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Hunted and Kidnapped - What Happened to Brittanee Drexel

September 1, 2025

During a spring break getaway, a teenage girl disappeared suddenly, leaving behind only puzzling clues of her last steps.

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AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

You're listening to an Oh No Media podcast.

Hey everyone, welcome back to Murder with My Husband. I'm Payton Moreland.

And I'm Garrett Moreland.

That's not the beginning. No, wait, you did that wrong.

Yeah. Hey, let me restart again.

Let me retry that. You guys, I didn’t even correct—how are we going to start a podcast and not even give them their intro? Okay, I'm ready. I'm ready.

Whoa. Everyone, cleanse. Cleanse. Let's retry.

Hey everyone, welcome back to the podcast. This is Murder with My Husband. I'm Payton Moreland.

And I'm Garrett Moreland.

And he's the husband.

And I'm the husband. Welcome back to another episode, another week. Hope everyone is having a great holiday.

Uh, majority of you are probably off work depending on what your jobs are.

Is it Labor Day?

It is Labor Day.

Anyways, hope you guys are enjoying today. No matter what you're doing, hope someone out there did something fun over the weekend. We have just been hanging out, chilling at home. Nothing too crazy. And here we are recording an episode, getting ready to hang out with you guys for the week.

We did just wake up. We have our Dutch Bros coffee.

We got our Dutch Bros. Even though they don't want to sponsor us, we got our Dutch Bros coffee.

We are energized. We're ready to go.

I made some bagels last night.

I know. I had a bunch of people asking about my bagels.

Yeah, they were really good.

Bro, they were like—pretty authentic when it comes to bagels.

I hope so. It was like a full two-day process.

He boiled, baked, all the things.

All the things. Let them sit in the fridge for hours.

Yeah, I did a good job. They turned out really good. That's all I have to say about that. Nothing more.

I've just been… Payton and I have—well, I guess for my 10 seconds I'll give you a little life update. This week we've just been kind of rearranging furniture. We got some new furniture. I dropped a dresser on my foot. I made some bagels. Exercising, hanging out. Halloween is coming up. I mean, not really, but kind of. We're getting there.

It's almost September. Actually, while you're listening to this, it'll be September. So it's basically time to get ready for Halloween.

So, hope everyone—wait, you know what? I came up with something right as I was talking. I think that we should do a Halloween contest this year.

Wait, it's September. That means I'm supposed to put Skelly in with us.

Yeah. So I think we should do a Halloween costume contest this year. And the winner gets…

What does the winner get?

Like, they post on their stories and tag us. Like, they send us or post on their stories and tag us. You know what? You guys go to Instagram to check the official rules ‘cause we're making this up off the top.

But the winner will get something really good. We'll keep everyone updated. That'll be fun.

Yeah, I'll think of like a really good prize. I don't know. Maybe one of my bagels. No, I'm just kidding. It'll be better than that. I'll think of something really good.

On that note, I'll see if Payton has anything to say and then we can hop into today's case.

Well, I don't have anything to say ‘cause I'm about to yap your ear off. Let's do it.

Our sources for this episode are livenews.com, abcnews.com, people.com, cbsnews.com, myhorynews.com, justice.gov, 13wam.com, wbtw.com, newyorkpost.com, warddw.com, and abc.com.

All right, before I get into it, I did want to say you might recognize this case ‘cause it is a little bit more well-known in the true crime community. But we haven't done this for a little while. I always find it interesting to introduce more well-known cases to Garrett because this will be the first time he's ever heard of it, and it's almost kind of fascinating to listen to someone digest information that we all already might be aware of.

So, if you have heard of this case, just stick around and listen. I promise it'll be worth it.

And for those who might be new listening—I don't know these cases. Everyone's always like, "How do you not know these cases? Do you not listen to true crime?" No, the only time I listen to true crime is when I am sitting down in this chair hearing it from my wife.

Okay. So, for a lot of people, part of being a teenager is pushing boundaries, finding your independence, learning how to be an adult, and believing that you know a heck of a lot better than your parents do. And most of us have been told no by our parents before—that we can't go to a party or we can't stay out past our curfew—and then we all tried to do it anyways.

But when we're teenagers, we aren't thinking about why our parents are setting those boundaries for us. We just think they want to keep us on a leash and say no just because they can. We never consider that they're actually trying to protect us from all of the scary things out there in the real world.

