Crime Junkie - MISSING: Brittanee Drexel

Episode Date: January 13, 2020

High school junior Brittanee Drexel just wanted to get away for Spring Break and have a good time with her friends in Myrtle Beach. Her mysterious disappearance would frustrate law enforcement and haunt her family for years to come. For more information on human trafficking, visit https://polarisproject.org/ For current Fan Club membership options and policies, please visit https://crimejunkieapp.com/library/. Sources for this episode cannot be listed here due to character limitations. For a full list of sources, please visit https://crimejunkiepodcast.com/missing-brittanee-drexel/ 

Hi Crime Junkies, I'm your host Ashley Flowers. And I'm Britt. And January 11th was Human Trafficking Awareness Day. And in fact, January is now Human Trafficking Awareness Month. So the story I want to tell you today is all about a girl who is believed to have fallen victim to this modern day slavery practice. And this is one of the episodes I think is super important for young people to hear. So parents share with your kids, high school and college students listen close.

Because according to the United Nations International Labor Association, over 40 million people across the world are exploited, trafficked and enslaved with women and girls being disproportionately affected. Human trafficking isn't something that happens far away in poor isolated regions. It can happen anywhere. At any time and anyone, including a high school soccer star on her spring break, can fall victim. This is the story of Brittany Drexel.

Brittany Drexel just wanted to have some fun. Her family life in Rochester, New York, was undergoing some dramatic changes during her junior year of high school. Her parents had recently decided to divorce. Her dad, Chad, who'd adopted her as a little girl after marrying her mom, Dawn, had just moved out of the house. And 17-year-old Brittany was taking it really hard. Now, she normally enjoyed school and she loved being on the soccer team.

But the problems at home were difficult. As she tried not only to navigate these new waters for herself, but also be there for her younger brother and sister through the divorce. Now, her normal spark around this time was just dimmed. But as winter ended and spring break of 2009 got closer, Brittany saw an opportunity to reignite it when a trio of seniors from the high school invited her to go down to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina with them for spring break. Now, this is a big deal to be invited by her.

Now, this is a big deal to be invited by the older kids. This is kind of a tradition for the seniors to go to Myrtle Beach and have a good time before graduation. And Brittany really wants to go. There's just one problem. Her parents won't let her. Dawn is not about to let Brittany take a 14-hour road trip, six states away with a group of kids that she doesn't know with no parental supervision.

And Chad agrees, like, it's not happening. I mean, I'm sure if I were Brittany, I would be upset. But as a mom, I'm also seeing that it's a really good idea not to go. Yeah. But here's the thing. You're right. Brittany is all about this. She doesn't stop asking.

And pretty soon, they're fighting about it all through the weeks leading up to spring break. It's a constant discussion point in our house all the way up until the week of April 20th when Brittany's school let out for vacation. Finally, on April 22nd, Brittany asked Dawn again, because this is when they're planning on leaving, like, mom, can I please go to Myrtle Beach? But Dawn holds firm and their argument comes to a head. And Brittany ends up storming out of the house.

She calls her boyfriend to come pick her up and he takes her over to a friend's house. Now, once she gets there, she calls Dawn to apologize. And of course, along with the apology, asked just one more time. Once again, Dawn says no. She actually did an episode on Brittany's case called The Secret Journey. And Dawn told the producers of that show that she just got a bad feeling about the whole Myrtle Beach thing. And she was kind of sick of Brittany asking. But she got it.

It was spring break. She thinks that, you know, she does need some kind of change of scenery. Some breathing room might not be a bad idea. I mean, it's been a stressful school year with Dawn and Chad separation. It's not easy on anyone. Now that there's this long way to break from school, Brittany suggests a compromise. Brittany says, listen, let me spend spring break at my friend's house. Like I will call you all the time.

I'm going to be around if you need anything. And this seemed like a happy medium. This would like let Brittany get away, but not all the way to South Carolina with a bunch of people. Dawn didn't know. So Dawn says, yes, let me talk to your friend's parents first. And this should be fine. So Brittany hands the phone over to one of her friends parents so Dawn can talk to them for a few minutes. And by the time she hangs up, Dawn feels a lot better because now both she and Brittany can relax.

