Authorities found a dead body late on Friday on the South Carolina property where a missing woman was discovered “chained up like a dog”, the coroner said, as horrific details emerged of the kidnapped woman’s ordeal.
Kala Brown, 30, had gone to the rural property of Todd Christopher Kohlhepp, a 45-year-old registered sex offender, for a cleaning job around 31 August, accompanied by her boyfriend, a family friend explained to the Associated Press on Friday.
“They were going to do some work, help cleaning up the property. And he pulled out a gun and took them hostage,” said her friend, Daniel Herren, after visiting Brown in hospital.
Brown saw her boyfriend, Charles Carver, 32, get shot and killed, prosecutor Barry Barnette said on Friday. Authorities did not identify the killed victim.
Authorities are “trying to make sure that we don’t have a serial killer on our hands”, said the Spartanburg County sheriff, Chuck Wright.
Wright described how officers discovered Brown when they heard banging as they searched the 100-acre property near Woodruff. Cellphone and computer data from Brown and Carver pointed them to Kohlhepp’s property.
Family and friends reported the couple missing in early September, after Carver’s mother grew concerned about her son’s several days of silence. She asked the building manager to check the couple’s apartment, where searchers found Brown’s pet pomeranian, along with her glasses and medication, making her family believe she had not intended to leave.
Police found her on Thursday “in a container chained up like a dog”, Wright said. The cargo container was just 30ft by 15ft wide.
“It’s tragic that this person was being treated like that,” said Wright.
For two months, Brown had been kept in a padlocked storage box, with a chain around her neck.
“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 on Friday. “It didn’t sound like it was every day. It was kind of sporadic.”
Every evening she was fed around 6pm, he said.
Brown “didn’t tell us exactly what she was eating. But from what I gathered, it could have been fast food,” Herren said. “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.”
Brown told police up to four dead bodies could be on the property. Authorities found a cache of guns and weapons on the property, which Kohlhepp has owned for two years.
Kohlhepp spent about 14 years in jail for a 1986 crime in which he kidnapped and raped a 14-year-old girl when he was 15. He has been listed on South Carolina’s sexual offender list since at least 2012.
On Friday, he appeared in the Spartanburg County jail on a kidnapping charge. He was refused bail. Barnette described him as a “very, very dangerous man” and suggested a murder charge was likely, reported the Post and Courier. Members of Carver’s family attended the court hearing.
In recent years, Kohlhepp has worked as a real estate agent, and the company website described his multiple degrees and love of flying planes and driving fast cars, according to the paper. The staff page of the realty website could not be accessed on Saturday.
In a bizarre twist, comments and posts about life updates continued to appear from Carver’s Facebook account after his disappearance, including private messaging to friends that horrified those close to him.
“His Facebook posts have been hacked. It’s not him posting,” his best friend, Lindsey Mayson, told the Daily Beast last month.
