Victim found alive in container at Amazon serial killer site

On the morning of November 3, 2016, police officers surveyed a site near Woodruff, in Spartanberg County, South Carolina. They were looking for the missing couple from Anderson - Kala Brown, 30, and Charles Carver, 32. Both disappeared in late August.

A knock was heard outside the door of a green shipping container. Constipation did not succumb: rescuers tried to cut them, knock them down, squeeze them. The autopsy took about ten minutes.

They came in with lights. Past the racks and water packages, the police went deep into the container where Brown was. There was a massive chain on her neck that ran towards the wall. The woman explained where the shackles were fixed while staff looked for the key and brought a bolt cutter.

One of the officers asked if she knew where her companion was.

Charlie? He shot him.

Brown named her name Todd Kohlhepp and described what she saw: three shots to Carver's chest, a blue tarpaulin wrapped in his body, a tractor bucket. She was then locked in a container. She never saw Carver again. Kohlhepp said he was dead and buried at the site. And that there are other bodies.

After releasing the woman, the police threw a towel over her shoulders and led her outside. She was held captive for more than two months.

Kohlhepp ran the real estate agency TK-hey. Brown had already cleaned the houses he was preparing for sale. Her friend Lindsay Mason once helped with the job and met her landlord. On a short acquaintance, he seemed to her a calm, ordinary person.

Kohlhepp was already on the register of sex offenders. In 1987, he was sentenced to 15 years in prison in Arizona for kidnapping a 14-year-old neighbor. According to court records, he stole the girl under threat of a revolver and raped her. The sexual assault charge was dropped as part of an agreement, but he was required to register as a sex offender. After his release in 2001, he moved to South Carolina.

In late August 2016, Brown and Carver arrived at his site to work. Carver was a printer; his mother remembered him as a man who loved to laugh and was able to amuse others. After the disappearance of her son, she initially admitted that he was just sleeping off after long shifts. Then the lack of answers began to worry the family.

Brown and Carver didn't come to dinner with friends. When her mother was in her apartment, the door was unlocked and the dog was left without food or water.

Brown subsequently told TV presenter Phil McGraw that after Carver's murder, Kohlhepp knocked her to the ground, shackled her arms and legs, gagged her mouth. In the container, a chain around the neck was added to this. The kidnapper raped her and threatened to kill her for attempting to escape or resist.

Brown was impressed that she would fall in love with him over time. During her captivity, Kohlhepp told her about other murders.

While Brown remained in the container, police examined the phone records and correspondence of the missing. Mobile phone data pointed to Spartanberg County, but the exact address was not given.

Investigators then found reports between Brown and Kohlhepp about working on his land. The site was located in the area where the phone was recorded. Comparison of this information allowed obtaining a search permit.

On November 3, one group surveyed the land near Woodruff, while another came to Kohlhepp's home in Moore. On a recording of the visit, the staff explain to him that they are looking for Brown and Carver: he was one of the last people to contact them. Kolhepp was arrested that day.

Carver's car was found at the site, hidden in a ravine. The next day, November 4, the body of a man was found in a shallow grave. He was later identified as Carver. The coroner found that he died from multiple gunshot wounds.

Kohlhepp listed two more burials. There lay spouses Johnny Joe Coxy and Meegan Lee McCraw-Coxy, who disappeared in December 2015. Showing the graves, he called the dead by name. According to coroner Rusty Clevenger, tattoos helped to establish identities.

The couple also came to Kolhepp to work: he hired them to clean up. According to the indictment documents and the subsequent appearance of the Prosecutor Barry Barnett in court, he shot Johnny, and Meegan kept in the container for another six days, and then killed her.

Brown heard about the couple from the kidnapper. But on the way to the hospital, she gave the police information about the crime committed long before their disappearance. Kohlhepp told her he killed four people at Superbike Motorsports.

The name of the store brought investigators back to November 2003.

On November 6, 2003, the owner and three employees were shot dead in a motorcycle store near Chesney. The dead 30-year-old Scott Ponder, his 52-year-old mother Beverly Guy, service manager Brian Lucas and mechanic Chris Sherbert.

