SPARTANBURG, S.C. — The Latest on the investigation after a missing woman was found chained inside a storage container (all times local):

A coroner is working to identify the body found on property in rural South Carolina where a woman was found chained in a storage container.

Spartanburg County Coroner Rusty Clevenger says the body was exhumed Friday night and taken to the morgue. It remained unclear Saturday when the body would be identified.

Police vehicles could be seen going back and forth across the property. An Anderson police officer put two bouquets of flowers in the fence Saturday.

Todd Christopher Kohlhepp is charged with kidnapping after authorities found a woman Thursday chained at her neck and ankle in a storage container. Prosecutor Barry Barnette says the woman saw her captor shoot and kill her boyfriend, who went with her for a cleaning job on the suspect's property.

The man accused of chaining a woman in a storage container for weeks had a violent past and was "preoccupied with sexual content" from a young age.

That's according to details emerging as investigators search his rural property for bodies.

Teams digging on the property found one body Friday and feared there could be more.

Prosecutor Barry Barnette says the woman saw her captor shoot and kill her boyfriend, who went with her for a cleaning job on the suspect's property. The body discovered Friday was not immediately identified.

Todd Christopher Kohlhepp is charged with kidnapping. The 45-year-old registered sex offender has a previous kidnapping conviction in Arizona. More charges are expected.

Barnette said that in the Arizona case, Kohlhepp kidnapped a 14-year-old girl, bound her and raped her in 1986. Online prison records show he served about 14 years for the felony. He was released in 2001. </s> SPARTANBURG, S.C. — Investigators began searching for human remains Friday on a tract of South Carolina land near where a missing woman was found "chained up like a dog" in a large storage container.

Spartanburg County Sheriff Chuck Wright told reporters that authorities planned to excavate the area after cadaver dogs signaled the possible presence of remains.

The missing woman was found Thursday inside a container measuring about 30 feet by 15 feet. The sheriff said she told him the bodies of other women could be buried on the land owned by Todd Christopher Kohlhepp.

Kohlhepp, a 45-year-old registered sex offender with a previous kidnapping conviction, has been arrested and charged with kidnapping. He was scheduled for a bond hearing Friday in Spartanburg.

The woman's boyfriend, 32-year-old Charles Carver, is still missing after the couple disappeared in late August.

Acting on a tip, deputies found the woman after hearing her banging inside the container in Woodruff, 80 miles northwest of the state capital of Columbia, the sheriff said.

The woman, who had worked for Kohlhepp, had a chain around her neck, Wright said. She told deputies she had been kept in the container for two months and had been fed regularly.

Anderson Police Chief Jim Stewart said his department's investigation into the couple's disappearance led authorities to the property near Woodruff.

"We got computer and cellphone records that ultimately led us to the area in Woodruff," Stewart said. "We knew that was the last place that a cellphone tied to this case pinged."

Records indicate Kohlhepp is a licensed real estate agent and licensed pilot. As a teenager, he was convicted and sentenced to prison in Arizona for kidnapping and dangerous crimes against children.

Referring to the possibility of other victims, the sheriff said: "We're trying to make sure that we don't have a serial killer on our hands." </s> Image copyright AP Image caption Todd Kohlhepp, a registered sex offender, has confessed to seven killings

Todd Kohlhepp, the man arrested after a woman was found "chained like a dog" on his property in South Carolina, has confessed to seven killings, a sheriff says.

Kohlhepp told police on Saturday that he was responsible for the deaths of four people in 2003.

He also showed law enforcement officers where he said he had buried two other victims on his property.

This comes after the discovery of a body at the 95-acre site on Friday.

Registered sex offender Kohlhepp, 45, has been charged with four counts of murder and one of kidnapping.

He was arrested on Thursday when police found a woman on his property chained in a container.

She had been missing, along with her boyfriend, since late August.

Image copyright AP Image caption A woman was discovered on Kohlhepp's property inside a metal shipping container

The woman was discovered after police heard banging noises and screams from inside a metal shipping container in Woodruff, 80 miles (130km) northwest of the state capital of Columbia.

It was described by Spartanburg County Sheriff Chuck Wright as "a hellish place to be locked in hot weather. No lights, no windows, no air flow".

Officers had been led to the property thanks to a tip-off by a sex-crime investigator.

The woman told officers that Kohlhepp had shot and killed her boyfriend in front of her.

Mr Wright confirmed on Saturday that the body found on the site a day earlier was that of her boyfriend Charles Carver, 32.

"They're obviously heartbroken," he said after talking to the Carver family. "It's terrible."

Mr Carver died of multiple gunshot wounds.

Kohlhepp told investigators that he was also the gunman behind the fatal shooting in 2003 of four people at a motorcycle shop in Chesnee near Spartanburg, South Carolina. </s> Social media posts from a man accused of chaining a woman to a storage container show he made light of instances where people have been reported missing and had been putting gravel and boulders on his property.

