Todd Kohlhepp

Todd Christopher Kohlhepp (7 March 1971-) is an American rapist and serial killer.

Pre-Murders
Kohlhepp was raised by his mother and stepfather, after his parents got divorced when he was two. He had an awful relationship with his stepfather, and gained a reputation at his nursery school for violence towards others there. When he was nine, Kohlhepp was entered into counselling and his therapist discovered that he was preoccupied with sexual content and enjoyed hurting and killing animals, a classic trait of psychopaths and future serial killers. His parents response was to send him to a psychiatric hospital. Eventually, Kohlhepp was sent to live in Arizona with his biological father, who taught him to make bombs. In 1986, Kohlhepp kidnapped a fourteen-year-old girl, tied her up, taped her mouth shut and raped her, before threatening to kill her younger siblings. He was convicted the following year, and sentenced to fifteen years in prison, as well as being registered as a sex offender. He was released on parole one year before his sentence entered, and graduated from various universities, as well as starting a firm.

Killings
On 6th November 2003, Kohlhepp visited a motor shop named Superbike, which he had had problems returning a faulty motorbike to earlier that day. Entering through the back, he ran into shop mechanic Chris Sherbert in the workroom and shot him dead. He then walked through the shop and shot bookkeeper Beverly Guy, service manager Brian Lucas and owner Scott Ponder, all of whom died.

Several years later in 2016, Kala Brown and her boyfriend Charles David Carver arrived to clean Kohlhepp' s house. Kohlhepp shot Carver and abducted Brown, confining her inside a storage container and making her his sex slave, raping her countless times. He also murdered Johnny Joe Coxie and his wife Meagan Leigh Mcraw-Coxie and buried them on his property, using their graves to intimidate Brown into not trying to escape.

In November of that year, neighbours heard strange noises coming from the container where Brown was held. They called the police, who found Brown in the container, released her and arrested Kohlhepp. They also searched his property and found the bodies of the Coxies.

Investigation
While under interrogation, Kohlhepp admitted to killing the Coxies and Carver, as well as his offences against Brown. He also eventually admitted to the killings of Sherbert, Guy, Lucas and Ponder at Superbike. Kohlhepp' s firm was shut down, and Kohlhepp later claimed to have shot and killed a man in Arizona, triggering an investigation into all the unsolved homicides committed while Kohlhepp was there. He has also since been named as a person of interest in an unsolved bank robbery and triple homicide six months before the Superbike murders, and has written to the Spartanburg Herald-Journal claiming to have killed more people.

Trial And Conviction
Kohlhepp was charged with one count of kidnapping, multiple counts of rape, one count of possession of an illegal weapon and seven counts of homicide, as well as being prosecuted for wrongful death by relatives of the Superbike shooting victims and having a civil lawsuit filed against him by Brown. Eventually, Kohlhepp plea bargained his way out of a capital punishment sentence and received seven consecutive life sentences. He continues to this day to claim that he killed other victims who he says the FBI did not permit him to confess to killing.