In South Carolina, a woman suspected of being the girlfriend of the convicted murderer of a teenage girl has been charged with many federal crimes.
Brittanee Drexel, 17, went missing and died during spring break while on a trip to Myrtle Beach in April 2009.
Raymond Moody, 64, was charged with the girl’s murder, kidnapping, and rape in May 2022. Previously convicted of kidnapping and raping a 9-year-old child, the killer confesses to his second set of crimes and was sentenced to life in prison in October 2022.
“I served 20 years and thought it was enough, but it wasn’t,” Moody stated after his sentencing. “I was a monster then, and I was a monster when I took Brittanee Drexel’s life.”
Angel Vause, 56, of Georgetown, a small town in the Lowcountry about an hour south of Myrtle Beach, is now charged with three counts of giving false statements to the FBI during the long-running investigation into Drexel’s death.
Drexel’s case remained cold for years. While the media showed a certain level of interest in the missing young girl for years, the inquiry had essentially stalled by 2016, when the FBI believed she was dead. A succession of false restarts, hazy/false allegations, and untrustworthy testimony sank the case in the Lowcountry salt marshes.
Moody simply turned himself in. He went on to offer the FBI a full confession as well as key crime information.
On the night of April 25, 2009, the attacker kidnapped Drexel, raped her, strangled her to death beside the Santee River, and buried her body about four feet deep on Old Town Avenue in Harmony Township, Georgetown’s HOA area.
The girl was only identified by her dental records.
Previous law enforcement claims that Drexel was gang-raped and subsequently fed to alligators, with several witnesses, were dropped.
According to officials, at least one other person was aware of some of the events surrounding Drexel’s final hours of life.
According to a federal indictment filed in South Carolina U.S. District Court on Tuesday, Vause lied to the FBI during a May 2022 interview about going to someone’s house “to get keys from a truck ring” while Drexel was “being assaulted and killed” by Moody, “when in fact” Vause “was traveling in a different direction and not for that purpose.”
According to the complaint, Vause also claimed to FBI agents that Drexel maintained her cellular phone on her during the experience, despite the fact that the older lady seized the girl’s phone and dumped it somewhere between Georgetown and Charleston.
Authorities also claim that Vause told investigators Drexel “voluntarily joined” her and Moody on the night in question to “consume marijuana and cocaine” when the teenager was actually “abducted under false pretenses.”
Vause was detained Wednesday morning and is scheduled to be arraigned this afternoon before U.S. Magistrate Judge Molly H. Cherry, according to a press release from the US Department of Justice.