SPARTANBURG, S.C. — A woman who was “chained up like a dog” for weeks in a dark storage container was lured to her captor's South Carolina property for a cleaning job with her boyfriend, a family friend said Friday as search teams digging up the area found one body and looked for more.

Authorities were “trying to make sure that we don't have a serial killer on our hands,” the sheriff said. Investigators were told the property could hold as many as three other corpses.

Prosecutor Barry Barnette said the woman saw her captor shoot and kill her boyfriend. The body discovered Friday was not immediately identified.

The couple disappeared around Aug. 31 when they went to do the work on the suspect's nearly 100-acre property in a rural area near the community of 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.

Todd Christopher Kohlhepp, a 45-year-old registered sex offender with a previous kidnapping conviction, appeared at a bond hearing Friday in Spartanburg on a kidnapping charge. More charges will be filed later, the prosecutor told the court.

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.