On a Facebook account for someone named Todd Kohlhepp RE, he made a post Sept. 15 saying after reading news about missing people, his reaction is “that person just went to the beach with friend, other person found with her parole violation boyfriend...”

Three days later, he posted photos of his property and said he was clearing land and putting 200 tons of gravel and boulders there.

Property records from Spartanburg County state he purchased 95 acres of land on Wofford Road in Woodruff in 2014.

The Greenville News reported the victim and her boyfriend had been missing since the end of August.

Officials said they are using cadaver dogs to look for bodies of other potential victims and will excavate the area.

The Facebook account has been active since at least August of 2015. On the page, he indicates he’s an agent with TKA Real Estate and has a link to the company’s website. </s> SPARTANBURG, S.C. -- Investigators found a body Friday during a search of land in South Carolina where a missing woman was discovered "chained up like a dog" in a large storage container, and there may be more remains in the area, a prosecutor said.

The body has not been identified, but prosecutor Barry Barnette said the woman saw her captor shoot and kill her boyfriend.

Referring to the possibility of other victims, the sheriff said authorities were "trying to make sure that we don't have a serial killer on our hands."

Todd Christopher Kohlhepp, a 45-year-old registered sex offender with a previous kidnapping conviction, appeared at a bail hearing Friday in Spartanburg on a kidnapping charge.

More charges would be filed, Barnette said in court.

The judge did not set bond and instead referred the matter to circuit court. The suspect did not appear to have an attorney, and the judge urged him to get one.

The missing woman was found Thursday inside a container measuring about 30 feet by 15 feet. Spartanburg County Sheriff Chuck Wright said she told him the bodies of other women could be buried on the land owned by Kohlhepp.

The woman's boyfriend, 32-year-old Charles Carver, has also been missing since the couple disappeared in late August.

Investigators began excavating the area after cadaver dogs signaled the possible presence of remains.

Acting on a tip, deputies found the woman after hearing her banging inside the container in Woodruff, 80 miles northwest of the state capital, Columbia, the sheriff said.

The woman, who had worked for Kohlhepp, had a chain around her neck, Wright said. She told deputies she had been kept in the container for two months and had been fed regularly.

Anderson Police Chief Jim Stewart said his department's investigation into the couple's disappearance led authorities to the property near Woodruff.

"We got computer and cellphone records that ultimately led us to the area in Woodruff," Stewart said. "We knew that was the last place that a cellphone tied to this case pinged."

Records indicate Kohlhepp is a licensed real estate agent and licensed pilot. As a teenager, he was convicted and sentenced to prison in Arizona for kidnapping and dangerous crimes against children.

Guns and a large amount of ammunition were seized from Kohlhepp, Barnette said.

"It's unbelievable how much he had," he said.

South Carolina's sex offender registry lists a 1986 kidnapping as the reason Kohlhepp is in the database of sex offenders. It indicates he was a juvenile offender.

Matching online prison records from Arizona show that Kohlhepp served about 14 years for the felony and was released in 2001.

The Arizona records show the kidnapping happened in November 1986 in the Phoenix area. He was convicted the next year.

In court Friday, Barnette said the Arizona case occurred when Kohlhepp kidnapped a 14-year-old girl, took her to his house and raped her after binding her with duct tape.

Arizona prison records also list violations while Kohlhepp was in prison. The records say he destroyed property and fought with others while incarcerated in 1988 and 1991.

Information for this article was contributed by Jack Jones, Jonathan Drew and Paul Davenport of The Associated Press. </s> Spartanburg County Coroner Rusty Clevenger has confirmed that at least one body has been found on the 96-acre property off Wofford Road where a woman was found chained, alive, in a storage container this week.

"I just got here," Clevenger said. "We've still got to evaluate everything we've got."

Authorities have a helicopter in the air, and an excavator is working farther back on the property.

After she was found, the victim told investigators she had heard as many as four bodies may be buried on the property.

Spartanburg County Sheriff Chuck Wright told reporters that cadaver dogs have signaled possible remains near where the woman was found. He says deputies will excavate the area.

The missing woman was found Thursday "chained up like a dog" inside the container measuring about 30 feet by 15 feet. Wright says she told him the bodies of other women could be buried on the land, owned by 45-year-old Todd Christopher Kohlhepp.

Kohlhepp, a registered sex offender, has been arrested and charged with kidnapping. He was scheduled for a bond hearing Friday afternoon in Spartanburg.

The woman's boyfriend, 32-year-old Charles Carver, is still missing after the couple disappeared in late August.

The sheriff said deputies acting on a tip found the woman after hearing her banging inside the container in the town of Woodruff.

