MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP) – A fugitive New York fashion writer wanted for questioning in the Halloween night sexual attack on a woman in her Manhattan apartment by a man posing as a city firefighter was captured Friday on a college campus in Tennessee, police said.

Peter Braunstein, 42, slashed himself in the neck with a knife after he was confronted by police on the University of Memphis campus, police said.

The incident marked yet another strange turn in a cat-and-mouse game that became a tabloid sensation in New York City. Braunstein had tormented for weeks by popping up in various public places – there were reports of him all around New York City, in bars in Ohio, at a blood bank in Tennessee.

On Friday, Braunstein was spotted on the Memphis campus by a woman who police said recognized him from media reports.

“He said, ‘I’m the person you’re looking for,’ and he stabbed himself three times in the neck,” Browne said.

Memphis police Sgt. Vincent Higgins said Braunstein was hospitalized in critical condition. University of Memphis spokesman Curt Guenther said not many students and teachers were on campus Friday.

“It was easy to spot someone who didn’t belong there,” Guenther said. “We’re not aware of any connection he has to the university or Memphis. The assumption was he was passing through. We just happened to be the place where he ended up and was spotted.”

Braunstein was apprehended on a street surrounded by parking lots in the northwestern corner of the campus.

New York police had been hunting since early November for the freelance journalist, once a writer for Women’s Wear Daily. Police want to question Braunstein about the attack on a woman by a man who bluffed his way into her apartment after setting two small fires and pounding on her door while dressed in full fire gear.

He bound the woman and molested her for more than 13 hours, police said.

Braunstein has not been charged in the attack, but investigators said they believe Braunstein was obsessed with the victim.

The 34-year-old woman’s ordeal began Halloween night when a man set two tiny blazes – later extinguished by real firefighters – inside the apartment building in Manhattan’s Chelsea section. With smoke filling the hallway, he pounded on the victim’s door and announced he was from the “FDNY.”

The woman told detectives that when she opened her door, the fake firefighter pulled a gun on her, then covered her face with a rag soaked in some type of chemical.

As she faded in and out of consciousness, the man put on a ski mask, tied her up and gagged her with duct tape, and molested her, she said. She also recalled him videotaping the attack.

The man left the next morning, leaving the victim naked and bound to her bed. She managed to free herself and call police.

A $12,000 reward had been offered for information leading to Braunstein’s arrest and his father had made several public appeals, begging his son to turn himself in.

“Just goes to show you how desperate he must have been,” Braunstein’s father, Alberto Braunstein, told MSNBC on Friday night. “As a father, I’m terribly saddened. And I hope that now the news will cover something else, because you would have thought that he murdered 20 people.”

News reports in New York and Tennessee have reported witnesses spotted Braunstein Nov. 29 selling his blood for $20 at a donation center in Memphis.

A front desk clerk at the blood bank said Braunstein used his real name and a passport for identification. He told the clerks he was a freelance journalist on his way to Kansas.

Higgins said Braunstein was found not far from the blood bank where he was reportedly spotted.

“At this time, we don’t have any information that he’s committed a crime (in Memphis),” Higgins said.

The University of Memphis, which enrolls close to 20,000 students, sits in a park-like setting in Tennessee’s largest city. The campus is flanked by golf courses and a country club.