Disappearance of Brittanee Drexel

Coordinates: 33°40′09″N 78°54′21″W / 33.6692°N 78.9057°W / 33.6692; -78.9057

Brittanee Drexel
Image of Drexel distributed after her disappearance
Born	(1991-10-07)October 7, 1991 Rochester, New York, U.S.
Disappeared	April 25, 2009 (aged 17) Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, U.S.
Status	Missing for 12 years, 7 months and 28 days
Height	5 ft 0 in (152 cm)

On the night of April 25, 2009, 17-year-old Brittanee Drexel of Chili, New York, United States, left the Bar Harbor Hotel in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, where she had been staying with friends on a spring break trip that she had taken without her mother's knowledge or permission. Drexel walked to another hotel a short distance away, and from there, texted her boyfriend to say that she was going to see another friend at another hotel. She has not been seen since.

Police had no leads until 2016, when it was announced that a prison inmate had told them that Drexel had been abducted and killed.^[1] The man accused by the informant denied knowledge of any alleged crime. Based on that information, the FBI considers the case a homicide, although it has not identified any suspect.

Background[]

Brittanee Drexel was born in Rochester, New York, on October 7, 1991, to her mother, Dawn, and a man of Turkish descent.^[2] Shortly after Brittanee was born, Dawn married Chad Drexel, who adopted the girl at that time.^[3] After Chad's military service ended, the family lived in the Rochester suburb of Chili. Drexel took an early liking to soccer, and friends and family recall her as being particularly fast with the ball despite her small stature.^[4]

Drexel aspired to a career in nursing, cosmetology,^[3] or modeling. She had been born with persistent hyperplastic primary vitreous in her right eye, which required several surgeries and rendered the eye blind. To cover the eye's tendency to wander, she wore contact lenses that gave her a distinctive appearance.^[2]

Dawn and Chad Drexel separated in 2008, a development that was not easy for Brittanee, adversely affecting her academic performance; Chad says that it also aggravated the depression from which she had long suffered.^[5] She remained with her mother but kept in close contact with Chad. In April 2009, Brittanee asked Dawn if she could go to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, over spring break with her boyfriend and some girlfriends. Her mother refused, since she did not know the other teenagers and there were no accompanying adults on the trip; she also had a premonition that something bad would happen.^[2] This led to arguments between the two for several days until April 22, when Brittanee asked if she could go to a friend's house for a day or two to calm down, to which Dawn agreed. That day, Brittanee left for South Carolina with the other students without telling her mother.^[3]

Three days later, Brittanee called Dawn once during the daytime after having arrived in Myrtle Beach, where the group stayed at the Bar Harbor Hotel, telling her mother that she was at the beach. Dawn was not alarmed, as she assumed that Brittanee had been referring to a beach along the Lake Ontario shoreline. A trip there seemed plausible to her since the temperature had reached a high of 83 °F (28 °C) in the area that day.^[3][6]

Disappearance[]

That night, around 8 p.m., Drexel left her friends at the Bar Harbor Hotel beachfront to walk 1.5 miles (2.4 km) south down South Ocean Boulevard to another hotel, the Blue Water Resort, to visit a longtime friend who was staying there. Security cameras at the Blue Water Resort showed her arriving, wearing a black-and-white tank top, flip-flops and shorts, carrying a beige purse and then leaving around 8:45.^[3]

Drexel continued texting her boyfriend, John Grieco, who had stayed in the Rochester area because of work commitments.^[7] At around 9:15 her texts suddenly stopped, and Grieco began calling her friends in Myrtle Beach to see if they knew where she was or what had happened. When those efforts failed, he called Brittanee's mother Dawn, who had not known that her daughter was in Myrtle Beach until she was contacted.^[3] Dawn called Chad and then the Rochester police, hoping that they could establish communications with their counterparts in South Carolina. Repeated calls and texts to Brittanee's phone went unanswered.^[3]

Investigation[]

Myrtle Beach police began looking for Drexel the following morning. They located the security camera footage from the Blue Water Resort and found the friends whom she had visited. The last person who had seen Drexel before she had left was identified as Peter Brozowitz, a 20-year-old nightclub promoter whom Brittanee had known from the Rochester area and who was also vacationing in Myrtle Beach. They had apparently met at a local nightclub the night before. After police interviewed Brozowitz and the men with whom he was sharing his hotel rooms, they said that "no one has been ruled in or out," adding that they did not have any persons of interest.^[2]

