With six words penned to his local newspaper, serial killer Todd Kohlhepp gave voice to the fears of investigators and anyone else worried that a missing loved one was killed by South Carolina’s infamous murderer:

“Yes there is more than seven.”

The sentence was a chilling part of a prison letter Kohlhepp sent to the Spartanburg Herald-Journal last week – more than a year after a woman who had been summoned to Kohlhepp’s property to clean was found chained by the neck inside a large storage container.

The investigation led authorities to identify seven other victims. Three had also been lured to the property under cleaning gig pretenses. Their bodies were buried in shallow graves. Another four were victims of a quadruple murder that hadn’t been solved for 13 years.

In May, Kohlhepp pleaded guilty to avoid the death penalty and was sentenced to seven lifetimes in prison, plus 60 years.

But he apparently wants people to know – or at least wonder – about other possible victims.

“I tried to tell investigators and I did tell FBI, but it was blown off,” he told the Herald-Journal.

It’s plausible that there could be more murder victims. Some of Kohlhepp’s previous murders had been unsolved for more than a decade. Authorities told the media they confiscated an “arsenal” of weapons from the Woodruff property where the woman was found and at Kohlhepp’s home 10 miles away.


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