Brittanee Drexel case: New details, no apology haunt accused family | Opinion

Chad Drexel finally got the call he’d dreamt of for 13 years, the call in which he expected law enforcement to tell him the “evil” Taylor family of McClellanville, S.C., would be held accountable for the disappearance of his 17-year-old daughter Brittanee. He knew, just knew, the Taylors were responsible for her gruesome death, including feeding her body to alligators.

His daughter had gone missing on April 25, 2009. Brittanee had snuck away from Rochester, N.Y., against her parents’ wishes to visit Myrtle Beach for spring break. Within weeks of her disappearance, Chad Drexel had been told the Taylors were the culprits. Myrtle Beach police were the first to tell him. Private investigators told him the same. The FBI topped them all seven years into the investigation with claims of attempted sex trafficking and gang rape and alligator pits.

It was May 2022. Drexel was ready to see Timothy Shaun Taylor and Timothy Dashaun Taylor in handcuffs, in chains and orange prison jumpsuits, the father and son who had been publicly associated with Drexel’s disappearance more than anyone else. He would get to look them in the eye in court and tell them to their faces some of the things he had only been able to say to family members and other loved ones, and to podcasters and TV producers and hosts and newspaper reporters from South Carolina, where Drexel was last seen, to Rochester, and on local and national news programs.

The call he had been anticipating didn’t go as he envisioned. He was told a man named Raymond Moody had been arrested for kidnapping Brittanee from Myrtle Beach and driving her an hour away to Georgetown County to rape and murder her.

“I asked my wife, what about the Taylors?” Drexel told me about how he reacted to the news.

Neither he nor the public knew of a key development early in the search: The Taylors had provided authorities with a strong alibi weeks into the investigation – and it checked out. According to the Taylors’ attorney, Ryan McKaig, that fact was confirmed by a member of the task force pulled together to investigate Brittanee Drexel’s disappearance.

“I tried to speak to as many investigators from the task force who would speak to me” as part of a months-long investigation, McKaig said. Only former Charleston Detective Rocky Burke would talk. “Burke told me that he had confirmed the Taylors were in Edisto Island that night, and that the task force knew about it then.”

According to McKaig, Burke said he confirmed with people in Edisto the Taylors were on the island when Moody was kidnapping Drexel. McKaig included the revelation in his filing officially suing the FBI on behalf of Dashaun Taylor but is for the first time revealing the source.

It’s what the Taylors have said from the outset – from the moment law enforcement first asked them about Brittanee Drexel – that they were nowhere near Myrtle Beach on the night of April 25, 2009. Edisto Island is at least 137 miles from where Drexel went missing, a more than 3-hour-drive.

Burke, who recently lost a primary to become Charleston County sheriff, declined comment, saying he couldn’t speak about the case because of the Taylors’ lawsuit against the federal government and other concerns.

The injustice was worse and deeper than the Taylors could have known. The Drexel case was just the latest chapter of a decades-long saga of false allegations — about Black men in the South allegedly kidnapping, raping and murdering young white women — levied against the Taylors then dropped. It stands in stark contrast to the benefit of the doubt the actual killer, Moody, a convicted and well-known repeated sex offender, received on more than one occasion from the same system.

In the years I have covered this case, I’ve found no evidence of overt or purposeful racism. No matter. Officials identified a couple of primary suspects early on. One was the Taylor family, which included members who had clean criminal records, those who had a series of petty infractions, and one who served prison time for a crime nothing like those inflicted upon Brittanee Drexel. The other was Raymond Moody, the kind of character often conjured up by Hollywood horror writers, the relatively rare kind of sexual predator whose existence is the stuff of nightmares. Before Drexel went missing, Moody had served 21 years in a California prison for sexually assaulting several young girls.

Local law enforcement officials have said publicly they long knew the Taylors were not involved. That’s why they didn’t participate in a much-ballyhooed FBI press conference in 2016 at the McClellanville Magistrate’s Office during which the agency announced it knew Drexel was dead. “We do know that Brittanee was in this community for several days,” FBI agent Dave Thomas told the public then while announcing a $25,000 reward for information. “It wasn’t just a one-time passing through. By being here for several days, other people came in contact with her, saw her, know that she was here, so we know that there is information in the community here.”

