St. Johns, Ariz. ? Over the past three weeks, an escaped Arizona prisoner and his girlfriend bedeviled the hundreds of lawmen hunting them across the desolate highways and thick forests of the West.

There would be sightings of John McCluskey and Casslyn Welch. One in Montana. Another as far away as Arkansas. And then sometimes nothing.

Until Thursday, when an alert forest ranger’s tip led police right to them. The self-styled “Bonnie and Clyde” offered little resistance. A few threats. No shootout. They didn’t even try to run.

As the nation kept a look out for them and law enforcers put up alerts at campgrounds and truck stops, the couple somehow slipped back into Arizona, their beat-up Nissan hidden at a campground across the state from the prison where McCluskey escaped, police say, with help from Welch — his cousin and fiancee.

When a SWAT team descended on the campsite at dusk, Welch reached for a weapon but dropped it when she realized she was outgunned, police said. A shirtless, tattoo-covered McCluskey told officers that he regretted not shooting them with the gun he had in a nearby tent.

“He has no remorse,” Apache County Sheriff’s Cmdr. Webb Hogle said.

The capture brought an end to a manhunt that began July 30 when McCluskey and two murderers broke out of a medium-security prison in Kingman, 185 miles northwest of Phoenix. Authorities say Welch threw a set of wire cutters onto prison grounds, allowing them to cut open a fence.

One inmate was caught after a shootout in Colorado. The other was nabbed in a small Wyoming town after he was spotted at a church.

The escape cast a critical spotlight on Arizona’s prison system. A report on Thursday found a series of breakdowns that allowed the inmates to slip away into the desert, including alarms that went off so often that prison personnel often just ignored them.

Police on Friday were still trying to piece together details about the couple’s time on the lam.

McCluskey, 45, and Welch, 44, are suspected in several crimes, including the killing of a couple in New Mexico whose torched bodies were found in Santa Rosa. Officials said the Nissan had New Mexico license plates that were stolen around the time they were killed.