October 19, 2022, Moody pleaded guilty to all charges and was sentenced to life in prison plus two consecutive 30-year terms.

In March 2024, Moody's girlfriend, Angel Vause, was charged with three federal counts of lying to the FBI about her involvement in the Drexel investigation. She pleaded guilty to all counts in September 2024 and was sentenced to 18 years in prison on February 13, 2025.