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Missing Woman Found Chained in Container; Realtor Todd Kohlhepp Arrested

Deputies heard Kala Brown banging inside a padlocked container on his land near Woodruff. Her boyfriend's body was found the next day.

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Todd Kohlhepp, dark-haired, in a black top, photographed against a pale wall

The deputies were on Todd Kohlhepp's land on Thursday morning, November 3, 2016, because a phone had been traced there. They had started searching the hundred-acre property off Woodruff Road, near Woodruff, South Carolina, at about 8:30, with dogs, digging equipment and a helicopter overhead, when they heard banging from inside a padlocked metal storage container about thirty feet by fifteen. Inside was Kala Brown, 30, who had been missing since late August. "Chained up like a dog," Spartanburg County Sheriff Chuck Wright said, with a chain around her neck. She told them she had been in the container for two months and had been fed regularly. Wright called it "divine intervention from God himself" that she was found, and "the grace of God that she was found alive."

Kohlhepp, 45, the owner of the land, was on the property when the warrant was served. He was arrested at 10:45 that morning and held on a single charge of kidnapping. He was a registered sex offender. He was also a real estate broker in charge of a firm with offices in Greenville and Spartanburg and more than a dozen employees, who described himself as a licensed pilot. Brown had cleaned houses for him. A friend who once helped her on the job remembered collecting a key at his house. "Didn't seem like a person who would do anything to anybody," she said. "He seemed down to earth."

The registry told a different story. In Arizona in 1987, when he was fifteen, Kohlhepp had been arrested for kidnapping and sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl, according to court documents ABC News obtained; the girl said he threatened her with a revolver, tied her up and taped her mouth shut. The case was moved to adult court. He pleaded guilty to kidnapping, the sexual assault charge was dismissed, and he was sentenced to fifteen years in prison.

Brown and her boyfriend, Charles Carver, 32, had vanished together. Their car was found hidden in a wooded part of the property. The Anderson police had learned that Brown's phone had been tracked to Kohlhepp's land, and the solicitor, Barry Barnette, said Kohlhepp was the last person to speak to her before she disappeared. Brown told investigators that he had taken both their phones and that she had seen him shoot Carver. She also told them there might be four people buried on the property. "We're trying to make sure that we don't have a serial killer on our hands," Wright said. "It very possibly could be what we have."

On Friday a body was found, and cadaver dogs marked other spots. At a bond hearing that afternoon Barnette called Kohlhepp "a very, very dangerous individual"; no bond was set. By Saturday night the body had been identified as Carver's. He had been shot several times, and his death was ruled a homicide. Every unsolved missing-person case had been reopened, and the search, less than a third done, went on. Brown, through a family statement, asked for privacy. She needed time, it said, "to process and begin to cope with the events that have occurred."

Six months later, in May 2017, Kohlhepp pleaded guilty to seven murders and was sentenced to seven consecutive life terms.

What this story covers. The search, the container, the sheriff's and solicitor's words, the arrest time and charge, the bond hearing, Kohlhepp's business, the friend's account, the 1987 Arizona case as described in court documents, the phones, the car, what Brown told investigators, the identification of Carver's body and the family statement come from ABC News's report of November 5, 2016. The 1987 details are what the court documents alleged; he pleaded guilty only to kidnapping. The plea and sentence of May 2017 come from the Associated Press report of May 26, 2017.

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