Spartanburg County Sheriff Chuck Wright told news outlets that deputies acting on a tip found Kala Brown after hearing her banging on the container from the inside Thursday in the town of Woodruff, 80 miles northwest of the state capital of Columbia.
Wright said Brown had a chain around her neck. He says she told deputies she had been kept in the container for two months and had been fed regularly.
The sheriff said a registered sex offender identified as Todd Christopher Kohlhepp has been arrested in connection with the incident.
Kala Brown was found chained up like a dog in a metal container after vanishing two months ago with her boyfriend. Brown has revealed she witnessed her captor murder her partner Charlie Carver, 32, just hours after police found a body on the 100-acre property.
Spartenburg coroner Rusty Clavenger confirmed a corpse had been unearthed by police, less than 24 hours into the investigation of the sprawling property in Woodruff, South Carolina.
The sex of the discovered body was not revealed, and police said they are still searching for three more. Fears are growing one of the bodies they are searching for could be Carver.
Brown was discovered on Thursday. She and Carver had last been seen on August 30. The 32-year-old’s car was found on the property on Thursday night.
Social media posts from a man accused of chaining Brown to a storage container show he made light of instances where people have been reported missing and had been putting gravel and boulders on his property.
On a Facebook account for someone named Todd Kohlhepp RE, he made a post Sept. 15 saying after reading news about missing people, his reaction is “that person just went to the beach with friend, other person found with her parole violation boyfriend…”
It also emerged Friday that Kohlhepp had been convicted of raping a 14-year-old at gunpoint when he was 15.
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.
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.”
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