In 2016, a South Carolina couple went missing and their families knew something was wrong, especially when their Facebook accounts seemed to remain active. With the use of their cell phone data, investigators quickly zeroed in on the last location the man and woman had visited, and what they found there was terrifying. But not only that—the discovery on that November day in 2016 unraveled the mystery of a local quadruple-homicide that taken place years earlier, and revealed a monster had been living and practicing in the community for years.
On November 6, 2003, a customer walked into the Superbike Motorsports store in Chesnee, South Carolina to find it eerily quiet. The reason? The four employees inside the store, three men and one woman, had been murdered, shot multiple times. They were Scott Ponder, 30, of Boiling Springs; Brian Lucas, 30, of Gaffney; Beverly Guy, 52, of Spartanburg, and Christopher Sherbert, 26, of Boiling Springs.
Superbike Motorsports, at the time, located next to a cattle field, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains and adjacent to farmland was not a place one would normally expect a violent crime to take place.
Noel Lee had stopped by Superbike Motorsports to get tickets for a motor cross race in Greenville that was scheduled. He was friends with Brian Lucas and Scott Ponder and often stopped in the shop when he had time off from his job at BMW. He said his two friends had taught his 8-year-old son to ride a little motorcycle.
Scott Ponder was one of the owners of the shop and Beverly Guy was his mother who also worked there. Brian Lucas and Christopher Sherbert were employees. Noel found the bodies of Brian and Scott just outside the shop, Beverly was in the front area, and Christopher was in the back of the shop, just on the other side of two double doors. Each victim had been shot at least once in the head and once in the chest.
At the time of the shootings, residents and investigators wondered if they were linked to a triple homicide that had occurred during a bank robbery in Greer, South Carolina a few months earlier. However, nothing appeared to be stolen from the shop at the time of the murders.
A man named Robert Fowler said he’d seen customers come in to pick up their repaired equipment and vehicles grow irate when they received their invoices. He wondered if an angry customer could have flown off the handle and been responsible for the murders. Sheriff Bill Coffee said he didn’t think the murders were a random act of violence.
Investigators released sketches of two people they thought might be witnesses to the murders. Reportedly witnesses had seen a dark green minivan driving erratically away from the motorbike shop, where a man was chasing a woman who appeared to be upset. Lt. Ron Gahagan would not say whether the couple was at the shop or whether they had come forward on their own.
Scott Ponder’s wife Melissa gave birth to their son seven months after the murders. By November 2004, a year after the shootings, no arrests had been made. The Spartanburg Sheriff’s Office offered a $25,000 reward for information leading to an arrest and released sketches of potential witnesses and photos of vehicles that were at the shop on November 6, 2003, when the four victims were discovered deceased. The murders at Superbike Motorsports would haunt the Chesnee community until thirteen years later, when the disappearance of two couples finally provided a stunning answer.
A Couple Disappears Years Later
In early September 2016, the family members of Kala Brown, age 30, and Charlie Carver, age 32, became concerned when they hadn’t heard from the couple who were living together in Anderson. They resided at the Anderson Crossing Apartments, with Charlie working at a tissue plant and Kala at a dialysis clinic. She had also begun working a side job working for a real estate agent, 45-year-old Todd Kohlhepp, helping him clean and clear houses before he offered them for rent.
Her friend Leah Miller told The Greenville News that she had once gone with Kala to Kohlhepp’s residence to get the key to a house Kala was supposed to clean. She helped her friend out that day, and Todd told the two women they could keep whatever the people had left there. She was supposed to continue helping Kala with the house cleaning jobs but had neck surgery and had to take a break from the work to recover.
Who Was Todd Kohlhepp?
On Thursday, November 4, 2016, investigators headed to a property in Woodruff, South Carolina owned by Todd Kohlhepp. It spanned 95 acres. They knew the last time a cell phone tied to Kala and Charlie had last pinged at that location and that helped narrowed down their search. While there, they heard banging coming from a metal storage building and grew suspicious. Upon further inspection, they discovered Kala Brown inside, alive but chained up by the neck. Anderson Police Chief Jim Stewart said the investigation into Kala and Charlie’s disappearances prompted the department to obtain search warrants for Todd Kohlhepp’s home in Moore, as well as his property out in Woodruff. Kala told authorities Todd had shot Charlie in front of her, and that there could be as many as four more bodies buried on the property.