The FBI was referring to claims it also made in court, that Dashaun Taylor and a small group of black men had held Drexel in a “stash house.” Drexel tried to escape, was captured and pistol-wiped before being shot, most likely by Shaun Taylor. The men wrapped her body in a rug and tossed it into an alligator pit, the FBI claimed.

That, however, was a complete fiction the FBI presented to the public as fact. The prison informant the agency had relied upon made the story up. Despite the Taylors having provided a solid alibi from the beginning, local law enforcement officials, including the solicitor’s office, spent years pressuring the family in a variety of ways. That, combined with the FBI’s fantastic falsehoods, led to a cold, hard, ugly fact:

The innocent Black family, by happenstance or on purpose, was treated worse by the legal system at every level than a known white convicted high-level sexual predator.

Full disclosure: My wife grew up with and attended the same church as Joan Taylor when they were girls, something I didn’t discover until after Moody had led authorities to Brittanee Drexel’s body.

“We all know that race is a major factor in this story,” Mckaig said. “There’s absolutely no question there is a difference in treatment between the Taylors and Moody. This type of difference in treatment, with what was known about the different parties, is something I’ve never seen before. One guy who is a violent serial rapist and kidnapper, and you got this family over here you’ve heard rumors about, going on hearsay and suspicions, and you decide to come down on them.”

A series of false accusations

If investigators knew the Taylors could not have hurt Drexel, why did they spend years pursuing them?

Though they wouldn’t answer my questions, from documents and case files I’ve reviewed, it’s likely linked to a kidnapping, rape and murder of a different white woman that occurred a decade before Drexel met the same fate – a fact that was also often repeated in media, including by Chad Drexel. (Moody, a convicted sex offender, was also suspected in that unsolved case. The Level 3 designation is for adults who have committed the most serious sexual offenses.)

“The uncle and the father were so bad when they were young, the uncle went to jail for raping a woman and then setting her on fire and throwing her into a lake,” Chad Drexel told a podcaster in 2020.

It wasn’t true. The Taylors had been falsely accused. Though those charges were dropped after an investigation, there was no public exoneration, and the rumors persisted.

Yes. You are reading that correctly. Brittanee Drexel is the second white woman la enforcement has falsely accused the Taylors of having kidnapped, raped, and murdered.

It began with a 3 a.m. loud bang on Randell Taylor’s door in early February 2001. A decade earlier, he had been a combat engineer in the U.S. Army on standby for a potential deployment to Iraq during “Desert Storm.” When a groggy Taylor answered that door knock, a gaggle of police officers from Charleston and Georgetown rushed in, grabbed him, slammed him to the floor, handcuffed him. His girlfriend and her daughter were screaming. None of them knew what was happening. A police helicopter hovered above the apartment.

“That’s when they said I was being charged,” he said. “I was saying what the [expletive] is going on. I was very pissed off. That was a crazy moment. They told me what was going on, put me inside the back of a police car, and took me to Charleston County jail.”

Taylor was one of five Black men arrested and charged in the disappearance of Shannon McConaughey from my hometown St. Stephen. The 19-year-old McConaughey had last been seen leaving a Cracker Barrel restaurant in Charleston the night of Jan. 29, 1998. Her dark-blue Mercury Cougar was found weeks later in the Francis Marion National Forest in the McClellanville area nearly destroyed by fire, according to a police report. A cellphone and a few Amway books had survived the flames. McConaughey had not.

Taylor would spend 10 months in jail, a time during which a detective would testify Taylor was the primary perpetrator. There was talk of the death penalty for Taylor and life sentences for the others.

“I knew I was innocent, so I wasn’t really worried,” Taylor told me. “At that hearing, my mother was there. The victim’s mother was there. The cop got on the stand and said I told him I did it. That’s when I went off. The words I used, I never used them in front of my mother before.”

Another police officer testified McConaughey had left a McClellanville area bar with the five Black men. Each of the men allegedly had planned to rape her. But Taylor went “berserk” after raping then shooting her in the head twice, the detective claimed. That account was based on a jailhouse informant, a co-defendant, who had secretly been working with police to get Taylor to implicate himself while they talked in the jailhouse yard. Other written statements were made by some of the men after long interrogations, though the facts and order of alleged events kept changing until the men recanted, said they had felt pressured to lie. One of those men later wrote Taylor a five-page-letter, apologizing.

