Posted on 08/26/2016 6:21:44 PM PDT by Gamecock
A teenage girl who disappeared from Myrtle Beach seven years ago was abducted, gang-raped, shot to death and thrown into an alligator-infested swamp in the dense forests near McClellanville, according to the FBI.
FBI agent Gerrick Munoz this week gave the first detailed account of what investigators think happened to 17-year-old Brittanee Drexel after she disappeared in 2009. His account, contained in a federal court transcript obtained by The Post and Courier, is based on a statement from a prison inmate who claims he was present when she was killed.
But a McClellanville woman whose husband and son have been implicated by the inmate says the story is just a bunch of “craziness” adopted by federal authorities desperate to solve a vexing case.
For years, tips repeatedly have sent state and local investigators on wild goose chases from Myrtle Beach to McClellanville searching in vain for clues to the young woman’s disappearance or her remains.
A major break came earlier this year when an inmate who had recently been imprisoned to serve a 25-year sentence for voluntary manslaughter gave a “jailhouse confession,” telling authorities that he witnessed what happened to the girl.
In the transcript, Munoz testifies that the inmate, Taquan Brown of Walterboro, told investigators he went to a “stash house” in the McClellanville area in the days after Drexel was abducted. As he entered the house with a couple of other men, he saw Timothy Da’Shaun Taylor, then 16, “sexually abusing Brittanee Drexel,” the agent said.
The FBI agent gave the following account of what the inmate said happened next:
He spotted others also in the room with the girl and Da’Shaun Taylor, and he kept walking through the house to the backyard to give some money to Da’Shaun Taylor’s father, Shaun Taylor.
As the two talked, Drexel ran from the house. She was “pistol-whipped” and taken back inside.
Two shots rang out and the inmate assumed Shaun Taylor shot the girl. Then the girl’s body was wrapped up and taken away.
Asked what happened to the girl’s body, the FBI agent testified that it has not been found but that “several witnesses have told us Miss Drexel’s body was placed in a pit, or gator pit, to have her body disposed of. Eaten by the gators.”
Munoz told the court that investigators have searched several alligator ponds to no avail. He said investigators have been told that the area is peppered with as many as 40 of these ponds. Investigators also have searched the stash house, the agent testified. ‘Showed her off’
Since June when authorities held a news conference revealing their belief that the teen was held captive in McClellanville for days until she was killed, tips from people with “tidbits” and “secondhand information” have been coming in, the FBI agent testified.
Some of those tips corroborate the jailhouse confession, including secondhand information from an inmate in the Georgetown County jail, the agent said.
That prisoner provided authorities with details of what he was told happened to Drexel in the days after April 25, 2009, when a video camera recorded her leaving the beach-side Blue Water Hotel in Myrtle Beach. She had gone there against her parents’ permission from their home in Rochester, N.Y., earlier that month because she wanted to spend time in the warmth of the Grand Strand during spring break. But she vanished during the trip, her last cellphone signal pinging from the McClellanville area.
The Georgetown prisoner told authorities that Da’Shaun Taylor picked Drexel up in Myrtle Beach and took her to McClellanville. There he “showed her off, introduced her to some other friends that were there … they ended up tricking her out with some of their friends, offering her to them and getting a human trafficking situation,” the FBI agent testified.
By that point, the prisoner said, searches for the missing teen had generated massive media publicity. That created a problem for her abductors and she was “murdered and disposed of,” the agent told the court.
Both the FBI and federal prosecutors declined this week to discuss the jailhouse confession, Munoz’s testimony or the hunt for Drexel.
The young woman’s family could not be reached for comment Friday. The squeeze is on
The FBI agent’s testimony came out during a bond hearing on an unusual charge against Da’Shaun Taylor that his attorney, David Aylor, characterized in the transcript as “clearly nothing but a squeeze-job” designed to pressure him into confessing and helping the government.
Aylor argued that despite the jailhouse confession, investigators have not been able to generate any hard evidence or cooperation from others who reportedly saw the girl. As a result, he said, federal prosecutors pulled out an unusual legal tactic in an effort to force Taylor’s cooperation.
Federal prosecutors obtained indictments in June charging Da’Shaun Taylor, 25, with interference of interstate commerce by threat or violence for his involvement in a 2011 robbery of a Mount Pleasant McDonald’s restaurant. Taylor was the getaway driver while two others held up the restaurant, one wounding the store manager with two non-life threatening gunshots.
