Image copyright AP Image caption Todd Kohlhepp, a registered sex offender, has confessed to seven killings

Todd Kohlhepp, the man arrested after a woman was found "chained like a dog" on his property in South Carolina, has confessed to seven killings, a sheriff says.

Kohlhepp told police on Saturday that he was responsible for the deaths of four people in 2003.

He also showed law enforcement officers where he said he had buried two other victims on his property.

This comes after the discovery of a body at the 95-acre site on Friday.

Registered sex offender Kohlhepp, 45, has been charged with four counts of murder and one of kidnapping.

He was arrested on Thursday when police found a woman on his property chained in a container.

She had been missing, along with her boyfriend, since late August.

Image copyright AP Image caption A woman was discovered on Kohlhepp's property inside a metal shipping container

The woman was discovered after police heard banging noises and screams from inside a metal shipping container in Woodruff, 80 miles (130km) northwest of the state capital of Columbia.

It was described by Spartanburg County Sheriff Chuck Wright as "a hellish place to be locked in hot weather. No lights, no windows, no air flow".

Officers had been led to the property thanks to a tip-off by a sex-crime investigator.

The woman told officers that Kohlhepp had shot and killed her boyfriend in front of her.

Mr Wright confirmed on Saturday that the body found on the site a day earlier was that of her boyfriend Charles Carver, 32.

"They're obviously heartbroken," he said after talking to the Carver family. "It's terrible."

Mr Carver died of multiple gunshot wounds.

Kohlhepp told investigators that he was also the gunman behind the fatal shooting in 2003 of four people at a motorcycle shop in Chesnee near Spartanburg, South Carolina.</s>WOODRUFF, S.C. — The man arrested after authorities found a woman chained on his property in rural South Carolina killed at least seven people, and his confessions have solved a 13-year-old case, Sheriff Chuck Wright said Saturday.

Todd Kohlhepp confessed he was the shooter who killed four people at a motorcycle shop in Spartanburg County in 2003, Wright said.

“God is good,” he said. The community is no longer wondering who’s responsible for the “four people who were brutally murdered.”

Wright says Kohlhepp also showed law enforcement officers Saturday the gravesites of two of his other victims buried on his 95-acre property near Woodruff.

That’s in addition to the body found Friday at the site. Wright and Coroner Rusty Clevenger identified that victim as 32-year-old Charles Carver, the boyfriend of the woman found in a locked metal container Thursday.

Wright says “God answered our prayers” in solving the 13-year-old cold case.

The sheriff says it’s possible more bodies will be uncovered.

When he was 15 and facing charges he raped a neighbour 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 neighbour 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. She told investigators that Kohlhepp shot and killed her boyfriend in front of her.

“They’re obviously heartbroken,” he said after talking to Carver’s family. “It’s terrible. I do think this helps with a little bit of closure. .. We prayed for God to show us, and He did.”

Carver died of multiple gunshot wounds. An anthropologist is helping determine how long Carver was buried, said Coroner Rusty Clevenger. He declined to say how many times Carver had been shot.

Kohlhepp is charged with kidnapping the woman. Authorities say more charges are coming.

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 erect a fence around it said to have cost $80,000. 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.

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 conscience, who presents the greatest risk to the community,” the officer wrote in the papers obtained by WHNS-TV.

Kohlhepp remains behind bars. The 45-year-old had to register as a sex offender after his release from prison in Arizona.

But that didn’t stop him from becoming an apparently successful real estate agent. Kohlhepp followed the rules and admitted he had a felony conviction when he applied for his real estate license in 2006. But his letter explaining the charge was full of lies. He said he argued with his girlfriend, police were called, he had a gun and was caught up in a crackdown on gun violence.

Police said Kohlhepp had a crush on the 14-year-old girl, who was friendly, but not romantic toward him. After raping her, he said he would kill her 6-year-old and 3-year-old siblings that she was babysitting if she called the police. His first question to officers when he was arrested was how long he was going to have to spend in prison, according to court papers.

In the South Carolina case, the couple disappeared about Aug. 31 when the woman went to do some cleaning on the suspect’s nearly 100-acre property near Woodruff. Her boyfriend accompanied her, said Daniel Herren, a friend who sat with the woman in her hospital room after she was rescued Thursday.

