Have you ever read about a person who was so callous and evil throughout their entire life that it makes you question why they were ever allowed to participate in society? Well, this is one of those stories.
Back in 1987, a judge said of Todd Christopher Kohlhepp: "He has been unabatedly aggressive to others and destructive of property since nursery school," adding, "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."
At that time, a teenage Kohlhepp was on trial for using a gun to kidnap and threaten a 14-year-old girl — he reportedly had a crush on the girl but she didn't return his feelings. He took her home, tied her up, taped her mouth shut, and raped her. When he was finished, he walked her home and threatened to kill her entire family. He was charged with kidnapping, sexual assault, and committing a dangerous crime against children, and he served 14 years in prison after pleading guilty in exchange for removal of the sexual assault charge. At the time, he'd been living with his biological father in Arizona, but upon his release, he returned to South Carolina to be near his mother whom he'd lived with for most of his childhood.
While in prison, he earned a bachelor's degree in computer science, and once he set up his new life in the Palmetto State, he worked as a graphic designer before earning another degree in business administration from the University of South Carolina Upstate. By 2006, five years after his release from prison, he lied on his application about being a felon and registered sex offender and earned his real estate license in South Carolina. He'd go on to become a top-selling agent and start his own firm, as well as invest in numerous properties himself. From the outside looking in, he was a successful man who had turned his life around. Though later, people ranging from customers to waitresses at the Waffle House he frequented would admit that he could be rude and often made them uncomfortable with his inappropriate talk about sex and violence. One banker who worked with him even said he used to watch pornography on his computer in his office.
In 2016, Kohlhepp hired a woman named Kala Brown and her boyfriend, Charles David Carver, to remove some brush from one of his properties — 100 acres of land that he'd purchased in Spartanburg County in 2014 and promptly spent $80,000 fencing in. The couple never returned home, and the search for them began making headlines. Just over two months later, cellphone signals led police to the property where they found Carver's dead body with multiple gunshot wounds and Brown, still alive, tied up in a storage container.
Kohlhepp was arrested, of course, and that was only the beginning. Police also found the bodies of another couple, Johnny Joe Coxie and his wife, Meagan Leigh McCraw-Coxie. Both had been shot. He'd reportedly hired them to do some work on the property as well.
And that's not all. Back in 2003, in the town of Chesnee, South Carolina, the owner of Superbike Motorsports and three employees had been found murdered inside the shop. The case remained unsolved for fourteen years, but in exchange for being allowed to talk to his mother and transfer some of his money to pay for a friend's child's college tuition, he confessed to those murders, proving he did it by providing details police had not released to the public.
During a conversation with his mother, Kohlhepp claimed there were many more victims, stating that she did not have enough fingers to count them all. He also wrote a letter to the Spartanburg Herald-Journal claiming he'd killed many other people. However, police have yet to identify any of them in Arizona or South Carolina.
Kohlhepp is obviously an extremely troubled man, and as the judge in 1987 pointed out, he's been that way since childhood. In nursery school, he bullied other children and destroyed property, and as he grew up, he tortured animals. He was also said to be "preoccupied with sexual content" by the age of nine, and he would often destroy his own property at random, ranging from his clothing to his bed his bedroom furniture and even his own pets. It's said he shot his dog with a BB gun and killed a goldfish by pouring bleach into its tank.
He spent three and a half months in a psychiatric hospital as a child, but it sounds like everyone around him knew that there was no hope. His own father said the only emotion he was capable of was "anger and madness." And his mother, when talking about the murders he committed inside the bike shop, claimed he did it because they laughed at him when he fell off a bike. She also told CNN that he was "not a child you left alone."
When police raided Kohlhepp's property, they found no shortage of weapons and tools that he used to commit these murders, and that's where Amazon come in. He reportedly left reviews of said items that literally told what he was using them for. For example, he purchased a folding shovel and left a review stating "Keep in car for when you have to hide the bodies." On a page for locks, he wrote, "have 5 on a shipping container...won't stop them...but sure will slow them down til they are too old to care."
In 2017, he was sentenced to seven life terms in prison, plus 60 years.
If you want to learn more about this evil man and his victims, Fox Nation has a documentary series called "The Amazon Review Killer" that you can watch online with a membership.