Things that our innocent, naive selves still aren't thinking of yet: drunk drivers, handsy boys, strangers in the night.

And while most of the time those fears are just our parents being overprotective, today's case proves that sometimes those fears are greatly justified.

So, let's travel now to upstate New York, to a suburb of Rochester called Chili. The year is 2009, and this is a place that a 17-year-old girl named Brittanee Drexel calls home.

So again, 2009, in a suburb of Rochester—17-year-old Brittanee. Now, Brittanee was born on October 7, 1991. Her parents, Dawn and John, were teenagers themselves when they had Brittanee, and they weren’t married at the time.

Knock it up. Dawn and John.

Sorry. Well, it’s not like they chose their names and were like, “Let’s be a couple and be Dawn and John.” They just met each other, fell in love.

Yeah. They weren’t married at the time. Again, they were teenagers, so the relationship didn’t last long.

Now, around the time Brittanee turned two, Dawn got together with a man named Chad Drexel, who ended up adopting Brittanee and took on the role of a father figure in her life. It was good that Dawn had the support, because things weren’t easy with Brittanee when she was a baby.

She was born with something called persistent hyperplastic primary vitreous in her right eye, which basically required a bunch of surgeries throughout her life and inevitably rendered her blind in that eye.

But that didn’t discourage Chad and Dawn from growing their family. Years later, Brittanee had a little half-brother and sister named Marissa and Camden, and she grew extremely close with these siblings.

While Brittanee’s eye troubles certainly must have been a challenge, they didn’t seem to hinder her confidence as she grew up and into her teenage years. People who knew Brittanee described her as a little spitfire, a ball of energy who was extremely feisty—especially on the soccer field.

There, Brittanee was a massive star, scoring 26 goals for her team in one season alone. She was also studying cosmetology and had hopes of either pursuing that or modeling once she got done with high school.

But come 2009, 17-year-old Brittanee started doing what a lot of kids her age do: she began testing boundaries. Things at home were getting complicated because Dawn and Chad were actually in the midst of a separation. Her biological dad, John, had just come back into her life and was looking to rekindle a relationship with his daughter.

Meanwhile, Brittanee was trying to make the most of her high school years. It was her junior year, and she had just started hanging out with a new group of friends who were all a little bit older than she was. This meant Brittanee was invited to more parties and less parent-supervised outings.

She also, at this point, had a boyfriend—a kid named John Greco—who she had been with for about a year or so, and she seemed pretty serious about him.

But in the spring of 2009, Brittanee went to her mom with a request. She wanted to go with a few of her new friends down to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, for a spring break trip.

Now, Dawn, her mother, told her right away, “I do not approve,” especially because she hardly knew the new friends Brittanee was going with and was told there wouldn’t be any parents going with them. This led to a bunch of arguments between Dawn and Brittanee over the next week or two, but Dawn was not about to cave—especially because she just had that mom feeling that if she let Brittanee go, something terrible would happen.

It didn’t seem like she shared this intuition with Brittanee at the time, but Dawn did stand her ground.

Then, around April 22, Brittanee came to her and said, “Okay, plans have changed. Now me and my friends just want to go to another friend’s beach house in Rochester, on the island.”

This time, Dawn agreed, figuring it was a good compromise since Brittanee wouldn’t even be crossing state lines. But she had no idea that Brittanee wasn’t being truthful.

Later that day, Brittanee got in a car with three of her new friends and headed south to Myrtle Beach.

Anyways—okay. So, her sneaky little plan was to tell Mom the plans had changed, but they actually hadn’t.

She and her friends checked into a place along the water called the Bar Harbor Hotel. They spent the next three days enjoying themselves without a hitch.

And on day three, April 25, Brittanee started to feel a little guilty about the fights she’d had with her mother about this trip. So she called her that day to say she was at the beach. She didn’t specify what beach. Dawn obviously thought she meant Lake Ontario’s shoreline, which was close to the house and something they always referred to as “the beach.”

Plus, the weather was warm back in New York that day—it was 83°. So Dawn didn’t really ask too many questions. She was just happy that the air was getting cleared between her and Brittanee, and that her daughter sounded in high spirits that day and was having fun.

Before she hung up the phone, Brittanee told her mother she loved her and that she would see her the following day.

Unfortunately, though, that would be the last conversation the two of them would ever have.