Several months later, the charges against all the men were dropped – but not before the case received local and national attention that has forever associated Randell Taylor’s name with McConaughey’s still-unsolved murder.

“God used my lawyer to save my life,” he said. “They wanted to put me on death row and actually kill me. No apologies. Nope. Not at all, not one.” (His lawyer, Bill Runyon, died before I could speak with him.)

The Charleston County Sheriff’s Office, in response to my inquiries, provided a copy of an old police report but declined to comment.

Several years ago, Randell left South Carolina “permanently” but began “having flashbacks of my nightmare” after seeing reports of Shaun’s 2010 arrest in another dubious case, that of an alleged kidnapping attempt in Myrtle Beach of Randa Massey, a tourist from Tennessee.

“I was concerned for my brother. I knew what he was going through,” Randell Taylor said. “I was upset. This can’t be happening again.”

It did happen again. Not a decade later, another Taylor would be falsely accused of trying to kidnap a young white woman.

Shaun Taylor spent several months in jail after being falsely accused by Massey. I could not locate Massey, who was visiting Myrtle Beach from Tennessee in 2010. We know Taylor was falsely accused because he was fortunate to have been caught on video at a McDonald’s during the time Massey said she was being attacked. What the public hasn’t been told is Myrtle Beach police did a good job of verifying Shaun Taylor’s whereabouts that day – even before the video was located.

According to the Massey case file, Myrtle Beach police visited the places Shaun Taylor said he had visited that day. Employees at those business establishments confirmed he was there, including with time-stamped receipts. They also tracked down a van fitting the description Massey gave them, which had a unique sticker, to a gated community in North Myrtle Beach. And to this day, there is no verified information that the alleged kidnapping attempt happened. Massey said she elbowed one of the alleged attackers with her elbow, making his nose bleed, giving her time to escape. Myrtle Beach police didn’t find a single drop of blood when they examined the alleged crime scene.

Given those facts, I wanted to know why it took months to drop the charges against Shaun Taylor. I did not get a response from Myrtle Beach police or Solicitor Jimmy Richardson before or after the Taylors filed the lawsuit against the FBI.

Massey picked Shaun Taylor out of a lineup. It’s important to note he was placed in that lineup for two reasons. In his front yard, he spoke with a Charleston County cop with whom he had long been friendly. They talked about their shared love of Mustangs. It was during that conversation the officer claimed Taylor said he was in Myrtle Beach admiring cars on the day of the alleged Massey attempted kidnapping, placing him near the scene of the crime. A South Carolina Law Enforcement Division agent told the court a prison informant said Taylor had a van that matched the description Massey gave.

Shaun Taylor was charged based on that negligible evidence. The case file showed police officers quickly linked the alleged attempted kidnapping to the Drexel case, saying there were similarities given that it reportedly happened where officers believed she had been abducted. Media trumpeted that news, the kind of news that became so pervasive Shaun Taylor almost confessed to crimes he didn’t commit to ease the pressure on his family, the kind of news that profoundly affected other family members as well.

Breaks for Raymond Moody

Gladys Myers moved to the Kensington Community of Georgetown County from New York “because I felt like it was safer.”

She was unnerved by a man who had also moved into the neighborhood, a man named Raymond Moody. He came to live with his parents after being released from a California prison where he had served 21 years for his attacks on multiple girls and young women.

That’s what Myers told my former Sun News colleague Kelly Marshall in 2004, five years before Moody would kidnap, rape, and murder Brittanee Drexel. Moody was one of more than 100 men in Georgetown County listed on the sex offender register at the time.

“I was babysitting a little girl and I said ‘I guess we can’t go outside,” Ashley Myers, Gladys’ granddaughter, told Marshall.

Those women weren’t alone. The Georgetown Sheriff’s Office got several calls after word spread about Moody. That was true even though he would be electronically monitored for at least three years, couldn’t live near elementary schools, which is why he had to leave his parents’ home, but also couldn’t live alone, among other restrictions. He had to regularly check-in with the sheriff’s office. Other residents asked the local legislative delegation for stricter monitoring of sexual offenders.

