Brittanee Drexel went to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, for spring break in April 2009, even though her parents told her not to.
In a sad turn of events, the little girl disappeared without a trace, and the police later found proof that she had been brutally killed. The show “20/20: The Darkest Night” on ABC News is about the years-long search for justice in Brittanee’s case and how the police found a suspect. So, if you want to know what happened, we’ll tell you.
How Did Brittanee Drexel Die?
At the time of the incident, Brittanee Drexel and her family lived in Chili, New York, which is a suburb of Rochester. The 17-year-old was a junior at Gates Chili High School, where he played soccer and was an important part of the team. Brittanee wanted to be a nurse or a cosmetologist, and her mom, Dawn, said she was a lively, fit, and pretty teenager. Brittanee had her own plans for spring break, but unfortunately, not everything went as planned.
Brittanee and a few of her friends went on a short trip to Myrtle Beach on April 22, 2009. She didn’t tell her parents about it. Brittanee was last seen on April 25 at 8:45 p.m., when a surveillance camera caught her leaving the hotel of a friend she had gone to see. But the teenager seemed to have disappeared without a trace. Brittanee’s body wasn’t found in Georgetown, South Carolina, until May 2022. The police said that she had been raped, killed, and buried in a wooded area. The preliminary cause of death was strangulation by hand.
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Who put Brittanee Drexel to death?
Brittanee went to Myrtle Beach with three of her friends on April 22, even though her parents didn’t want her to. She told them she was going to spend a few days at a friend’s house in Rochester. There, on April 24, 2009, she met her friend Peter Brozowitz at the resort where he was staying. That night, Brittanee, Peter, and four of Peter’s friends met at a club, and she went to see them the next morning and that night.
Brittanee was always talking to her boyfriend John Greico, who was still in Rochester. But between 9 pm and 9:15 pm on April 25, 2009, she stopped texting and calling all of a sudden. Then John told Dawn that Brittanee had gone to Myrtle Beach, which made her family call the police and start looking for her. At first, the police didn’t say much about the case, and Brittanee’s phone led them to a swampy area about 50 miles from Myrtle Beach.
But the search didn’t turn up any more clues, and the case didn’t move forward for a few years until 2016. At the time, the police said that Brittanee had been kidnapped, gang-raped, killed, and dumped in a swamp near McClellanville, South Carolina, which was full of alligators. The information came from a prisoner named Taquan Brown. He said he saw Brittanee at a stash house and that Timothy Taylor and his father, Shaun, killed her.
Even though Timothy failed a lie detector test, the investigation showed that Brittanee’s murder was done by someone else. In May 2022, her body was found in a wooded area. Raymond Moody, who had been a suspect in the case for a long time, admitted to killing her and showed the police where the body was buried. When Brittanee went missing on or around April 25, 2009, the police thought she had been killed, so Taquan’s claims were not true.
Raymond had been in prison for 21 years because he had kidnapped and raped a nine-year-old girl in 1983. After his time in prison, the convicted sex offender moved back to Georgetown. In April 2009, he was living in a motel less than three miles from where the remains were found. In 2011, Raymond’s room was searched, but there was nothing that linked him to the case. But he was also stopped for speeding the day after Brittanee went missing.
Raymond had cuts on his face at the time. Ernest Merchant, who used to work with him, confirmed this information. He said that Raymond had scratches on his neck and head around the time Brittanee went missing. It was said that both Raymond and the teenager were in the same place at the same time, based on information from their cell phones. The arrest was also helped by surveillance footage.
The police thought Brittanee might have gotten into Raymond’s car on her own, but it quickly turned into a kidnapping. He was accused of taking her to a boatyard landing on the Santee River in South Carolina, where he sexually assaulted her and then killed her. The police then thought that Raymond took Brittanee’s body to a wooded area in Georgetown and buried her there. He has been charged with murder, kidnapping, and other crimes, and he is due in court in the second half of October 2022.