That night around 8:00 p.m., Brittanee left her hotel alone to go visit some other friends in town who were staying at another nearby hotel. It was called the Blue Water Resort. It was about a mile and a half away from the place she was staying with her friends. Security cameras show her walking into this new hotel and then leaving shortly after, at around 8:45 p.m.

Apparently, one of the friends Brittanee went down with had texted her asking if she borrowed her pair of black shorts. When Brittanee was like, “Yeah, I did,” it kind of became an argument between the two friends. So Brittanee agreed to leave this visit at the new hotel and head back to her original hotel with her friends to give the girl her pair of shorts.

Okay, sorry—that was a little complicated ‘cause there are a lot of friends.

By the way, Brittanee’s boyfriend, John, was not on the trip with them, but the two were texting pretty much the entire time she was on spring break. She told John what was happening as she left the hotel that night to go return the shorts to her original hotel. She told him she was walking back.

But around 9:15 p.m. that night, Brittanee’s texts stopped out of the blue. John wasn’t hearing from her anymore, and he honestly began to panic. He started calling her friends that she was with. They said they hadn’t heard from her either. And Brittanee, who was walking that mile and a half back to the hotel in the dark, hadn’t made it back yet.

So that’s when John upped the stakes. He told Brittanee, “Hey, if you don’t text me back soon, I’m going to call your mom and tell her that you lied and are in Myrtle Beach.”

When more time passed that night without hearing from Brittanee and her not showing up at the hotel, John followed through on that promise. He called Dawn later that night and said, “Hey, I’m really worried about Brittanee. She just stopped texting me out of the blue, her friends haven’t seen or heard from her, and also—she is not in New York. She did actually go to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.”

I mean, probably a good thing that he told her, obviously.

And so that’s when Dawn realized she had to get to Myrtle Beach immediately.

Oh wow.

So, by the following morning, Dawn and the rest of the family were on their way to South Carolina. Of course, one of their first stops when they got there was immediately to the local police, because Brittanee never showed up the entire night.

They also started walking up and down the strip that Brittanee had been walking between these hotels, to see if anyone had spotted her.

Meanwhile, the Myrtle Beach police began searching Brittanee’s hotel room.

They find that all of her clothes are still there, but her purse and her cell phone are missing. They also gain access to a security camera on Ocean Boulevard, which is where Brittanee’s hotel was. It’s honestly sort of the main drag along the water with all the different hotels.

They find footage of Brittanee walking toward the Blue Water Resort southbound around 8:00 p.m., which matches the story. She has her head down, looking at her cell phone—likely texting John. They also have footage of her going in to the other friends’ hotel, and then back out of the Blue Water Resort where the friends were staying. Basically, she entered around 8:00 p.m. and left around 8:45 p.m.

Okay. So everything seems fine.

Yes, it seems to match what everyone was saying. But what they don’t have is Brittanee walking past that original camera on Ocean Boulevard again later, heading back toward her hotel.

Okay, so they at least have a kind of point on a map of where they know she didn’t get to.

Okay, so what happened to Brittanee after she left the Blue Water Resort?

Police begin by tracking Brittanee’s cell phone, and they find that she left the Myrtle Beach area pretty soon after leaving the Blue Water Resort.

Interesting.

Yes. Her phone traveled 15 miles south.

Oh, so she went the other way from her hotel.

Okay. And obviously in a car, because you’re not going to be walking 15 miles.

It was pretty fast. They also learned that the last ping of her cell phone was in the early morning hours of April 26, off a cell tower about 50 miles south.

Oh my gosh.

Okay, so, I mean, yeah—someone took her in a car.

It was near a rural, swampy area on the Georgetown–Charleston County line. And you can imagine her friends, her boyfriend, her family learning this from police after reporting her missing. Like, okay, yeah, we believe you—she is missing. And also, she was taken in a car. Did she get in there willingly?

And all of her friends and family were like, “No, this is nowhere Brittanee would have gone on her own without telling John or us or someone.”

Which then obviously led everyone’s hearts to drop, because that meant she was most likely kidnapped.

So the local police mobilized pretty quickly, sending search teams out to the area to scour the land on ATVs, horseback, and by foot.

Oh my gosh. And this is heartbreaking. But after—

They found the body that quick?

After 11 days of nonstop searches, from sunrise to sunset, they came up empty-handed.

Oh my gosh. So they found the last ping, but nothing.

Eleven days had gone by without a word from Brittanee. There was no sign of her. Honestly, things weren’t looking good.

