Left: Brittanee Drexel; Right: Raymond Moody (Georgetown County Sheriff’s Office); Inset: Angel Vause (15th Circuit Solicitor’s Office)
A woman believed to be the girlfriend of a teenage girl’s convicted killer has been indicted on several federal charges in South Carolina.
Brittanee Drexel, 17, vanished and died during spring break while on a trip to Myrtle Beach in April 2009.
Raymond Moody, 64, was arrested for the girl’s murder, kidnapping, and rape in May 2022. Previously convicted of kidnapping and raping a 9-year-old girl, the killer admitted to his second tranche of crimes and was convicted and sentenced to life in prison in October 2022.
“I served 20 years and I thought it was enough, but it wasn’t,” Moody said during his sentencing. “I was a monster then, and I was a monster when I took Brittanee Drexel’s life.”
Angel Vause, 56, who hails from Georgetown — a small town in the Lowcountry region located roughly an hour due south of Myrtle Beach — now stands accused of three counts of making false statements to the FBI during the long-running investigation into Drexel’s death.
For years, Drexel’s case was cold. While national media for years measured a certain level of interest in the missing teenage girl, the investigation was more or less hamstrung by 2016 when the FBI determined she was dead. A series of false restarts, hazy/false allegations, and unreliable testimony bogged the case down in the Lowcountry salt marshes.
And then Moody simply turned himself in. He would go on to provide a full confession and relevant details of the crime to the FBI.
On the night of April 25, 2009, the killer kidnapped Drexel and raped her, strangled her to death along the Santee River and then buried her body about four feet deep at a location on Old Town Avenue in Harmony Township, an HOA neighborhood in Georgetown.
The girl was only identifiable by her dental records.
Previous law enforcement claims that Drexel had been gang-raped and then fed to alligators — with multiple witnesses — were abandoned.
Now, authorities say there was at least one other person privy to at least some of the details that made up the final hours of Drexel’s life.
According to the federal indictment filed in South Carolina U.S. District Court on Tuesday, Vause, during a May 2022 interview, lied to the FBI 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.”
Vause also allegedly told FBI agents that Drexel kept her cellular phone on her throughout the ordeal when, in fact, the older woman took the girl’s phone from her and then discarded it somewhere in between Georgetown and Charleston, according to the indictment.
Authorities also allege that Vause told investigators Drexel “voluntarily joined” her and Moody on the night in question to “consume marijuana and cocaine” when the girl was actually “abducted under false pretenses.”
Vause was arrested Wednesday morning and slated to be arraigned this afternoon before U.S. Magistrate Judge Molly H. Cherry, according to a U.S. Department of Justice press release.
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