The Associated Press is not naming the woman because the suspect is a sex offender, though authorities have not said whether she was sexually assaulted.

Kohlhepp has a house about 9 miles away in Moore, where neighbour Ron Owen said Kohlhepp was very private, but when they did talk across the fence, he was a “big bragger.”

Kohlhepp liked to talk about the money he made day trading online, for example, and about his two BMWs. He recently told Owen, 76, that he’d paid $80,000 to put the chain-link fence around his property where the woman was found.

“We didn’t see any signs whatsoever that this was going on,” Owen said. “My first reaction’s a baseball bat, but I know I’m not to take that in my own hands. God will deal with him.”

But even as his father felt he couldn’t be helped, and as the neighbour recounted how Kohlhepp laughed when her son cried as he rolled him down the street locked in a dog carrier, court records show Kohlhepp’s still had one supporter in 1987 — his mother.

She wrote a letter asking the judge to send Kohlhepp to his grandparents instead of prison.

“He even walked the girl home,” she wrote. “Does that sound like a dangerous criminal?”</s>SPARTANBURG, S.C. — A woman who was "chained up like a dog" for weeks in a dark storage container was lured to her captor's South Carolina property for a cleaning job, a family friend said Friday as search teams digging up the area found one body and looked for more.

Authorities were "trying to make sure that we don't have a serial killer on our hands," the sheriff said. Investigators were told the property could hold as many as three other corpses.

Prosecutor Barry Barnette said the woman saw her captor shoot and kill her boyfriend, who went with her to the job. The body discovered Friday was not immediately identified.

The couple disappeared around Aug. 31 when they went to do the work on the suspect's nearly 100-acre property in a rural area near the community of Woodruff, said Daniel Herren, a friend who sat with her in her hospital room after she was rescued Thursday.

"They were going to do some work, help cleaning up the property. And he pulled out a gun and took them hostage," Herren said, adding that the abduction happened quickly.

Todd Christopher Kohlhepp, a 45-year-old registered sex offender with previous kidnapping conviction, appeared at a bond hearing Friday in Spartanburg on a kidnapping charge. More charges will be filed later, the prosecutor told the court.

The judge did not set bond and instead referred the matter to circuit court. The suspect did not appear to have an attorney, and the judge urged him to get one.

The Associated Press is not naming the woman because the suspect is a sex offender, though authorities have not said whether she was sexually assaulted. Her boyfriend was identified as 32-year-old Charles Carver.

Herren, who visited her in the hospital and had dinner with her Thursday, said he did not ask the woman if she was sexually assaulted.

But she did describe to him the details of her captivity, telling him she was in the container nearly the entire time except for when she was taken out for occasional walks.

"He never took the chain off of her, but he was taking her around, let her get, not so much exercise, but let her walk around some," Herren said. "It didn't sound like it was every day. It was kind of sporadic."

She was fed once a day around 6 p.m. She "didn't tell us exactly what she was eating. But from what I gathered, it could have been fast food. ... It wasn't like he was keeping her alive on bread and water. He was in a weird, sick kind of way being, I guess, kind of humane, as far as feeding her," Herren said.

She left the hospital late Thursday and is staying with family, Herren said.

The property includes grassy areas, some covered in waist-high weeds, as well as stands of trees. Most or all of it is surrounded by a chain-link fence 6 to 7 feet tall.

In the middle was the cargo container, which measured about 30 feet by 15 feet. It was next to a two-car garage that had a living space on top, Barnette said.

During Friday's search efforts, officers using all-terrain vehicles and a backhoe came and went while a law enforcement helicopter circled overhead.

Investigators began excavating after cadaver dogs signaled the possible presence of remains.

Acting on a tip, deputies found the woman after hearing her banging inside the container, Spartanburg County Sheriff Chuck Wright said.

Anderson Police Chief Jim Stewart said computer and cellphone records led authorities to the property near Woodruff, 80 miles northwest of the state capital of Columbia, because it was the last place that a cellphone pinged.

Records indicate Kohlhepp is a licensed real estate agent and licensed pilot. As a teenager, he was convicted and sentenced to prison in Arizona for kidnapping and dangerous crimes against children.