As they dug into his past, investigators learned Todd Kohlhepp was a convicted sex offender. While living in Arizona in 1986, 15-year-old Todd lured a female neighbor to his home with the promise that her boyfriend was waiting there to speak to her. Once out of her house, he put a gun to her head and forced her to his home a few blocks away from Arizona State University. His father was away at the time on a business trip. Inside the home, he tied the girl’s hands with rope and put tape over her mouth before sexually assaulting her. Afterwards, he walked her home and threatened to murder her younger brother and sister if she told anyone what happened. Someone else alerted the authorities, though, and when police arrived at his father’s house, he had a rifle pointed at the ceiling. He told them he had committed the crime out of anger and rebellion towards his father, who he had been living with in Arizona.
Todd was convicted of rape and served 15 years in prison before relocating to Upstate South Carolina, where he opened his real estate business. He had to register as a sex offender, something one of his neighbors on Windsong Way in Moore became aware of him when he moved in next door to her. She said she had looked it up and the details disturbing, but she never noticed any strange behavior in him. Agents who worked at Todd’s real estate firm, TKA Real Estate Agency, had no idea their boss was a registered sex offender and were surprised when police told them.
Investigators discovered Charlie’s deceased body on Todd’s property, along with the bodies of two other people who’d been reported missing in the months prior.
On November 28, 2016, Todd was charged with three counts of murder, three counts of possession of a weapon during the commission of a violent crime and one count of kidnapping in the deaths of Charlie Carver and Johnny and Meagan Coxie. The Coxies had been shot on December 25 or 26 of 2015 and buried on his property. Meagan McGraw Coxie, age 25, died of a gunshot wound to her head and her husband, 29-year-old Johnny Joe Coxie, had been shot in the torso. They were both identified through dental records and tattoos on both of their bodies. Because it appeared Meagan and Johnny had gone to his land voluntarily, authorities did not introduce additional kidnapping charges in their cases.
Kala told police she’d met Todd five or six years earlier after being introduced by a young man she was dating at the time. She and Todd kept in touch on Facebook and eventually she’d started cleaning houses for him. In late August, she and Charlie had driven out to the property so they could help trim some underbrush. What happened after is something that no one should ever have to experience in their lifetime.
She said after the couple retrieved hedge clippers Todd told them to wait outside while he went back into the house. When he came back out, he had a gun in his hand and fired three shots into Charlie’s chest. Todd then grabbed Kala, took her inside the house and handcuffed her. He told her he was sorry about killing Charlie, but that she knew he liked to kill people because he used to do it for a living. Kala said he told her he didn’t know if he was going to keep her or sell her. When he took her back outside, she saw that he had wrapped Charlie’s body up in a blue tarp and put it in the bucket of his tractor. He then chained her up inside the metal building where she was eventually discovered. Todd asked for the passwords to both of their phones and Facebook accounts. He said he had dumped Charlie’s car after spray painting it.
Over the next two months, Kala endured numerous sexual assaults when Todd would retrieve her from the building and take her back to the main house. He provided her with meals and let her bathe, but all the while, he told her about the many people he’d killed and promised to teach her how to do it, too. He said he would never see jail time because he would either buy his way out of jail or his handlers would get him out. He bragged he’d been a military contractor that killed people and also confessed to killing four people at a bike shop in Anderson years earlier.
The real estate agent had bought that piece of land in May 2014 for $305,000. He told colleagues at the TKA Real Estate Agency that he was interested in farming.
Strange Social Media Postings
During the time family members couldn’t reach Kala and Charlie, they said strange postings appeared on their Facebook accounts. One even announced the two had married, which they hadn’t discussed with friends or family. An especially eye-raising post allegedly made by Charlie included lines from The Eagles song “Hotel California.” You know, the line that says, “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave?”
Meanwhile, while Kala and Charlie’s family were concerned about their whereabouts, Todd Kohlhepp posted multiple times on Facebook about work he was doing on his 95-acre property. He posted twelve times about it, to be exact. He described filling ravines with gravel and boulders, running from a swarm of bees, and using heavy machinery to take down trees. On August 31, the last day anyone reported seeing Kala, he posted a status about his trash pickup, saying it was, “way more interesting than what’s on the news.”
The Superbike Motorsports Connection
On November 5, 2016, Tom Clark and Mark Gaddy, senior investigators with the Spartanburg County Sheriff’s Office Violent Crimes Unit, questioned Todd. Tom Clark had been acquainted with the real estate agent previously when they both lived at an apartment complex in Spartanburg. The two men devised a plan to keep Todd talking as long as they could, knowing it would enable them to a majority of their questions answered. Todd was not the kind of guy to stay silent for long. Todd had already confessed to killing Charlie Carver at this point.
