Todd Kohlhepp

What the record shows

Todd Kohlhepp is a South Carolina real estate agent who pleaded guilty on May 26, 2017, to seven counts of murder committed in Spartanburg County between 2003 and 2016: the four Superbike Motorsports killings in Chesnee in November 2003 and three people killed on his rural property near Woodruff in 2015 and 2016. He received seven consecutive life sentences without parole under a plea agreement that took the death penalty off the table. No court has attributed further deaths to him, although he has since claimed, without specifics, that there are more victims.

The Superbike Motorsports killings were a cold case for 13 years. According to ABC News, shop owner Scott Ponder, 30, service manager Brian Lucas, 29, mechanic Chris Sherbert, 26, and bookkeeper Beverly Guy, 52, Ponder's mother, were found on the morning of November 6, 2003, and investigators said all four had been shot with the same pistol. NBC News reported that at his plea hearing Kohlhepp admitted shooting the workers after the shop's manager made him angry.

The next known killings came in December 2015. NPR, citing the arrest warrants, reported that Johnny Joe Coxie, 29, was shot on December 19, 2015, and that his wife, Meagan Leigh McCraw Coxie, 25, was kidnapped that day and shot on either December 20 or December 26. The couple had been hired to work on Kohlhepp's property and were reported missing in late December. Their remains were recovered in November 2016 after Kohlhepp led investigators to the graves.

The case broke open in 2016. Kala Brown, 30, and her boyfriend Charles David Carver, 32, disappeared on about August 31, 2016, after going to a cleaning job on Kohlhepp's fenced property of nearly 100 acres near Woodruff. The Associated Press reported that Spartanburg County deputies, led there by the couple's last known cellphone signals, found Brown chained inside a metal storage container on November 3, 2016, after about two months in captivity. Brown told investigators she had watched Kohlhepp shoot Carver, whose body was found in a shallow grave on the property the next day. Brown has spoken publicly about her ordeal.

Kohlhepp was arrested on November 3, 2016, and charged with kidnapping Brown. According to the AP, Sheriff Chuck Wright announced on November 5 that Kohlhepp had voluntarily confessed to the four Superbike murders and pointed out two more graves. On November 28, 2016, prosecutors added three murder counts for Carver and the Coxies with kidnapping and weapons charges, NBC News and NPR reported.

On May 26, 2017, Kohlhepp pleaded guilty in Spartanburg County to seven counts of murder, two counts of kidnapping, one count of first-degree criminal sexual conduct and weapons charges. WLOS reported that under the nine-page agreement, signed by Seventh Circuit Solicitor Barry Barnette, Sheriff Wright and Brown, he received seven consecutive life terms plus 30 years each for the kidnapping and sexual-conduct counts, waived his right to appeal, and agreed never to seek parole. Barnette said the state could have pursued execution but chose a plea in part because South Carolina's lethal-injection drugs had expired, NBC News reported. Through his attorney, Kohlhepp said there were no other victims.

That claim did not hold. The Associated Press reported in December 2017 that Kohlhepp had written an eight-page letter to the Spartanburg Herald-Journal saying he had additional undiscovered victims but saw no reason to give numbers or locations; the FBI's Columbia office confirmed a pending investigation. According to Wikipedia, he was named a person of interest in a 2003 Greer bank triple homicide, which he denied and which has not been linked to him. Brown and victims' relatives have filed civil suits.

Kohlhepp was born Todd Christopher Sampsell in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on March 7, 1971, according to Wikipedia. As a teenager in Tempe, Arizona, he forced a 14-year-old neighbor into his home at gunpoint and assaulted her; the AP reported he pleaded guilty to kidnapping in 1987, the sexual-assault charge was dismissed, and he served about 15 years and had to register as a sex offender. After his release in 2001 he moved to South Carolina, obtained a real estate license in 2006 and built a brokerage with more than a dozen agents.