Guns and a large amount of ammunition were seized from Kohlhepp, the prosecutor said.

"It's unbelievable how much he had," he said.

South Carolina's sex offender registry lists a 1986 kidnapping as the reason Kohlhepp is in the database of sex offenders. Matching online prison records from Arizona show that Kohlhepp served about 14 years for the felony and was released in 2001.

In court Friday, Barnette said the Arizona case occurred when Kohlhepp kidnapped a 14-year-old girl, took her to his house and raped her after binding her with duct tape.

A real estate agent who worked at a firm run by Kohlhepp said she had known him for 10 years after they met at a university in the Spartanburg area and were study partners in a statistics class. She said she was in disbelief.

"He's not the kind of person to do something like this," Cherry Laurens said by phone. "Working with him he was an excellent boss. He stood up for us whenever we needed him."

She said it was widely known that he was registered as a sex offender, but he told people that it was based on trumped-up charges after he "had gone joyriding with a girl" and upset her father, who was a prominent local official.

Kohlhepp also had a house in Moore, on the outskirts of Spartanburg, about 15 minutes from the rural property where the woman was chained.

His neighbor there, 76-year-old Ron Owen, said Kohlhepp was private but pleasant.

"Todd was in my opinion a likable guy," Owen said.

Breed reported from Raleigh. Associated Press writers Jack Jones in Columbia, South Carolina; Alex Sanz in Spartanburg; Jonathan Drew in Raleigh, North Carolina; and Paul Davenport in Phoenix contributed to this report.</s>WOODRUFF, S.C. — The man arrested after authorities found a woman chained on his property in rural South Carolina killed at least seven people, and his confessions have solved a 13-year-old case, Sheriff Chuck Wright said Saturday.

Todd Kohlhepp confessed he was the shooter who killed four people at a motorcycle shop in Spartanburg County in 2003, Wright said.

“God is good,” he said. The community is no longer wondering who’s responsible for the “four people who were brutally murdered.”

Wright says Kohlhepp also showed law enforcement officers Saturday the gravesites of two of his other victims buried on his 95-acre property near Woodruff.

That’s in addition to the body found Friday at the site. Wright and Coroner Rusty Clevenger identified that victim as 32-year-old Charles Carver, the boyfriend of the woman found in a locked metal container Thursday.

Wright says “God answered our prayers” in solving the 13-year-old cold case.

The sheriff says it’s possible more bodies will be uncovered.

When he was 15 and facing charges he raped a neighbour 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 neighbour 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. She told investigators that Kohlhepp shot and killed her boyfriend in front of her.

“They’re obviously heartbroken,” he said after talking to Carver’s family. “It’s terrible. I do think this helps with a little bit of closure. .. We prayed for God to show us, and He did.”

Carver died of multiple gunshot wounds. An anthropologist is helping determine how long Carver was buried, said Coroner Rusty Clevenger. He declined to say how many times Carver had been shot.

Kohlhepp is charged with kidnapping the woman. Authorities say more charges are coming.

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 erect a fence around it said to have cost $80,000. 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.

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 conscience, who presents the greatest risk to the community,” the officer wrote in the papers obtained by WHNS-TV.

Kohlhepp remains behind bars. The 45-year-old had to register as a sex offender after his release from prison in Arizona.

But that didn’t stop him from becoming an apparently successful real estate agent. Kohlhepp followed the rules and admitted he had a felony conviction when he applied for his real estate license in 2006. But his letter explaining the charge was full of lies. He said he argued with his girlfriend, police were called, he had a gun and was caught up in a crackdown on gun violence.

Police said Kohlhepp had a crush on the 14-year-old girl, who was friendly, but not romantic toward him. After raping her, he said he would kill her 6-year-old and 3-year-old siblings that she was babysitting if she called the police. His first question to officers when he was arrested was how long he was going to have to spend in prison, according to court papers.

In the South Carolina case, the couple disappeared about Aug. 31 when the woman went to do some cleaning on the suspect’s nearly 100-acre property near Woodruff. Her boyfriend accompanied her, said Daniel Herren, a friend who sat with the woman in her hospital room after she was rescued Thursday.

