John Jefferson
Left: Brittanee Drexel. Right: Raymond Moody (Georgetown County Sheriff’s Office); Inset: Angel Vause (15th Circuit Solicitor’s Office).
The girlfriend of a child rapist who killed a 17-year-old girl on vacation in South Carolina has admitted to lying to the FBI.
Angel Vause, 56, pleaded guilty on Monday to three counts of making false statements to federal agents, according to court records. As Law&Crime previously reported, Vause’s boyfriend, Raymond Moody, was convicted in October 2022 of kidnapping, raping, and murdering Brittanee Drexel in April 2009 as the teen was on spring break in Myrtle Beach. The case had gone cold for years, but Moody turned himself in to authorities in 2022, not long after Drexel’s remains were discovered.
Moody told authorities that he and Vause had picked up Drexel, originally from upstate New York, when she was walking alone. Vause, during a May 2022 interview, gave a different account, according to the indictment, telling FBI investigators that she had gone to someone’s house “to get keys from a truck ring” while Drexel “was being assaulted and killed” by Moody. She had also allegedly told FBI agents that Drexel kept her cellphone on her throughout the ordeal when, in fact, the older woman took the girl’s phone from her and then discarded it somewhere in between Georgetown and Charleston, the indictment says.
Vause also reportedly told investigators Drexel “voluntarily joined” her and Moody on the night in question to “consume marijuana and cocaine” — but in reality, the girl was “abducted under false pretenses.”
Her guilty plea was entered Monday without a plea agreement, the docket notes. She was taken into federal custody.
Vause was indicted on the federal charges in March, and the guilty plea comes after months of apparent back and forth over how the case would proceed. In August, Vause appeared poised to plead guilty but withdrew in the final minutes of the plea hearing over confusion as to the potential sentence and signaled an intent to go to trial, according to local NBC affiliate WMBF. However, according to the federal docket, Monday’s change of plea hearing was added to the docket on Sept. 3, indicating yet another change of heart on Vause’s part.
The plea is another chapter in the case that has taken more than a decade to be solved.
On the night of April 25, 2009, Moody kidnapped Drexel and raped her, strangled her to death along the Santee River and then buried her body about four feet deep at a location on Old Town Avenue in Harmony Township, an HOA neighborhood in Georgetown. The girl was only identifiable by her dental records. The case was cold for years, with law enforcement — relying on witness testimony — determining that Drexel had been sexually assaulted and fed to alligators.
After Moody’s confession, that theory was abandoned.
Moody had previously been incarcerated for over two decades after being convicted of raping and kidnapping a child under the age of 14.
“I served 20 years and I thought it was enough, but it wasn’t,” Moody said during his sentencing for Drexel’s death. “I was a monster then, and I was a monster when I took Brittanee Drexel’s life.”
Vause faces up to 24 years behind bars. The federal docket did not indicate a sentencing date.
Alberto Luperon and Colin Kalmbacher contributed to this report.
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