The night before, Todd’s mother, Regina Tague, called an investigator with the 7th Circuit Solicitor’s Office and shared that her son had called her from jail. She mentioned her son’s arrest and incarceration in Arizona in the 1980s. She said she asked her son if he’d been responsible for killing others, and he told her there were “more bodies than you can count on two hands.”
She also suggested investigators might want to look into Todd’s connection to the Superbike murders. She said around that time, Todd had bought a motorcycle he couldn’t ride, became irrationally angry, and refused to even drive past the store after the murders.
When Clark asked Todd why he shot Charlie, he said he didn’t know how to answer that, only that he wasn’t angry at Charlie, but at Kala. He asked if investigators had found Charlie’s body yet, and they told him yes. That’s when he let them know there were other bodies on the property and shared how he met Meagan and Johnny Coxie. He said he’d seen Meagan panhandling out on Reidville Road one day and felt sorry for her, so he offered her and her husband a job cleaning houses for his business. According to Todd, they’d come to his Woodruff property to pick up cleaning supplies when Johnny pulled a knife on him. Todd reacted by shooting him in the chest. He said he put Meagan in the metal shipping container, the one he’d later used to imprison Kala Brown, and kept her in there for several days, bringing her food, drinks, and cigarettes. He said he was going to give her $4,000 and drop her off in Tennessee so she could get work and start her life over. But then he said she kept burning things in the container and destroying property, acting like a “caged animal.” So, his solution was to shoot her in the back of the head.
The interrogation had been going on for two hours at that point, and Tom Clark wanted to circle back to the Superbike murders. He said he’d worked on that case when he first started out as a detective and that it was important to him. He told Kohlhepp he thought he’d owned a motorcycle in the past and wanted to know what happened to it. Todd came clean and said he’d purchased a Suzuki motorcycle from the store but wasn’t able to ride it. When he tried to trade it in, the manager had made fun of him, which angered Todd. He said the employees had “stolen his bike” and laughed at him.
After more gentle prodding from Clark and Maddy, he said he shot the victims with a Beretta 92FS and described two different types of ammo he’d used. Spartanburg County Sheriff Chuck Wright held a press conference and told the dozen reporters standing outside Todd’s Woodruff property that they’d just solved a 13-year-old cold case, the identity of the Superbike Motorsports shooter.
During his first few years of prison in Arizona, Todd was cited for various infractions, including destroying property and fighting. Then he took jobs in the prison cafeteria and in landscaping and maintenance. He also had the opportunity to receive vocational training in computer programming. He was released at the age of 30, and moved back to South Carolina to be closer to his mother. He had to register as a sex offender, but began working as a graphic designer for a sports apparel company. He worked for that company for two years until the month the Superbike Motorsports murders occurred.
Kohlhepp Reinvents Himself
In 2006, Todd applied for a South Carolina real estate license. On that application, he told a different story when asked to explain his criminal background. He wrote that he’d had an argument and breakup with a girlfriend but they agreed to remain friends. Her dog escaped from her house and the two agreed to search for it together. Her parents had grown concerned about her and called the police. He said he was carrying a firearm because he was fearful of the gangs in the Phoenix area and told her not to move while they talked things out. He also said that he earned his GED and an associate degree in computer science while in prison. The license was approved, and Todd worked as a broker for a Spartanburg real estate company before starting his own agency, TKA Real Estate, which eventually employed 12 agents. He bought his home on Windsong Avenue in January of 2007, running his business from there.
On May 26, 2017, Todd Kohlhepp pleaded guilty to the murder of Charlie Carver, Johnny and Meagan Coxie, Beverly Guy, Scott Ponder, Brian Lucas, Chris Sherbert and the kidnapping and sexual assault of Kala Brown. Instead of the death penalty, he received seven consecutive life sentences in prison, plus 60 more for his crimes against Kala Brown. The solicitor in the case, Barry Barnette, said he knew it was a death penalty case, but that it wasn’t fair for the families to have to wait years and years for justice, as the South Carolina’s death penalty can take a long time to catch up to a prisoner. At the time of Todd’s sentencing, there were 38 people on death row in South Carolina, with the oldest case dating back to 1983. He agreed not to seek the death penalty in exchange for Todd’s guilty plea.
