Kala Brownhad been missing formore than two monthswhen authorities chasing a tip about a sex crime ventured onto a rural South Carolina property and heard banging coming from within a metal shipping container.
Inside they discovered the disheveled 30-year-old woman in restraints with a locked chain wrapped around her neck. Yet even as they worked with bolt cutters to free her, deputies stumbled onto another horrific revelation.
“Do you know where your buddy is?” they asked about Brown’s boyfriend, who disappeared with her on Aug. 31, 2016.
“Charlie?” Brown answers in the video of her rescue — a riveting moment in the three-part limited seriesSerial Killer: Devil Unchained,which premiered in July 2019 onInvestigation Discoveryand is now available to stream onDiscovery+.
“He shot him,” Brown asserts in a strong voice, still in restraints. “Todd Kohlheppshot Charlie Carver three times in the chest. He wrapped him in a blue tarp, put him in the bucket of the tractor [and] locked me down here, I’ve never seen him again.”
The charge abruptly spun the image of Kohlhepp from kidnapper to killer. He would laterplead guilty to the murders of Carver and six othersover 13 years and be sentenced to seven consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole.
“It was pretty emotional, to say the least, when she was found,” Spartanburg County Sheriff Chuck Wright told reporters on the scene, as shown on the series premiere episode, “especially when she was chained like a dog.”
Source: Kala Brown/Facebook
Kohlhepp was arrestedafter police freed Brown on Nov. 3, 2016, from the container on Kohlhepp’s nearly 100-acre property in Woodruff, S.C. The body of 32-year-old Carver was later found on the property.
Source: Facebook
Kohlhepp’s sixth and seventh murder charges were in connection to the 2015 deaths ofJohnny and Meagan Coxie, whose bodies were recovered from Kohlhepp’s property after Brown’s rescue. They went missing in December 2015.
Tim Kimzey/The Spartanburg Herald-Journal/AP
Meagan, according to an indictment, also had allegedly been held in Kohlhepp’s storage container for about six days after she disappeared, chained at both the wrists and ankles.
Brown was located after authoritieslearned from her Facebook pagethat she and Carver had planned to go work on Kohlhepp’s property on the day they disappeared. In an interview three months after her recovery, she said Kohlheppshot her boyfriend in front of herbefore taking her prisoner.
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“I had to stay alive in order to be found, and I realized that it was easier if he felt things were going his way,” she toldPhil McGraw. “So I made him think whatever I had to … to stay alive and to keep him from abusing me.”
“According to the stories he told me, I’d already been alive longer than anyone else, so … I believed [my strategy] was working,” she said.
The Investigation Discovery series revs up when journalist Maria Awes receives a call from the accused killer, who claims he has murdered more than his seven victims. Awes then follows his trail to learn whether his story might be true.
The three-part limited seriesSerial Killer: Devil Unchainedis available to stream on Discovery+.
source: people.com