As the days go by, Brittany keeps up her end of the bargain. She regularly calls Dawn and her cell phone to chat, tell her what she's up to. She says that her and her friend just, you know, taking it easy, hanging at home, watching movies. They even got to go to the beach one day. There's this beach near Lake Ontario, like where they live. And one afternoon it hit like 80 in Rochester, so they went to the beach. Now on April 25th, Brittany calls Dawn and says she'll be home tomorrow, just like agreed. She says she and her friends are watching more movies, all going to stay in nice and relaxing spring break.

Dawn told Eddie Newlands of my horny news that Brittany told her she loved her and she would see her tomorrow before they hung up the phone. She didn't think anything of it at the time. Just as by love you too. Later that night though, Dawn gets a phone call, not from Brittany, but from Brittany's boyfriend, John. And he's a little panicky and he tells Dawn something that infuriates her. Brittany isn't at her friend's house in Rochester. She's actually down in Myrtle Beach at the Bar Harbor Hotel with her older friends, Jen, Phillip, and Elana, right where she's not supposed to be. Now right away, Dawn is so angry.

However, her rage melts away when John tells her not only is Brittany in Myrtle Beach, but he can't get a hold of her. She's stopped responding to his texts over an hour ago and no one can get a hold of her now on the phone. When Dawn realizes that no one knows where Brittany is, an immediate fear sets in. This isn't right. Frantic, Dawn calls Chad and then tries multiple times to call Brittany, only to have her calls go unanswered before eventually they go to voicemail. Once John gets off work, he goes right to Brittany's house and confesses everything to Dawn so she can tell the Rochester police. Now, there's not a lot that police can do from upstate New York, so John and Dawn also call a family friend that they have in North Carolina, who instantly heads south to file a missing persons report with the Myrtle Beach police because that's who they have to file with since that's where she went missing.

Dawn spends an anxious night on the phone with Chad and her parents as they try to coordinate a plan. They're all too worried to even get any rest, but there's still reason to hope, and so they try to focus on the potential positives instead of all of the negatives. The next morning, Dawn, John, and a small group of Brittany's loved ones get up early to begin the long drive from Rochester to Myrtle Beach to try and bring Brittany home. Along the way, John tells them more of the story about how Brittany started off having a great time. She was hanging out with her friends until they started partying too hard and left her isolated. As nice as the weather was, as much as she wanted to be on that trip, John says that Brittany was ready to come home. None of this is really setting in for Dawn by the time they get to Myrtle Beach. It is surreal and awful to think that her baby is missing, yet here they are, hundreds of miles away from home and desperate for answers.

Now that she's in South Carolina, though, she lets the Myrtle Beach police take over in hopes that they'll be able to find Brittany fast. One of the first things police do is they talk to Jen, Alana, and Phillip, those same people that she went down there with. And they also talk to John, her boyfriend, since he was actually the last person known to have been in contact with her. Between the four of them, they want to try and track Brittany's last movements, and here's what they learn. John says that when he was texting her, she tells him that she's not with her group anymore. She'd actually been doing her own thing that day, and she met up with a guy named Peter, who she knew from back home. Now, in the last moments that John was texting her, she told him that she was at the Blue Water Resort hanging out with Peter. Now, according to the police report, when they talked to her friends, they learned that they had asked her to come to their hotel and bring some shorts back that she had borrowed.

So Brittany leaves the Blue Water Resort to go return the shorts to her friends, except she never made it back to their hotel. Knowing that Peter is potentially one of the last people now to have interacted with Brittany, the police naturally want to find him and talk to him. Now, Peter's a little bit older. He's actually already graduated from high school, and he is down in Myrtle Beach with a group of buddies for a spring break trip of his own. And he's actually pretty well known back home in Rochester for being a club promoter and knowing, like, the best spots to have a good time. Here's the scoop, though. When they go look for him, there's a problem. He is gone. According to the Myrtle Beach police report, investigators go to the Blue Water Resort to talk to Peter and his friends only to find that they left in a hurry at about 2 o'clock on the morning of April 26, just hours after Brittany went missing the night before. Their stuff is still in their room, and they didn't even bother to get their deposit back. Yeah, that's super sketchy, especially if you don't have anything to hide.

