On the night of April 25, 2009, 17-year-old Brittanee Drexel of Chili, New York, United States, left a hotel in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, where she had been staying with friends over spring break.

Police investigated Drexel's disappearance but no developments were made public until 2016, when it was announced that a prison inmate had told them that she had been abducted and killed.

The last person who had reported seeing Drexel before she had left was identified as Peter Brozowitz, a 20-year-old nightclub promoter she had known from the Rochester area and who was also vacationing in Myrtle Beach.

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.

[4] Dawn, who had driven to Myrtle Beach the day after her daughter's disappearance, eventually relocated there permanently to be close to where Drexel had last been seen and to better monitor the progress of the investigation.

In a 2014 newspaper article on the case's fifth anniversary, she expressed her theory that Drexel had defied her to go to Myrtle Beach because she had been "promised something" of interest, such as a modeling job.

[1] Two months later, the Charleston Post and Courier reported new developments from 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 Taquan Brown, another South Carolina inmate 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" to give money to Taylor's father.

[10] The bond hearing had been held after Taylor's arrest on a federal indictment for interfering in interstate commerce by threat or violence, a charge stemming from his role as the getaway driver in a 2011 robbery of a McDonald's restaurant in Mount Pleasant.

[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 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.

[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.

[citation needed] Before the sentencing hearing was scheduled, Taylor was found to have violated the terms of his bail and was held in Charleston County jail.

In August, presiding federal district judge David C. Norton ordered his 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.

[15] Six months later, Norton sentenced Taylor to time served, 319 days, after a guilty plea forced by his similar disposition in state court.

[18] Brown claimed he saw Drexel being sexually assaulted by a group of eight to twelve young men at the McClellanville stash house on April 27, two days after her disappearance.

[18] Brown claimed his third encounter was five days later when he saw Drexel on a lightly traveled dirt road near his cousin's residence in Jacksonboro, 80 miles (130 km) south of McClellanville.

[19] In early May 2022, Raymond Moody, a 62-year-old registered sex offender, turned himself in to the Georgetown County Sheriff's Office on the basis of an obstruction of justice charge.

[20] By May 11, human remains were located, buried in the woods off a gated private drive outside Georgetown, about four feet into the ground; they were identified as Drexel's through DNA and dental records on May 15.

[22] Moody was arrested again and charged with murder, kidnapping and first-degree criminal sexual misconduct, all alleged to have occurred on the day Drexel disappeared.

On October 19, Moody pleaded guilty to all charges and was subsequently sentenced to life in prison with an additional two consecutive terms of 30 years.