Taylor confessed, cooperated with authorities and was sentenced to probation, which he has successfully completed. The gunman got a 25-year sentence and the other robber got six years, suspended after serving 10 months.
Under federal law, prosecutors have the authority to bring parallel charges when federal laws are violated along with state laws. They often did so during the civil rights movement, bringing rights violation charges against people freed from or not charged with state law violations.
What makes this case unusual is that the federal charges against Taylor involve virtually the same evidence as in the McDonald’s robbery for which he confessed and that he has long since completed his state sentence.
The federal charges, which include use of a deadly weapon, carry a potential life sentence.
In his argument at the federal bond hearing for Da’Shaun Taylor, Aylor said he shouldn’t be punished for something he’s already done his time for just because the government wants “to squeeze him” for something they can use to solve the Drexel case other than the testimony of a jailhouse rat and another guy in jail who heard a story.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Winston Holliday conceded as much during Taylor’s bond hearing. U.S. Magistrate Judge Mary Gordon Baker questioned him about “the real reason” the government brought the interstate commerce charges against Taylor so long after he was convicted in state court. She asked Holliday if the reason was because he is a suspect in the Drexel case.
“That would be one,” Holliday replied.
But Holliday said a federal provision also gives the government the ability to lodge federal charges when it believes the outcome in a state court has been fundamentally unfair. In Taylor’s case, Holliday said, the government brought the new charges because he got off so lightly for the McDonald’s robbery while the other two suspects got substantial sentences.
The judge ordered Taylor released on $10,000 bail, which he posted later in the day after the bond hearing.
Neither Aylor nor co-defense attorney Mark Peper, both of Charleston, would discuss Taylor’s case after the hearing.
Ninth Circuit Solicitor Scarlett Wilson, whose office handled the original state prosecution of Taylor, said Friday that federal prosecutors did not consult with her or her staff about their plans to bring new charges against him in connection with the 2011 holdup. She declined to comment further. It’s just craziness
Taylor’s mother, Joan Taylor, 44, of McClellanville, told The Post and Courier on Thursday that she’s talking out about the accusations because she believes the government is unjustly trying to “pin something else on him” based on a bogus jailhouse confession.
She was stunned during the bond hearing when she heard the FBI agent’s testimony that implicated both her son and husband in Drexel’s abduction, rape and murder. “I wanted to just scream and yell.” She called the inmate’s story and the fact that the government is running with it “craziness.” The crimes her husband and son have been implicated in are “not in our nature,” she said.
Neither her son nor her husband responded to requests for them to comment on the allegations, but Joan Taylor said her husband, a former merchant seaman who now works as a tow truck driver and mechanic, is “fed up with it and he thinks it’s crazy.”
She described her son as a hard-working young man who has matured into a good, caring person. She said he lost an arm in a childhood accident, works as a mechanic and takes care of a son, a daughter and his grandmother. He just wants to know why he’s been singled out this way, she said.
I remember this case. She was featured on one of the episodes of “Disappeared”.
http://www.investigationdiscovery.com/tv-shows/disappeared/
She chose to hang out with drug-dealing thugs.
Beautiful girl. What a horrible way to die.
Sadly, there's thousands just like it. The number of people who vanish off the face of the earth is staggering.
The pawn shop scene in Pulp Fiction still haunts me. I’ve often wonder about walking into small shops like that and falling off the face of the planet.
One only has to look at Africa to see the truth of your hypothesis.
Not surprising but hardly makes her torture and murder justified or excused.
I still think she was the victim of a serial killer. I remain skeptical pending further evidence.
what is true and always probably has been is that blacks have raped white women in huge numbers....
but a group of ferals attacking and raping and murdering a single white female happens a LOT doesn’t it?....so I tend to believe this jail house rant...
sadly, she was also a stupid person....
I point this out to the many porn addicted and those that "just" support the Hooters type mentality and how our boys have suffered greatly from this sexual immorality but its scoffed at....nothing too off base for some daddies...
These are animals who need to be eliminated from the face of the earth in about 1 week. There are no shortages of assisted suicide drugs, so no shortage of Execution drugs, some one is running a CON GAME. Any Veterinarian can put down a horse or cow or a 400 lb sub human.
