On November 3, 2016, investigators tracing the last cellphone signals of a missing couple came to a fenced property of nearly a hundred acres near Moore, in Spartanburg County, South Carolina, and heard banging from inside a metal storage container. Inside was Kala Brown, thirty, chained to the wall. She and her boyfriend, Charles David Carver, thirty-two, had disappeared on August 31 after going to clear brush for the landowner. She told police she had watched Todd Kohlhepp shoot Carver, and that during her two months in the container he had raped her repeatedly and shown her the graves of his other victims to frighten her out of trying to escape. Carver's body was found on the property, and his car in a ravine covered with brush. In the weeks after the couple vanished, posts on Carver's Facebook account had been so strange that friends suspected someone else was writing them.
Kohlhepp was a real estate broker with a firm of about a dozen agents and a reputation as one of the top sellers in the Carolinas. He had a private pilot's license and properties in other states, and he had bought the land near Moore in May 2014 for $305,632 and put an $80,000 fence around it. He was also a registered sex offender, and he had obtained his real estate license on June 30, 2006, by lying about his felony on the application.
He was born Todd Christopher Sampsell in Florida on March 7, 1971, and raised in South Carolina and Georgia. His parents divorced when he was two. He was aggressive in nursery school, and at nine, when he started counseling, he was described as explosive and preoccupied with sexual content; he shot a dog with a BB gun and killed a goldfish with bleach, and spent three and a half months in a Georgia psychiatric hospital. In 1983 he went to live with his father in Arizona, took his surname and learned from him to collect weapons and make bombs. On November 25, 1986, at fifteen, in Tempe, he kidnapped a fourteen-year-old neighbor, Kristie Granado, at the point of a .22 revolver, tied her up, taped her mouth and raped her, then walked her home and threatened to kill her family if she told. In 1987 he pleaded guilty to kidnapping and was sentenced to fifteen years. The judge called him very bright but behaviorally and emotionally dangerous, and his probation officer wrote that he felt the world owed him something.
He was released in August 2001 after fourteen years, having earned a computer science degree in prison, and moved to South Carolina, where his mother lived. He worked as a graphic designer in Spartanburg and later earned a business degree at the University of South Carolina Upstate in 2008. On November 6, 2003, a customer found four people shot dead at Superbike Motorsports, a motorcycle shop in Chesnee: the owner, Scott Ponder, thirty; his mother, Beverly Guy, fifty-two, the bookkeeper; the service manager, Brian Lucas, twenty-nine; and the mechanic, Chris Sherbert, twenty-six. Eighteen 9mm casings were recovered, twenty-seven guns were tested against them over the years, and the casings were sent to England for new fingerprint techniques. The case went unsolved for thirteen years. Ponder's widow said Kohlhepp had been a disgruntled customer, and his mother said he had tried to return a motorcycle there and the staff had laughed at him.
After his arrest he confessed to the Chesnee shootings, giving details never made public, in exchange for being allowed to see his mother, give her a photograph and transfer money to a friend's child's college fund. On November 6 and 7, 2016, two more bodies were dug up on his land: Johnny Joe Coxie, twenty-nine, and his wife, Meagan Leigh McCraw-Coxie, twenty-six, of Spartanburg, reported missing on December 22, 2015, whom he had hired to work on the property. Johnny had been shot in the torso and Meagan in the head about a week later, on December 25 or 26. She had been a waitress at a Waffle House in Roebuck where his behavior had so unsettled the staff that the male cook took his orders. Police found 9mm pistols fitted with suppressors and semiautomatic rifles on the property, and Amazon reviews under his wish list joked about padlocks on a shipping container and a folding shovel for hiding bodies.
He told his mother there were more victims than anyone knew; asked how many, he said, "You do not have enough fingers." He claimed to have shot someone in Arizona, and Tempe police searched their unsolved cases from 1983 to 1986 and from 2001. Greer police named him a person of interest in a 2003 bank robbery and triple killing; no link was established, and he denied it. On May 26, 2017, he pleaded guilty to seven murders, two kidnappings and criminal sexual assault, and was sentenced to seven consecutive life terms without parole under an agreement that spared him the death penalty. In October 2025 he was moved to indefinite supermax confinement after a Fox Carolina investigation found messages from his prison tablet arranging sales of signed items connected to his crimes.