Brittanee Drexel’s white killer went free for 13 years while the police pursued black suspects

I remember when Brittanee Drexel went missing from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, during spring break in 2009. I wasn’t much older than her — she was a senior in high school and I was a senior in college. As someone who never had warm feelings about the week-long college bacchanals in Panama City and Myrtle Beach, the details of the case told me I was right to follow my instincts. They also chilled me to the bone: how could this pretty 17-year-old disappear from a fully booked hotel on the main drag in Myrtle Beach without anyone trying to intervene? Police traced Brittanee’s cell phone along a 50-mile trail, all the way to a boat ramp in a remote area of neighboring Georgetown County. That was where the phone pinged a cell tower for the last time, about a day after she was last seen at her hotel. Despite having this trail of electronic evidence — as well as security footage and some witnesses who recalled seeing Brittanee get into a white car — no one was ever arrested. But the police did publicly identify “persons of interest” — a group of black men living in small-town South Carolina. At one point, one of these men, Timothy Deshaun Taylor, apparently confessed to the crime, saying he had witnessed Drexel getting shot twice at a “stash house” owned by local drug dealers, who dumped her body into an alligator pit. But then something funny happened: despite his confession, Taylor was never charged with anything.

Why? Because none of it was true. A few weeks ago, after thirteen years, police announced they had “found” Brittanee’s body buried on the killer’s property, very close to where her cell phone sent its last signal — but only after the killer told them where he buried it. And the perpetrator wasn’t a black drug addict— it’s this guy.

Raymond Moody is a convicted rapist who walked free for 13 years while the police pursued black men. Understandably, Brittanee’s family is angry, saying Moody was “free to kill” for over a decade while police pursued the wrong men.

“But wait,” you may be asking, “Didn’t Timothy Deshaun Taylor confess that he saw Brittanee murdered?” Well, it turns out the falsely accused Taylor is now speaking out on the case, and inasmuch as he had nothing to do with Drexel’s murder, he didn’t confess. Any time the police claim a suspect provided a highly detailed confession that turns out to be completely false, it’s a sure sign the suspect didn’t concoct the story — the investigators concocted the story and coerced the suspect into agreeing with it. This case should be renewing the debate over police interrogation tactics and suspect’s rights. After her son was cleared of any association with Drexel’s murder, Taylor’s mother spoke out about how awful the last 13 years have been for her family: “The years-long fight against false accusations and the media frenzy have traumatized us, affecting every aspect of our lives. It publicly questioned, without reason, our family, our family’s character, and has shaken us to the core.”

Obviously, this was a major miscarriage of justice, and Taylor deserves restitution for all the years he lived under a cloud of suspicion for no apparent reason. How could this happen? Well, after checking for developments in this case over the years, I can think of at least one possibility. At the risk of hurting some Southern feelings, this is small-town South Carolina we’re talking about. I visit the state frequently, the last time in the spring of 2021. One night, I was talking to the waitress at CQ’s Restaurant on Hilton Head Island. She grew up in Charleston and was in school to become a paralegal. She told me she wants to work for the Innocence Project or a similar legal nonprofit, and that I would be “surprised” by how racist South Carolina still is. Unfortunately, having lived in the South for three years as a young adult, I’m really not that surprised. In Brittanee Drexel’s case, the police found a group of suspects they believed fit the profile of “rapist and killer” and coerced them into saying what the investigators wanted to hear.

Of course, that’s not the only issue at play here. Brittanee Drexel had gone on spring break without telling her parents, apparently with “older friends” who were in college. They didn’t report her missing during the critical window when police are most likely to find someone, because they were all underage and weren’t supposed to be there. So therefore, I’ll end this piece with a personal note for my young female readers: Girls, do not go on spring break. You tend to feel safer than you really are, because you’re traveling with people your age, who you know and believe you can trust. But every local sexual predator (and there are a lot of them in these towns) knows where to find you. Every year, someone dies in a drunken accident, a car crash, or a murder that won’t be properly investigated because it’s easiest to assume you’re drunk and shacking up somewhere. Like with Natalee Holloway and Brittanee Drexel, your companions probably won’t even notice and won’t call the cops or your parents. Therefore they probably won’t even start looking until after the window to rescue you has closed. You’re missing nothing. Go home to your parents for the week.

In addition to renewing the discussion around police racism and unethical investigations, maybe we should also renew the discussion around the false sense of security around these spring break bacchanals. In reality, in many places, the streets are still unsafe for women. As merry groups of sorority sisters danced to “Neon Moon” on TikTok last fall, I wondered how many knew that a “neon moon” is how Brooks & Dunn described the glow from the bar lights. I also wondered how many of them would eventually encounter their rapist while making bar banter beneath the light of a neon moon.