Teams digging on the property found one body Friday and feared there could be more.

Prosecutor Barry Barnette said the woman saw her captor shoot and kill her boyfriend, who went with her for a cleaning job on the suspect's property. The body discovered Friday was not immediately identified, and Spartanburg County Coroner Rusty Clevenger said he isn't sure when that might happen.

Police vehicles continued to crisscross the property of Todd Christopher Kohlhepp, a 45-year-old registered sex offender.

"This is a very, very dangerous individual," the prosecutor said.

Kohlhepp, who has a previous kidnapping conviction in Arizona, appeared Friday at a bond hearing in Spartanburg on a kidnapping charge. More charges are expected.

The judge did not set bond and instead referred the matter to circuit court. The suspect didn't appear to have an attorney.

Barnette said that in the Arizona case, Kohlhepp kidnapped a 14-year-old girl, bound her and raped her in 1986. Online prison records show he served about 14 years for the felony. He was released in 2001.

Records from the Arizona case obtained by WHNS-TV in South Carolina show that a judge decided in 1987 to transfer the case to adult court partly because of 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.

In the South Carolina case, the couple disappeared about Aug. 31 when they went to do the work on the suspect's nearly 100-acre property near Woodruff, said Daniel Herren, a friend who sat with the woman 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.

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 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 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.

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

"It's unbelievable how much he had," he said, adding that Kohlhepp frequently took target practice in an area near the storage container.

Records show Kohlhepp received his South Carolina real-estate license in 2006 before a state law went into effect requiring background checks.

A real estate agent who worked at the 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. 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.

Kohlhepp made frequent online posts about moving around rocks and trimming trees at the rural property, according to the Facebook page that Laurens confirmed was his.

He wrote a post about news reports on missing people: "reading the news.. this person missing, that person missing, another person missing.. oh wait.. that person just went to beach with friend, other person found with her parole violation boyfriend... in the event I become missing, please note no one would take me. I eat too much and I am crabby..."

The post was written about two weeks after the couple disappeared in August.

Associated Press writers Allen G. Breed in Raleigh, North Carolina; and Alex Sanz in Spartanburg contributed to this report.</s>WOODRUFF, S.C. (AP) — Authorities: Body found on rural South Carolina property is boyfriend of woman found chained in a storage container .</s>(CNN) A 45-year-old South Carolina man accused of kidnapping a woman and holding her captive for two months appeared briefly in court Friday.

Suspect Todd Kohlhepp went before a judge but the matter of his bond was referred to another court. For now, he's still in jail.

Kohlhepp, 45, told a judge he did not have an attorney and asked what would happen if he didn't have one in time for an initial appearance, which is scheduled for January 19. He has not entered a plea.

An arrest warrant alleges that he kidnapped 30-year-old Kala Brown about August 31 in Spartanburg County. Authorities say they found Brown on Thursday chained inside a shipping container on Kohlhepp's farm property near Woodruff.

Searchers found a body Friday on the property, but it is too soon to say whether it was that of Brown's missing boyfriend or someone else.

Here's what we know so far about Kohlhepp:

1. He's been and convicted of kidnapping

Kohlhepp was a teenager living in Tempe, Arizona, when he was accused of holding a 14-year-old girl at gunpoint and sexually assaulting her.

Originally, he was charged with kidnapping, sexual assault and committing a dangerous crime against children. The other charges were dropped after he pleaded guilty to kidnapping and was sentenced to 15 years in prison, according to court records obtained by CNN affiliates KPHO and KTVK.

In 1987, Maricopa (Arizona) County Judge C. Kimball Rose ordered that Kohlhepp's case should be transferred out of the juvenile system because his offenses had been committed "in an aggressive, violent, obviously premeditated and willful manner," according to the court documents.

"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's ruling said. "He destroys his own clothing, personal possessions and pets apparently on whim and caprice. Approximately six years of intervention in fifteen years of life have resulted in abysmal failure. Twenty-five months of the most intensive and expensive professional intervention, short of God's, will provide no protection for the public and no rehabilitation of this juvenile by any services or facilities presently available to the Juvenile Court."

Kohlhepp -- who is 5-foot-11 and weighs about 300 pounds -- had numerous guns on the property where Brown was found and a body was discovered, officials said.

7th Judicial Circuit Solicitor Barry Barnette told a judge at Kohlhepp's arraignment that the suspect appeared to have been target shooting on the land he owns near Woodruff.

