Solved cold cases in South Carolina
3 documented cases.
Brittanee Drexel
Brittanee Drexel, 17, from the Rochester, New York, area, went to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, on spring break in April 2009 after her mother told her she could not go. She was last seen on April 25, 2009, in front of the Blue Water Resort on Ocean Boulevard. Her phone last pinged near the North Santee River, 46 miles away, and searches over the next decade found nothing. Raymond Moody, a registered sex offender who received a traffic ticket in Surfside Beach the next day, was named a person of interest in 2012 but was not charged. In 2016 the FBI offered a reward and described a different theory, built on jailhouse informants, that produced no charges. The break came in April 2022, when investigators interviewed Moody's girlfriend and she said she still had her phone from 2009. A search of the home followed, and Moody's lawyer contacted authorities the same day. On May 4, 2022, Moody was taken into custody on an obstruction charge, confessed, and led investigators to a shallow grave in Georgetown County. Remains recovered on May 11 were identified as Brittanee's by dental records, with DNA analysis corroborating. On October 19, 2022, Moody pleaded guilty to murder, kidnapping and criminal sexual conduct and was sentenced to life in prison plus two consecutive 30-year terms.
John Orner
John Orner, 63, a Columbia, South Carolina taxi driver who worked the soldier trade at Fort Jackson, took a dispatch to the post's NCO club at 11:15 p.m. on February 28, 1961 and never came home. His bloodied cab was found on Assembly Street the next morning and his body two days later beside Highway 601 in lower Richland County, shot once in the head from behind, his pockets pulled out. The same day he disappeared, an 18-year-old Fort Jackson private from Indiana, Edward Freiburger, had bought a .32 Harrington and Richardson revolver at a Main Street pawn shop; a month later a Tennessee trooper found the loaded gun on him while he was hitchhiking, absent without leave. The state laboratory tested that gun and a second .32 H and R taken from a local man's house; its head examiner could not identify Freiburger's gun and, according to a 1961 letter from the SLED chief to J. Edgar Hoover, believed the other gun had killed the driver. No one was charged. The sheriff's volunteer cold-case squad reopened the file in 1999, five SLED examiners again found the comparison inconclusive, and a private examiner hired by the sheriff declared a match. Freiburger was convicted of murder on August 1, 2002 and sentenced to life. In 2015 the South Carolina Court of Appeals set the conviction aside because his lawyers never showed the jury the 1961 letter. Freed on bond in 2016, he entered an Alford plea to voluntary manslaughter in June 2017, maintaining his innocence, and was released for time served at 74.
Ronald Eugene Woodham IV
On December 4, 2008, utility workers found the body of a newborn boy abandoned in a wooded area near Conway, in Horry County, South Carolina. He had been born alive and, according to the coroner, could have survived with medical attention; instead he died of exposure. Unidentified, he was buried under the name 'Baby Boy Horry.' The case stayed cold for more than a decade until investigative genetic genealogy by the Texas lab Othram identified the infant's parents. His mother, Jennifer Sahr, formerly Jennifer Rickel, a Coastal Carolina University student at the time of the birth, was arrested in March 2020 and charged with homicide by child abuse. In September 2022 she pleaded guilty to the reduced charge of voluntary manslaughter and was sentenced in 2023. The infant was later given the name Ronald Eugene Woodham IV by his biological father.