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 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. 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. This comes after the discovery of a body at the 95-acre site on Friday. 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. 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. (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 . The woman told officers that Kohlhepp had shot and killed her boyfriend in front of her. "They're obviously heartbroken," he said after talking to the Carver family. “He’s not the kind of person to do something like this,” Cherry Laurens said by phone. "They were going to do some work, help cleaning up the property. .. We prayed for God to show us, and He did.”

Carver died of multiple gunshot wounds. Investigators say they found Carver's car on the Woodruff property on Thursday. 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. 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. Investigators began excavating after cadaver dogs signaled the possible presence of remains. 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. Todd Kohlhepp, a registered sex offender who's been working as a real estate agent in the area, owns the property. He said he argued with his girlfriend, police were called, he had a gun and was caught up in a crackdown on gun violence. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. She wrote a letter asking the judge to send Kohlhepp to his grandparents instead of prison. “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.