Discarded targets were found near a two-car garage. "He appears to be a very good shot from looking at the shooting that he did," Barnette said.

According to tax records, Kohlhepp bought the 95.57-acre property for $305,000 in May 2014.

When he applied to take a real estate license exam in South Carolina in 2006, Kohlhepp offered an explanation of his criminal history, telling officials that the Arizona case was his only conviction and that he'd made significant strides to follow the law and give back to the community since then.

In that letter, Kohlhepp said he'd been charged with kidnapping because he was a minor in possession of a firearm during an argument with his girlfriend.

"I was charged with the felony of kidnapping due to the fact that I did have a firearm on me regardless that she didn't know it, and I had told her not to move while we talked this out," he said. "At this time, Arizona was coming down very hard on minors and anything to do with firearms due to the heavy gang activity out there, and I received a sentence of 15 years, for which I served every day, no parole required."

5. He describes himself as a former professional graphic designer and a licensed pilot.

On the website for his real estate company, Kohlhepp also says he studied computer science and business administration.

6. Parents divorced when he was very young

According to court documents, Kohlhepp's parents divorced when he was either 1 or 2 years old. His mother remarried when he was 3 and later divorced and remarried his stepfather several times.

Kohlhepp lived with his mother in Georgia and South Carolina for most of his childhood, but went to stay with his biological father in Arizona when he was 12. He was going to high school in Tempe when he was arrested and convicted of kidnapping.</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 Kala Brown saw her captor shoot and kill her boyfriend, who went with her to the job. Brown’s boyfriend was identified as 32-year-old Charles Carver.

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.

Todd Kohlhepp Spartanburg County Sheriff

“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.

Kala’s friends say she worked with her alleged kidnapper cleaning houses, according to CBS affiliate WSPA.

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.

Herren, who visited her in the hospital and had dinner with her Thursday, said he did not ask Brown 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.

Deputies heard her banging on the container as they were serving a search warrant, CBS affiliate WSPA reports.

Woman in S.C. found chained inside metal storage container

Anderson Police Chief Jim Stewart said they were pinging Brown’s phone 2 days after she was reported missing.

He says it pinged on the property where Brown was found. The Phone went dead after two days.

Two weeks before they were able to get a search warrant for the property the sheriff’s office flew over the property and saw it was extensive and need to get on the ground.

Anderson Police say from early on they had no indication there was foul play, even with the cell phone pings.

Brown 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 Brown 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 Brown 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.</s>(CNN) A 45-year-old South Carolina man accused of kidnapping a woman and holding her hostage for two months appeared briefly in court Friday.

Suspect Todd Kohlhepp went before a judge but the matter of his bond was referred to another court. For now, he's still in jail.

Kohlhepp, 45, told a judge he did not have an attorney and asked what would happen if he didn't have one in time for an initial appearance, which is scheduled for January 19. He has not entered a plea.

An arrest warrant alleges that he kidnapped 30-year-old Kala Brown about August 31 in Spartanburg County. Authorities say they found Brown on Thursday chained inside a shipping container on Kohlhepp's farm property near Woodruff.

Searchers found a body Friday on the property, but it is too soon to say whether it was that of Brown's missing boyfriend or someone else.

Here's what we know so far about Kohlhepp:

1. He's been and convicted of kidnapping

Kohlhepp was a teenager living in Tempe, Arizona, when he was accused of holding a 14-year-old girl at gunpoint and sexually assaulting her.

Originally, he was charged with kidnapping, sexual assault and committing a dangerous crime against children. The other charges were dropped after he pleaded guilty to kidnapping and was sentenced to 15 years in prison, according to court records obtained by CNN affiliates KPHO and KTVK.

In 1987, Maricopa (Arizona) County Judge C. Kimball Rose ordered that Kohlhepp's case should be transferred out of the juvenile system because his offenses had been committed "in an aggressive, violent, obviously premeditated and willful manner," according to the court documents.

"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's ruling said. "He destroys his own clothing, personal possessions and pets apparently on whim and caprice. Approximately six years of intervention in fifteen years of life have resulted in abysmal failure. Twenty-five months of the most intensive and expensive professional intervention, short of God's, will provide no protection for the public and no rehabilitation of this juvenile by any services or facilities presently available to the Juvenile Court."

