Left: Brittanee Drexel. Right: Raymond Moody (Georgetown County Sheriff's Office); Inset: Angel Vause (15th Circuit Solicitor's Office).
In a jailhouse interview with federal authorities, the man who raped and murdered a 17-year-old girl on spring break in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, over 15 years ago said his girlfriend helped lure the teen into their SUV so they could kidnap her -- and then watched the girl's horrifying final moments.
Raymond Moody in November met with FBI agents for over three hours at Lieber Correctional Institution in Ridgeville, where he is housed, to discuss the role his girlfriend, 57-year-old Angel Vause, allegedly played in the crime.
Moody, 64, was sentenced to life in prison in October 2022 in the murder of Brittanee Drexel, who was visiting the tourist town with friends from upstate New York. Vause, who hails from Georgetown -- a small town in the Lowcountry region located roughly 35 miles south of Myrtle Beach -- pleaded guilty in September to three counts of making false statements to the FBI during the long-running investigation into Drexel's death.
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He described how he and Vause were driving up and down Myrtle Beach's main drag on the night of April 25, 2009, in search of a kidnapping victim when they saw Drexel walking on her own. Per the feds, Drexel and her group of friends were staying in different hotels nearly 2 miles apart. She was wearing clothes she had borrowed from another girl staying in the other hotel from Drexel. The girl wanted the clothes back so Drexel headed in her direction to return them.
Unbeknownst to Drexel, Moody and Vause were on the prowl.
"We were hunting," Moody explained in a synopsis of the interview as part of Vause's sentencing memorandum.
He continued: "I had my eye on her, and I thought, she's the one."
According to Moody, Vause got out of the vehicle to talk to Drexel. They thought since Vause was a woman she would "trust us," Moody said. The suspects acted as if they were tourists like Drexel and offered to give her a ride to the hotel.
When Drexel entered the SUV, Moody, who was driving, pretended to get lost and had Vause start to drive. That's when Moody attacked. He handcuffed Drexel and told her he kidnapped girls and demanded $5,000 from the chamber of commerce, who would pay the ransom to escape bad publicity. Vause then drove them to a tent along the Santee River that she and Moody had already set up. Moody left Drexel with Vause while he drove to his apartment and returned with a briefcase of what was described in the interview summary as "sex toys."
Upon return, he said he raped and sodomized Drexel before strangling her to death with rope. Moody then stabbed her with an ice pick just to make sure she was dead, he told agents. Vause did not participate in the rape or murder, Moody said, but was inside the tent watching. He then buried the girl's body in a shallow grave.
Moody went on to tell the agents that Vause had been attracted to his criminal past which is what drew them together. He was previously convicted of kidnapping and raping a 9-year-old girl in California and served two decades in prison. She expressed a desire to join him on one of his twisted jaunts.
"So you want to go hunting with me, huh?" Moody asked in a text message.
"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."
For years, Drexel's case was cold. While national media had 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 or 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.
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.
After Moody's conviction, the FBI set its sights on Vause.
According to the federal indictment filed in South Carolina U.S. District Court in March 2024, 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 cellphone 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."
Prosecutors are requesting the judge sentence Vause to 24 years in prison, the maximum sentence allowed. A sentencing date has yet to be set.