Sex offender who chained up woman killed at least seven, say police
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 on Saturday.
Todd Kohlhepp confessed he was the shooter who killed four people at a motorcycle shop in Spartanburg County in 2003, Wright said.
“God is good,” he said. The community is no longer wondering who’s responsible for the “four people who were brutally murdered”.
Body found at home of South Carolina sex offender as kidnap details emerge
His confession came one day before the 13th anniversary of the deaths of the owner, the service manager, the mechanic and the bookkeeper of Superbike Motorsports in Chesnee.
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When Kohlhepp 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 Kohlhepp was released from prison for that crime, Spartanburg County deputies were brought to his property by the last known cell phone 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.
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Kohlhepp is charged with kidnapping the woman.
Authorities say more charges are coming.
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 licence, build a real estate firm with more than a dozen agents and buy land and erect a fence around it, said to have cost $80,000.
On that land, dozens of officers continued to search on Saturday for any additional bodies after the woman told investigators Kohlhepp claimed to have killed at least four others.
As a teen, Kohlhepp was said to be 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, angry and felt the world owed him something, his chief probation officer wrote in court papers in Arizona in 1987.
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The 45-year-old had to register as a sex offender after his release from prison in Arizona.
But that didn’t stop him from becoming an apparently successful real estate agent.
Kohlhepp followed the rules and admitted he had a felony conviction when he applied for his real estate license in 2006.
But his letter explaining the charge was full of lies.
He said he argued with his girlfriend, police were called, he had a gun and was caught up in a crackdown on gun violence.
Police said Kohlhepp had a crush on the 14-year-old girl, who was friendly, but not romantic toward him.
After raping her, he said he would kill her six-year-old and three-year-old siblings, whom 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.
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But even as his father felt he couldn’t be helped, and as the neighbour recounted how Kohlhepp laughed when her son cried as he rolled him down the street locked in a dog carrier, 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?”
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