The Associated Press is not naming the woman because the suspect is a sex offender, though authorities have not said whether she was sexually assaulted.

Kohlhepp has a house about 9 miles away in Moore, where neighbour Ron Owen said Kohlhepp was very private, but when they did talk across the fence, he was a “big bragger.”

Kohlhepp liked to talk about the money he made day trading online, for example, and about his two BMWs. He recently told Owen, 76, that he’d paid $80,000 to put the chain-link fence around his property where the woman was found.

“We didn’t see any signs whatsoever that this was going on,” Owen said. “My first reaction’s a baseball bat, but I know I’m not to take that in my own hands. God will deal with him.”

But even as his father felt he couldn’t be helped, and as the neighbour recounted how Kohlhepp laughed when her son cried as he rolled him down the street locked in a dog carrier, court records show Kohlhepp’s still had one supporter in 1987 — his mother.

She wrote a letter asking the judge to send Kohlhepp to his grandparents instead of prison.

“He even walked the girl home,” she wrote. “Does that sound like a dangerous criminal?”</s>(CNN) Investigators are combing a farm in rural South Carolina where they found a 30-year-old woman "chained up like a dog" inside a shipping container .

Kala Brown, who went missing with her boyfriend more than two months ago, warned authorities that there could be other victims.

So far, there are more questions than answers about this troubling case. Here's the latest on what we know:

Authorities have been tight-lipped about what exactly brought them to the 100-acre farm in Woodruff, South Carolina, near Spartanburg.

Spartanburg County Sheriff Chuck Wright said sex crimes investigators led them to the property, where they'd showed up to serve a search warrant Thursday. But he hasn't revealed the evidence that pointed them in that direction.

Brown went missing in August, along with her boyfriend, Charles David Carver.

Investigators say they found Carver's car on the Woodruff property on Thursday. It was in a ravine, covered in brush.

Who owns the property, and how is he connected?

Todd Kohlhepp, a registered sex offender who's been working as a real estate agent in the area, owns the property. He was arrested Thursday and is not cooperating with investigators, the sheriff said.

Kohlhepp, 45, was added to the South Carolina Sex Offender Registry as a result of a 1987 kidnapping conviction in Arizona when he was a teenager.

Now he's being held without bond on suspicion of kidnapping, according to jail records. He's scheduled to appear in court Friday. It wasn't immediately clear whether he had retained legal representation.

Investigators think Kohlhepp, Carver and Brown knew each other.

"I do know that there was a prior relationship, but at this point, I don't know the extent of it," Wright said.

Are there other victims?

Brown told investigators she thinks four people might be buried on the property.

A cadaver dog picked up on something during a search, Wright said, but it's not clear what.

What have investigators found so far?

In addition to Carver's car, investigators have found "lots of weapons and ammo" on the property, the sheriff told HLN.

It's not clear whether bodies are buried on the property. But investigators are planning to keep looking.

"We're not going to leave the property until we're 100% sure that we've done everything possible," Wright said.</s>SPARTANBURG, S.C. — Investigators began searching for human remains Friday on a tract of South Carolina land near where a missing woman was found "chained up like a dog" in a large storage container.

Spartanburg County Sheriff Chuck Wright told reporters that authorities planned to excavate the area after cadaver dogs signaled the possible presence of remains.

The missing woman was found Thursday inside a container measuring about 30 feet by 15 feet. The sheriff said she told him the bodies of other women could be buried on the land owned by Todd Christopher Kohlhepp.

Kohlhepp, a 45-year-old registered sex offender with a previous kidnapping conviction, has been arrested and charged with kidnapping. He was scheduled for a bond hearing Friday in Spartanburg.

The woman's boyfriend, 32-year-old Charles Carver, is still missing after the couple disappeared in late August.

Acting on a tip, deputies found the woman after hearing her banging inside the container in Woodruff, 80 miles northwest of the state capital of Columbia, the sheriff said.

The woman, who had worked for Kohlhepp, had a chain around her neck, Wright said. She told deputies she had been kept in the container for two months and had been fed regularly.

Anderson Police Chief Jim Stewart said his department's investigation into the couple's disappearance led authorities to the property near Woodruff.