Wright said she had a chain around her neck. He says the woman, who worked for Kohlhepp, told deputies she had been kept in the container for two months and had been fed regularly.

Anderson Police Chief Jim Stewart said his department's investigation into the disappearance of the woman and her boyfriend led authorities to the property near Woodruff.

"We got computer and cellphone records that ultimately led us to the area in Woodruff," Stewart said. "We knew that was the last place that a cellphone tied to this case pinged."

Records indicate Kohlhepp is a licensed real estate agent as well as a licensed pilot. In 1986, he was convicted and sentenced to prison for kidnapping and dangerous crimes against children.

On Friday, referring to the possibility of other victims, the sheriff said: "We're trying to make sure that we don't have a serial killer on our hands." </s> The 30-year-old woman officers found chained in a storage container near Woodruff this week told investigators she saw her captor, Todd Kohlhepp, shoot her boyfriend, officials said.

He and the victim, of Anderson, both went missing about two months ago.

Anderson police were informed that the victim’s phone had been traced to Kohlhepp's 96-acre property off Wofford Road near Woodruff, 7th Circuit Solicitor Barry Barnette said during Kohlhepp's bond hearing Friday.

Barnette said in court that investigators believe other bodies are on Kohlhepp's property. Spartanburg County Coroner Rusty Clevenger told the Herald-Journal on Friday that he had been called to that property on the report that at least one body had been found.

When she was first rescued, the victim told investigators Kohlhepp had indicated as many as four bodies may be on the property.

Currently, Kohlhepp has been charged with kidnapping, but investigators say additional charges are likely.

"This is a very, very dangerous individual," Barnette said in court.

Kohlhepp will be arraigned in court on Jan. 19, Spartanburg County Magistrate Judge Danny Burns ruled Friday.

Kohlhepp, of Moore, is a registered sex offender for crimes committed in Arizona. He is the owner and broker in charge of TKA Real Estate in Spartanburg. </s> (CNN) A 45-year-old South Carolina man accused of kidnapping a woman and holding her captive for two months appeared briefly in court Friday.

Suspect Todd Kohlhepp went before a judge but the matter of his bond was referred to another court. For now, he's still in jail.

Kohlhepp, 45, told a judge he did not have an attorney and asked what would happen if he didn't have one in time for an initial appearance, which is scheduled for January 19. He has not entered a plea.

An arrest warrant alleges that he kidnapped 30-year-old Kala Brown about August 31 in Spartanburg County. Authorities say they found Brown on Thursday chained inside a shipping container on Kohlhepp's farm property near Woodruff.

Searchers found a body Friday on the property, but it is too soon to say whether it was that of Brown's missing boyfriend or someone else.

Here's what we know so far about Kohlhepp:

1. He's been and convicted of kidnapping

Kohlhepp was a teenager living in Tempe, Arizona, when he was accused of holding a 14-year-old girl at gunpoint and sexually assaulting her.

Originally, he was charged with kidnapping, sexual assault and committing a dangerous crime against children. The other charges were dropped after he pleaded guilty to kidnapping and was sentenced to 15 years in prison, according to court records obtained by CNN affiliates KPHO and KTVK.

In 1987, Maricopa (Arizona) County Judge C. Kimball Rose ordered that Kohlhepp's case should be transferred out of the juvenile system because his offenses had been committed "in an aggressive, violent, obviously premeditated and willful manner," according to the court documents.

"At less than the age of 9, this juvenile was impulsive, explosive, and preoccupied with sexual content. He has not changed. He has been unabatedly aggressive to others and destructive of property since nursery school," the judge's ruling said. "He destroys his own clothing, personal possessions and pets apparently on whim and caprice. Approximately six years of intervention in fifteen years of life have resulted in abysmal failure. 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 by any services or facilities presently available to the Juvenile Court."

Kohlhepp -- who is 5-foot-11 and weighs about 300 pounds -- had numerous guns on the property where Brown was found and a body was discovered, officials said.

7th Judicial Circuit Solicitor Barry Barnette told a judge at Kohlhepp's arraignment that the suspect appeared to have been target shooting on the land he owns near Woodruff.

Discarded targets were found near a two-car garage. "He appears to be a very good shot from looking at the shooting that he did," Barnette said.

According to tax records, Kohlhepp bought the 95.57-acre property for $305,000 in May 2014.

When he applied to take a real estate license exam in South Carolina in 2006, Kohlhepp offered an explanation of his criminal history, telling officials that the Arizona case was his only conviction and that he'd made significant strides to follow the law and give back to the community since then.

In that letter, Kohlhepp said he'd been charged with kidnapping because he was a minor in possession of a firearm during an argument with his girlfriend.

"I was charged with the felony of kidnapping due to the fact that I did have a firearm on me regardless that she didn't know it, and I had told her not to move while we talked this out," he said. "At this time, Arizona was coming down very hard on minors and anything to do with firearms due to the heavy gang activity out there, and I received a sentence of 15 years, for which I served every day, no parole required."

