South Carolina man who kidnapped woman confesses to 7 murders

Todd Kohlhepp
(Image credit: Spartanburg County Sheriff's Office/Associated Press)

The South Carolina man accused of keeping a woman "chained up like a dog" in a storage container confessed to seven murders, said Spartanburg Sheriff Chuck Wright. The woman was discovered Thursday on land belonging to Todd Kohlhepp, who has a history of violent behavior.

On Friday, a body was found on the same property, which law enforcement identified Saturday as belonging to the woman's boyfriend. Kohlhepp then admitted to seven killings, including an unsolved case known as the "Superbike murders" in which four people were killed at a motorcycle shop in 2003.

Wright said Kohlhepp showed officers other graves and "told us some stuff nobody else ought to know," suggesting the confession is genuine.

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Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.