‘Smoking rubble:’ Lawsuit against FBI dismantles agency claims that Taylor kidnapped, killed Drexel
HORRY COUNTY, S.C. (WBTW) — Chad and Dawn Drexel believed their fury toward Timothy Taylor was warranted. After all, if FBI agents told you they were certain who was behind the brutal kidnapping and murder of your teenage daughter, wouldn’t you feel the same way?
Except the Black McClellanville teenager with one arm, who loved going to car shows with his dad, was more than three hours away in Edisto Island the last time Drexel, a bubbly 17-year-old who trekked to Myrtle Beach on spring break in April 2009, was seen alive – something police confirmed within hours after Drexel vanished.
The FBI took over the Drexel investigation in 2016, and its relentless assault on the Taylor family name continued even months after he was internally cleared as a suspect, and after claims so shocking that the family would see itself shunned and dissolved.
In short, the FBI fashioned a second victim in the nationally known case.
That’s according to a 68-page federal complaint filed Tuesday in Charleston that accuses the U.S. government of intentionally inflicting emotional distress, abuse of process and gross negligence.
“The FBI thought it knew better. It was America’s elite crimefighting organization,” Taylor’s attorney Ryan McKaig wrote. “It had the manpower, experience and tools to finish the jobs that were beyond the reach of local cops. As the premiere law enforcement agency in the world, the Bureau and its agents were confident that they could see things and do things that local police just couldn’t.”
“The FBI had a long history … It had taken down Dillinger, Capone, Gotti and the Unabomber. Now, it was here to get Timothy Taylor,” the suit claims.
Raymond Moody, a career criminal accused of violent sexual crimes dating back to 1983 in California, is serving a life sentence for Drexel’s disappearance and murder. He led detectives to her body after confessing to the crimes in October 2022.
A Cracker Barrel murder, a questionable arrest
To understand why Taylor and his father Shaun were ever brought into the orbit of Drexel’s disappearance, you have to turn back the clock to a 1998 murder.
Shaun’s brothers Jacob and Randall were arrested in connection with the killing of Shannon McConaughey. She was last seen outside of a North Charleston Cracker Barrel and found shot to death in a field not far from where her car was found in McClellanville.
A jailhouse informant said Randall pulled the trigger, which led to his and Jacob’s incarceration.
“Their arrests would mark the first two times and the first of three generations of Taylor men who were falsely charged with kidnapping innocent white women,” McKaig wrote.
Then, in 2010, a woman named Ranna Massey claimed three Black men tried to abduct her near the very spot along South Ocean Boulevard where Drexel was last seen. She identified Shaun Taylor as one of her attackers after going through photographs provided by police.
But Shaun was spotted on surveillance footage in Conway at the time Massey said she was victimized.
“From the spring of 2009 until the summer of 2010, detectives from the various jurisdictions worked their way through the McClellanville area targeting member after member of the Taylor family, aggressively testing out suspicions based entirely on rumors and conjecture that contradicted what the detectives had already confirmed,” McKaig wrote.
By the summer of 2010, the original task force examining Drexel’s case dissolved, and agents from the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division took over.
Almost immediately, they homed in on Moody as the prime suspect based on a file provided by the Georgetown County Sheriff’s Office flagged by one of Moody’s own daughters.
An interview with Ernie Merchant, Moody’s jailhouse lover from California, caused them to become even more certain of his guilt.
Angel Vause was in a police interrogation room on April 26, 2011 — and she had a chilling story for detectives.
How investigators linked Raymond Moody to the death of Brittanee Drexel
Moody, her boyfriend at the time, often had “nightmarish fantasies of torture and death.” He would disappear in the middle of the night and was obsessed with violent pornography, according to the lawsuit. He was aroused by re-enacting his past sexual crimes using Vauss as a substitute for new victims.
Moody would threaten her, saying if she ever left he’d abduct another girl to fulfill his sadistic desires.
Former News13 reporter reflects on 2011 confrontation with Raymond Moody
Banned from social media due to his own status as a sex offender, Moody would use Vauss’s information to communicate with potential partners on various websites. Vauss told police she was worried that Moody might have kidnapped and killed Drexel.
But Moody was as cunning as he was cruel. He knew authorities were watching him and had a GPS tracker on his car. He was careful where he went and never left any evidence that would tie him to Drexel.