Police searched Drexel's hotel room, finding all of the clothes she had packed, but not her purse or cell phone. The phone's network pings were tracked on a path leading 50–60 miles (80–97 km) south of Myrtle Beach, in an area along U.S. Route 17 near the Georgetown–Charleston county line. The pings had stopped abruptly early on the morning of April 26. Areas near there and around Myrtle Beach where a body might have been disposed of were then searched for eleven days. In 2011, police searched an apartment in Georgetown County, but that effort did not yield any information that helped identify a suspect.^[2]

Dawn and Brozowitz had several confrontations on the television show Dr. Phil, during which Brozowitz often expressed frustration at the damage to his reputation.^[2] Dawn, who had driven to Myrtle Beach the day after her daughter's disappearance, eventually relocated there permanently to be close to where Brittanee had last been seen and better monitor the progress of the investigation. In a 2014 newspaper article on the case's fifth anniversary, she expressed her theory that Brittanee had defied her to go to Myrtle Beach because she had been "promised something" of interest, such as a modeling job. Dawn believes that her daughter was trafficked, but the Myrtle Beach police did not believe this was a strong possibility due to their claim of little or no trafficking taking place in their jurisdiction.^[2] A 2019 report conducted by the South Carolina Human Trafficking task force rated Horry County as the number one county in South Carolina for reported human trafficking victims.^[8]

Taquan Brown allegations[]

In June 2016, the FBI, which had also been involved in the case, announced at a news conference that they believed that Drexel had been murdered shortly after her disappearance. She had been abducted from Myrtle Beach to somewhere in the vicinity of Georgetown, near where the cell phone pings had ended, and killed there. The bureau put up a $25,000 reward for information leading to the resolution of the case.^[1]

Two months later, the Charleston Post and Courier reported on the allegations in more detail, based on a transcript of a bond hearing for Timothy Da'Shaun Taylor, an inmate then serving time in state prison on an unrelated charge. FBI agent Gerrick Munoz testified that earlier that year, another South Carolina inmate, Taquan Brown, who had begun serving a 25-year sentence for manslaughter, told them that in 2009, shortly after Drexel disappeared, he had gone to visit a McClellanville "stash house" – a house where weapons and supplies are hidden^[9] – to give money to Shaun Taylor, Timothy's father.^[10]

As he walked through the house, Brown had told Munoz, he saw Timothy sexually abusing Drexel with others present. He continued to the backyard, where he found Shaun and made his payment. As they talked, Drexel ran from the house but was soon recaptured. Brown said he saw Timothy pistol-whip Drexel, then take her back inside the house, where he heard two gunshots, which he assumed were the sounds of the young woman being killed. Brown claims to have seen a wrapped body being removed from the house, which was then dumped in one of many alligator ponds in the area.^[10]

Brown's statement to investigators, Munoz said, was partially corroborated by information received from another informant, unidentified but described as incarcerated at the Georgetown County jail at the time he had talked to authorities. According to the second inmate, Timothy had picked up Drexel in Myrtle Beach and taken her to McClellanville, where he showed her off to friends and tried to sell her to them for trafficking purposes. But when the case drew heavy media attention, Taylor decided to kill Drexel to avoid arrest.^[10]

Federal charges[]

The bond hearing had been held after Timothy Taylor's arrest on a federal indictment for interfering in interstate commerce by threat or violence, stemming from a 2011 robbery of a McDonald's restaurant in Mount Pleasant in which he had been the getaway driver. Unusually, he had already been convicted for his involvement in the crime in state court and had been sentenced to probation, which he had finished by the time of the federal charges. Taylor's lawyer called the new charge a "squeeze" based on nothing more than the statement of two jailed informants; his mother called them "craziness", since she believed that her son and husband could never commit such a crime.^[10]

Winston Holliday, the federal prosecutor at the hearing, admitted to the judge that the suspicions in the Drexel case were among the government's reasons for having brought the new charge for the conduct South Carolina had already sentenced Taylor for. In response to questions of whether this amounted to double jeopardy, Holliday cited a federal law that states that the federal government may bring charges for a crime if it believes the state prosecution led to an unfair outcome. In this case, Holliday noted that the other two participants in the robbery had both been sentenced to prison, with the gunman, who shot the restaurant's cashier twice, serving a 25-year minimum term.^[10]