Background
Brittanee Drexel was born on October 7, 1991, in Rochester, New York. Her father, John Kahyaoglu, is from Turkey, and her mother, Dawn, is from England. Teenagers, they were not married. Dawn married Chad Drexel soon after Brittanee was born. At that time, Brittanee became his daughter. After Chad’s time in the military was over, the family moved to Chili, which is near Rochester.
Drexel was born with a condition called persistent hyperplastic primary vitreous in her right eye. This condition caused the eye to become blind and required several surgeries. She wore contact lenses that gave her a unique look to hide the fact that her eye wandered.
Brittanee asked her mother in April 2009 if she could spend spring break with her boyfriend and some friends in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Her mother said no because she didn’t know the other teens and there were no adults going with them. She also had a feeling that something bad was going to happen. This caused them to fight for a few days. On April 22, Brittanee asked Dawn if she could go to a friend’s house for a day or two to calm down, and Dawn agreed. Brittanee and the other students went to South Carolina without telling her mother.
After she and her group got to the Bar Harbor Hotel in Myrtle Beach three days later, Brittanee called her mother once during the day to tell her she was at the beach. Her mother didn’t worry because she thought Brittanee was talking about a beach on the shore of Lake Ontario. She thought it was possible to go there because the temperature in Rochester that day reached an unseasonable high of 83°F (28°C).
Disappearance
That night, around 8 p.m., Drexel left her friends at the beachfront of the Bar Harbor Hotel and walked 1.5 miles (2.4 km) south on South Ocean Boulevard to visit a longtime friend who was staying at the Blue Water Resort. The Blue Water Resort’s security cameras caught her coming in. She was wearing a black-and-white tank top, flip-flops, and shorts. Her purse was beige. Around 8:45, the cameras caught her leaving.
Drexel was sending a text message to her boyfriend, John Grieco, who had to stay in the Rochester area for work.
They had been texting back and forth, but around 9:15, her texts stopped. Grieco started calling her friends in Myrtle Beach to find out where she was and what had happened.
When those didn’t work, he called Brittanee’s mother, Dawn. Dawn didn’t know her daughter was in Myrtle Beach until she got a call from him. Dawn called Chad and then the Rochester police in hopes that they could get in touch with their counterparts in South Carolina. Brittanee’s phone was called and texted many times, but she never answered.
Investigation
The next morning, the police in Myrtle Beach started looking for Drexel. They found the footage from the Blue Water Resort’s security cameras and found the friends she had gone to see. Peter Brozowitz, a 20-year-old nightclub promoter who Brittanee knew from the Rochester area and who was also on vacation in Myrtle Beach, was the last person who saw Drexel before she left. They may have met the night before at a nightclub in the area. After talking to Brozowitz and the other men who were staying in his hotel room, police said that “no one has been ruled in or out” and that they had no persons of interest.
Police looked through Drexel’s hotel room and found all the clothes she had brought with her, but not her purse or cell phone. The phone’s network pings were followed on a path that went 80–97 km (50–60 miles) south of Myrtle Beach, along U.S. Route 17 near the county line between Georgetown and Charleston. Early in the morning of April 26, the pings stopped all of a sudden. Then, for eleven days, places near there and around Myrtle Beach where a body might have been thrown away were searched. In 2011, police looked through an apartment in Georgetown County, but they didn’t find anything that helped them figure out who was responsible.
Dawn and Brozowitz got into several fights on the TV show Dr. Phil. During these fights, Brozowitz often complained about how bad it was for his reputation. Dawn drove to Myrtle Beach the day after her daughter went missing. She ended up moving there permanently so she could be close to where Brittanee was last seen and keep track of how the investigation was going. In a 2014 newspaper article about the fifth anniversary of the case, she said that she thought Brittanee went to Myrtle Beach against her orders because she was “promised something” like a modeling job. Dawn thought that her daughter had been trafficked, but the Myrtle Beach police didn’t think this was likely because they said that trafficking didn’t happen much or at all in their area. The South Carolina Human Trafficking task force did a report in 2019 that said Horry County had the most reported victims of human trafficking in the state.
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