Officials: Fugitive admits N.M. murders

ST. JOHNS, Ariz. (KRQE) - A SWAT commander Friday described how his team took down an escaped Arizona prison inmate and his armed fiancée in a campground standoff that ended without injuries.

After spending nearly a month on the run John McCluskey and Casslyn Welch spent Wednesday night in a jail cell in St. Johns, Ariz.

On Friday afternoon McCluskey and Welch made their first court appearances before a judge in St. Johns who their bonds at $1 million. He ordered both returned to Mohave County where the initial escape took place.

For now McCluskey faces charges of escape, kidnapping, armed robbery, aggravated assault and misconduct with weapons. Welch faces similar charges.

No charges have been filed yet in two New Mexico murders linked to the couple and a third escaped inmate recaptured earlier in Wyoming.

McCluskey and Welch, who are cousins, were captured Thursday evening at a campground deep in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest near Greer, Ariz. McCluskey and two other inmates escaped from a medium-security prison near Kingman, Ariz., on July 30 allegedly with help from Welch.

A U.S. Forest Service ranger first spotted an unattended campfire and went to check it out. He wrote down the New Mexico license plate on the silver Nissan parked at the site and later had a conversation with the man at campsite No. 5 in the Gabaldón Campground.

But it wasn't until the ranger ran the license plate and found out the car was stolen that he realized he had just talked to McCluskey.

It took the Apache County Sheriff's Department SWAT team led by Cmdr. Webb Hogle three hours to get to the remote area while other law enforcement kept an eye on the area.

Then they quickly moved in first tackling McCluskey when he refused to lie on the ground. Then the dozen or so officers apprehended Welch who pulled a pistol from the small of her back before apparently realizing she was outgunned.

"When she threw the gun down, one of my guys picked it up, unloaded it, removed it," Hogle said during a news conference in St. Johns attended by KRQE News 13. "One of the sergeants on scene said, 'Don't mess with that; could possibly be the murder weapon.'

"He (McCluskey) said, 'No. The murder weapon's over is in the tent.' So spontaneous utterances that he had committed the murder."

According to Apache County officials McCluskey said he alone killed Linda and Gary Haas, both 61, a vacationing couple from Tecumseh, Okla., whose remains were found Aug. 4 in the burned wreckage of their camper trailer on a ranch in northeastern New Mexico near Santa Rosa.

They also said McCluskey made other statements including saying he should have killed the forest ranger when he had the chance and that had he been able to get to his tent he could have killed the entire SWAT team.

The last confirmed sighting of McCluskey and Welch was Aug. 6 in Montana, and there has been abundant speculation about where else they may have been.

It's also not known how long they had been in the campground although they appeared to have been getting comfortable there and had been seen in a nearby town where they had a flat tire fixed.