In March 2018, WPDE-TV in Florence reported that nine months earlier, as part of his plea bargain negotiations, Taylor had agreed to take a lie detector test, which he failed.^[11] According to the federal government's sentencing memorandum,^[12] the only possible knowledge of the case to which Taylor admitted involved having overheard part of an argument between two people over who had Drexel's cell phone, a discussion that he said had made him suspicious.^[11] But when Taylor was connected to the lie detector and asked whether he had seen Drexel after her disappearance, or if he knew he was involved, the examiner determined he was not being truthful. Under the plea agreement he would thus face at least ten years in prison for his role in the 2011 robbery.^[12] After reviewing the results with Taylor's lawyer, the examiner attempted to continue but Taylor was too angry to do so.^[11] The government's memo therefore recommended the minimum sentence.

Before the sentencing hearing was scheduled, Taylor was found to have violated the terms of his bail and was held in Charleston County jail. But in August, presiding federal district judge David C. Norton ordered Taylor's bail reinstated on the condition that he remain on house arrest until the U.S. Supreme Court decided the case of Gamble v. United States, a constitutional challenge to the dual sovereignty doctrine, which allows separate state and federal prosecutions for the same criminal offense. The development pleased activists^[13] who had been attempting to draw national attention to what they considered to be a "witch hunt".^[14]

In June 2019, the Supreme Court decided Gamble in favor of the government, upholding dual sovereignty and allowing the federal government to proceed with its case against Taylor.^[15] Six months later, Norton sentenced Taylor to time served, 319 days, after a guilty plea forced by his similar disposition in state court.^[16]

2019 interview[]

In February 2019, Brown gave a telephone interview to Rochester station WHEC-TV from McCormick Correctional Institution, where he is currently incarcerated. He said he had actually seen Drexel four times after her disappearance. In addition to the first encounter, Brown said he had seen her again a month later, and it was at that time she was killed.^[17]

According to Brown, his first encounter with Drexel was on April 27, two days after her disappearance, at the McClellanville stash house being sexually assaulted by a group of eight to twelve young men. He did not recognize her at the time but realized who she was a month later when publicity arose surrounding the case. Brown's second encounter with Drexel came a few days later; this was the event that he had described to the FBI with the gunshots inside the building, and the body being carried out in a rug.^[17] Brown's third encounter, five days later, occurred when he saw Drexel on a lightly traveled dirt road near his cousin's residence in Jacksonboro, 80 miles (130 km) south of McClellanville.^[17] Brown claimed to have seen Drexel for the last time in late May, once again on his cousin's residence, while visiting with another friend. In a wooded area at the rear of the property, Brown claimed to have witnessed Drexel being murdered by a man whom Brown knew only as "Nate", who shot her twice with a double-barreled shotgun. Brown and his friend left immediately, fearing being considered as accomplices if they had remained.^[17]

WHEC was able to corroborate some of Brown's account. His description of the McClellanville stash house matched the station's own reporting from a 2016 visit. His account of the second visit, when he believed Drexel had been shot, is consistent with his original story as told to the FBI.^[17] The station was unable to locate the friend whom Brown said had accompanied him on the last visit. The cousin who owned the property where Drexel was purportedly killed is now dead. Another witness whom Brown had named could not be found.^[17]

Brown has filed suit against Munoz, Holliday and other federal officials whom he says had identified him publicly or played a role in doing so. By doing so, he alleges, they gave him a reputation as a "snitch" and put his life in danger. Brown says that Taylor has offered $15,000 to anyone who kills Brown and that he has already been assaulted.^[18]

See also[]

• Crime in South Carolina
• Disappearance of Heather Elvis, 2013 case in Myrtle Beach where foul play is also suspected
• List of Disappeared episodes
• List of people who disappeared mysteriously: post-1970
• Murder of Jerry Michael Williams, 2000 case in Florida where absence of victim's body was initially explained as resulting from consumption by alligators

References[]

External links[]

• Brittanee Drexel at NamUs
• Brittanee Drexel at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children