The man convicted of kidnapping, raping, and killing Brittanee Drexel 13 years ago received his life-in-prison sentence on Wednesday.
Raymond Douglas Moody, 62, received two consecutive sentences of 30 years in prison for sexual assault and kidnapping charges.
The hearing did not go smoothly, and emotions were running high as the family and friends of Brittanee Drexel, who was 17-years-old when she died, were reminded of the horrors the girl went through.
Drexel’s mother, in particular, blasted the murderer during the hearing. She said that she hoped Moody would always be haunted by what he did to her daughter when she disappeared 13 years ago.
During the trial, the prosecution presented evidence that showed Brittanee had tried to fight off Moody and that she had scratched his head and left him with scars.
Dawn Pleckan, Drexel’s mom, told Moody that he would carry the scars her daughter inflicted on him as she fought for her life.
Moody, who was also allowed to speak at the hearing, stood before Drexel’s family and the judge and pleaded guilty to the teen’s gruesome murder, dubbing himself a “monster.”
He told the court that he was the monster that took Drexel’s life and that he has felt horrible for his actions ever since.
Moody was arrested in May. A week after his arrest, he led authorities to where he had buried Drexel thirteen years ago.
According to authorities, Moody kidnapped Drexel in 2009 while she was walking in Myrtle Beach and took the teenager to his Georgetown County home, where he raped her, murdered her, and buried her body a few hours later. No one heard from her or saw her again.
Investigators had set their eyes on him in 2012 when they considered Moody a person of interest in Drexel’s case, but he was neither arrested nor charged, and the case went cold.
Police reopened the case in May 2022 when they arrested Moody for an unrelated obstruction of justice charge. That is when he confessed to kidnapping Drexel, then raping, killing, and burying her on April 25, 2009.
Authorities identified Drexel’s body through her dental records, and the coroner later announced the teenager’s cause of death was strangulation.
After the guilty plea, Judge Ferrell Cothran sentenced Moody to two consecutive terms of 30 years in prison for the kidnapping and rape charges, and handed him a life sentence for the murder charge.
Drexel’s parents were emotional as they spoke to Moody about what he did to their daughter. For more than a decade, they wondered what had happened to her, and although they finally got closure, the pain of knowing the horror she had gone through was too much to bear.
Drexel, 17 at the time of her murder, had traveled to Myrtle Beach from New York without her parent’s knowledge. Her boyfriend got concerned when she suddenly stopped answering text messages. Her case went cold for thirteen years before Moody confessed to killing her.
Moody has an extensive sex offender history. According to South Carolina’s state law records, he was registered as a sex offender in 1983 after being convicted of raping someone under the age of 14.