Enter the FBI
By the summer of 2016, the FBI assumed Drexel’s case, armed with all information previously obtained by the task force and SLED.
In July of that year, the FBI held a press conference near Taylor’s home, offering a $25,000 reward for assistance in bringing Drexel’s killer to justice — an event heavily covered by media.
But four men were absent: Two SLED agents who had interviewed Vauss, Georgetown County Sheriff Carter Weaver and 15th Circuit Court Solicitor Jimmy Richardson.
“Those four did not attend, because they did not want to have to explain to people, years later, why they had ever gone along with something like this,” Taylor’s suit claims.
Taquan Brown was doing a 25-year spell for manslaughter but told the FBI he was present at Drexel’s murder. He knew exactly who was involved and what happened.
It’s a story Richardson had heard as well but refused to act on because there was no corroborating evidence beyond the snitch. What Brown had to say was not only shocking but vaulted the Drexel case to international fame.
The FBI, McKaig said in the suit, told Drexel’s parents they knew Taylor killed their daughter, but wouldn’t share its proof.
That happened on Aug. 16, 2016, at a federal bond hearing in Charleston. By itself, that was unusual because Taylor was being brought up on charges from five years earlier when he was the getaway driver in a robbery at McDonald’s.
Taylor pleaded guilty and got probation as a youthful offender, but the FBI re-arrested him as a pretext for their probe into Drexel, according to McKaig’s suit.
What should have been a routine proceeding instead turned into a jaw-dropping plot twist after FBI Special Agent Gerrick Munoz said under oath that Taylor was the target “of another ongoing investigation now involving, again, kidnapping, human trafficking and murder.”
The FBI said Taylor, who was 16 at the time of Drexel’s disappearance and weighed about the same as her, was her lone kidnapper. Munoz said Brown was with Taylor and Drexel at a drug stash house in McClellanville where was eventually killed.
Then, Munoz said, Brown recalled her body being fed to alligators.
“The FBI had wanted to turn up the heat on Timothy Taylor and it had. Now everybody knew who Timothy Taylor was and what he had done the kidnapping, rape, murder, and alligator pit savagery and everybody, everywhere now hated him,” McKaig wrote in his suit. “He was no longer safe anywhere in public. Some members of the public, outraged and eager to take matters into their own hands, even personally wanted to kill him, as they would tell him, repeatedly, over the coming years.”
Taylor would spend a year behind hard at the Sheriff Al Cannon Detention Center in Charleston on the robbery, but it was a tool the FBI was using to pressure him and build a stronger case. He was eventually released because the FBI couldn’t establish probable cause for charges.
As he was incarcerated, Taylor’s mother Joan was fired and Shaun lost customers at his auto repair business. A pastor in their church stopped talking to them as well
“The FBI, in one brief stroke, had comprehensively and permanently reduced Timothy Taylor’s life and the lives of his family members to smoking rubble,” the lawsuit says.
At one point, Shaun Taylor hatched a plan to confess to Drexel’s killing, take sole responsibility in an effort to bring peace to the family. An attorney said it wouldn’t work, because the FBI would want to recover Drexel’s remains as proof.
In February 2019, Brown retold his story to a journalist, but every detail had changed. The FBI knew Taylor had nothing to do with Drexel’s murder – just as SLED agents told them years prior.
“The FBI watched as Taquan Brown’s credibility collapsed, taking with it their own. They ruled Timothy Taylor out as a suspect, but they were careful to keep that a secret,” McKaig’s lawsuit claims.
By not publicly clearing him, Taylor and his family remained the prime suspects in the public eye, and the bullying and death threats continued.
As of the March 26 lawsuit filing, the FBI has yet to apologize or publicly acknowledge that Taylor had no involvement in the tragic, final weekend of Drexel’s life.
“To this day, the only apologies that the Taylors have received were given to them by the people who suffered and lost the most from this long and senseless human tragedy the parents of Brittanee Drexel,” McKaig wrote.
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Adam Benson joined the News13 digital team in January 2024. He is a veteran South Carolina reporter with previous stops at the Greenwood Index-Journal, Post & Courier and The Sun News in Myrtle Beach. Adam is a Boston native and University of Utah graduate. Follow Adam on X, formerly Twitter, at @AdamNewshound12. See more of his work here.
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