Right, but here's the thing. It's not like he was on the run. Peter had actually gone right back home to Rochester, so they were able to track him down. But as soon as he got home, he immediately got a lawyer, which raises some eyebrows for the friends and family and everyone involved. Now, that Blue Water Resort where he was at, though, isn't a total dead end. Since Peter was staying with a group of friends, the hotel is able to pass all of their names and contact information over to police who can get in touch with them before they lawyer up like Peter did. Now, Peter's four friends are named in the police report as Anthony, Matthew, Keith, and Phillip. And they all say that they met Brittany at a club on the 24th, and then they saw her again the next day at the beach, and she walked to their hotel later that night to hang out with Peter. But according to them, she only stayed about 10 minutes and then left to go return Jen Shorts, which matches the story police were hearing from Brittany's friends. So the Myrtle Beach police request the Blue Water Security footage to look for timestamps and to see if the boy's story matches up with the footage. Now, once they're able to get the tapes, they see Brittany leaving the resort at 8.48pm on the 25th, right in line with the boy's time frame.

Now, the police keep combing over the tapes. There's Brittany going in, there she is again, going back out, timestamp 8.48 when she leaves, then just nothing. You said that she's going from one hotel to the other, right? Yes. Was there any sign of her on like traffic cams or, you know, security between the two places? No, not really. So there's this shot of her from 8.15pm when she's heading south on Ocean Boulevard on her way to the Blue Water Resort where Peter and his friends stayed. Now, Brittany left Peter's hotel to go back to Bar Harbor, drop Jen Shorts off, and then turn around and go back to the Blue Water Resort, but she never made it to Bar Harbor in the first place. So sometimes somewhere along that mile and a half stretch between the two hotels, Brittany disappeared. And there was no other footage of her, at least not that police had ever released.

So to continue to find her, police pull her cell phone records because they knew she was using her phone like up until the time she went missing. So they're eager for any scrap of information about who else she might have talked to or what she might have been doing or even if they can track it. And what they find takes Dawn down a much darker path. Once police get ahold of Brittany's cell phone records, they're able to trace its last ping, not to Myrtle Beach where she was last seen, but to its cell tower over 50 miles to the south near McClellanville. This is down in Georgetown County, South Carolina. Now, this is a super rural area near the South Sandy River that's covered in swamp land. Like it's hot, it's muggy, full of alligators, snakes, wild boars, like you name it.

And there's no way like her family is like, you're not going to find some upstate teenager from New York on spring break hanging out here on her own unless she had been brought there against her will. And this is when a darker thought crosses the mind of Brittany's mom and those close to her. Perhaps she had become a victim of human trafficking. And at first it didn't seem possible. Like that doesn't happen here. It doesn't happen to people like us, like other people, other places far away. But that's the thing, you guys, it can happen everywhere to every type of person and no one is immune. Like it's so interesting telling this story.

I feel like I'm smack dab in the middle. Like when I tell it, I feel like I was Brittany five minutes ago. I was 17 and I remember I wanted to do everything and like I was so mature. And my mom used to say this thing to me all the time. She was like, it's not that I don't trust you. I don't trust anybody else. I don't trust people. I don't know.

I don't trust strangers. I don't trust anyone else. And it used to infuriate me and it's so weird being on the other side of this. Like I don't have kids, but I am now in my 30s and I so side with her mom and it's so hard. I don't know how you communicate that to teenagers. I don't know how I would have gotten it through my head. And that's why I hope like anyone listening, like your mom isn't crazy. It is real.

Like it's not you. It is this whole world of other people out there. Even before I had kids, like going on girls trips or bachelorette parties, being like counting our heads and making sure we're all together and making sure no one's talking to anybody sketchy. Getting older really does make me side with the mom 100% more than I did with my own mom growing up. Yeah. And I just want to like grab all of our like young listeners in like a bear hug and be like, let's just please listen to your moms, listen to us.