Teens are often stupid, sometimes fatally so. But, not often is it so brutally cruel, at the hands of others. She was a pretty girl, but naive and willful. She was going to Myrtle Beach, whether her parents wanted her to go or not. She went. She encountered the wrong people there.
Richard Speck, who murdered eight student nurses, one at a time, in their townhouse. Speck was armed only with a knife. None of his victims was armed. Speck’s crime should make every liberal gun-grabber think, then vomit.
Ashley Nichole ‘Nikki’ Read (8yrs old, 67 lbs) March 16, 1990
http://murderpedia.org/male.K/k/keen-david.htm
Nikki was beaten, RAPED, strangled with her own shoelaces, wrapped in a green blanket, which was then tied, by David Keen, he dumped her body into the river off the old Auction Street Boat Dock in Memphis, TN. She drowned to death. Nikki was alive as Keen RAPED her. DNA proved he did and he eventually confessed to the crime. 2 juries, up held the Death Sentence. All State and Federals Appeals are done. Yet he still sits on Tennessee Death Row because Tennessee’s RINO governor won’t sign the Death Warrant for this Child Rapist/Killer.
It’s 2016 Nikki’s mother is still waiting for JUSTICE!
TN Governor Bill Haslam
(615) 741-2001
Bill.Haslam@tn.gov
Murder in Memphis, Deborah Groseclose
https://mylifeofcrime.wordpress.com/2015/03/08/psycho-for-love-william-groseclose-hired-2-men-phillip-michael-britt-and-ronald-rickman-to-kill-his-wife-deborah-groseclose/hired men to murder his young wife. Let them into the house, while he slipped out with the kids. She was Raped, stabbed, neatened, strangled until she passed out. Stuffed into the trunk of her car, which was then relocated down town, where she is still alive, she COOKED TO DEATH in the 100 + summer temps of Memphis. A anti-death penalty federal judge and 2 state supreme court judges kept blocking the use of the DP. They finally were retried, found guilty again, and given Life WITH parole. There is 1 sick sister Rebeca Easley left to fight the parole hearings.
http://www.jfa.net/news.html
2 of her killers still live and have parole hearings.
The Gruesome Story of a Murdered Tennessee Couple You May Have Never Heard – But That You Will Never Forget
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/08/13/the-gruesome-story-of-a-murdered-tennessee-couple-you-may-have-never-heard-about-but-that-you-will-never-forget/#
9/13/14
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/s-dad-strangled-5-kids-death-officials-article-1.1938388
South Carolina dad STRANGLED (HIS 5) kids to death. Ages 1-8
Medical Malpractice
http://www.medicalmalpracticelawyer.center/2014/05/new-study-confirms-440000-deat.html
Memphis mom kills her 4 kids
http://wreg.com/2016/07/03/mother-charged-with-murder-following-deaths-of-4-children/
http://fox8.com/2016/04/01/police-4-year-old-tortured-beaten-to-death-after-mother-shoots-up-heroin/
“These are animals who need to be eliminated from the face of the earth in about 1 week.”
300 years ago they would have been-——now the accused have more rights than the victims.
Everything is backwards.
.
Exactly right. I doubt that there is any teen who hasn’t made a stupid mistake, but usually they manage to escape serious consequences. This poor girl didn’t.
A young millennial, taught all her life that judging is wrong and that black culture is "cool" by the media and her peers, going with these thugs? Yep. 100%. Not a doubt in my mind.
I can still remember the teenage girl who told me how a boy in college threatened to tell everyone she was racist because she wouldn't sleep with him after just meeting him. She gave in (and lost her virginity) rather than face the social stigma. Disgusting, but very common nowadays. Kids are very different now...
Tell me about it, I’m the mom of a physically and mentally 12 yr old the calendar said was 16 who was beaten to death with a 2 ft section of fence post by a Sociopath who wanted the thrill to see what it felt like to kill. He chose my son, less than a block from home, ambushed him after school. Went and bragged about it to friends and took them to see what he’d done. Stood on the sidelines as the PD investigated until some one pointed him out, then ran, got caught, 2 years to get a LIBTARD plea deal of M1 down to M2 and 20 yrs, took 6 parole hearings to eke out 12.5 yrs until he maxed out his ‘good behavior time’, and he was no model prisoner. He now walks Tennessee a free man, and I CCW and I’m good enough to hit what I aim at.
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