SERIAL KILLER: Todd Kohlhepp

 A serial killer that openly told the world about his crimes through Amazon reviews.

On the 7th of March, 1971 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida a baby boy named Todd Christopher Sampsell was born. Within the first two years of his life, things started to turn south when his biological parents divorced. This quickly led to a man named Carl Kohlhepp entering Todd’s life when he married Reggie Tague, Todd’s mother.

Even though five-year-old Todd wasn’t Carl’s biggest fan, the man still adopted him, Todd taking Carl’s last name making him Todd Kohlhepp. At this young age, Todd began demanding to move in with his biological father.

His want to move was most likely because of the abuse coming from his grandfather’s hands, reports said that the abuse was so brutal it often involved a cattle prod.

Whilst this was happening, the family was moving between states going from Florida to South Carolina and finally to Georgia all before Todd was 10 years old. It was during these moves that Todd began exhibiting disturbing behaviours at school. Some of the behaviours, to begin with, were bullying his classmates and destroying their class projects. But this soon escalated into killing a goldfish by pouring bleach into the tank and shooting a dog with a BB gun.

His behaviour resulted in Todd getting referred to Behaviour Evaluation Center at Georgia Mental Health Insitute when he was 8 or 9 years old.

Fast forward a few years to 1983, Reggie and Carl divorced and Todd’s childhood dream came true. He was sent to live with his biological father, William Sampsell. It was going well for Todd for a few years as far as we are aware.

November 25th 1986, Todd Kohlhepp is fifteen years old when he commits his first crime.

Kohlhepp found a young teenage girl, just 14 years old, when he kidnapped her, taking her out to the house he lived in with his father. There he would bind and rape her inside the home all while holding her at gunpoint. Once he was finished, Kohlhepp threatened to kill the girl’s family if she told anyone what he had done before releasing her. The second that the girl got home she told her parents and called they reported the event to the police.

Kohlhepp was arrested a few hours later.

The case went all the way to sentencing where a judge reportedly described Kohlhepp as “very bright” but “emotionally dangerous”. Todd Kohlhepp was sentenced to fifteen years in an adult prison and upon his release, he would be made to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life.

Fourteen years of his sentence were served before Kohlhepp was released into the world where it seemed he was working on making a better life for himself. He moved back to South Carolina where he went to school earning 2 bachelor’s degrees one in Computer Science and the other in business. He even became a real estate agent.

It would be through this job that he crafted a “normal” life and a fortune that would allow him to purchase multiple properties, including a home that stood on 95 acres of land in a secluded area of Woodruff, South Carolina.

This seemingly picturesque life was unravelled in 2016 when a missing couple’s social media history was discovered by police.

Kala Brown (30) and Charles ‘Charlie’ Carver (32) were last seen on August 31st, 2016 before going radio silent to friends and family’s urgent calls and messages. Yet, the couple’s social media was weirdly active, talking about being married and purchasing a home together. They were reported missing by Charlie’s mother and police immediately started looking for answers.

Before the police were able to go through Kala’s Facebook account, all they knew was the couple’s phone had last pinged in Spartanburg County. Upon reading her private messages, they found that the day that the couple went missing they had been hired to do some cleaning tasks on Todd Kohlhepp’s property in Woodruff. This was the key to getting a search warrant for the land.

During the search police officers heard banging coming from inside a large, metal shipping container. Inside, chained to a wall by her neck and ankle, was Kala Brown.

When questioned about where her boyfriend was Kala told them “He shot him. Todd Kohlhepp shot Charlie Carver three times in the chest.”. After Kohlhepp had killed Charlie, she was locked inside the shipping container and that was the last time she saw him.

She would tell the police about everything that Kohlhepp had done in the two months he held her captive.

Kohlhepp would tell Kala all about the crimes he had previously committed, those included the ones he would be connected with and ones that he couldn’t be linked to. He would “brag about being a serial killer and mass murderer” to Kala whilst she was captive and tell her had killed nearly 100 people and that he wouldn’t stop killing since “he had dreams of his body count being in three digits.”. On top of the disturbing things he would say, Kohlhepp would repeatedly rape Kala whilst she was chained to the container wall.

Kala Brown would be the reason that six families would get closure for the deaths of their loved ones.

Police looked into the claims that Kala told them about and made a shocking discovery. Kohlhepp was connected to at least two cases he had told Kala about.

The first of the cases was a mass shooting in 2003 that took the lives of four motorsports store workers in under a minute. Kohlhepp claimed that he murdered the four workers because they had, according to Kohlhepp, mocked the bike he had purchased.
The four lives Kohlhepp senselessly took that day were:
Scott Ponder (30)

Brian Lucas (29)

Chris Sherbert (26)

Beverly guy (52)

The second case that police uncovered with Kala Brown’s help was from around the beginning of December 2015. A married couple had vanished after being hired to do work on Kohlhepp’s property. Kohlhepp killed the husband before keeping the wife for a week, raping her repeatedly before shooting her as well. He buried both of them in graves that he would later show to Kala Brown.
The couple that was brutalised by Kohlhepp were:
Johnny Joe Coxie (29)

Meagan Leigh McCraw-Coxie (26)

On the 26th of May 2017, Todd Kohlhepp was charged with 14 different charges. He pleads guilty to all. He was sentenced to 7 consecutive life sentences.

Throughout all of Todd Kohlhepp’s crimes, he was leaving reviews on Amazon about the tools and weapons that he used in his crimes.
In a review on a master padlock, he put, “solid locks… have 5 on a shipping container… won’t stop them… but sure will slow them down till they are too old to care.”
In another on a fixed blade, he put, “havent stabbed anyone yet…… yet…. but I am keeping the dream alive and when I do, it will be with a quality tool like this…”

As for his sole survivor, Kala Brown, she had a message for Kohlhepp from later interviews. “He tried to crush me, but I’m not broken. He cannot destroy who I am… I won.”