“It is our understanding that he [Moody] has met all of his requirements as prescribed by law,” Georgetown County’s then-Assistant Sheriff Carter Weaver said. Weaver is sheriff today.

Weaver was right. Moody had done nothing to violate his parole, which meant there was no reason to arrest him, even if his presence unnerved a community. The system was working as designed. After a perpetrator served his time – 21 years in prison is a significant punishment – the plan is to monitor him for a period, then allow him to fully reintegrate into society. The sheriff’s office did nothing wrong, and neither did the parole office, because Moody had broken no laws after his released.

Even unnerved Kensington residents understood.

“Everybody deserves a second chance,” Ashley Myers told my former colleague. “He’s served his time, but we have to keep our guard up.”

Moody also got another break from the system. He had assaulted more than a half dozen girls and young women and was convicted in 1983 of criminal sexual conduct of a minor younger than 11. His crimes included sodomy of a child under the age of 14, two counts of lewd behavior on a child under 14, and three counts of rape, among others. Under California law at the time, Moody only had to serve little more than half of his 40-year-sentence. Had he committed his crimes three years later, he likely would have gotten a 120-year-sentence and have had to serve at least 85 percent, which would have effectively been a life sentence. He would not have been free when Drexel made her way to Myrtle Beach.

In 2008, a year before he would kidnap, rape, and murder Brittanee Drexel, Moody was charged with indecent exposure in Georgetown. Moody was caught masturbating while wearing “bikini looking underwear” and “peeping out” of a public bathroom stall in a gas station. His behavior wasn’t subtle. He could have received up to three years in prison for that infraction, which would have meant he would have been behind bars when Drexel made her way to Myrtle Beach.

Compare the treatment Moody received from the legal system before confessing to Drexel’s murder to how Dashaun Taylor – who was a 17-year-old high schooler at the time Drexel went missing – was treated by law enforcement.

In court, Moody’s charge was reduced to public disorderly conduct and he paid a small fine, which is typical for such an act for most people charged with such a crime. It’s a misdemeanor, and in most cases, such an outcome makes sense. Critics of the system have long said there are too many people in the sex offender registry for crude but non-violent offenses. It doesn’t make sense to flood our jails and prisons with men who do such things.

Moody was no typical case, though. He was a level 3 sex offender who had a long history of sexual violence.

That’s the man the system let go with a slap on the wrist.

In 2010, Moody failed to register as a sex offender. He faced up to a $1,000 fine and a year in jail. He received a fine – and no jail time. Again, that’s a typical outcome for most first-time offenders on the registry. But, again, Moody was no typical case. And yet, he received treatment not afforded to the Taylors, who were time after time falsely accused, convicted by the public, left vulnerable by those who were supposed to do the opposite.

“The legal system had it out for my family, and everybody knows that,” said Randell Taylor. “Our family has gone through a lot. Why? I have no idea. It was an ongoing cycle. The legal system is supposed to protect you, but they didn’t. They tried to hurt my family.”

Healing

In 2006, a Black woman was assaulted and raped by a group of white Duke University lacrosse players who had hired her and another stripper to perform at a private party.

That was the initial story, which spawned international headlines. It wasn’t true. By the time the truth emerged, Duke lacrosse players, three in particular – Reade Seligmann, Collin Finnerty, and David Evans – had been portrayed as monsters in media internationally.

Three years later, a white teen from New York, Brittanee Drexel, went missing while on spring break in New York. Two members of a Black family were accused of kidnapping, raping, murdering, then feeding Drexel’s corpse to alligators to get rid of the evidence.

It wasn’t true. By the time the truth emerged, those men, Timothy Shaun Taylor and his son Timothy Dashaun Taylor, had been portrayed as monsters in media internationally.

But their stories diverged for one extremely important reason. Law enforcement officials openly and repeatedly declared the white lacrosse players innocent after a thorough investigation.

