Answers Still Elusive After Arrest of Eric Frein in Killing of a State Trooper

CANADENSIS, Pa. — There were tantalizing signs all along. Handwritten notes found at a campsite. An abandoned military rifle hung on a tree. Serbian cigarettes, a brand favored by a fugitive who liked to dress as a Cold War soldier and had threatened to kill police officers.

But as late summer turned to October, and towns canceled first hunting season and then Halloween parades, a manhunt that at its peak numbered nearly 1,000 trained pursuers became increasingly frustrating as a self-styled survivalist accused of assassinating a state trooper and wounding another in a Sept. 12 shooting eluded capture.

The arrest of the fugitive, Eric M. Frein, at dusk on Thursday in the Pocono Mountains brought relief to northeastern Pennsylvania after nearly seven weeks of uneasiness, even as how he evaded the authorities for so long remained a mystery.

The police used helicopters, heat-sensing technology and an armored siege vehicle in a search estimated to cost $10 million. There were earlier reports that Mr. Frein had been spotted, and the authorities, including Gov. Tom Corbett, repeatedly promised his imminent capture. But the predictions were premature. Woodsmen familiar with the region of dense maple and oak and swamps said it was possible to be 20 feet from another man in the woods and not see him.

In the end, Mr. Frein, 31, was found about 12 miles from his family home, at the abandoned Birchwood-Pocono Airpark near Tannersville. The police said he had stashed weapons in a hangar. He surrendered without a struggle to federal marshals who spotted him during a sweep of the area.

Marshal Scott Malkowski, a member of the team that arrested Mr. Frein, said the team had noticed the airstrip, part of an old honeymoon resort, earlier in the day and decided to revisit it. “Every one of our team,” he said, had a sense “that if I was a bad guy, this is where I would hang out.”

For two hours team members searched the grounds, until about 6 p.m., when Mr. Malkowski and two other marshals crossed a bridge that led to an old runway and a vacant hangar. They spotted a man wearing a black watch cap. “He turned toward me,” Marshal Malkowski said. “I identified myself as law enforcement, and I told him to get on the ground, proned out.”

“Who are you?” he asked the man. “What’s your name?”

“Eric Frein,” came the reply.

He looked “sad and defeated,” Marshal Malkowski said. “From what I saw, he felt defeated because we won.”

The authorities said that Mr. Frein had moved through the dense woods during his 48 days on the run, but that they did not know where he hid. Wearing a neatly trimmed goatee and appearing healthy at a court hearing on Friday morning, he did not look like someone who had been exposed to the elements or had lived off the land.

Lt. Col. George Bivens of the Pennsylvania State Police said Mr. Frein broke into cabins and other buildings where he was able to find food and shelter. “In other cases he had things hidden,” Colonel Bivens said. The authorities have said Mr. Frein, who lived with his parents, had spent years planning his attack and efforts to elude the authorities.

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District Attorney Raymond Tonkin of Pike County said he would seek the death penalty in the Sept. 12 attack, which killed Cpl. Bryon K. Dickson II, 38, and wounded another state trooper, Alex T. Douglass. The men were ambushed outside their barracks in Blooming Grove, Pa. Three days later, the police found a Jeep partly submerged in a pond nearby. In the Jeep were Mr. Frein’s driver’s license, Social Security card, shell casings matching those from the shooting, camouflage face paint and information about foreign embassies.

Police officers lined the walls of the courthouse in Milford, Pa., where Mr. Frein heard the charges against him. During his arrest, he had been restrained in handcuffs belonging to Corporal Dickson and driven to jail in his patrol car.

Mr. Frein was heckled outside the courthouse as he was led to a police car. “You’re not a real soldier,” someone shouted.

Magistrate Judge Shannon L. Muir scheduled a preliminary hearing for Nov. 12.

Asked by reporters about a bruise above Mr. Frein’s left eye and a bloody abrasion on his nose, Colonel Bivens said the injuries occurred “at some point during his flight,” not during his capture.

With his weekly briefings, Colonel Bivens was the public face of the manhunt, which drew federal marshals, F.B.I. agents and the state and local police. “Troopers were anxious to come here,” he said. “There was never a shortage of volunteers.”

In Canadensis, where Mr. Frein grew up, and in the nearby townships of Barrett and Price, where schools have been intermittently closed and football games canceled, there was a great sense of relief.

“A lot of weight has been lifted off our shoulders,” said Chief Steve Williams of the Barrett Township police. “And not just off our shoulders, but the communities and the businesses that have been under stress.”

Chief Williams said he feared that normalcy might never entirely return. “When you’re in a small community you have that comfort zone,” he said, “and something like this just turns everything even more rapidly upside down.”

At Mick’s Motors, a service station in Mountain Home, where customers are still trusted to fill their tanks before paying, Gloria Brady, an employee, hoped that it would finally quiet down with Mr. Frein’s capture. “He got to play his little war game and lost,” she said. “We’ll get back to being friends and neighbors and live our lives and come together out of necessity.”

Trick-or-treating in the area, which had been canceled, was back on Friday night.

And while there were still armed men in camouflage in the woods nearby, they were hunters scouting for wild turkeys in anticipation of the start of hunting season on Saturday.