CHECH MATE: Katherine Russell, wife of killed Tamerlan Tsarnaev, converted for the killer. (William Farrington)
The weeping bride of the elder Boston bomber returned to the family’s Cambridge home yesterday, a day after her twisted husband died in a shootout with police.
Katherine Russell, 24, who converted to Islam for jihadist hubby Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, covered her head with a leopard-print hijab and nervously shouted for the landlord when she couldn’t get in the door.
“Joanna,” she screamed.
The woman frantically pounded on the door until she was let into the three-story colonial on Norfolk Street.
Her daughter with Tsarnaev, 3-year-old Zahara, waited inside a white Volvo with an unidentified woman.
“The mother and baby didn’t do anything,” neighbor Harvey Smith told The Post. Smith said his roommate helped her pack some belongings.
“She came to get her cat also,” he added. “I heard the cat crying.”
She left the home after a few minutes carrying her pet cat, a shopping bag and a duffel bag.
The Tsarnaev family moved into the quaint, white-shingled home around 2002 or 2003, Smith said.
Tamerlan and brother Dzhokhar continued to live there after their parents moved back to Russia.
“I would see her more than him,” he said. “She would be out in the yard playing with her child.”
At her family’s home on Coriander Lane in North Kingstown, RI, neighbors said Katherine was quiet and polite — though her drastic wardrobe change shocked them.
“Last fall, I saw her outside, and she was in full Muslim [dress]. It just got my attention,” said Karen Mather, 41.
Russell, raised a Christian, began shrouding herself in Muslim garb after leaving Suffolk University in 2010, a neighbor said.
Additional reporting by Candice M. Giove in New York