Like it's no one wants you to have a bad time or not be a part of things. This is such a scary world we live in. And what we're talking about today is happening everywhere. It's happening in people's back yard. Like I'm not kidding when I say it's not far and away. It happens here in Indiana all the time and it can happen to you. So please just be smart out there, kids. So now Dawn is faced with this new reality.

Like her daughter is in a completely foreign place. Maybe something happened to her and maybe someone took her against her will. Did Dawn think that Brittany just got like scooped up off the street? Like it was in the middle of the day, right? Yeah. And that's actually not what she thought, but it totally could happen like that. I mean, again, we have to get away from what we think is normal or not. But her mom thinks it was maybe more subtle.

She wondered if Brittany had been deceived into willingly going with a trafficker. Dawn told my horny news that maybe she thought someone had offered Brittany a modeling job as a lure. Because according to Dawn, Brittany had thought about modeling in the past and she thinks maybe that would just be like an easy way to get her to go with them. And this is interesting because the more I was reading up on human trafficking, I found the Polaris Project and they're this huge nonprofit whose mission is to fight and end modern slavery. And their website says that making a fake job offer is a really common trafficking tactic. So while Dawn is becoming more and more convinced that this is what could have happened to her daughter,

the Myrtle Beach police are pretty adamant that Brittany wasn't trafficked because they say on that disappeared special quote, quote, we've got no history. We've had nothing prior or since, end quote. But that is not the reality of human trafficking. Even though this episode first aired in 2010, just a year after Brittany vanished, human trafficking is very much an in-plane site crime that is chronically underreported. And as Tori Gessner reported for WTW News in 2019, not only is South Carolina one of the country's top 20 trafficking hubs,

but Horry County, where Myrtle Beach is, is one of the state's most affected trafficking locations. Well, and on top of that, saying it didn't happen because it doesn't happen here is not a good excuse. Yeah, and also like kind of bearing your head in the sand to say, like you're saying, it never happened. So it definitely couldn't have happened here. And, you know, since then, nothing has happened like that is clearly not accurate. I know it's probably kind of weird to say, but it also makes sense for a really touristy area like Myrtle Beach to be, you know, a trafficking hotspot. No, it totally does.

There are more people coming in and out of town. There are like different behavior patterns. So it's easier. You don't have regulars. You don't have locals. Yeah, it's easier not to stand out. And also the heightened demand for labor and like the hospitality sector brings like a bunch of people to the town. And I was also reading in the UN's International Labor Association website that trafficking victims are forced into all kinds of stuff like participation in commercial sex industry, domestic servitude.

So it's not even just like this one type of thing. Now, Dawn told disappeared in 2010 that she worried Brittany was being forced into non-consensual sex work, but she kept searching, helping Brittany's father Chad pass out flyers, talking to police and praying that the searchers turn up a single clue in their efforts to find her daughter. So though they may have disagreed in the early days about why Brittany was missing and who took her, the police in the family had the common goal of finding her. Investigators started to search the cell tower that her phone pinged on. They thought basically they could use that as a range to give them some kind of guidelines about where to look.

Now, despite the miserable search conditions, this is a big operation. And lots of volunteers and multiple counties like came together like pooled their resources to try and do anything they could to find Brittany. But days go by in those swamps and eventually the searchers are forced to admit the truth. There's no sign of Brittany here and the case begins to cool off slowly and eventually gets ice cold. Then in mid-December of 2009, eight months after Brittany vanished, an anonymous tip gets phoned in. Police are reluctant to give the media any details about the tip specifics, but they take it seriously enough to resume the search in the swamp areas close to where they were looking months before. But this time they're looking on the banks of the Santee River just north of their original search radius.

And this time they catch a break. They find a pair of sunglasses laying on the riverbank. Now, Dawn and Chad don't recognize the glasses and neither does Brittany's boyfriend, John, but that doesn't mean she didn't buy a pair when she was down there. So they're hoping that maybe they can get some kind of DNA off of them. But heartbreakingly, there's nothing on the sunglasses. It's just another dead end and the case goes cold again. It takes a couple of more months until something happens.

