Inside the 13-Year Search for Any Trace of Brittanee Drexel
“It was really quick,” Georgetown County Solicitor Jimmy Richardson said, “and it was hours, it wasn’t days, the entire process was a series of hours, from the time that she went missing to the time that she was buried.”
As for the suspect, Georgetown County Sheriff Carter Weaver described Moody as a man with an “extensive sex offender criminal history.”
Moody is on the South Carolina State Law Enforcement Division’s sex offender registry for convictions in 1983 in California for rape by force, kidnapping, and lewd or lascivious acts and sodomy with a child under 14. He was released from prison in 2004 after serving 20 1/2 years of a 40-year sentence, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation confirmed to WMBF News, after which he moved to South Carolina. His supervised parole ended in 2007. On the sex offender registry site, there’s also a citation for failure to register in South Carolina from 2010.
E! News has reached out to Moody’s attorney, Scott Bellamy.
“In the coming months, we will move to seek justice for Brittanee and we’ll be talking about arraignments and indictments and hearings,” Richardson said during the May 16 presser. “We’re going to do our very best to see that Raymond Moody pays for what he’s done, but that is not going to replace Brittanee.”
“Already the skeleton of the trial is in my mind,” he also told WMBF on Wednesday, noting that there were hundreds of boxes of discovery to go through. “And I’ve lived it for awhile, but Mr. Bellamy hasn’t, so it’ll take him a lot longer to catch up than it would me, but we could prepare our witness list for the most part today.”
“Brittanee lost her life in a tragic way at the hands of a horrible criminal who was walking our streets,” Susan Ferensic, lead agent at the FBI’s Columbia field office, told reporters Monday. Acknowledging the many law enforcement agencies represented around her and the people who worked the case at every level, she said, “No one ever wavered over this time. And we wish we could have come to these results sooner.”
