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Raymond Moody and Brittanee Drexel Wiki – Raymond Moody and Brittanee Drexel Bio
On Wednesday, 13 years after Brittanee Drexel disappeared while on a spring break trip to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, the convicted sex offender who kidnapped and murdered her pleaded guilty to the crimes and was sentenced to life in prison.
“I was a monster,” Raymond Moody, 62, a longtime person of interest in the case, said in court after pleading guilty, the Democrat & Chronicle reports. “I was a monster then and I was a monster when I took Brittanee Drexel’s life. I have no words to express how horrible I feel…I’m so sorry.”
The judge sentenced Moody to consecutive 30-year sentences on the kidnapping and criminal sexual conduct charges and life in prison on the first-degree murder charge for kidnapping, raping, and strangling the 17-year-old high school football star who dreamed of become a nurse or cosmetologist, reports Democrat & Chronicle.
In his victim statement in court before Moody was sentenced, Drexel’s stepfather, Chad Drexel, who along with her mother, Dawn Pleckan, tirelessly searched for the teenager, said he had always hoped one day she would find her. they will find
“Thirteen years later, I find out the horrible and disgusting way she was killed,” he said through tears, reports WMBF and WHSV.
Pleckan had harsher words for Moody.
“I hope you suffer in prison for the rest of your useless life,” said Pleckan, who never stopped looking for his daughter.
Raymond Moody and Brittanee Drexel Age
Raymond Moody, 62, was sentenced to life in prison for raping and murdering the 17-year-old girl who disappeared while vacationing in Myrtle Beach
Investigation Report
For more than a decade, Drexel’s parents have wondered what happened to the outgoing junior at Gates Chili High School in Chili, N.Y.
Unbeknownst to her parents, on April 22, 2009, Drexel joined a group of friends heading to Myrtle Beach for spring break.
“I didn’t know he was going to go,” Pleckan previously told PEOPLE. “The day she left she was mad at me because she asked if she could go and I said no. I told her, ‘There are no adults going, and I have no idea who these kids are and I’m not comfortable with that.’ ”
“I told him I felt like something was going to happen to him,” Pleckan said. “I just felt it.”
On April 25, 2009, Drexel left her hotel alone and headed to the Blue Water Resort on Ocean Boulevard, Myrtle Beach’s busy main drag, to visit a friend who was staying there.
She was last seen around 8:45 p.m. when surveillance cameras caught her leaving the hotel wearing a black-and-white tank top, shorts and flip-flops, authorities say.
She texted her boyfriend on the way home saying she was walking back to the Bar Harbor, an inn a mile and a half away, where she and her friends were staying.
It was never again heard from her.
Body of Brittanee Drexel, New York Teen Who Disappeared in 2009, Found in South Carolina, Suspect Charged
Her cell phone transmitted the last known signal from her the day after she disappeared near the South Santee River, between McClellanville and Georgetown, authorities say.
For years, local authorities and the FBI searched for her, holding press conferences along the way asking for the public’s help.
In May of this year, her body was finally found buried in the woods of South Carolina.
Details about what happened to Drexel when she disappeared were finally revealed when police arrested Moody that month, after he directed them to the location where she had buried her body.
The day after Drexel disappeared, police in the nearby town of Surfside pulled Moody over for speeding, according to the arrest warrant obtained by PEOPLE.
But authorities did not identify him as a possible person of interest in the case for another two years.
Moody was living an hour from Myrtle Beach, in a motel in Georgetown, S.C., in 2009 when Drexel was last seen, investigators said.
According to authorities, Moody kidnapped Drexel while she was walking alone on the Myrtle Beach strip.
Thanks to advances in cell phone technology, beginning in 2019, authorities were able to trace Drexel’s phone, showing that he went from walking the strip to riding in a car and ended up in the Georgetown County area, he explained in a statement. court assistant attorney Scott Hixson. WMBF reports.
The case came to a head in April 2022 when Moody’s girlfriend, Angel Vause, agreed to help the FBI and use a microphone to talk to Moody about what happened to Drexel, WMBF reports.
On May 5, 2022, Moody admitted what he did to Drexel, Hixson said, WMBF reports.
He told authorities that he and Vause were driving in Myrtle Beach when they saw Drexel and asked him to party with them, Hixson said, the Democrat & Chronicle reports.
He said she got into the car voluntarily, which her family disputed, the newspaper reports.
He said he took Vause and Drexel to a campground in Georgetown County, where they smoked marijuana.
When Vause left, Moody said that she wanted to have sex with Drexel. When she refused, he raped her.
Worried that he might get in trouble for raping Drexel, he strangled her, wrapped her body in a blanket and hid her in the woods, Hixson said.
When Vause returned, she told him that Drexel’s friends had picked her up.
She returned to the camp later, moved Drexel’s body and buried it elsewhere, Hixson said, the Democrat & Chronicle reports.
According to the Democrat and Chronicle, Moody is a registered sex offender who spent 21 years in prison following a 1983 kidnapping and rape case in California involving a 9-year-old girl.
The guilty plea and sentence are bittersweet for Drexel’s family.
“I will never get to walk Brittanee down the aisle and neither will her blood father or Dawn,” Chad Drexel said, News 10 NBC reports. “She will never be able to see my granddaughter, her niece who is incredible, all of that was taken from us.”