Kohlhepp -- who is 5-foot-11 and weighs about 300 pounds -- had numerous guns on the property where Brown was found and a body was discovered, officials said.

7th Judicial Circuit Solicitor Barry Barnette told a judge at Kohlhepp's arraignment that the suspect appeared to have been target shooting on the land he owns near Woodruff.

Discarded targets were found near a two-car garage. "He appears to be a very good shot from looking at the shooting that he did," Barnette said.

According to tax records, Kohlhepp bought the 95.57-acre property for $305,000 in May 2014.

When he applied to take a real estate license exam in South Carolina in 2006, Kohlhepp offered an explanation of his criminal history, telling officials that the Arizona case was his only conviction and that he'd made significant strides to follow the law and give back to the community since then.

In that letter, Kohlhepp said he'd been charged with kidnapping because he was a minor in possession of a firearm during an argument with his girlfriend.

"I was charged with the felony of kidnapping due to the fact that I did have a firearm on me regardless that she didn't know it, and I had told her not to move while we talked this out," he said. "At this time, Arizona was coming down very hard on minors and anything to do with firearms due to the heavy gang activity out there, and I received a sentence of 15 years, for which I served every day, no parole required."

5. He describes himself as a former professional graphic designer and a licensed pilot.

On the website for his real estate company, Kohlhepp also says he studied computer science and business administration.

6. Parents divorced when he was very young

According to court documents, Kohlhepp's parents divorced when he was either 1 or 2 years old. His mother remarried when he was 3 and later divorced and remarried his stepfather several times.

Kohlhepp lived with his mother in Georgia and South Carolina for most of his childhood, but went to stay with his biological father in Arizona when he was 12. He was going to high school in Tempe when he was arrested and convicted of kidnapping.</s>Spartanburg Sheriff Chuck Wright on Saturday night said a body found in a shallow grave on a 96-acre property on Wofford Road was that of Charles Carver, who had been missing from Anderson County.

Carver was the boyfriend of the woman who was found Thursday chained in a metal cargo container on the property, which is owned by Spartanburg real estate agent Todd Kohlhepp.

Kohlhepp was arrested Thursday and charged with kidnapping after the missing 30-year-old Anderson woman was found.

Wright would not confirm a report that Kohlepp was brought to the scene Saturday afternoon.

During the formal bond hearing, Seventh Circuit Solicitor Barry Barnette gave a short timeline of how the kidnapped woman ended up on Kohlhepp’s property.

The woman and Carver were reported missing in Anderson County in early September. Her friend, Dan Herren, told the Associated Press on Friday that when he visited her in the hospital, she told him the couple had gone out to Kohlhepp’s property to do some work and Kohlhepp had suddenly “pulled out a gun and held them hostage.”

When she talked with law enforcement, she told them she witnessed Kohlhepp shoot Carver, Barnette said.

He said investigators believe other bodies might be buried on Kohlhepp’s property. Wright said Thursday the rescued woman had told investigators Kohlhepp told her four additional bodies were buried on the property.

Barnette said the city of Anderson Police Department contacted the Spartanburg County Sheriff’s Office after receiving information that the rescued woman’s phone had been pinging around the area of Kohlhepp’s property in Woodruff.

A social media and phone search showed Kohlhepp was the last person she spoke to before she went missing, Barnette said. With that information, investigators obtained a search warrant for Kohlhepp’s Wofford Road property and executed that warrant Thursday, Barnette said.

Investigators discovered a metal cargo container on the property that is next to a two-car garage with a living area above it, Barnette said. As investigators were looking around in the garage area, Barnette said they heard noises coming from the cargo container and found the woman inside with a chain around her neck and ankle.

“They had to go through several different locks to get to her,” Barnette said.

Barnette described Kohlhepp’s property as a compound. In the garage and living area, Barnette said investigators found “numerous guns everywhere” and a lot of ammunition. It appeared that Kohlhepp had been shooting targets for practice, Barnette said, and there were several shell casings on the ground.

When deputies executed another search warrant on Kohlhepp’s home in Moore, Barnette said they found more guns and ammunition.

Barnette asked the judge to deny Kohlhepp’s bond based on this information and his past criminal record. Kohlhepp was convicted in 1986 of kidnapping a girl in Arizona and served 16 years in prison. Kohlhepp was also charged with sexually assaulting the 14-year-old girl in the case, but through a plea agreement, that charge was dropped.