But her family wasn’t giving up hope. After posting flyers, the police ended up getting hundreds of tips from local people claiming to have seen Brittanee—either wandering Ocean Boulevard (which we knew) or sitting on a bus somewhere close by after she disappeared.

But none of this could be confirmed. Nothing really led to anything useful.

There was, however, one person police zoomed in on pretty early in the investigation. And it was actually the last person Brittanee was said to be with.

It was one of these friends at the Blue Water Resort, a 20-year-old guy named Peter Brozowitz.

I mean, something’s got to be on the cameras. Like, 100%, they find something—her getting into a car or being forced into a car—there has to be.

So, they’re looking into Peter, who was a friend at the other hotel. He was a nightclub promoter back in Rochester who also happened to be vacationing down in Myrtle Beach that same week. He and Brittanee and some of his friends had apparently met up the night before she vanished.

She had already hung out with these friends on April 24 at a place called Club Kryptonite. Then Brittanee, Peter, and his friends met back up the following morning at the beach near the Blue Water Resort around 11:00 a.m., and again in their room when Brittanee stopped by the night she went missing at around 8:00 p.m.

Now, there’s really nothing suspicious about the encounter with Peter from what I can tell—aside from the fact that he lawyered up pretty quickly as soon as Brittanee disappeared, which honestly just seems like a smart move if you’re going to be questioned by the police.

But there is something he said that made Brittanee’s mom question his story. He said she spent 10 minutes in his room the night before her friend texted her, saying she wanted her to walk back and give her back the shorts. That’s when Brittanee left and planned to make the mile-and-a-half walk back to her hotel.

But Brittanee’s mom said she hated walking. It didn’t make any sense that she would have turned right back around and walked another mile back to the hotel.

Okay.

And when asked why Peter, who had a car, didn’t offer to just give her a quick ride back, he said, quote, “He wasn’t in Myrtle Beach to babysit.”

Now remember, Brittanee is a little bit younger, but this response gets police wondering: did Brittanee not want to make the walk back to her hotel, and so instead she got a ride from a cab or potentially a stranger that night?

Like, as she was on the walk back, she decided to try—and maybe that innocent ride went seriously wrong.

Well, after several dead ends, the investigation into Brittanee Drexel started to slow. But Brittanee’s mom, Dawn, refused to give up hope. She actually moved to Myrtle Beach with her parents full-time so she could keep applying pressure to local law enforcement. Plus, she said it just made her feel closer to her missing daughter.

Meanwhile, Dawn started to have her own theories on what might have happened to Brittanee. She wondered if maybe Brittanee was lured to Myrtle Beach by someone promising her something—maybe a prospective modeling job, which Brittanee had expressed interest in. She also wondered if perhaps Brittanee had fallen victim to sex trafficking.

This theory came partly from the fact that Horry County, where Myrtle Beach is located, had been rated the number one county in South Carolina for human trafficking.

Wow. Okay.

However, I’m not sure if local police took any of that seriously enough.

Yeah, it’s hard. I mean, I think at some point you get so many theories, you’ve got to nail something down, right?

Yeah. It gets hard.

I do know that for another two years—

So sad.

The investigation crept by with a lot of false leads, bad tips, and little movement.

Okay.

That was until August of 2011, when someone came forward in the case with something useful. That year, a woman went to the police and said she wanted to report something. Her boyfriend, a 54-year-old man named Raymond Moody, had been abusing her. She also mentioned that Raymond was on a sex offenders list and might be worth looking into for the Brittanee Drexel case.

Wow.

So, this woman basically walked in and said, “My boyfriend sucks. And also, you might want to look into him as a suspect.”

Well, it just so happened that Raymond also lived pretty close to the area where Brittanee’s cell phone last pinged—only about 10 miles away over in Georgetown County. In fact, Raymond used to be in the Navy, and when he was stationed back in California, he was convicted of seven different sexual assaults, some of which included crimes against kids and teenagers. He served about 20 years for those.

After his release in California, Raymond moved back to his hometown in Georgetown, South Carolina.

This ends up being the guy.

I don’t really know what to say other than—20 assaults?

Yeah, we just… keep him there for life. You’re either staying in prison for life, or—you’re not going to get better. Because if this ends up being the guy, look what happened. Look exactly what happened when he got out of prison.

And I’m not saying that everyone who gets out of prison—
But for anyone who’s unaware, the amount of people who reoffend when they get out of prison? The percentage is absolutely astonishing for sex crimes.

