A Greenville man was sentenced to 40 years in the South Carolina Department of Corrections after being convicted of kidnapping and brutally assaulting a woman he lured away from a gas station in June 2024. Robert Wilson Voorhees, now 50, beat the victim so severely that she suffered multiple facial fractures and a kidney injury, according to prosecutors who tried the case in Greenville County.
The attack began early on June 8, 2024, when Voorhees lured the woman away from the Spinx gas station on North Pleasantburg Drive, according to the FOX Carolina report on the case. He then took her across a bridge to a secondary location near Worley Road, where he assaulted her, striking her in the back and causing a kidney injury, and punching and kicking her in the head and face, leaving her with multiple facial fractures. A witness called 911 and described Voorhees to arriving officers, who apprehended him nearby while he was still covered in the victim's blood, per the same report. The Greenville Police Department investigated the case, and the Thirteenth Circuit Solicitor's Office, which serves as the chief prosecution agency for major felony cases in Greenville and Pickens counties, announced that a jury found Voorhees guilty of kidnapping and assault and battery of a high and aggravated nature. Under South Carolina law, kidnapping is a Class A violent felony carrying up to 30 years in prison, according to Justia Law, while ABHAN can carry up to 20 years when it causes great bodily injury or involves means likely to produce death or serious disfigurement.
A Criminal History Stretching Back Two Decades
Voorhees's criminal history dates back to an attack in 2004, and court records reviewed by FOX Carolina describe a lengthy pattern of violence predating the 2024 case. Between 2003 and 2012, he accumulated convictions in Greenville County for indecent exposure three times, ABHAN in 2007, and first-degree assault and battery in 2012, according to CrimeOnline. Despite that record, he had never been listed on South Carolina's sex offender registry before his 2024 arrest.
CrimeOnline reported that after a 2015 arrest for criminal sexual conduct and kidnapping, Greenville Police Lt. Jason Rampey noted that detectives were familiar with Voorhees assaulting women, but that his convictions were legally non-sexual — the result, police officials said, of more than a decade of guilty pleas to non-sexual assault charges that allowed him to avoid state sex offender registry requirements. That systemic gap meant a man with a documented history of violence against women moved through the Greenville County court system for years without triggering registration requirements meant to track that exact kind of offender.
Pending Charges Include a Cold-Case Murder
The 40-year sentence resolves the 2024 case, but it does not close the book on Voorhees. While he was incarcerated awaiting trial for that attack, the Greenville County Sheriff's Office charged him in October 2025 with murder in the August 2023 blunt-force trauma death of 57-year-old Janet Denise Abrilz, whose body was found on a trail in Greenville's Lakeside Park. Days after that cold-case murder warrant was served, the sheriff's office's Specialized Investigation Division filed additional charges against Voorhees — including first-degree criminal sexual conduct, kidnapping, and ABHAN — after identifying another woman he allegedly physically and sexually assaulted in 2022.
Voorhees also faced trouble from behind bars. In June 2025, the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division charged him with four counts of threatening the life of a public official while he was detained at the Greenville County Detention Center, an investigation SLED opened at the request of county detention officials. Those pending cases — the cold-case murder, the 2022 assault, and the threats against officials — remain unresolved in the Greenville County court system even as Voorhees begins serving his 40-year sentence for the 2024 kidnapping and assault.
Assaults Remain Common Statewide
The case also lands amid broader statewide numbers on violent assault. South Carolina law enforcement agencies recorded 19,710 aggravated assault offenses in 2024, according to a Price Benowitz LLP analysis of data from the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division. For the woman attacked outside a Greenville gas station that June, the sentence marks a resolution to one chapter of a case that investigators say connects to a much longer pattern of violence tied to the same man.
