Kidnapping suspect confesses to killing 7
Body found on S.C. site ID’d as victim’s boyfriend
WOODRUFF, S.C. — The man arrested after authorities found a woman chained on his property in rural South Carolina killed at least seven people, and his confessions have solved a 13-year-old case, Sheriff Chuck Wright said Saturday.
Todd Kohlhepp confessed he was the shooter who killed four people at a motorcycle shop in Spartanburg County in 2003, Wright said.
Wright says Kohlhepp also showed law enforcement officers Saturday the gravesites of two of his other victims buried on his 95-acre property near Woodruff.
That’s in addition to the body found Friday at the site. Wright and Coroner Rusty Clevenger identified that victim as 32-year-old Charles Carver, the boyfriend of the woman found in a locked metal container Thursday.
Wright says “God answered our prayers” in solving the 13-year-old cold case.
The sheriff says it’s possible more bodies will be uncovered. ‘Devil on a chain’
When he was 15 and facing charges he raped a neighbor after forcing her into his home at gunpoint and tying her up, Kohlhepp’s father told court officials the only emotion the teen was capable of showing was anger, and a neighbor called him a “devil on a chain.”
Fifteen years after he was released from prison for that crime, Spartanburg County deputies were brought to his property by the last known cellphone signals of two missing people. On Thursday, they found a woman chained in a container for two months. She told investigators that Kohlhepp shot and killed her boyfriend in front of her
The Associated Press is not naming the woman because the suspect is a sex offender, though authorities have not said whether she was sexually assaulted.
Carver died of multiple gunshot wounds. An anthropologist is helping determine how long Carver was buried, said Coroner Rusty Clevenger. He declined to say how many times Carver had been shot.
Kohlhepp is charged with kidnapping the woman. Authorities say more charges are coming. Raped a 14-year-old
It was an abrupt, but perhaps not unexpected turn for a man who spent his 20s in prison but after his release managed to get a private pilot license, build a real estate firm with more than a dozen agents and buy nearly 100 acres of land and erect a fence around it said to have cost $80,000.
As a teen, Kohlhepp was cold and callous. He went to his 14-year-old rape victim’s house after talking to her parents and making sure they wouldn’t be home. He was smart, an- gry and felt the world owed him something, his chief probation officer wrote in court papers in Arizona in 1987.
“It is this type of individual, one with little or no conscience, who presents the greatest risk to the community,” the officer wrote in the papers obtained by WHNS-TV.
Police said Kohlhepp had a crush on the 14-yearold girl, who was friendly, but not romantic toward him. After raping her, he said he would kill her 6-year-old and 3-year-old siblings that she was babysitting if she called the police. His first question to officers when he was arrested was how long he was going to have to spend in prison, according to court papers. Mother defended him
In South Carolina, neighbor Ron Owen said Kohlhepp was very private, but when they did talk across the fence, he was a “big bragger.”
Kohlhepp liked to talk about the money he made day trading online, for example, and about his two BMWs.
“We didn’t see any signs whatsoever that this was going on,” Owen said. “My first reaction’s a baseball bat, but I know I’m not to take that in my own hands. God will deal with him.”
But even as his father felt he couldn’t be helped, court records show Kohlhepp’s still had one supporter in 1987 — his mother.
She wrote a letter asking the judge to send Kohlhepp to his grandparents instead of prison.
“He even walked the girl home,” she wrote. “Does that sound like a dangerous criminal?”