"We got computer and cellphone records that ultimately led us to the area in Woodruff," Stewart said. "We knew that was the last place that a cellphone tied to this case pinged."

Records indicate Kohlhepp is a licensed real estate agent and licensed pilot. As a teenager, he was convicted and sentenced to prison in Arizona for kidnapping and dangerous crimes against children.

Referring to the possibility of other victims, the sheriff said: "We're trying to make sure that we don't have a serial killer on our hands."</s>WOODRUFF, S.C. — The man arrested after authorities found a woman chained on his property in rural South Carolina killed at least seven people, and his confessions have solved a 13-year-old case, Sheriff Chuck Wright said Saturday.

Todd Kohlhepp confessed he was the shooter who killed four people at a motorcycle shop in Spartanburg County in 2003, Wright said.

“God is good,” he said. The community is no longer wondering who’s responsible for the “four people who were brutally murdered.”

Wright says Kohlhepp also showed law enforcement officers Saturday the gravesites of two of his other victims buried on his 95-acre property near Woodruff.

That’s in addition to the body found Friday at the site. Wright and Coroner Rusty Clevenger identified that victim as 32-year-old Charles Carver, the boyfriend of the woman found in a locked metal container Thursday.

Wright says “God answered our prayers” in solving the 13-year-old cold case.

The sheriff says it’s possible more bodies will be uncovered.

When he was 15 and facing charges he raped a neighbour 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 neighbour 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. She told investigators that Kohlhepp shot and killed her boyfriend in front of her.

“They’re obviously heartbroken,” he said after talking to Carver’s family. “It’s terrible. I do think this helps with a little bit of closure. .. We prayed for God to show us, and He did.”

Carver died of multiple gunshot wounds. An anthropologist is helping determine how long Carver was buried, said Coroner Rusty Clevenger. He declined to say how many times Carver had been shot.

Kohlhepp is charged with kidnapping the woman. Authorities say more charges are coming.

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 erect a fence around it said to have cost $80,000. 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.

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 conscience, who presents the greatest risk to the community,” the officer wrote in the papers obtained by WHNS-TV.

Kohlhepp remains behind bars. The 45-year-old had to register as a sex offender after his release from prison in Arizona.

But that didn’t stop him from becoming an apparently successful real estate agent. Kohlhepp followed the rules and admitted he had a felony conviction when he applied for his real estate license in 2006. But his letter explaining the charge was full of lies. He said he argued with his girlfriend, police were called, he had a gun and was caught up in a crackdown on gun violence.

Police said Kohlhepp had a crush on the 14-year-old girl, who was friendly, but not romantic toward him. After raping her, he said he would kill her 6-year-old and 3-year-old siblings that she was babysitting if she called the police. His first question to officers when he was arrested was how long he was going to have to spend in prison, according to court papers.

In the South Carolina case, the couple disappeared about Aug. 31 when the woman went to do some cleaning on the suspect’s nearly 100-acre property near Woodruff. Her boyfriend accompanied her, said Daniel Herren, a friend who sat with the woman in her hospital room after she was rescued Thursday.

The Associated Press is not naming the woman because the suspect is a sex offender, though authorities have not said whether she was sexually assaulted.

Kohlhepp has a house about 9 miles away in Moore, where neighbour Ron Owen said Kohlhepp was very private, but when they did talk across the fence, he was a “big bragger.”

Kohlhepp liked to talk about the money he made day trading online, for example, and about his two BMWs. He recently told Owen, 76, that he’d paid $80,000 to put the chain-link fence around his property where the woman was found.

“We didn’t see any signs whatsoever that this was going on,” Owen said. “My first reaction’s a baseball bat, but I know I’m not to take that in my own hands. God will deal with him.”

But even as his father felt he couldn’t be helped, and as the neighbour recounted how Kohlhepp laughed when her son cried as he rolled him down the street locked in a dog carrier, court records show Kohlhepp’s still had one supporter in 1987 — his mother.

She wrote a letter asking the judge to send Kohlhepp to his grandparents instead of prison.

“He even walked the girl home,” she wrote. “Does that sound like a dangerous criminal?”</s>SPARTANBURG, S.C. | A woman who was “chained up like a dog” for weeks in a dark storage container was lured to her captor’s South Carolina property for a cleaning job, a family friend said Friday as search teams digging up the area found one body and looked for more.

