Saved from a serial killer
This is the dramatic moment sex slave Kala Brown is finally rescued after being held captive for two months in a shipping container by estate agent Todd Kohlhepp
IT COULD be a scene straight from a cheap horror movie. Police use a power saw to cut through the doors of a metal storage container, creating a shower of sparks. Eventually they break in and discover a young woman cowering in a corner, barely able to move because her arms and neck are chained.
“How are you, honey?” asks one of the stunned rescuers. “We’re going to get you out of here. You’re OK, we’re here.”
So ended the ordeal of 30-yearold Kala Brown – held captive for more than two months by a serial killer in South Carolina. She’d seen her boyfriend shot dead and was raped daily.
Footage of her dramatic release has just been made public by the US authorities after Todd Kohlhepp confessed to seven murders over the past 13 years. He buried some of the bodies, including Kala’s partner Charlie Carver, on his isolated 95-acre farm near the small town of Woodruff.
Kala, who’d gone to the property with Charlie after they answered an advert for a job, was found when her mobile telephone was traced to the area.
In the video, filmed by officers at the time of her rescue last November, she seems remarkably calm as she tells them how her 32-year-old boyfriend was gunned down and wrapped in a blue tarpaulin.
Kala has since spoken of her two-month ordeal and her determination not to let the killer ruin her life. “He bound me and put a chain around my neck,” she told US chat show host Dr Phil.
“I would just tell him that no matter what he did to me he did not break me. He cannot destroy who I am and I won. He tried to crush me but I am not broken.”
She and Charlie had driven to the farm on August 31, expecting to earn extra cash for tidying up the ramshackle site, and were being shown round. Kala had previously cleaned a few homes for Kohlhepp, an estate agent. “He was nice, polite, a regular businessman,” she has recalled. “There was never anything inappropriate.”
Describing how her boyfriend of only a few months was shot four times after Kohlhepp emerged from a garage carrying a gun, Kala added tearfully: “I didn’t realise what was going on.
“Kohlhepp pretty much shot Charlie before he got out the door. I didn’t know what to do. I just stood there. He was completely calm, like nothing had happened.
“He grabbed me and told me to come inside or I would join Charlie.”
KALA told how over the next two months Kohlhepp, 45, gave her food and water inside the rusty container which measured 30ft by 15ft and was camouflaged to conceal it from a nearby road.
Kohlhepp would only unchain her neck, which was secured to the container wall, while she ate or used a bucket he provided for a toilet. She was fed on crackers, cheese and peanut butter, most of the time in total darkness.
Sgt Brandon Letterman, of the local sheriff’s office, says: “It’s horrific that we have a female chained up and sleeping on two dogs’ beds in the back of a container. You almost asked yourself: ‘Did I just walk on to a movie set in Hollywood?’
“I have no doubt if we had not found Kala before long she would have been his eighth victim.”
Kohlhepp has admitted killing a married couple in 2015. Johnny and Meagan Coxie were also lured with a bogus job offer. The 29-year-old husband was killed immediately but like Kala Brown his wife was initially held alive. Kohlhepp said he murdered Meagan, 26, after she tried to burn down the container with cigarettes he’d given her.
He also confessed to a slaughter in the southern US state in 2003. At the Superbike shop in the town of Chesnee he shot owner Scott Ponder, 30, Beverly Guy, 52, Brian Lucas, 30, and Chris Sherbert, 26. The motive appears to have been a minor dispute over a stolen bike.
Kohlhepp, who agreed a deal to avoid the death penalty, got life after admitting seven murders and rape. It has emerged that he moved to South Carolina in 2001 after a 14-year jail term in Arizona for kidnapping and raping a 14-year-old girl at gunpoint as a teenager. A judge said he was “impulsive, explosive and preoccupied with sexual content”.
Kohlhepp tried to cover up the Kala case by posting fake social media messages stating the couple had moved away. But Kala’s mother became suspicious when she discovered that the missing woman had left her pet dog behind at their apartment.
Guns and ammunition were recovered from another property owned by Kohlhepp.
He was granted an estate agent’s licence in 2006, before background checks became compulsory. He held a pilot’s licence and drove a sports car.
In the US, where Kala is being called “the girl in the box”, there’s admiration over how well she seems to be coping following her release on November 4. Only time will tell what mental scars have been caused by her ordeal at the hands of a monster.