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HELTER SHELTER: Cops used tracking dogs to locate Gelman’s creepy lair in Brooklyn (above) — but when they arrived, the alleged slasher had already fled. (J.B Nicholas)
FACE OF MADNESS: Maksim Gelman is led out of a station house in Coney Island to his arraignment by arresting Officer Terrance Howell (in hat) yesterday. (Alex Rud)
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Brooklyn butcher Maksim Gelman fled to a freaky, litter-filled shrine — which he spray-painted with blood-red hearts and the name “Yelena,” his fatal obsession — while on the run, sources told The Post.
NYPD cops using tracking dogs made the chilling discovery while following the accused killer’s scent to beneath an LIRR freight-train overpass along Ocean Avenue on the western edge of the Brooklyn College campus.
There — on the outside wall of a ramshackle structure where Gelman had once been arrested for spray-painting graffiti — was a red heart with tragic victim Yelena Bulchenko’s first name sprayed on it.
READ THE COMPLAINT AGAINST GELMAN (PDF)
Inside the cinder-block shack, known as a hangout for druggies and graffiti vandals, cops found hypodermic needles, beer cans and empty cans of spray paint littering the floor.
Police used a ladder to search crevices in the ceiling in their bid to find Gelman, who was on the lam after allegedly killing the 20-year-old Bulchenko, her mother, his stepdad and a pedestrian. But he was nowhere to be found.
Cops believe that Gelman, who tagged under the aliases “Max” and “Wes,” first made his way to the site because it was an area he knew well. The Pontiac Bonneville that he had allegedly carjacked from East 24th Street was found just yards from the tracks, its engine running.
Gelman wound up in the neighborhood surrounding St. Johns Place and Rochester Avenue, where he allegedly tried to steal another car.
He was finally nabbed during another stabbing spree aboard a No. 3 uptown train at 34th Street at around 9:15 a.m. Saturday.
Yesterday, an angry crowd verbally abused Gelman as he was walked to his arraignment from the 61st Precinct station house.
“Rot in hell!” someone shouted.
“Die!” and “Pig!” others yelled at the man charged in the bloodbath that started in Sheepshead Bay and ended 28 hours later.
Led by NYPD Officer Terrance Howell, one of the hero cops who took him down, the haggard-looking suspect snarled back at those who had gathered on Coney Island Avenue shortly before 3 p.m.
“Shut up, man!” he sniveled while bizarrely proclaiming his innocence. “This is bulls – -t. This was a setup.”
Gelman, 23, whose blood-soaked clothes had been taken as evidence, was wearing a white jumpsuit and appeared injured, grimacing as cops squeezed him into a car for the ride to central booking.
Earlier, the psycho boasted to a fellow prisoner, “You’re here for nickel bags? Look what I’m here for,” a law-enforcement source told The Post.
Gelman was charged with four counts of second-degree murder, single counts of first-degree and second-degree assault and three counts of first-degree robbery.
He glowered at his arraignment last night and mumbled to his Legal Aid lawyer but said nothing publicly. He was ordered held without bail.
None of his relatives showed up to support him.
Gelman was captured by Howell, another transit cop and a detective who were searching for him after he’d been spotted on a subway heading uptown from Penn Station. A straphanger who Gelman brutally slashed also helped take him down.
Before helping to haul Gelman to his arraignment yesterday, Howell even managed to get another bust under his belt — aiding in the arrest of an iPhone thief in Chelsea before the court session.
Gelman started his monstrous rampage at 5:09 a.m. Friday, when he allegedly killed his stepfather.
At 10 a.m., he went to the nearby home of Bulchenko, a dental receptionist he briefly dated and had become obsessed with.
He allegedly killed her mother, Anna, then waited until Bulchenko returned home at 4:20 p.m. and attacked her.
Andre Bulchenko, Yelena’s brother, yesterday told The Post, “I don’t even know if I am happy he was caught or not . . . It’s not going to change anything, really.
“There’s one part of me saying that he just didn’t know what he was doing and I feel bad for him. Yet there’s another part of me that wants to cut him up to pieces, exactly what he did to my sister.”
The brother insisted that Gelman “wasn’t my sister’s boyfriend.”
“She hasn’t spoken with this guy for like five months or more,” he said.
Friends said yesterday that the final days of Bulchenko’s life were happy ones, filled with socializing and fun nights on the town.
“Yelena was cheery, bubbly, happy, carefree,” one of her girlfriends said. “She enjoyed going out and having a good time. Everyone loved her.”
On Thursday — the night before she died — she met up with friends for drinks in Bay Ridge.
“She was having a blast,” one friend recalled. “She was happy.”
That night, Bulchenko stayed over at her girlfriend Aleksandra’s house.
She returned home the next afternoon, only to find her mother mortally injured.
Before she was stabbed, Bulchenko had a chance to call a friend and 911.
“She said, ‘Please come to my house! My mom is dead!’ ” said the friend, who gave her name only as Aleksandra. By the time the friend got there, Yelena, too, had been slain.
Additional reporting by Reuven Fenton, Candice M. Giove and Mitchel Maddux