Todd Kohlhepp Victims

Case background and investigation

Todd Kohlhepp's crimes came to light on November 3, 2016, when Spartanburg County sheriff's deputies searching a rural property near Woodruff, South Carolina, heard banging from inside a locked metal storage container. Inside, they found 30-year-old Kala Brown chained by the neck and ankles. She had been missing since August 31, 2016, when she and her boyfriend, 32-year-old Charles David Carver, traveled to the property to do cleanup work. Investigators had traced the couple's last cellphone signals to land owned by Kohlhepp, a local real estate agent. Brown told deputies that Kohlhepp had shot and killed Carver and held her captive for roughly two months.

Kohlhepp, 45, was arrested that same day. Brown reported that other people were buried on the property, and searches soon confirmed it. On the days that followed, investigators recovered two more bodies: Johnny Joe Coxie, 29, and his wife Meagan Leigh McCraw-Coxie, 26, a couple Kohlhepp had hired to work on his land in late 2015 and then killed. Carver's body was also recovered from the property.

In custody, Kohlhepp confessed to a crime that had gone unsolved for 13 years: the Superbike Motorsports murders. On November 6, 2003, four people were shot to death at the Chesnee motorcycle dealership. The victims were owner Scott Ponder, 30; service manager Brian Lucas, 29; mechanic Chris Sherbert, 26; and bookkeeper Beverly Guy, 52, who was Ponder's mother. The quadruple homicide had baffled investigators for years. Authorities determined that Kohlhepp, who had reportedly been unhappy with service he received at the shop, was responsible.

Kohlhepp had a prior criminal record. In 1987, as a teenager in Arizona, he was convicted of kidnapping and sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl and served time in prison before being released and moving to South Carolina, where he became a licensed real estate agent.

On May 26, 2017, Kohlhepp pleaded guilty in a Spartanburg County courtroom to seven counts of murder, along with kidnapping and criminal sexual conduct charges. He was sentenced to seven consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole, plus an additional 60 years for the other offenses. Prosecutors said they could have pursued the death penalty but agreed to the plea deal in part because the state's supply of lethal injection drugs had expired, and the arrangement spared victims' families a lengthy trial while guaranteeing Kohlhepp would never be released.

During the plea hearing and a later 2018 evidentiary hearing, family members of the victims confronted Kohlhepp directly. Kala Brown, whose survival led to the discovery of the killings and the reopening of the Superbike case, has been widely credited as central to solving the crimes. Todd Kohlhepp remains incarcerated in the South Carolina prison system, serving his life sentences. He has at times claimed additional victims, but no further murders have been officially confirmed.