The sad story of Brittanee Drexel is the main focus of the ABC News show “20/20: The Darkest Night.”
The teenager went missing all of a sudden while on spring break in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Brittanee’s family and friends didn’t stop looking for her for years, but her body was found in a wooded area, putting an end to the search. So, here’s what we know about how Brittanee’s family handled everything and where they might be today.
Who does Brittanee Drexel come from?
Dawn Drexel and John Kahyaoglu, who was Turkish, had Brittanee. Dawn later said this about her daughter: “She always looked good, and she had beautiful teeth. She went to Abercrombie and Hollister to buy clothes. She was a size zero zero, then a zero. Her hair and make-up were both just right. Before what happened, Dawn was married to Chad Drexel, who had adopted Brittanee, but they were going through a divorce. Myrissa and Camdyn were her sisters and brother.
Brittanee, who was 17 at the time, wanted to go to Myrtle Beach with some friends in April 2009. However, her parents didn’t want her to go because there would be no adults with them. But Brittanee lied to her parents and told them she was in Rochester with friends. Instead, she went to South Carolina. Dawn said that her daughter wasn’t doing well because things at home weren’t going well. She also said, “Her mind wasn’t stable. We were getting a divorce and I was about to lose my house. My ex-husband had already moved out. She wanted to feel safe and stable.”
But Brittanee suddenly disappeared from Myrtle Beach after only a few days there. John Greico, her boyfriend who was in Rochester, talked to her up until the night of April 25, 2009. When she stopped talking to him, he called Dawn, and they went to Myrtle Beach to look for her. Chad put up posters and hired a private investigator when he heard that Brittanee had gone missing. He also said, “I tried everything I could to find her. I’m the only father she’s ever known. “We were very close.”
The investigation showed that Brittanee went missing after she left a resort where a friend was staying. About 13 years later, her family found out that her body had been buried in a wooded area in Georgetown, South Carolina. The authorities think that a convicted sex offender named Raymond Moody raped and killed her around the time she went missing. They thought Brittanee got into his car on her own, which led to her being taken away. Dawn said that her daughter didn’t like to walk, so it’s possible that she was trying to find a ride.
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Where is the family of Brittanee Drexel now?
Dawn moved to Myrtle Beach after Brittanee went missing and did everything she could to find her daughter. There, she worked at a pest control company and was a state director and volunteer for Community United Effort, an organization that helped find missing people. Dawn said about Brittanee when Raymond was arrested, “She had her whole life ahead of her. And this horrible thing took it from her. I’m glad Moody is in jail so he can’t hurt anyone else’s child.”
Dawn has been an advocate for missing people ever since, and she uses social media to spread the word about cases. She lives with David Conley in Sorrento, Florida. They have been together since September 2019. John, Brittanee’s birth father, talked about getting back in touch with her in 2009, before she went missing. From what we can tell, he lives in Tampa, Florida. He is married and has kids.
Chad, who used to be in the US Navy, was also glad when Raymond was caught. He still lives in Rochester. He has been married to Kristy Drexel since September 2015, and they have a grandson. Camdyn finished high school in 2021. He is now a student at The Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia, where he bowls for the team. In a recent interview, Myrissa said, “My mom was always going to find my sister. But now we’re just waiting for her to get what’s coming to her.” She went to Monroe Community College in Rochester, where she seems to still live.
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).
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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.
Claims against Timothy Taylor
In June 2016, the FBI held a news conference where they said they thought Drexel was killed soon after she went missing. She was taken from Myrtle Beach and killed somewhere near Georgetown, which is where the cell phone pings stopped. The FBI offered a reward of $25,000 for information that helped solve the case.
Two months later, the Charleston Post and Courier wrote about what happened at a bond hearing for Timothy Da’Shaun Taylor, who was in state prison at the time for a charge that had nothing to do with the bond hearing. FBI agent Gerrick Munoz testified that earlier that year, a South Carolina inmate named Taquan Brown, who was serving a 25-year sentence for manslaughter, told them that in 2009, right after Drexel went missing, he went to a “stash house” in McClellanville to give money to Taylor’s father.
Brown told Munoz that as he walked through the house, he saw Taylor sexually abuse Drexel in front of other people. He went to the backyard and paid Shaun. Drexel ran away from the house as they talked, but he was quickly caught. Brown said that he saw Taylor whip Drexel with a pistol whip and then bring her back inside. Then he heard two gunshots, which he thought meant the young woman was dead. Brown says he saw someone take a wrapped body out of the house and put it in one of the many alligator ponds in the area.
Munoz said that part of what Brown told investigators was backed up by information from an unnamed informant who was in the Georgetown County jail at the time he talked to authorities. The second inmate said that Taylor picked up Drexel in Myrtle Beach and took her to McClellanville, where he showed her off to his friends and tried to sell her to them for trafficking. Brown said that when the case got a lot of press, Taylor killed Drexel to avoid being caught.
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