Todd Christopher Kohlhepp was born in Florida on March 7, 1971. At fifteen, in Arizona, he abducted a fourteen-year-old neighbour at gunpoint, tied her and raped her, and was convicted of kidnapping. He served fourteen years and was released in 2001 as a registered sex offender.
He then built a conventional life in Spartanburg County, South Carolina. He got a real estate licence, ran his own agency, owned property, flew light aircraft, and had good reviews online. The South Carolina press called him the Superbike Killer, after the shop where four people died.
On November 6, 2003, four people were shot dead at Superbike Motorsports in Chesnee: the owner Scott Ponder, his mother Beverly Guy, the service manager Brian Lucas and the mechanic Chris Sherbert. It was one of the most notorious unsolved cases in the state. Kohlhepp had bought a motorcycle there and felt he had been treated with contempt.
In August 2016 Kala Brown and her boyfriend Charlie Carver disappeared after going to do clearance work on land Kohlhepp owned at Woodruff. On November 3, 2016, deputies searching the property heard banging from inside a locked steel shipping container. Brown was inside, chained by the neck, and had been for two months. She said Kohlhepp had shot Carver in front of her.
He pleaded guilty in May 2017 to seven murders: the four at Superbike, Charlie Carver, and Johnny and Meagan Coxie, a couple killed at the property in 2015. He received seven consecutive life sentences without parole under an agreement that avoided the death penalty and required him to identify the graves. He has since claimed more killings, which have not been substantiated.