A man was sentenced to life in prison Wednesday after confessing to the 2009 killing of a 17-year-old girl who disappeared while on a beach vacation in South Carolina.
Raymond Moody led police to Brittanee Drexel’s body in May after advances in technology helped investigators determine that the teen’s cellphone was in Moody’s vehicle the night she disappeared while walking alone along the Myrtle Beach waterfront.
Drexel, a high school student from upstate New York, had been celebrating spring break with friends.
Moody, 62, confessed to her killing, saying he’d offered marijuana to Drexel and that she voluntarily went to his campsite 35 miles (56 kilometers) away in Georgetown County. After his girlfriend left, Moody said he tried to have sex with Drexel, who refused.
Moody said he then strangled Drexel because he realized he would go back to prison as a convicted sex offender — he had previously been convicted of raping an 8-year-old girl in California.
“I was a monster. I was a monster then and I was a monster when I took Brittanee Drexel’s life,” Moody said in a Georgetown County courthouse after pleading guilty Wednesday to murder, kidnapping and rape for the teen’s killing.
Drexel was always texting and her boyfriend, who stayed home near Rochester, New York, began looking for her within 15 minutes of her disappearance in April 2009, prosecutor Scott Hixon said.
That search went on for more than a decade. Drexel’s family repeatedly came to Myrtle Beach to keep attention on the missing teen. There were candlelight vigils and police sifted through hundreds of false tips as the case captured the attention of the true-crime community.
Among those tips were rumored links to other missing women and wild allegations of stash houses in which sexual abuse victims’ bodies were being fed to alligators.
“Some were excruciatingly sickening in detail on what some person claimed they did. Law enforcement had to spend a significant amount of time disproving what I would call crackpot, really breathtaking claims,” Hixon said.
Moody’s girlfriend came to police in 2011 and said she was abused. She knew Moody served 20 years of a 40-year prison sentence for raping a child in California and said she no longer believed Moody’s story that friends picked up Drexel while she was gone.
Investigators searched where Moody was staying and questioned him, but couldn’t gather enough evidence to charge them.
Then, in 2019, investigators decided to restart their…
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