Authorities were “trying to make sure that we don’t have a serial killer on our hands,” the sheriff said. Investigators were told the property could hold as many as three other corpses.

Prosecutor Barry Barnette said the woman saw her captor shoot and kill her boyfriend, who went with her to the job. The body discovered Friday was not immediately identified.

The couple disappeared around Aug. 31 when they went to do the work on the suspect’s nearly 100-acre property in a rural area near the community of Woodruff, said Daniel Herren, a friend who sat with her in her hospital room after she was rescued Thursday.

“They were going to do some work, help cleaning up the property. And he pulled out a gun and took them hostage,” Herren said, adding that the abduction happened quickly.

Todd Christopher Kohlhepp, a 45-year-old registered sex offender with a previous kidnapping conviction as a teenager in Arizona, appeared at a bond hearing Friday in Spartanburg on a kidnapping charge. More charges will be filed later, the prosecutor told the court.

The judge did not set bond and instead referred the matter to circuit court. The suspect did not appear to have an attorney, and the judge urged him to get one.

The search of his property was unfolding as more details of the suspect’s violent past emerged, including an Arizona judge noting in 1987 that he had displayed aggressive behavior and sexual preoccupation since he was a child — behavior the judge expected to continue.

The Associated Press is not naming the woman because the suspect is a sex offender, though authorities have not said whether she was sexually assaulted. Her boyfriend was identified as 32-year-old Charles Carver.

Herren, who visited her in the hospital and had dinner with her Thursday, said he did not ask the woman if she was sexually assaulted.

But she did describe to him the details of her captivity, telling him she was in the container nearly the entire time except for when she was taken out for occasional walks.

“He never took the chain off of her, but he was taking her around, let her get, not so much exercise, but let her walk around some,” Herren said. “It didn’t sound like it was every day. It was kind of sporadic.”

She was fed once a day about 6 p.m. She “didn’t tell us exactly what she was eating. But from what I gathered, it could have been fast food. … It wasn’t like he was keeping her alive on bread and water. He was in a weird, sick kind of way being, I guess, kind of humane, as far as feeding her,” Herren said.

She left the hospital late Thursday and is staying with family, Herren said.

The property includes grassy areas, some covered in waist-high weeds, as well as stands of trees. Most or all of it is surrounded by a chain-link fence 6 to 7 feet tall.

In the middle was the cargo container, which measured about 30 feet by 15 feet. It was next to a two-car garage that had a living space on top, Barnette said.

During Friday’s search efforts, officers using all-terrain vehicles and a backhoe came and went while a law enforcement helicopter circled overhead.

Investigators began excavating after cadaver dogs signaled the possible presence of remains.

Acting on a tip, deputies found the woman after hearing her banging inside the container, Spartanburg County Sheriff Chuck Wright said.

Anderson Police Chief Jim Stewart said computer and cellphone records led authorities to the property near Woodruff, 80 miles northwest of the state capital of Columbia, because it was the last place that a cellphone pinged.

Guns and a large amount of ammunition were seized from Kohlhepp, the prosecutor said.

“It’s unbelievable how much he had,” he said.

Records indicate Kohlhepp is a licensed real estate agent and licensed pilot. As a teenager, he was convicted and sentenced to prison in Arizona for kidnapping and crimes against children, according to South Carolina’s sex offender registry.

Online prison records from Arizona show that Kohlhepp served about 14 years for the 1986 felony. He was released in 2001.

In court Friday, Barnette said the Arizona case occurred when Kohlhepp kidnapped a 14-year-old girl, bound her and raped her.

Court records from the Arizona case obtained by WHNS-TV in South Carolina show that a judge decided in January of 1987 to transfer the case to adult court partly because of concerns about Kohlhepp’s aggressive nature.

“At less than the age of 9 this juvenile was impulsive, explosive and preoccupied with sexual content. He has not changed. He has been unabatedly aggressive to others and destructive of property since nursery school,” the judge wrote, adding that his aggressive behavior was likely to continue into the future.

A real estate agent who worked at a firm run by Kohlhepp said she had known him for 10 years after they met at a university in the Spartanburg area and were study partners in a statistics class. She said she was in disbelief.

