A South Carolina jury has awarded $700 million in damages to the family of upstate New York teen Brittanee Drexel, who disappeared in 2009 while on spring break in Myrtle Beach and was found murdered 13 years later.
The unanimous verdict came Tuesday in a civil case filed in January 2023 by Brittanee’s mother, Dawn Conley, against her daughter’s confessed killer, Raymond Moody. The case went to trial on Monday.
“I wanted to set a precedent that the people who commit these crimes and do what Mr. Moody did to my daughter, they need everything taken away from them, because they took the most precious thing they could have taken away from me,” Conley said on the witness stand, according to The Sun News.
In 2009, 17-year-old Brittanee snuck off from her family’s home in Chili, N.Y., near Rochester, to spend spring break with friends, disobeying her divorcing parents, who had forbidden her to go.
On one of the nights in Myrtle Beach, Brittanee walked to a neighboring resort about a mile away to visit a friend, and was last seen on camera leaving there. Investigators later triangulated her cellphone location to determine she’d entered a moving vehicle.
The disappearance remained a mystery for years. At one point, in 2018, an informant briefly convinced the FBI that Brittanee had been abducted, gang-raped, shot to death and disposed of in an alligator-infested swamp. That theory was later debunked when a search of area alligator ponds and the stash house she was allegedly held in turned up nothing.
Brittanee’s remains were found in May 2022, 13 years after her disappearance, buried in a wooded area in South Carolina about 35 miles south of Myrtle Beach.
Moody eventually confessed to abducting, raping and strangling the teen. The convicted sex offender, who had already spent 21 years in prison for abducting and raping a 9-year-old girl in California in 1983, was sentenced to life in prison. His girlfriend at the time, Angel Vause, was sentenced to 18 years for lying to federal agents.
“I’m in loss of words…I have so much regret,” Moody said in court Tuesday, according to WMBF. “I realized it doesn’t matter how sincere I am about how I feel about things I’ve done. It’s not enough.”
Raymond Moody appears in court, Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2022, in Georgetown, S.C. (Jason Lee/The Sun News via AP)
But Conley’s attorney didn’t buy it.
“He’s a psychopath, and so I do not put any credibility one way or the other in anything that comes out of his mind,” attorney Roy Willey told WMBF. “I think that he is very sorry that he got caught. He obviously watched this unfold on his own TV set, and the billboards up the highway for 13 years, and said nothing.”