This article is from the source 'guardian' and was first published or seen
on .
It last changed over 40 days ago and won't be checked again for changes.
Sex offender who chained up woman killed at least seven, say police
Sex offender who chained up woman killed at least seven, say police
(about 3 hours later)
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.
A South Carolina man killed at least seven people in a hidden crime spree that lasted more than a decade and only was uncovered when police rescued a woman chained at the neck in a storage container, authorities 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.
Todd Kohlhepp accepted responsibility for an unsolved massacre one day before the 13th anniversary of the deaths that stumped authorities, said Sheriff Chuck Wright, who was first elected a year after the murders.
“God is good,” he said. The community is no longer wondering who’s responsible for the “four people who were brutally murdered”.
Kohlhepp, 45, was due in court for a bond hearing on Sunday, having confessed to the deaths of the owner, service manager, mechanic and bookkeeper of Superbike Motorsports, a motorcycle shop in Chesnee, in Spartanburg County. He faces four counts of murder and a single kidnapping charge, according the Spartanburg County Sheriff website on Sunday.
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.
“God answered our prayers. If it wasn’t for Him answering our prayers and Todd talking to us, I don’t know that we’d ever solve that case,” Wright said.
“He’s been very cooperative,” said Wright, first elected sheriff in 2004. He’s confident Kohlhepp’s confession solved the case. “He told us some stuff nobody else ought to know.”
Wright said Kohlhepp also showed law enforcement officers on Saturday where he says he buried two of his other victims on his 95-acre property near Woodruff. Kohlhepp, in handcuffs and wearing an orange jumpsuit, was at the site for less than an hour.
Wright says Kohlhepp also showed law enforcement officers on Saturday the gravesites of two of his other victims buried on his 95-acre (38-hectare) property near Woodruff. Kohlhepp, in handcuffs and wearing an orange jumpsuit, was at the site for less than an hour.
Those were in addition to the body found on Friday at the site. Wright and Coroner Rusty Clevenger identified that victim as 32-year-old Charles Carver, the boyfriend of the woman found Thursday in a locked metal container.
Those are in addition to the body found on 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 on Thursday.
Carver and the woman went missing around 31 August. Their last known cellphone signals led authorities to the property. 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.
Wright said “God answered our prayers” in solving the 13-year-old cold case. The sheriff said it was possible more bodies would be uncovered.
Carver died of multiple gunshot wounds. An anthropologist is helping determine how long he was buried, Clevenger said. He declined to say how many times Carver had been shot. The sheriff said it was possible more bodies will be uncovered.
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”.
The wife of one of the 2003 victims said detectives told her Kohlhepp was an angry customer who had been in the shop several times. Melissa Ponder told the AP she was resigned that her husband Scott’s death would never be solved before getting a phone call on Saturday evening from one of the case’s original detectives.
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.
Detectives told family members of all four victims of the confession at the same time. “He knew too much about the crime scene,” Ponder said of Kohlhepp’s account to detectives. “He knew everything.”
“They’re obviously heartbroken,” he said after talking to Carver’s family. “It’s terrible. I do think this helps with a little bit of closure ... We prayed for God to show us and He did.”
The Superbike killings stunned the Chesnee community, with rumors like they were committed by a Mexican drug gang or were part of a love triangle crushing the families of the victims. Melissa Ponder said she was glad the rumors weren’t true.
Carver died of multiple gunshot wounds. An anthropologist was 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.
“It isn’t closure, but it is an answer,” she said. “And I am thankful for that.”
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.
Kohlhepp was released from prison in Arizona in 2001. At 15, he was convicted of raping a 14-year-old neighbor at gunpoint and threatening to kill her siblings if she called police. Kohlhepp had to register as a sex offender. That didn’t stop him from getting a South Carolina real estate license in 2006 and building a firm.
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.
Wright said “it’s strange” that Kohlhepp managed the pretext of a normal life for so long. Scott Waldrop, who has lived next door to the Woodruff property for nearly 22 years, said he thought Kohlhepp was a serious Doomsday “prepper” who liked his privacy, but “he didn’t seem like a threat”.
“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.
Waldrop said when he saw the container, it was full of bottled water and canned goods. After buying the property two years ago, Kohlhepp immediately started putting a chain link fence around it.
Kohlhepp remains behind bars. 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.
Waldrop said Kohlhepp paid him to put up no trespassing signs, cut trees for him and other odd jobs around the property. Kohlhepp also installed deer cameras and put bear traps throughout.
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.
“I was the only one he let over there, I think because I laughed at his jokes and listened to him,” he said. “I just hate to know somebody who’s done something like this.”
In the South Carolina case, the couple disappeared about 31 August when the woman went to do some cleaning on Kohlhepp’s property. Her boyfriend accompanied her, said Daniel Herren, a friend who sat with the woman in her hospital room after she was rescued on Thursday.
Kohlhepp has a house about nine miles away in Moore, where neighbor Ron Owen said Kohlhepp was very private, but when they did talk across the fence, he was a “big bragger”.
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.
Kohlhepp liked to talk about the money he made day trading online, for example, and about his two BMWs. He recently told Owen, 76, that he’d spent $80,000 on the chain link fence.
Kohlhepp has a house about nine miles (14 kilometres) away in Moore, where neighbour 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. He recently told Owen, 76, that he’d paid $80,000 to put the chain-link fence around his property where the woman was found.
“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.”
“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, 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?”