“He’s not the kind of person to do something like this,” Cherry Laurens said by phone. “Working with him, he was an excellent boss. He stood up for us whenever we needed him.”

She said it was widely known that he was registered as a sex offender, but he told people that it was based on trumped-up charges after he “had gone joyriding with a girl” and upset her father, who was a prominent local official.

Kohlhepp also had a house in Moore, on the outskirts of Spartanburg, about 15 minutes from the rural property where the woman was chained.

His neighbor there, 76-year-old Ron Owen, said Kohlhepp was private but pleasant.

“Todd was in my opinion a likable guy,” Owen said.

Associated Press writers Jack Jones in Columbia, South Carolina; Alex Sanz in Spartanburg; and Paul Davenport in Phoenix contributed to this report.</s>WOODRUFF, S.C. — The man arrested after authorities found a woman chained on his property in rural South Carolina killed at least seven people, and his confessions have solved a 13-year-old case, Sheriff Chuck Wright said Saturday.

Todd Kohlhepp confessed he was the shooter who killed four people at a motorcycle shop in Spartanburg County in 2003, Wright said.

“God is good,” he said. The community is no longer wondering who’s responsible for the “four people who were brutally murdered.”

Wright says Kohlhepp also showed law enforcement officers Saturday the gravesites of two of his other victims buried on his 95-acre property near Woodruff.

That’s in addition to the body found Friday at the site. Wright and Coroner Rusty Clevenger identified that victim as 32-year-old Charles Carver, the boyfriend of the woman found in a locked metal container Thursday.

Wright says “God answered our prayers” in solving the 13-year-old cold case.

The sheriff says it’s possible more bodies will be uncovered.

When he was 15 and facing charges he raped a neighbour 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 neighbour 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. She told investigators that Kohlhepp shot and killed her boyfriend in front of her.

“They’re obviously heartbroken,” he said after talking to Carver’s family. “It’s terrible. I do think this helps with a little bit of closure. .. We prayed for God to show us, and He did.”

Carver died of multiple gunshot wounds. An anthropologist is helping determine how long Carver was buried, said Coroner Rusty Clevenger. He declined to say how many times Carver had been shot.

Kohlhepp is charged with kidnapping the woman. Authorities say more charges are coming.

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 erect a fence around it said to have cost $80,000. 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.

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 conscience, who presents the greatest risk to the community,” the officer wrote in the papers obtained by WHNS-TV.

Kohlhepp remains behind bars. The 45-year-old had to register as a sex offender after his release from prison in Arizona.

But that didn’t stop him from becoming an apparently successful real estate agent. Kohlhepp followed the rules and admitted he had a felony conviction when he applied for his real estate license in 2006. But his letter explaining the charge was full of lies. He said he argued with his girlfriend, police were called, he had a gun and was caught up in a crackdown on gun violence.

Police said Kohlhepp had a crush on the 14-year-old girl, who was friendly, but not romantic toward him. After raping her, he said he would kill her 6-year-old and 3-year-old siblings that she was babysitting if she called the police. His first question to officers when he was arrested was how long he was going to have to spend in prison, according to court papers.

In the South Carolina case, the couple disappeared about Aug. 31 when the woman went to do some cleaning on the suspect’s nearly 100-acre property near Woodruff. Her boyfriend accompanied her, said Daniel Herren, a friend who sat with the woman in her hospital room after she was rescued Thursday.

The Associated Press is not naming the woman because the suspect is a sex offender, though authorities have not said whether she was sexually assaulted.

Kohlhepp has a house about 9 miles away in Moore, where neighbour Ron Owen said Kohlhepp was very private, but when they did talk across the fence, he was a “big bragger.”

Kohlhepp liked to talk about the money he made day trading online, for example, and about his two BMWs. He recently told Owen, 76, that he’d paid $80,000 to put the chain-link fence around his property where the woman was found.

“We didn’t see any signs whatsoever that this was going on,” Owen said. “My first reaction’s a baseball bat, but I know I’m not to take that in my own hands. God will deal with him.”