April 9, 2010, Dawn's hopes are lifted when seemingly out of nowhere, police announced they have several persons of interest. Now, they're deliberately vague on the details in the media and they withhold names even from the Drexel family, but no arrests are ever made. So once again, it leads nowhere but to disappointment. Now, in 2012- Wait, I feel like you've glossed over a lot here. Like, who are these people of interest?

Were there arrests? Like, what's going on? Well, no, they never made arrests. And this is like the frustrating part. I don't have answers to like who they are, how they got on the radar, why they're, you know, being announced as person of interest never led to being called a suspect or an arrest. Dawn says that police are super vague and they barely told her anything. So she just gets these tiny glimmers of hope and then nothing.

So the next glimmer of hope that she got was in 2012. A man named Raymond Moody, who was a South Carolina sex offender with convictions for rape, kidnapping, kidnapping and loot acts on a child under 14 years old, is announced as a new person of interest. But this is another dead end and Raymond is never definitively connected to Brittany's disappearance. Now, the years go by, Brittany's little siblings grow up, Dawn eventually moves down to South Carolina to be closer to the investigation and keep the pressure on police. Then on June 8th, 2016, the FBI confirms the Drexel's worst fears. Brittany is deceased.

David Lorre reported for the Huffington Post that the FBI special agent in charge of South Carolina makes the announcement at a press conference near where Brittany's phone last pinged, basically saying that the FBI believes that Brittany traveled to that area and that she was killed there. Wait, like how, how do they know that she's deceased? Like there's been nothing for years at this point. Well, it turns out that the FBI had new information and their new information changed everything. In 2016, a man named Taquan Brown, who was a convict doing time for manslaughter in a case totally unrelated to Brittany's, tells a story straight out of every parent's nightmares.

As recounted by an FBI agent in the U.S. District Court records, Taquan says that back in 2009, he went to a stash house, which is basically someplace to store drugs or cash or other illicit stuff, in this McClellanville, South Carolina, where Brittany's phone last pinged. So according to him, he went to this house to give some money to a man named Sean Taylor. And while he was there, he saw Sean's 16-year-old son, Timothy DeSean, sexually assaulting a teenage girl with a black eye in a room full of other men. That girl, Taquan claims, was Brittany Drexel.

According to the testimony transcript, Don's hunch about trafficking was right because not only did Timothy pick Brittany up, but he also offered her around to his friends, getting into what the FBI calls human trafficking situation in court, and he was selling her against her will for sex. So Taquan says that he saw Brittany a couple of days after she vanished and that while he was at the stash house, he saw her try to escape and he tells the FBI that she made a break for it only to be brought back and brutally pistol whipped. Now Taquan says that he then heard shots after Brittany was taken back into the house

and assumed she'd been killed. The FBI agent recounting Taquan's story on the stand says that, quote, several witnesses told them that Brittany's body was taken away and thrown into an alligator pit. Now of course, hearing this, Don is beyond heartbroken. Like there are things no parent ever wants to hear. And then there's this, you know, like this is a whole different level of gruesome. And it's all but it's so horrific. Yeah, and it's all but impossible to cope with.

But the images of her oldest child's last days play in her head like a horror movie again and again, only reinforcing her need to find answers. Now the only thing she can take comfort in though is that Timothy Taylor, who is sometimes referred to by his middle name to Sean, is well on police's radar and they know right where he is. Because Timothy, as it turns out, is already in jail. What's he in jail for? Well, this is where things start to get a little murky. So back in 2011, Timothy and a group of guys decided to rob a McDonald's

and Timothy acted as their getaway driver. Now the robbery didn't go well, they all got caught and Timothy was given probation. Now, typically once a sentence is completed, that's that. But in 2016, Timothy's arrested again on federal charges related to the same robbery. Wait, so they're charging him again for a crime that he already served time for? Isn't that double jeopardy? So that's what I thought too. And that's what Timothy's lawyer argues.