However, Kohlhepp was required to register a sex offender, Barnette said.

“This individual is a very, very dangerous individual,” Barnette said.

Once an autopsy is completed on the body that was found, Kohlhepp could be facing additional charges, Barnette said.

Kohlhepp will be arraigned in court on Jan. 19, Spartanburg County Magistrate Judge Danny Burns ruled Friday.

Lt. Kevin Bobo, spokesperson with the Spartanburg County Sheriff’s Office, said investigators would probably return to the scene around daybreak to continue their investigation.</s>Body found where woman was held hostage in US South

MIAMI -- Police in South Carolina found a body Friday buried on a property where a woman "chained like a dog" has been rescued.

Spartanburg County Sheriff Chuck Wright said at a news conference "we did find a body on a shallow grave on this piece of property at around 10 this morning."

Wright said it was not immediately known how the person died or whether the remains were of a man or a woman.

Asked whether the body could be the work of a serial killer, the sheriff said it was possible.

The owner of the property in the town of Woodruff, northeast of the state capital Columbia, is Todd Kohlhepp, 45, a real-estate agent and registered sex offender.

He was arrested Thursday and charged with kidnapping after the female hostage was rescued from his property.

He has not been accused of killing the person whose body was found.

Kala Brown, 30, was discovered Thursday inside a padlocked shipping container after police heard a banging sound when they arrived at Kohlhepp's property with a search warrant.

Wright had described Brown as being "chained like a dog."

Brown told officers she had been in the container for two months.

Brown and her boyfriend, Charles Carver, had been missing since August. Carver's whereabouts are unknown.

Wright said that cadaver-sniffing dogs found the body Friday on the 95-acre (38-hectare) property. Authorities are investigating whether Kohlhepp owns other properties, he said.

According to WSPA, a local affiliate of the CBS television network, Brown's friends said that she worked for her alleged kidnapper cleaning houses.

"We went by his house to get a key before we went by his house to clean. Didn't seem like a person who would do anything to anybody," Brown's friend Lindsey Mayson told WSPA.

Kohlhepp has been registered as a sex offender in South Carolina for a 1987 conviction in Arizona for kidnapping, according to WSPA. He was 15 when he was accused of kidnapping and sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl.</s>SPARTANBURG, S.C. — The Latest on the investigation after a missing woman was found chained inside a storage container (all times local):

A coroner is working to identify the body found on property in rural South Carolina where a woman was found chained in a storage container.

Spartanburg County Coroner Rusty Clevenger says the body was exhumed Friday night and taken to the morgue. It remained unclear Saturday when the body would be identified.

Police vehicles could be seen going back and forth across the property. An Anderson police officer put two bouquets of flowers in the fence Saturday.

Todd Christopher Kohlhepp is charged with kidnapping after authorities found a woman Thursday chained at her neck and ankle in a storage container. Prosecutor Barry Barnette says the woman saw her captor shoot and kill her boyfriend, who went with her for a cleaning job on the suspect's property.

The man accused of chaining a woman in a storage container for weeks had a violent past and was "preoccupied with sexual content" from a young age.

That's according to details emerging as investigators search his rural property for bodies.

Teams digging on the property found one body Friday and feared there could be more.

Prosecutor Barry Barnette says the woman saw her captor shoot and kill her boyfriend, who went with her for a cleaning job on the suspect's property. The body discovered Friday was not immediately identified.

Todd Christopher Kohlhepp is charged with kidnapping. The 45-year-old registered sex offender has a previous kidnapping conviction in Arizona. More charges are expected.

Barnette said that in the Arizona case, Kohlhepp kidnapped a 14-year-old girl, bound her and raped her in 1986. Online prison records show he served about 14 years for the felony. He was released in 2001.</s>Fifteen years after he was released from prison for raping a 14-year-old neighbor, Spartanburg County deputies were brought to the property of Todd Christopher Kohlhepp, where they found a woman who had been chained in a container for two months and the body of her boyfriend.

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 who had been chained in a container for two months. She told investigators that Kohlhepp shot and killed her boyfriend in front of her.

Late Saturday, Sheriff Chuck Wright identified the body found on the site a day earlier as her boyfriend, 32-year-old Charles Carver.

