On April 25, 2009, a 17-year-old girl from Upstate New York disappeared while on spring break in Myrtle Beach, S.C. It was a high-profile case, and it seemed as though investigators had no good leads. But seven years after Brittanee Drexel went missing, authorities said they believed they knew what had happened to her: She had been abducted, gang-raped, shot to death and thrown into an alligator-infested pit. The FBI named Timothy Taylor, a young Black man, as a person of interest.
Timothy Taylor is innocent. The FBI owes him an apology.
It is now clear that Mr. Taylor had nothing to do with the disappearance, as he has consistently insisted. Last month, authorities found Ms. Drexel’s body after they said Raymond Moody, a 62-year-old White man and registered sex offender, confessed to raping and killing her and revealed where her remains were. “We are much closer to the closure and the peace that we have been desperately hoping for,” the girl’s mother said.
No closure or peace exists for the Taylor family. “We’re not relieved. We’re enraged that it took this long,” Mr. Taylor’s mother, Joan, said at a news conference, describing how the unfounded allegations — which also falsely implicated her husband, Mr. Taylor’s father — had damaged the family emotionally and financially. “We were called monsters, we lost jobs, we got death threats,” Ms. Taylor said.
Mr. Taylor was never charged in the disappearance, but the FBI certainly tried. Federal investigators made Mr. Taylor their prime suspect based solely on the account of a jailhouse informant who claimed to have been present when the girl was killed. There was no evidence the informant, who had recently been sentenced to 20 years in prison, knew the Taylors. Jailhouse informants have an incentive to lie to get lighter sentences or better jail conditions. Nonetheless, federal authorities leaned on Mr. Taylor. They took the unusual step of charging Mr. Taylor federally for an armed robbery for which he had already served a state sentence. His attorney characterized the move as “putting the screws to him” in hopes of getting him to confess and implicate his father.
But Mr. Taylor steadfastly maintained his innocence, explaining that he was 16 and in class the day the girl disappeared. Think what might have happened if he had not been able to withstand the pressure: a false confession, innocent people wrongly jailed, and no apparent hope of finding the person who actually committed the crime. As it is, this family lived for six years under the accusation they committed a sadistic murder; such damage doesn’t go away overnight. Compounding the injury, they learned about Mr. Moody’s arrest through the media and have yet to receive an apology.
A spokesman for the FBI “respectfully declined” to comment on the case. Having chosen to make the accusation against Mr. Taylor public, authorities need to answer questions — about what went wrong and what steps they will take to prevent future character assassinations. Meanwhile, the reporters and media organizations who furthered the fiction must do some soul-searching, too.
Source: WP