For sex crimes, you guys would be mind-blown.

Don’t quote me, but the last time I looked into it—

Eighty percent plus.

Well no, the last time I looked into it, the highest reoffenders were sex crimes. I’d have to look at the percentage, but I remember it being an astonishing number where I was like, “Yep. This is why you should never get out of prison after one, two, three, four, five… twenty.”

One? Like, bye.

Insane. You’re obviously high on the reoffender list.

Okay. Anyways, that’s just really frustrating when we cover these cases and someone has offended that many times—whether Raymond did it or not. Why is he… I mean, okay, anyways.

So after his 20-year sentence, he got out. He moved back home to South Carolina and had been living there ever since his parole ended back in 2007. This was two years before Brittanee’s disappearance. So he was in the area, no longer on parole.

Now Raymond was back on the police’s radar—especially because one of the crimes he committed actually sounded eerily similar to what happened to Brittanee Drexel, once police were given his name and looked into him.

According to one of Raymond’s victims, a woman named Carrie Harding, she was eight years old back in 1983 when she was targeted by Raymond. She was walking to school one day to meet a friend when Raymond grabbed her from behind and threw her in his car.

After sexually assaulting 8-year-old Carrie, he did let her go. But police began wondering if the situation was maybe slightly different with Brittanee.

So they started questioning Raymond and those close to him. For starters, they heard from a friend and former romantic partner of Raymond’s—a guy named Ernest Merchant.

And he says, “A couple of days after Brittanee was reported missing, Raymond came to his house unexpectedly, and he had claw marks all over his face and neck.”

Oh my gosh, dude.

However—

You’ve got to be kidding me.

When police learned about him, they were like, “Yes, this is someone we’re going to look into.” And they decided to speak to Raymond. He said, “No way. This disappearance from years ago? No way. I was out of town around the time Brittanee Drexel went missing.”

So police investigated this alibi and learned it wasn’t the case. Raymond was lying to them. There was a parking ticket issued to him in Myrtle Beach the day after Brittanee disappeared.

Yeah.

And that officer who issued him the parking ticket also noted that he had scratch marks all over his face.

So this was the second person claiming that days after Brittanee’s disappearance, Raymond was not only in Myrtle Beach—he had scratches on him.

Police also learned that Raymond Moody had moved into a place in Georgetown called the Sunset Lodge the day before Brittanee vanished back in April of 2009. So in August 2011, they got a search warrant for the room Raymond had rented while he was in the area where Brittanee went missing.

They ripped the place apart. They tore down the wallpaper. They opened up mattresses, looking for any sort of clues or DNA—anything that could tie him to Brittanee. But there was nothing in that room that pointed to a murder or to Raymond Moody being guilty.

So it was a dead end. Meaning none of this was enough to move forward with Raymond Moody, at least according to local police. After that, the case kind of reached another standstill. Seemed like a good suspect, but they got nothing from it.

Five years later, in 2016, the FBI held a press conference to say that they felt pretty confident Brittanee Drexel was no longer alive. They believed she was killed in the Georgetown area, particularly an area called McClellanville, based on where her cell phone pinged.

Five years later. Okay, thank you.

Yeah. I mean, I think it was just more of them officially saying, “Hey, this girl was murdered.” But that made Brittanee’s family wonder—what had changed in the investigation for the FBI to confidently come out and say this? Was there new information they hadn’t been told?

The answer was yes—sort of. It turned out someone had recently come forward about Brittanee’s case. It was an inmate serving a 25-year sentence.

I’m pretty sure we’ve talked about this before—like snitching inmates. Sometimes it’s good information, sometimes it’s bad.

Right. Unreliable.

Yes.

So he said he had information on Brittanee Drexel’s disappearance. He said he saw Brittanee before her disappearance at a stash house in McClellanville. He claimed he noticed she was being assaulted there and then actually watched her get shot and killed when she tried to fight back.

Oh my god.

He also mentioned something particularly gruesome—that the people at this house dumped Brittanee’s body into an alligator pit.

Now, police did take this tip seriously, especially because it seemed to be corroborated by someone else. But the more they looked into it, the less it panned out. Eventually, police got this informant to admit he had made the entire thing up.

Yeah, that’s what I was hoping—that he was just trying to provide information so he could get some kind of leniency.

Which meant again Brittanee’s case sat idle until 2019. This was 10 years.