But even as his father felt he couldn’t be helped, and as the neighbour recounted how Kohlhepp laughed when her son cried as he rolled him down the street locked in a dog carrier, court records show Kohlhepp’s still had one supporter in 1987 — his mother.

She wrote a letter asking the judge to send Kohlhepp to his grandparents instead of prison.

“He even walked the girl home,” she wrote. “Does that sound like a dangerous criminal?”</s>WOODRUFF, S.C. — The man arrested after authorities found a woman chained on his property in rural South Carolina killed at least seven people, and his confessions have solved a 13-year-old case, Sheriff Chuck Wright said Saturday.

Todd Kohlhepp confessed he was the shooter who killed four people at a motorcycle shop in Spartanburg County in 2003, Wright said.

“God is good,” he said. The community is no longer wondering who’s responsible for the “four people who were brutally murdered.”

Wright says Kohlhepp also showed law enforcement officers Saturday the gravesites of two of his other victims buried on his 95-acre property near Woodruff.

That’s in addition to the body found Friday at the site. Wright and Coroner Rusty Clevenger identified that victim as 32-year-old Charles Carver, the boyfriend of the woman found in a locked metal container Thursday.

Wright says “God answered our prayers” in solving the 13-year-old cold case.

The sheriff says it’s possible more bodies will be uncovered.

When he was 15 and facing charges he raped a neighbour 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 neighbour 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. She told investigators that Kohlhepp shot and killed her boyfriend in front of her.

“They’re obviously heartbroken,” he said after talking to Carver’s family. “It’s terrible. I do think this helps with a little bit of closure. .. We prayed for God to show us, and He did.”

Carver died of multiple gunshot wounds. An anthropologist is helping determine how long Carver was buried, said Coroner Rusty Clevenger. He declined to say how many times Carver had been shot.

Kohlhepp is charged with kidnapping the woman. Authorities say more charges are coming.

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 erect a fence around it said to have cost $80,000. 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.

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 conscience, who presents the greatest risk to the community,” the officer wrote in the papers obtained by WHNS-TV.

Kohlhepp remains behind bars. The 45-year-old had to register as a sex offender after his release from prison in Arizona.

But that didn’t stop him from becoming an apparently successful real estate agent. Kohlhepp followed the rules and admitted he had a felony conviction when he applied for his real estate license in 2006. But his letter explaining the charge was full of lies. He said he argued with his girlfriend, police were called, he had a gun and was caught up in a crackdown on gun violence.

Police said Kohlhepp had a crush on the 14-year-old girl, who was friendly, but not romantic toward him. After raping her, he said he would kill her 6-year-old and 3-year-old siblings that she was babysitting if she called the police. His first question to officers when he was arrested was how long he was going to have to spend in prison, according to court papers.

In the South Carolina case, the couple disappeared about Aug. 31 when the woman went to do some cleaning on the suspect’s nearly 100-acre property near Woodruff. Her boyfriend accompanied her, said Daniel Herren, a friend who sat with the woman in her hospital room after she was rescued Thursday.

The Associated Press is not naming the woman because the suspect is a sex offender, though authorities have not said whether she was sexually assaulted.

Kohlhepp has a house about 9 miles away in Moore, where neighbour Ron Owen said Kohlhepp was very private, but when they did talk across the fence, he was a “big bragger.”

Kohlhepp liked to talk about the money he made day trading online, for example, and about his two BMWs. He recently told Owen, 76, that he’d paid $80,000 to put the chain-link fence around his property where the woman was found.

“We didn’t see any signs whatsoever that this was going on,” Owen said. “My first reaction’s a baseball bat, but I know I’m not to take that in my own hands. God will deal with him.”

But even as his father felt he couldn’t be helped, and as the neighbour recounted how Kohlhepp laughed when her son cried as he rolled him down the street locked in a dog carrier, court records show Kohlhepp’s still had one supporter in 1987 — his mother.

She wrote a letter asking the judge to send Kohlhepp to his grandparents instead of prison.

“He even walked the girl home,” she wrote. “Does that sound like a dangerous criminal?”
Kohlhepp, a man arrested in the American state of South Carolina for keeping a missing woman "chained like a dog", has reportedly confessed to seven murders, including four killed in an unsolved mass shooting at a motorcycle shop in 2003.