False FBI Tip About Black Man Feeding Girl to Alligators Ruined Lives

• A false jailhouse tip about a Black father and son in South Carolina ruined their lives for years.
• For 13 years, Shaun and Timothy Taylor were wrongly tied to the 2009 murder of Brittannee Drexel.
• The FBI trusted a phony jailhouse tip for years and in 2022, the real killer was sentenced.

For 13 years, a false accusation about a gruesome rape and murder in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, haunted a Black family and destroyed the fabric of their daily lives.

A deeply-reported piece by local journalist Isaac Bailey in The Charlotte Observer details the years after Shaun Taylor, 55, and his son Timothy Taylor, 26, were falsely accused of the 2009 murder of a white, 17-year-old girl, Brittanee Drexel, who was killed while on a spring break trip.

Shaun Taylor, a McClellanville, South Carolina, native was never formally charged with the murder. But a year after Drexel’s disappearance, frenzied media and true crime enthusiasts publicized links between Drexel’s case and an unrelated kidnapping charge against Shaun Taylor, which was eventually dismissed.

His name remained associated with the crime, however. And in 2016, a jailhouse informant fed the FBI a phony tip, which led them to publically name father Shaun Taylor and his son Timothy Taylor in the Drexel case — further plunging the Taylor family into years of turmoil and outside harassment.

How the misinformation spread

The informant detailed an outlandish allegation that the Taylors were involved in a drug and sex trafficking operation in a stash house where Drexel was present, and no evidence was presented to back it up, according to The Observer reporter.

“The jailhouse informant told the FBI he was at the stash house to conduct a drug deal with Shaun Taylor,” Bailey wrote. “He saw Drexel run out of the house, get caught, and pistol-whipped, he told the FBI. As he was leaving, he heard gunshots, assumed Drexel had been killed, possibly by Shaun Taylor, then saw what he believed was Drexel’s body wrapped in a carpet he believed was taken to an alligator pit, the informant claimed.”

According to ABC4 News, at a June 2016 press conference, the FBI Special Agent in Charge in South Carolina said that they were following a lead in McClellanville regarding Drexel.

“We believe she traveled to this area around McClellanville, the North Charleston, south Georgetown area, and we believe that she was killed after that,” the agent said in the press conference, per The Observer. Media that obtained the Taylors’ names mentioned by investigators during a detention hearing helped publicize the allegation, according to The Observer.

The FBI declined to comment on the matter to Insider. The South Carolina office pointed Insider to a May 2022 statement that the FBI “followed multiple leads to wherever they led us, based on the information we had at the time. We have an obligation to follow leads to their conclusion.”

The generational effects

The family slipped below the poverty line in the years that followed. Joan Taylor, Timothy Taylor’s mother and Shaun Taylor’s wife, was fired from her job months after the accusation became public. Without the income to address a black mold growth in their home, her asthma and lungs worsened. Shaun Taylor’s towing company was unable to secure work in his hometown or in neighboring towns.

“Money for us was real scarce,” Joan Taylor told The Observer. The whole family suffered, with Timothy’s sister Shaunleese saying she was hounded on social media.

“It really does take a toll on you. It really plays with your mind,” Shaunleese Taylor told The Observer, adding that she once overheard colleagues at her job joke about “the Black guy who fed that white girl to alligators.”

Shaun Taylor contemplated confessing simply to end the intense scrutiny his family had been under for no reason.

“If I admit to it, they’ll leave my kids alone,” Shaun Taylor said to his lawyer in 2016, according to The Observer.

“Shaun Taylor’s is an extreme illustration of the devil’s bargain Black people often face,” Bailey wrote, “as we grapple with how best to protect ourselves against systemic problems: blame ourselves because it’s the only way to mitigate the damage and claim some semblance of control, or stand firm knowing such defiance or resilience can produce a different kind of damage.”

The truth comes out

By May 2022, Raymond Moody confessed to law enforcement that he invited Drexel into his van near Myrtle Beach to procure weed, where he raped and killed her, later burying her body. In October 2022, Moody was sentenced to life in prison, and called himself a “monster.”

Afterward, the Drexel and Taylor family had a bittersweet reconciliation, according to The Observer.

“For 13 years, others were blamed for your actions, and for that I am sorry for all they have endured,” Drexel mother Dawn Pleckan, said during the sentencing hearing, addressing Moody. The Drexel family has also sued Moody in a civil suit, for intentional infliction of emotional distress.

Timothy Taylor told The Observer he no longer travels alone because of how he and his father had been cast by the FBI in the last six years, and the enduring stigma he feels from strangers.

“You know the movie ’12 Years A Slave?'” Shaun Taylor told the Observer. “Living under that stuff, it felt like 13 years a slave.”