So sad.

When things finally started to pick up some momentum. By this point, like I said, 10 years had passed. There was still no body, no suspects, and no real theories about what happened to her after she left the hotel that night.

All police knew for sure was that her cell phone had been in a car, traveled somewhere near the Georgetown County line, and then stopped working after that.

But now that a decade had passed, technology had vastly improved. So while looking back into the case, police used new methods to track the final movements of Brittanee’s cell phone. With this new technology, they were able to get a much more accurate reading of where she was.

More specifically, they were able to pinpoint down to the minute when her phone went from walking to driving.

That’s amazing. I didn’t know that. I didn’t think they could go back and do that.

And they also realized that the average speed this cell phone was traveling was 55 mph.

So now they could kind of put together a timeline of all the roads she was possibly on and the times she was traveling down them. Using this information, they essentially knew, okay—around 8:58 p.m. the car with Brittanee’s cell phone in it was going to pass this particular camera at 11th Avenue South.

Based on where they knew the phone ended up, they mapped it out. They said, “Okay, based on how fast the phone was traveling, what are the roads it most likely took? What’s the route?” And they realized, “There’s a camera on this road around the time this cell phone was passing it.”

So, they pulled up those old videos from 10 years ago and watched them incredibly closely.

Now, it takes months of scouring footage, but they study and look up every single vehicle that goes by in this time frame.

Wow.

And they cross-reference them with any vehicles in connection to any people of interest.

This is the part of true crime that I do love. I feel like I haven’t mentioned it in a while, but when you get all the cameras, you start cross-referencing everything. You look at all the frames, you’re just digging deep—and being able to figure it out from camera footage is so cool.

This is truly looking for clues. Like, you’re taking what you have to dig into possible leads. They might have the wrong road for all they know, you know what I mean? But it’s honestly just such great work.

So they’re studying, cross-referencing it with every single name that has come up in their investigation. They also compare it to footage near another location: a place called Pole Yard Public Boat Landing. They know this is where Brittanee’s cell phone actually ended up.

So, at a boat landing.

I’m just—I’m still mind-blown. I can’t believe… you know how, like, I feel like it was a thing when I was growing up? Stranger danger, you know, was like a big thing. And ice cream trucks and people giving out candy. It’s just crazy to me. I feel like it was really big in the ’70s and the ’80s.

I mean, I know it still happens now. But people just taking random people—and for so long. Just taking people.

Because for so long people thought it was stranger danger. Then we learned, oh, it’s usually someone you know. But in Brittanee’s case, it seems like it really was stranger danger. Like the reality, like Garrett’s saying, of people just taking strangers off the road.

It’s insane.

So, they’re cross-referencing everything, and eventually they find a match. It’s a very specific 1998 Eddie Bauer Ford Explorer. And they learn Raymond Moody’s girlfriend at the time of Brittanee Drexel’s disappearance—a woman named Angel—had owned one just like it.

What a surprise.

Yeah. So it’s not necessarily Raymond’s car, but it’s someone he was very heavily involved with in his life that is seen on camera.

You know what kind of sucks? They had him, what, five years ago?

Yeah.

Yeah. That sucks.

Instead of bringing Raymond back in for questioning—a pretty heavy person of interest in this case—they actually bring in Angel. This is his ex-girlfriend from the time. One of the main things they’re trying to determine is whether Raymond ever borrowed Angel’s car, and if he was driving it—or if she was with him—the night Brittanee disappeared.

When they ask her about the car, she admits, “Okay, I did pick up Raymond a couple of times in my car, but he really wasn’t in it that much.”

So eventually they start asking her whether she and/or Raymond were on Ocean Boulevard in Myrtle Beach the night Brittanee Drexel was taken. She’s like, “No, no, no, no, no. Neither of us had any involvement in that.”

So they pull out this other video. Let me backtrack a little bit here. I’m not sure when this evidence was brought to police, but at some point during the investigation, a friend of Angel’s showed up to police. They had heard mention in conversation in the friend group that she and Raymond might have been involved in Brittanee’s disappearance.

So police asked this person, “Are you willing to wear a wire and see if you hear this again?” And the friend was like, “Sure.”

Only, when they tried to get Angel to bring this up on wire, she said to this friend: Raymond had nothing to do with this. It was just me who did something to Brittanee.

What?

