The first time Kayla Brown felt the cold steel around her neck, she understood that the man who had promised her work had never intended to pay her in money. She was thirty years old when she and her boyfriend, Charles Carver, drove out to Todd Kohl’s ninety-five-acre property in early September 2016. They had been dating for a few months, had just moved in together, and were scraping by. Kayla knew Todd through an ex-boyfriend, remembered he always had odd jobs available.
When she reached out, he offered her work cleaning houses tied to his real estate listings. Then he sweetened the deal: he had work for both her and Charles, clearing brush on his land, just eight miles from his home. It sounded like a gift. When they arrived, Todd asked them to wait outside while he grabbed a few things from the garage.
Kayla noticed he seemed off, quieter than before, but before either she or Charles could react, he pulled out a pistol. He shot Charles three times in the chest, right in front of her. Charles never made a sound. Kayla watched the man she loved fall, then Todd turned to her.
He chained her by the neck, wrists, and ankles, dragged her to a shipping container sealed with five heavy padlocks, and locked her inside. For nearly two months, she lived in darkness. He let her out only in narrow windows, between one and three in the afternoon and again from five to seven in the evening. In the garage, he forced himself on her, over and over, and told her she was his property.
He told her she was beautiful and smart. He explained Stockholm syndrome to her, saying it would kick in soon, and they would be happy together. She waited, chained in the dark, listening for the sound of his truck. Back in Anderson, South Carolina, her family was falling apart.
Kayla’s mother, Bobby Newsome, knew something was terribly wrong. Her daughter’s beloved Pomeranian, Romeo, had been left alone in the apartment without food. “That dog is her baby,” Bobby told reporters. “She’d never leave him like that.
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Charles’s mother, Joanne Shifflet, filed the first missing person report on September 3rd. She hadn’t heard from her son in days, and the couple’s apartment manager said the unit looked like no one had lived there for weeks. Two days later, Kayla’s close friend Leah Miller filed another report. Kayla’s Chevy Cobalt was still parked at the complex, but Charles’s white 2002 Pontiac Grand Prix was gone.
Then strange activity began appearing on Charles’s Facebook account. Posts claimed he and Kayla were fine, happily married, and had simply disappeared for a while. The profile picture changed. But Charles had never been active on social media, and the tone was all wrong.
The families knew someone else was behind the keyboard. The police traced leads and found nothing. Then they got a warrant for Kayla’s social media accounts. Buried in her messages was a conversation about a job on Todd Kohl’s property.
On November 3rd, 2016, investigators arrived at Todd’s home. While officers questioned him at the house, others searched his land under a separate warrant. Inside the garage, they found shackles. In a nearby bathroom, they found clumps of reddish-brown hair on the floor, the same color as Kayla’s.
Then they heard the banging. It was faint, desperate, rhythmic, coming from a large shipping container sealed with five heavy padlocks. When they forced the doors open, they found Kayla Brown chained by the neck and ankles. She was alive.
The first thing she told them was where to find Charles. “He shot him,” she said. “Todd shot Charlie three times in the chest, wrapped him in a blue tarp, put him in the bucket of the tractor. He says he’s dead and buried.
He says there’s several bodies dead and buried out here. ”
Search teams found Charles’s white Pontiac Grand Prix, crudely spray-painted and buried under debris. They found Charles’s body. And they found two more: Johnny Joe Coxie, twenty-nine, and his wife Megan Lee McCraw Coxie, twenty-six, buried in shallow graves.
The couple had vanished in December 2015. Johnny had been shot in the chest on December 19th. Megan had been kept alive for six days before she was shot in the head on Christmas Day. They had just been released from prison, were struggling, panhandling, vulnerable.
Todd had paid them to clean his houses, then trapped them the same way he had trapped Kayla and Charles. Todd’s post-arrest interviews were bizarre. He claimed he pulled a gun on Johnny because he thought he was being robbed. He insisted he hadn’t wanted to kill Megan, but she kept damaging equipment in the container, and he felt he had no choice.
He seemed far more concerned about his own consequences than the lives he had taken. The deeper investigators dug, the darker it got. Most of the equipment Todd used to murder and imprison his victims had been purchased on Amazon, under an account named after himself. And he had left public reviews on those items, joking about murder.
On a chainsaw: “Works excellent. Getting the neighbor to stand still while you chase him with it is hard enough without having an easy to use chainsaw. ”
On a master padlock: “Solid locks. Have five on a shipping container.
Won’t stop them, but sure will slow them down till they are too old to care. ”
On a folding shovel: “Keep in car for when you have to hide the bodies and you left the full-size shovel at home. ”
On a knife: “Haven’t stabbed anyone yet, but I am keeping the dream alive. ”
He wrote them in plain sight, between May 2014 and August 2016, while committing the very crimes he joked about.
Then Todd made a confession that blew the case wide open. He admitted to a quadruple homicide that had gone unsolved for over a decade. In exchange for being allowed to call his mother, he confessed to killing four people in a motorcycle shop in Chesnee, South Carolina, in 2003. The victims were Scott Ponder, the shop’s owner; his mother, Beverly Guy, the bookkeeper; and employees Brian Lucas and Chris Sherbert.
Todd had bought a Suzuki motorcycle there, decided it was too much bike for him, and when he tried to return it, he felt the staff treated him rudely. Weeks later, the bike was stolen, and Todd convinced himself the shop was responsible. He waited until the store was nearly empty, asked mechanic Chris Sherbert to take a bike to the back, then shot him twice in the chest. He gunned down Beverly Guy as she reacted to the noise.
Brian Lucas was shot in the back as he ran. Scott Ponder was killed in the parking lot, a bullet to the head. “I cleared the door in under thirty seconds,” he boasted to investigators. “You guys would have been proud.
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The case had gone cold for thirteen years, in part because investigators had made a catastrophic error. Scott’s widow, Melissa, who was pregnant when he was killed, was subjected to accusations that her son’s biological father was not Scott, but Brian Lucas. DNA tests had been mixed up, producing a false result that made authorities suspect her. The mistake diverted attention from the true killer for over a decade.
At a court hearing in July 2019, Melissa Ponder stood and addressed the man who had murdered her husband. She apologized to him, on behalf of her late husband, for any way Scott’s employees had made Todd feel slighted. She told him she forgave him, that she hoped he could find peace. Scott Jr.
, who had never met his father, spoke too, telling Todd he forgave him and felt peace in doing so. Todd never apologized. He never addressed the families. When his mother asked him how many more victims there were, he said, “You do not have enough fingers.
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The real estate agent who had been named one of the top-selling rookies in the Carolinas, who built a successful firm and flew planes and bought a ninety-five-acre property, was led away in shackles. Kayla Brown filed a civil lawsuit and was awarded over six million dollars. “He tried to crush me,” she said in an interview, “but I’m not broken. ”
Todd pleaded guilty to seven counts of murder, two counts of kidnapping, and one count of criminal assault.
To avoid the death penalty, he accepted seven consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole. Years later, prison records obtained through open records requests revealed that Todd was trying to profit from his crimes. He discussed starting a merchandise line, with plans for shirts reading “TKSK,” which stood for Todd Kohl, Serial Killer. He corresponded about a potential documentary, gleefully writing, “Make that cha-ching.
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Charles’s father, Chuck, was sickened. “It makes me sick to my stomach,” he said. “He’s possibly cashing in on the tragedy that happened to us. ”
Kayla Brown was rescued from that shipping container, but her ordeal never fully ended.
She spent years in therapy, rebuilt her life slowly, and learned to trust the daylight again. She described the man who held her captive as infatuated, telling her she was his property and he had chosen her. She chose her freedom instead.
