For two years their faces were plastered by the FBI on electronic billboards in Ohio and across southern Florida and it had begun to look like Tommy Thompson, once America’s most famous hunter of sunken treasure, and his companion, Alison Antekeier, had vanished for good. Now their time on the run is over.

It was agents with the US Marshals Service who knocked on the door of a suite at a Boca Raton Hilton hotel on Florida’s east coast on Tuesday and found the fugitives inside. They had been living there under false names, leading a cash-only existences, for more than a year. Today they were to appear in court in West Palm Beach and thereafter, ankles shackled, flown back to Ohio.

Many Ohioans recall when Mr Thompson was a native hero of the state. He was the bearded buccaneer with buckets of braggadocio who, in the early 1980s, said he intended to find a paddle steamer called the SS Central America that in 1857 had sunk off the South Carolina coast taking down with it more than 400 souls and thousands of pounds in gold....

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.... In 2012 a judge declared them in contempt of court and issued a warrant for their arrest. But when US marshals showed up at their rented home they found it in a shambles. Furniture was wrecked, old cell phones were scattered about and pipes stuffed with cash were found buried in the garden. The last person to see Mr Thompson was a handyman found pacing round around the pool in dark glasses and underwear.

What they also found were self-help books on how to live under the radar. It was with those skills that the pair holed up at the Hilton. How they US marshals eventually tracked them down we have yet fully to learn.

Mr Thompson was “one of the most intelligent fugitives ever sought by the US marshals, and he had vast financial resources at his disposal,” said Ohio US Marshal Peter Tobin. His colleagues in Florida, he added, had “worked tirelessly on this case... to accomplish what many thought would be nearly impossible.” Impossible like finding a 160-year-old shipwreck, two miles down and 200 miles off the Carolina coast.
Back in Ohio, meanwhile, those who pursued Mr Thompson for so long can hardly wait to see him back. “This is a relief,” Mike Szolosi, a lawyer for the two original investors, told People magazine. “We’re hopeful there will be an answer as to where the money is.“ It may, of course, all be gone.