Yes. So police had this. We don’t know when, where, how. We don’t know if it was just kind of sketchy circumstances, which is why they didn’t take it very seriously. But either way, the police always felt like Angel was not the person who had done this.

Well, okay. Chances were she was just scared of Raymond Moody and was protecting him. Considering he’s the registered sex offender with a history of committing crimes against teenagers, they were like, “We’re pretty sure if anything happened, it was this guy.”

Then the car showed up on the footage.

So, cut back to that interrogation where they’re asking Angel about her car. After she’s done insisting that neither she nor Raymond was involved, police said, “Well, let’s break out this old video we have in our box of Brittanee Drexel’s disappearance—where we have you on recording saying that it was you, not Raymond, who was involved.”

This is when Angel slowly started to crack in the interrogation. She said, “Okay, yeah, see that whole thing? That was not true. Me on that wire—I don’t even know when you did that, but yeah, that wasn’t me.”

She said Raymond was using her car the night Brittanee disappeared. And she could prove she wasn’t there when Brittanee was killed, because she might actually still have her old cell phone from a decade ago that they could check the pings on.

Okay.

It’s a pretty big deal to police because it can either prove or disprove her statements, on top of maybe offering up text messages and correspondence between her and Raymond the night Brittanee disappeared.

So, hoping Angel would cooperate, they let her go. Except when they tried to reach out over the next few days to get this cell phone—she was gone. She just ghosted them.

Of course, still, now they felt they had enough to get a search warrant for both Angel’s house and the now 62-year-old Raymond Moody’s residence as well.

So, while they were searching Raymond’s house in May of 2022, they brought him in for questioning. And once he was presented with all of the evidence they had—Brittanee’s cell phone data, the Eddie Bauer truck, their theory of what happened—that’s when Raymond, realizing his hands were tied, just randomly decided to confess.

So, they hadn’t found anything at the houses, but he was like, “You have enough that… let me talk.”

And I want to mention—please take this next part with a huge grain of salt, because this is all coming from Raymond’s mouth over a decade later, when he felt like police had enough to at least tie him to being involved.

So, this is what he offered up.

He said that on the night of April 25, 2009, he and Angel were driving around Myrtle Beach together in her car when they saw Brittanee walking back down to her hotel. According to Raymond, he pulled over, asked her if she wanted to go party with them, and she said yes and willingly got in the passenger seat.

That is such BS, man.

He says—

Such BS.

The three of them started driving around town talking, smoking marijuana, and they ended up back in Georgetown, which is how her cell phone data got her there. They went to a spot where he used to camp down by the river to hang out.

He said at this point, Angel left. And that’s when things between him and Brittanee got, quote, “out of hand.” He said he tried to force himself on Brittanee. She fought back, and knowing that if he let her go he could go back to prison after just getting out, Raymond said he began strangling Brittanee, which ultimately led to her death.

Raymond also said during that confession that Angel was not involved at all. But police figured there was only one way to tell whether or not Raymond was being honest. They said, “If this is true, you need to lead us to Brittanee’s body.”

So Raymond took investigators to an area near the Sunset Lodge where he was staying at the time. It was about three miles away, into a heavily wooded area. He said, “Okay, this is where I buried her.”

After that, police immediately put him in handcuffs for obstruction of justice. This way, they could keep him behind bars until they could add charges for murder and kidnapping.

And over the course of the next three days, the FBI excavated the area.

Please tell me they found a body.

On May 11, 2022, they finally discovered human remains about four feet underground. There was a nose ring and a blue-colored contact lens—both of which Brittanee wore.

Okay.

Four days later, on May 15, using dental records and DNA analysis, they confirmed that they had finally found the remains of Brittanee Drexel.

While Raymond stated in his confession that Brittanee’s cause of death was strangulation, her remains were too decomposed for an actual cause of death to be determined.

That’s horrible.

Still, this was more than enough to charge Raymond Moody with first-degree murder, criminal sexual conduct, and kidnapping.

Meanwhile, Angel also made a deal with investigators. If she was completely truthful about her future statements regarding that night, police would take her cooperation into account when deciding whether or not to prosecute her.

I just—I don’t believe her at all. I think she’s probably more involved than we’ll ever know. But now I just don’t believe anything that’s coming out of her mouth.

So yeah, because she’s lied. She’s lied multiple times. Nothing to do with this—no, I don’t believe anything that’s coming out of her mouth.