But I was reading Drew Tripp's piece from ABC News 4 about this legal concept called separated sovereigns, which basically says that states are completely separate entities from federal government. So since Timothy had been convicted by the state in 2011, it's actually not double jeopardy for the federal government to come along in 2016 and arrest him again for the same crime. Like it's unusual, but apparently not illegal. So now federal prosecutors are arguing that even though Timothy pled guilty for his role in the McDonald's robbery, he got such a light sentence that they want to bring him up on federal charges that carry some much harsher sentences

all the way up to life in prison. So no deals like nothing. That is unless Timothy can give them some more information about what happened to Brittany Drexel. Okay, so let me get this straight. They're basically threatening to charge him again with a potentially harsher sentence, but it's more than likely just to get more information on Brittany's case. Exactly. Now, Timothy claims he has no idea what happened to Brittany and that he only knows her from the news

because her case was such a big deal. Now, his lawyers, meanwhile, argue that this is all a ploy by desperate law enforcement officials on their last leg of a case that they can't solve. I mean, it definitely feels like they're trying to squeeze some sort of information out of him, but they have to believe that Tequan is credible for them to go through all of this, right? Well, right. Tequan claims to have passed a polygraph test and we know from the FBI's testimony that they did talk to other witnesses who corroborate at least some of Tequan's statements,

but I mean, there's still no trace of Brittany's remains, even after renewed search efforts through the alligator habitats in and around this area that they said they left her in. I mean, if alligators is what they're thinking, like, would there even be anything to find? No, you know, I probably not. I would be, but I think this just shows you how seriously that they were taking it, that they would even go look for them, even if they thought they weren't going to find anything. Now, according to court documents from 2018,

part of Timothy's plea bargain for the federal charges involves a reduced sentence if he can pass a polygraph test. So he's hooked up to the machine and the person administering the test asked if he knows who was involved in Brittany's disappearance. Timothy says, no, I don't know. The administrator moves on. Did you, Timothy, ever see Brittany in person? Again, Timothy says, no.

Both times, the machine registered deceit indicating that Timothy is lying and he failed the polygraph. As a result, there's no incentive for the court to lower Timothy's sentence and now there's nothing for Dawn to do but wait since this feels like the most tangible lead they've had in seven long, miserable years. While she waits and prays for justice, more information emerges with some truly disturbing connotations. When Taquan Brown tells the FBI he'd witnessed what happened to Brittany Drexel,

he specifically mentions both Timothy Taylor and his dad, Sean. Now, what he doesn't mention and honestly probably doesn't know is Sean's criminal history. So it turns out back in 2010, about a year after Brittany disappeared, Sean was arrested and charged for, get this, trying to kidnap another young woman from the same spot where Brittany vanished right on Ocean Boulevard near the Bluewater Resort. What? Not only that, but as Graham Moore reported for ABC News 15,

Sean's brother, Randall, who would be Timothy's uncle, was also arrested and charged back in 2001 for connections to the death and disappearance of yet another missing young woman, 19-year-old Shannon McConaughey. Now, she vanished in January 1998 after leaving a Cracker Bell restaurant in North Charleston, South Carolina, and she was found dead in March of 1998 after being raped, murdered, and dumped in the woods near McClellanville where Brittany's phone last pinged. Now, the charges against Sean and Randall were eventually dismissed in both cases,

but I am seeing a creepy family trend here. The fact that you're even connected to multiple cases like this is very bizarre. Right. And not only that, if Taquan's story is to be believed, then his own family is full of its own deep dysfunction because according to interviews that he gave to Brett Davidson and others at WHEC News 10, in the spring of 2019, Brittany wasn't murdered in McClellanville. She was murdered about 130 miles south of Myrtle Beach,

in the woods near Jacksonboro, South Carolina, at a trailer belonging to Taquan's uncle, Herman. So he's basically saying that this poor girl got passed around from place to place to place. Yeah, and you know, the more I researched about this story and was writing this story, it kind of reminds me of like the Lloyd Lee Welch thing where, I mean, there are different scenarios, but how, it's like this whole family who seems... It's like a network almost. Yeah, who seems to be involved. Now, Taquan says that the last time he saw Brittany alive, she was at Herman's.

