Suspect accused of holding woman captive called ‘devil’

Associated Press

WOODRUFF, S.C.

When he was 15 and facing charges he raped a neighbor after forcing her into his home at gunpoint and tying her up, Todd Christopher Kohlhepp’s father told court officials the only emotion the teen was capable of showing was anger, and a neighbor called him a “devil on a chain.”

Fifteen years after he was released from prison for that crime, Spartanburg County deputies were brought to his property by the last known cellphone signals of two missing people. On Thursday, they found a woman chained in a container for two months. Authorities said a body found on the property is the boyfriend of the woman.

Spartanburg County Sheriff Chuck Wright identified the body Saturday as 32-year-old Charles Carver. He was found and exhumed from a shallow grave Friday.

Coroner Rusty Clevenger says Carver died of multiple gunshot wounds in the upper part of his body. He says he’s working with an anthropologist to estimate how long he’d been buried.

It was an abrupt, but perhaps not unexpected turn for a man who spent his 20s in prison but after his release managed to get a private pilot license, build a real-estate firm with more than a dozen agents and buy nearly 100 acres of land and put an $80,000 fence around it.

On that land, dozens of officers continued to search Saturday for any additional bodies after the woman told investigators Kohlhepp claimed to have killed at least four others.

Kohlhepp, handcuffed and wearing an orange jumpsuit, could be seen on the property Saturday with deputies. He was there for less than an hour, The Greenville News reported. The Spartanburg County Sheriff’s Office would not confirm he was brought to the site.

As a teen, Kohlhepp was cold and callous. He went to his 14-year-old rape victim’s house after talking to her parents and making sure they wouldn’t be home. He was smart, angry and felt the world owed him something, his chief probation officer wrote in court papers in Arizona in 1987.

“It is this type of individual, one with little or no conscious, who presents the greatest risk to the community,” the officer wrote in the papers obtained by WHNS-TV.

Kohlhepp remains behind bars.