From that day forward, Angel agreed to cooperate. Here’s what she said: she was in the car when she and Raymond picked up Brittanee. She left them down in Georgetown near a campsite. When she dropped them off, Brittanee was still alive and well. But when she came back later to get Raymond, Brittanee was no longer with him.

Apparently, he told her that a friend of Brittanee’s had come by to pick her up and take her back to Myrtle Beach.

Now, police did manage to get phone records from both Angel and Raymond from that night to confirm some of their stories. And they did find that Angel kind of did seem to be telling the truth. There was a period that evening when the two cell phones parted ways and then came back together.

Ultimately, this cooperation was Angel’s saving grace—for now.

Raymond Moody, on the other hand, pleaded guilty to murder, kidnapping, and sexual assault in October of 2022. He even said this before the court:

“I was a monster. I was a monster then, and I was a monster when I took Brittanee Drexel’s life.”

He was sentenced to life in prison without parole.

In January 2023, Brittanee’s mother, Dawn, filed a civil suit against Raymond Moody for emotional distress. Also included in that lawsuit was the hotel where Brittanee and her friends had been staying. Her family argued that the hotel contributed to the events by allowing unaccompanied minors to check in without adult supervision.

Okay.

In the end, the Drexel family was awarded $700 million in punitive damages—which they probably won’t ever see, because the hotel doesn’t have $700 million, and Raymond certainly doesn’t.

Then, in March of 2024, 57-year-old Angel was back on the FBI’s radar. While she wasn’t charged with kidnapping or murder, they finally hit her with charges for lying to federal officers about her involvement and for keeping information under wraps for 13 years.

I mean, you leave your boyfriend alone with a 17-year-old girl. She disappears that night and you never come forward and say anything. In fact, when you do come forward, you lie.

I just don’t believe that she got in that car willy-nilly and was like, “Oh, yeah, let’s go party.” No. Maybe she agreed to take a ride. Could I be wrong? Sure. But I just don’t think that’s what happened.

No, I don’t know.

By the time Angel left her boyfriend and a 17-year-old girl alone, she knew—maybe not murder—but she knew exactly what was about to go down.

100%.

Because I promise you, at that point, Brittanee was not cool with where they were, and she never got dropped back off at a hotel—if she ever willingly got in at all. We don’t even know if she willingly got in.

Yeah.

So that September, Angel pled guilty to those charges and was sentenced to 18 years in federal prison.

But two months later, Raymond Moody came forward with a shocking new revelation. He said, “Okay, actually Angel was an integral part of the kidnapping and murder.” He told the FBI that Angel helped lure Brittanee into the car, held the steering wheel while he restrained her, and helped guide Brittanee to a tent near the lake that they had set up previously.

Yeah, this is probably more likely.

And Angel letting her boyfriend stay alone with this teenager at this pre-setup location? He even said it was Angel’s idea to go out and find a woman they could assault together, and that Angel was there when he killed Brittanee.

Now, once again, I don’t know how much we can believe—because her cell phone does leave. Apparently, Raymond shared this with police because he was trying to strike a deal, one that would ensure part of his property remained in a trust for his grandkids.

Yeah. Raymond has kids and grandkids.

Okay, but you have to wonder: did Angel know a lot more than she confessed to? What’s the truth here? I think there are a lot of unanswered questions about this case, unfortunately—even though it was somehow solved years later.

But there’s one thing that Brittanee’s mother, Dawn, is sure of and honestly proud of: Raymond Moody was spotted by multiple people with obvious scratches all over his face.

Yeah.

We know Brittanee—the spitfire everyone remembered her as—fought hard. Which is both devastating, and also makes her mother proud to know that she did fight back. She did try.

And that is the case of Brittanee Drexel.

Yeah, I think definitely Angel had a lot more involvement than we’ll ever know. Nothing we can really do about that, because people can lie. Horrible.

It’s just crazy to me that people—I mean, they still do—just take people. People are just taken out of nowhere.

No.

What’s disgusting—and wild to me—is that in the revelations, we realize there was a tent preset up in this heavily wooded area.

No.

That’s wild. Which just means—gross. Yeah. They were telling the truth at the end: this was planned. They went out on the hunt for a girl who was alone that night.

Yep.

It’s disgusting.

It’s insane. It’s honestly mind-blowing.

All right, you guys. That was our episode, and we will see you next time with another one. Also, two bonus episodes have been released if you just need more.

I love it.

I hate it.

Goodbye.

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