“The result of our review and investigation shows clearly that there’s insufficient evidence to precede on any of the charges. Today, we are filing notices of dismissal for all charges against Reade Seligmann, Collin Finnerty, and David Evans. The result is that these cases are over, and no more criminal proceedings will occur,” then-North Carolina Attorney General (now governor) Roy Cooper said during a press conference carried live by local, state and national media. “We believe that these cases were the result of a tragic rush to accuse and a failure to verify serious allegations. Based on the significant inconsistencies between the evidence and the various accounts given by the accusing witness, we believe these three individuals are innocent of these charges.”

Mike Nifong, the Durham prosecutor who had secured indictments against the players, also apologized.

“We all need to heal,” he said. “I believe, however, that this healing process cannot truly begin until all proceedings involving this matter are concluded and everyone is able to go forward. Mr. Seligmann, Mr. Finnerty, and Mr. Evans were entitled to the presumption of innocence when they were under indictment. Surely, they are entitled to more than that now as they go forward with the rest of their lives, and that is what the attorney general tried to give them in his declaration that they are innocent… I sincerely apologize to Mr. Seligmann, Mr. Finnerty, and Mr. Evans, and to their families. It is my hope that all of us can learn from the mistakes of this case, that all of us can begin to move forward.”

Duke University’s president also apologized. The players eventually were granted multi-million-dollar settlements, including a reported $60 million from Duke.

It was little more than a year from the first headline to Cooper’s declaration of innocence.

For the Taylors, it took nearly 13 years from the first time detectives eyed them as potential suspects until a man named Raymond Moody, who had spent 21 years in a California prison for attacks on multiple girls and teenagers before returning to Georgetown, S.C., was sentenced to life for what he had done to Drexel.

That was October of 2022. Brittanee Drexel’s parents have apologized to the Taylors. No law enforcement or public official has apologized for the hell the Taylors endured, which included being fired from jobs, enduring years of racist and death threats and worsening health conditions, among other things. They were just doing their jobs, law enforcement officials have told me and others, effectively treating the Taylors as little more than collateral damage in the quest to find justice for the Drexels.

It’s not a small thing to be publicly charged with violent crimes when you’re innocent. It’s no small thing being publicly declared innocent afterwards, or being refused that courtesy.

“It’s been 395 days since this nightmare began, and finally today it’s come to a closure,” David Evans said after Cooper exonerated Evans and his teammates.

For the Taylors, the nightmare rolls on.

Stuck

On the day of Moody’s sentencing, the day he would announce to the world he had kidnapped, raped, and murdered 17-year-old Brittanee Drexel, I walked into the courtroom with the Taylor family. Solicitor Richardson quietly greeted them, ushering them forward with a gentle sweep of his right arm. He had saved them seats up front in a courtroom packed with media and Drexel family members and supporters. Richardson ushered them to the row closest to where Moody and his lawyer sat. He was saying, without uttering a word, that he saw them, that he cared, that they mattered.

It was a kind gesture. But strong promises and kind gestures by good men and women in law enforcement ring hollower by the day as they refuse to contend with what happened to the Taylors.

A justice system that inflicts injustice upon innocent people and refuses to make amends isn’t worthy of the title.

After they left the courtroom, the Taylors and a handful of friends and supporters got stuck in an elevator on their way to where a media scrum had formed in front of the courthouse. I could see the frustration drip from some of their faces. They had been eager to get downstairs to finally tell their story without the weight of rumors about their role in Drexel’s murder on their shoulders.

In the elevator, Joan’s head fell forward, as though in disbelief, before she took her usual role trying to keep everyone calm. Dashaun cracked a few jokes, one of the things he’s relied upon to keep sane while being falsely accused of trying to sell a teenage girl into sex trafficking before feeding her to alligators.

Shaun sized up the elevator doors and determined they could be forced open. They couldn’t be forced open. His daughter Shaunleese stood quiet behind her dad, as others in the cramped space began loudly talking over each other, wiping sweat from their brows as the temperature slowly rose.

A fire truck arrived, finally. The Taylors and their supporters filed out of the elevator and walked into a scene Joan was not surprised to see. A gaggle of reporters was still on the front lawn of the courthouse. They would eventually turn their cameras and microphones towards the family and their lawyers – but were totally unaware the Taylors had gone missing at all.

Issac Bailey is a McClatchy opinion writer in South Carolina and North Carolina.