Ponder started his business in 2001. Along with him worked a close friend Lucas, also fond of motorcycles. Ponder's mother was an accountant and helped in the store. Sherbert joined the group shortly before the shooting. “Superbike Motorsports” became a place where the owner’s acquaintances came for shopping and just chat.

One of them was Nowell Lee. On the day of the murder, he called Ponder, and a few minutes later came to the store and found the dead. Ponder and Lucas lay outside at the entrance, Guy and Sherbert inside. All four were killed with the same gun.

The owner's wife, Melissa, was expecting a baby. Two days before his death, Scott attended an ultrasound and heard the heartbeat of his future son. The boy was born after the murder of his father.

Melissa was suspected of involvement in the shooting. In an interview with the crime television program “Crime Watch Daily”, she said that investigators received biological material of the child from the diaper, which she changed while visiting the sheriff’s office. He was compared to blood taken at the crime scene. The widow was told: Ponder was not the father of her son, his father was Lucas.

So the investigation has a version about the love triangle. Melissa insisted it was impossible and demanded a re-examination. It produced the same result. She refused to talk to the investigation without a lawyer and was willing to seek the exhumation of her husband for the sake of a background check.

According to Melissa, the error was discovered after comparing the sample, believed to be Ponder’s blood, with the DNA of his mother Beverly. The kinship wasn't confirmed. It turned out that the samples of Ponder and Lucas were confused: the wrong name was on the container with blood. The child's father was Scott. Suspicions against the widow were removed.

By then, the rumors had spread. Melissa spoke publicly about the mistake even before Kohlhepp's arrest - when her husband's killer remained unknown.

Kohlhepp was no stranger to Superbike Motorsports. He bought a motorcycle there, his name was on the customer list. He was not a serious suspect in the investigation.

In 2013, police sent him a standard letter asking him to report if he knew anything about the killings. Later this document was among the published materials of the case. Sheriff Chuck Wright explained that the investigation had no reason to question each client.

After his arrest in November 2016, Kohlhepp confessed to shooting four people.

In the interrogation tapes, he returned to buying a motorcycle and said that the employees of the store allegedly made fun of his inability to ride. That's how he explained his anger. To investigators, he described shooting indoors and near the exit, reloading the weapon and how he subsequently disposed of the gun. According to him, he disassembled it and threw the parts in different dumpsters.

The sheriff's office found the confession credible, stating in an investigative report that Kohlhepp gave nonpublic details known to the killer. In court, he then pleaded guilty to all four murders at the store.

Melissa said she had never heard the defendant's name before. Lucas' parents, Lorraine and Tom, lost their son, who is survived by two boys. In interviews, they recalled him as a good father and a man willing to help others.

On May 26, 2017, 46-year-old Todd Kohlhepp pleaded guilty to 14 counts of murder: seven counts of murder, four counts of possession of a weapon while committing violent crimes, two kidnappings and first-degree sexual assault.

The seven dead were four from Superbike Motorsports, Coxy and Carver. For their murders, Kolhepp received seven consecutive life sentences. They added another 60 years in prison. He was not eligible for parole. Under the terms of the agreement, he also refused to appeal the guilty plea and conviction.

The prosecution agreed not to seek the death penalty. Prosecutor Barnett explained that South Carolina has not carried out executions since 2011, and the shelf life of drugs for lethal injection has expired. The families of the victims and Brown preferred life in prison to awaiting a death penalty decision that could have dragged on for years.

The agreement was signed by Kohlhepp, his lawyers, the prosecutor, Brown and representatives of the seven victims. If Kohlhepp had violated his terms, including by escaping, the prosecution could have demanded the death penalty again.

At the meeting, Johnny Coxy's mother Cindy revealed that her seven-year-old grandson had been hoping for months for his father's return. She had to tell the boy that her father was dead.

Scott Ponder’s son, a child whose heartbeat his father had heard two days before his death, was also on trial. He said he would always think about what his life would have been like if his father had stayed by his side.

Brown didn't come to court. According to her lawyer, Alex Stolvey, she did not want to see Kohlhepp again. The agreement maintained that the death of another person would not bring her satisfaction or a sense of justice. The lawyer relayed her words from one of his first meetings with the prosecutor:

"He's the killer, not me.".

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