And this is a few days after he saw her at the Taylor Stash House. And he said when he saw her, it seemed like she'd been drugged. So in total, he says he saw her four times at both the Stash House and out of his uncle Herman's trailer before she was killed. Now, here's the thing. He says he's not the only one to have seen her and that a group of his acquaintances have all seen Brittany when she was alive being held captive. I guess who is he like accusing of killing her?

Like there's so many people involved at this point. So he's actually not accusing his family. Not Sean, not Timothy, not Herman. According to Taquan, it's actually one of these acquaintances who'd seen her. He says it's a guy named Nate, just Nate, no last name. And no one, anyone has ever been able to track down. So according to Taquan, Nate shot Brittany in May of 2009 and her body was buried before being retrieved and tossed to alligators.

He's the FBI several months to go out and search Herman's trailer after these new revelations. And Dawn is furious at the delay. Like what is the holdup? Now, Herman died back in like 2016 and the property was still vacant. So she's like, you know, has no idea why. Like why aren't we just going there? I don't feel like you'd have to get a warrant. Right.

Like there's no reason for delay. Yeah. But as NBC News 10 reported last summer, the FBI might not be so confident about Taquan Brown anymore. While some of his story checks out, there are still big gaps missing. Like the other witnesses that he claims saw Brittany. Now, there's also his most recent polygraph test, which he took in May of 2019, which by his own admission to NBC News 10 ended with investigators telling him he's holding back information. You know, this raises a lot of questions for me and I'm sure it raised even more for the FBI.

And it kind of might be a big contributing factor as to why, as of this recording, Timothy Deshaun Taylor has never been charged with any crimes related to Brittany's disappearance. He was finally sentenced on December 9th of 2019 to 18 months probation and time served for that 2011 McDonald's robbery. But what Dawn hoped would finally give her the truth seems to be stalling yet again. And the resolution she craves appears to be no closer. Even though she spent the last few years advocating in the fight against human trafficking, the pain of Brittany's loss and the questions left behind are still as present as ever without having found any tangible trace of Brittany.

And she is still very much a missing person to this day. And I really want her story to be for something like Dawn has taken to advocacy and it's so important because I'm telling you guys, this stuff is happening all around you. It could be happening to someone you know right now because here's the other thing too. People don't just get picked up and swooped away. You never see them again. Like in Brittany's case, sometimes people can be trafficked and you still see them every day and they're under someone else's control. And looking at Brittany's case, I think we think of trafficking too as like, okay, you get like picked up off the street

or someone finds you by like running into you on the street or somewhere where you're not supposed to be or whatever. But that's not how it happens at all. Like first of all, we see trafficking in kids as young as 12 years old. And according to the New York Post, many of these traffickers are contacting kids and young adults through social media. Like they'll actually make a profile, request a bunch of kids all from the same school so it looks legit. And that's how they get in. Then they find kids who are looking for some type of caregiver or some craving something from a relationship. Some validation, yeah.

Yeah, they flatter them, they make them feel important. And then slowly and methodically, they brainwash them right there in their own home. Sometimes at the dinner table with mom and dad. Like these bad guys aren't just out there on the streets anymore, they're in our pockets. And I know we think this could never happen to us, but it happens to so many of us. And I'm going to link out to that New York Post article because it's really good and it outlines some of the tactics used by traffickers. And I'm also going to link to the organization Polaris who has a ton of resources for victims of human trafficking and even for people who haven't been trafficked because it's just as important that we know what to look for.

Right. Additionally, we're going to make a donation to Polaris to continue to fund their work. And we would encourage all of you to find a local organization of your own that is working to put an end to trafficking or to support the victims. I think you will be shocked to find that it really is happening in your own backyard. If you'd like to donate to the Polaris project or to learn more about how you can help in the fight against human trafficking and modern slavery, check out PolarisProject.org. And if you want to see any of the pictures or sources we use for this case, you can find all of that on our website crimejunkiepodcast.com. And be sure to follow us on Instagram at crimejunkiepodcast.

We'll be back next week with a brand new episode. Crimejunkie is an audio check production. So what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?