The families of the murder victims all agreed with the decision. Todd showed no emotion as family members gave their victim impact statements. In 2019, the families of Charlie Carver and Meagan and Johnny Coxie filed a lawsuit against Academy Sports + Outdoors, saying the store was negligent in selling guns to a “straw purchaser” named Dustan Lawson, who then supplied them to Todd Kohlhepp. Because of his rape conviction in Arizona, Todd was not legally allowed to own a gun. The sporting goods store sold twelve firearms in different transactions to Dustan Lawson, despite what the lawsuit cited as numerous red flags in the purchases. In 2018, Lawson pleaded guilty to 36 charges in illegally supplying Todd with the guns and was sentenced to federal prison. Those charges included 13 counts of making a false statement to purchase a gun, 13 counts of transferring a firearm to a felon, five counts of transferring a silencer device to a person not allowed to have one, and five counts of making a false statement to obtain a silencer. The settlement of $2.5 million dollars was split three ways between the victims’ family members.
A year after his conviction, Todd wrote a letter to the Herald-Journal in Spartanburg, South Carolina, claiming he had killed more people than seven. In the eight page letter, he said, “Yes, there is more than seven. I tried to tell investigators, and I did tell FBI, but it was blown off. It’s not an addition problem, it’s a multiplication problem. Leaves the state and leaves the country. Thank you, private pilot’s license.”
At the time, the FBI’s office in Columbia said they did not have new information to provide about allegations of additional potential victims.
Todd Kohlhepp Tries to Capitalize on His Serial Killer Status
In 2019, it became apparent that Todd Kolhepp showed no remorse for his crimes and was attempting to profit off them. South Carolina prohibits inmates from doing this, and FOX Carolina News began investigating after receiving a tip. Todd had been communicating with several different people from a prison-issued tablet. A tipster provided FOX with an envelope full of copies of artwork, photos, signed confessions, and autopsy reports for his victims. Todd had signed the pages and included a thumbprint, intending to sell the copies. In his e-mails he said he was working on designs for t-shirts with the letters SK TK printed on them, as well as other prints with sayings such as “What Would Kolhepp Do” and “My Glock Has Anger Issues.”
The news story prompted the Department of Corrections to take away his tablet and move him to the most secure cellblock in the state. Because he was caught abusing privileges and violating prison rules, he lost canteen and visitor privileges for 30 days. The Office of the Inspector General opened an official investigation into his business plans. Based on copies of emails obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, FOX News shared Todd had been messaging with a number of individuals who planned to sell his designs and signed memorabilia, as well as a book told from his point of view.
Show Sources:
The Gaffney Ledger
November 10, 2003
Theories abound on reason for murders
https://www.newspapers.com/image-view/79445454
Anderson Independent Mail
November 7, 2003
Four found dead in Motorcycle Shop
Page 1
https://www.newspapers.com/image-view/813745337
Page 2
The Greenville News
November 7, 2003
Four found dead in motorcycle shop
https://www.newspapers.com/image-view/195555593
Anderson Independent Mail
November 8, 2003
Police release sketches of witnesses in killings
https://www.newspapers.com/image-view/813745985
Florence Morning News
November 1, 2004
Suspects still being sought in year-old bike shop shooting
https://www.newspapers.com/image-view/986747912
The Greenville News
December 3, 2016
Agency Did Not Act on Complaints
Page 1
https://www.newspapers.com/image-view/249221984
Page 2
https://www.newspapers.com/image-view/249222046
The Greenville News
Area Woman Found Chained, But Alive
November 4, 2016
Page 1
https://www.newspapers.com/image-view/240013948
Page 2
https://www.newspapers.com/image-view/240014021
The Greenville News
November 5, 2016
Kohlhepp’s posts about land increased
https://www.newspapers.com/image-view/240014606
The Greenville News
November 29, 2016
Todd Kohlhepp formally charged in three deaths
Page 1
https://www.newspapers.com/image-view/247599201
Page 2
https://www.newspapers.com/image-view/247599279
The Greenville News
December 3, 2016
Page 1
https://www.newspapers.com/image-view/249221984
Page 2
https://www.newspapers.com/image-view/249222046
The Greenville News
November 13, 2016
Driven By Anger
Page 1
https://www.newspapers.com/image-view/243070189
Page 2
https://www.newspapers.com/image-view/243069835
Page 3
https://www.newspapers.com/image-view/243070234
The Greenville News
June 16, 2017
Investigators kept Todd Kolhepp talking until confession
Page 1
https://www.newspapers.com/image-view/311572381
Page 2
https://www.newspapers.com/image-view/311572501
The Greenville News
May 27, 2017
Kohlhepp receives seven life terms, 60 years
Page 1
https://www.newspapers.com/image-view/306104087
Page 2
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-40054629
https://www.cnn.com/2016/11/04/us/todd-kohlhepp-south-carolina-suspect
https://gavinfish.com/cases/todd-kohlhepp
https://www.bradyunited.org/press/brady-victims-families-settle-academy-sports