5. He describes himself as a former professional graphic designer and a licensed pilot.

On the website for his real estate company, Kohlhepp also says he studied computer science and business administration.

6. Parents divorced when he was very young

According to court documents, Kohlhepp's parents divorced when he was either 1 or 2 years old. His mother remarried when he was 3 and later divorced and remarried his stepfather several times.

Kohlhepp lived with his mother in Georgia and South Carolina for most of his childhood, but went to stay with his biological father in Arizona when he was 12. He was going to high school in Tempe when he was arrested and convicted of kidnapping. </s> SPARTANBURG, S.C. (AP) — The man accused of chaining a woman in a storage container for weeks had a violent past and was “preoccupied with sexual content” from a young age, according to details emerging as investigators search his rural property for bodies.

Teams digging on the property found one body Friday and feared there could be more.

Prosecutor Barry Barnette said the woman saw her captor shoot and kill her boyfriend, who went with her for a cleaning job on the suspect’s property. The body discovered Friday was not immediately identified.

“This is a very, very dangerous individual,” the prosecutor said.

Todd Christopher Kohlhepp, a 45-year-old registered sex offender with a previous kidnapping conviction in Arizona, appeared Friday at a bond hearing in Spartanburg on a kidnapping charge. More charges are expected.

The judge did not set bond and instead referred the matter to circuit court. The suspect didn’t appear to have an attorney.

Barnette said that in the Arizona case, Kohlhepp kidnapped a 14-year-old girl, bound her and raped her in 1986. Online prison records show he served about 14 years for the felony. He was released in 2001.

Records from the Arizona case obtained by WHNS-TV in South Carolina show that a judge decided in 1987 to transfer the case to adult court partly because of Kohlhepp’s aggressive nature.

“At less than the age of 9 this juvenile was impulsive, explosive and preoccupied with sexual content. He has not changed. He has been unabatedly aggressive to others and destructive of property since nursery school,” the judge wrote.

In the South Carolina case, the couple disappeared about Aug. 31 when they went to do the work on the suspect’s nearly 100-acre property near Woodruff, said Daniel Herren, a friend who sat with the woman in her hospital room after she was rescued Thursday.

“They were going to do some work, help cleaning up the property. And he pulled out a gun and took them hostage,” Herren said, adding that the abduction happened quickly.

The Associated Press is not naming the woman because the suspect is a sex offender, though authorities have not said whether she was sexually assaulted. Her boyfriend was identified as 32-year-old Charles Carver.

Herren said he did not ask the woman if she was sexually assaulted.

But she did describe to him the details of her captivity, telling him she was in the container nearly the entire time except for when she was taken out for occasional walks.

“He never took the chain off of her, but he was taking her around, let her get, not so much exercise, but let her walk around some,” Herren said. “It didn’t sound like it was every day. It was kind of sporadic.”

She left the hospital late Thursday and is staying with family, Herren said.

The property includes grassy areas, some covered in waist-high weeds, as well as stands of trees. Most or all of it is surrounded by a chain-link fence 6 to 7 feet tall.

In the middle was the cargo container, which measured about 30 feet by 15 feet. It was next to a two-car garage that had a living space on top, Barnette said.

Guns and a large amount of ammunition were seized from Kohlhepp, the prosecutor said.

“It’s unbelievable how much he had,” he said, adding that Kohlhepp frequently took target practice in an area near the storage container.

Records show Kohlhepp received his South Carolina real-estate license in 2006 before a state law went into effect requiring background checks.

A real estate agent who worked at the firm run by Kohlhepp said she had known him for 10 years after they met at a university in the Spartanburg area and were study partners. She said she was in disbelief.

“He’s not the kind of person to do something like this,” Cherry Laurens said by phone. “Working with him he was an excellent boss. He stood up for us whenever we needed him.”

She said it was widely known that he was registered as a sex offender, but he told people that it was based on trumped-up charges after he “had gone joyriding with a girl” and upset her father.

Kohlhepp made frequent online posts about moving around rocks and trimming trees at the rural property, according to the Facebook page that Laurens confirmed was his.

About two weeks after the couple disappeared, he wrote a post about news reports on missing people: “reading the news.. this person missing, that person missing, another person missing.. oh wait.. that person just went to beach with friend, other person found with her parole violation boyfriend… in the event I become missing, please note no one would take me. I eat too much and I am crabby…”

Associated Press writers Allen G. Breed in Raleigh, North Carolina; and Alex Sanz in Spartanburg contributed to this report.
A man identified as Todd Kohlhepp is arrested after authorities discover a missing woman chained up in a storage container on his property. The woman had gone missing along with her boyfriend around the end of August.