PHOENIX An escaped state prison inmate and his fiancee, who have been on the run for weeks amid a nationwide manhunt, were captured Thursday in northeastern Arizona after being spotted at a campground by Forest Service workers, officials told The Associated Press.
Details were sketchy and Arizona authorities scheduled a news briefing late Thursday night to discuss the capture of John McCluskey and Casslyn Welch, who also is the inmates cousin.
Sgt. Richard Guinn of the Apache County Sheriffs Office told the AP that a team of officers arrested McCluskey and Welch on Thursday evening after Forest Service employees spotted the pair and reported them to authorities. Guinn said McCluskey turned when confronted by officers but was immediately put on the ground. He and Welch are now held at the county jail in St. Johns.
They have been positively identified, Guinn said.
The team included county, state and federal law enforcement officers, who recovered two handguns from the couples campsite at an Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest campground, Guinn said.
McCluskey was among three prisoners who escaped July 30 from a privately operated state prison in Kingman, allegedly with the help of Welch, McCluskeys cousin and fiancee. The other two inmates were recaptured in Colorado and Wyoming.
Arizona Corrections Department officials have said that Welch helped McCluskey and inmates Tracy Province and Daniel Renwick escape July 30 from a private prison facility near Kingman by cutting through a security fence, setting off a massive multistate search.
Renwick was recaptured in Rifle, Colo., on Aug. 1, and Province was found in Meeteetse, Wyo., on Aug. 9. The last confirmed sighting of McCluskey and Welch � two of the most wanted fugitives in America � was on Aug. 6 in Billings, Mont.
Renwick and Province were serving time for murder. McCluskey was serving a 15-year prison term for attempted second-degree murder, aggravated assault and discharge of a firearm.
Province, McCluskey and Welch have been linked to the slayings of Greg and Linda Haas of Tecumseh, Okla., couple whose burned bodies were found in a travel trailer Aug. 4 on a remote ranch near Santa Rosa, N.M. They had been traveling to Colorado on an annual camping trip.
This is a terrible tragedy, and the department and the contractor have a lot of work to do, Arizona Department of Corrections Director Charles Ryan said Thursday of the deaths during a news conference held to discuss a report that outlined a series of embarrassing security breakdowns that allowed the escape.
The prison has a badly defective alarm system, a perimeter post was unstaffed, an outside dormitory door had been propped open with a rock and the alarms went off so often that prison personnel often just ignored them, the report said.
Also, operational practices often led to a gap of 15 minutes or longer during shift changes along the perimeter fence, Ryan said.
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Associated Press writers Walter Berry and Tim Korte contributed.
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