“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 near Woodruff and put an $80,000 fence around it. On that property, 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 land Saturday with deputies. He was there for less than an hour, The Greenville News reported. Wright would not confirm Kohlhepp 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 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 that 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 if she called the police he would kill her 6-year-old and 3-year-old siblings whom she was baby-sitting. 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 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 neighbor 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 neighbor recounted how Kohlhepp laughed when her son cried as he rolled him down the street locked in a dog carrier, court records show Kohlhepp 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>“Twenty-five months of the most intensive and expensive professional intervention, short of God’s, will provide no protection for the public and no rehabilitation of this juvenile by any services or facilities presently available to the Juvenile Court.”

That's how Arizona judge Rose Kimball described Todd Kohlhepp as a teenager in 1986 upon his transfer from a juvenile detention facility to face charges of kidnapping and sexual assault as an adult.

Now 45, Kohlhepp, who lives in Moore and owns a 96-acre property in Woodruff, has again been charged with kidnapping, this time by Spartanburg County Sheriff's deputies.

The 30-year-old woman was found Thursday chained in a storage container on the property. She and her boyfriend, Charlie David Carver, were reported missing in late August. ( does not identify alleged victims of sexual assault.)

Spartanburg County Sheriff Chuck Wright and Coroner Rusty Clevenger confirmed Friday afternoon that one body had been found on the property.

Kohlhepp's first encounter with law enforcement also involved a kidnapping charge.

A Tempe Police Department report from the 1986 incident, included in 199 pages of court documents obtained by the , states that when Kohlhepp was 15 years old, he was accused of pointing a gun at a 14-year-old girl, forcing her to walk to his home, tying her hands and sexually assaulting her.

Kohlhepp pleaded guilty to the kidnapping charge in exchange for the sexual assault charge being dropped. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison and had to register as a sex offender.

Court documents show Kohlhepp had a history of emotional troubles and disruptive and violent behavior even before the incident.

“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,” Kimball said in a statement included in court records.

A 1987 psychiatric exam showed Kohlhepp wasn’t psychotic, but had severe underlying emotional issues which “could result in emotional deterioration in the future or continued aggressive behavior towards others in the future.”

“He demonstrates episodes of ignoring or distortion of reality and regular use of projection defense mechanisms and the presence of degrees of an impaired sense of reality," Dr. Roger Martig said in the evaluation, adding that Kohlhepp had “excessively strange impulses and feelings” and has a “limited capacity to tolerate unpleasant affects.”

In his report, Martig cited an evaluation performed on Kohlhepp during his time at the Georgia Mental Health Institute.

Incidents were also cited where Kohlhepp destroyed his bedroom with a hammer, broke other children's things and hit them, put a goldfish in bleach because he wanted a gerbil instead, and shot a dog with a BB gun.

Records show a neighbor told Kohlhepp’s probation officer that on one occasion, Kohlhepp locked her son inside a dog kennel and rolled it over while laughing as the boy cried and begged him to stop.

One of the Arizona officials who compiled court records concluded, “this writer viewed the defendant (Kohlhepp) as an extremely cold and somewhat callous young man, who has no comprehension whatsoever of the devastating effects of his own violent and aggressive behavior.”

While court and law enforcement officials believed Kohlhepp was incapable of feeling the impacts of his behavior, the family of the girl he pleaded guilty to kidnapping was consumed by them.

In a letter dated Jan. 9, 1987, the girl’s parents wrote to Kimball about how terrified their entire family was of Kohlhepp. “We live in great fear of him,” the letter read. “We hope that you will do all you can to protect our family as well as the rest of the community from any further actions on his part.”

Several months after that, on Aug. 6, 1987, Kohlhepp’s mother, Regina, wrote to her son’s adult probation officer.

“I realize that he has done wrong and my heart aches for the little girl. But it also aches for my son. He was only 15 years old. He didn’t have any record of any kind and had never been in trouble before,” she said in the letter. “Todd knows he did wrong and he’s sorry, but they won’t even give him a chance to make a good life out of this. Everyone, everyone, deserves a second chance.”

Regina wrote that her son’s 15-year prison sentence was unjust, given his age. She said she never knew Kohlhepp was capable of inflicting violence on another person.

She pleaded with court officials to find alternate treatments for her son instead of putting him in prison for a decade and a half.

“He won’t be rehabilitated in prison,” she told the probation officer. “He will be ruined.”
A body, later identified as the boyfriend of a missing woman rescued on the previous day, was discovered on Kohlhepp's property.