The serial sex offender who allegedly attacked three women in Manhattan may have dodged cops for months by sleeping at construction sites and leaving town in between his heinous assaults, police said.
Cops had been hunting for Carl Phanor, 29, since April, after he attacked his first known victim, but they didn’t end up catching up with him until Thursday after two more attacks, including one in which he raped a 43-year-old Illinois tourist while she was out for a run on Pier 45, NYPD Chief of Detectives James Essig said.
“We believe he was staying in construction sites while he was in New York,” Essig told reporters this week.
“What we believe he was doing was doing his attacks and then leaving the city. We reached out to his family, who lived out of state, and they have no connection to him.”
After the first attack, where Phanor forced a 39-year-old woman running on Pier 46 to perform oral sex on him March 27, cops got a positive DNA match on him in the state database, police sources said.
His DNA had been on file thanks to misdemeanor convictions, sources said. Phanor’s past crimes have included assault, petit larceny and possession of burglary tools.
“We put out everything, patrol services gets his picture, transit gets his picture, housing gets his picture, homeless outreach gets his picture. We check in all the homeless shelters to see if he’s in the area … all the piers, we had fliers out to the local precincts,” Essig said.
“We couldn’t grab him.
“It was just nobody came up with any information, and that’s why we believe he was probably leaving” the area at times and sleeping at construction sites at others, Essig said.
On Oct. 6, while still wanted in the March attack, Phanor struck again on the FDR service road near East 37th Street, authorities said.
He snuck up behind a woman walking along the road, put her in a chokehold and ripped her jeans open, prosecutors said.
As his victim screamed for help, Phanor ran off — but not before swiping her cellphone and credit card, which he used at a nearby smoke shop about a half-hour later, authorities said.
He was able to continue to elude cops ’til Thursday’s rape, officials said.
Even then, he wasn’t caught until a few hours later, after he made his way to the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Manhattan and futilely tried to buy a bus ticket, authorities said.
Essig noted that Phanor had already changed his appearance at this point by shaving off his eyebrows.
“He looks different. It’s so difficult to be going down the street and say, ‘Oh, that’s the guy in this photo.’ It’s just a very, very difficult thing,” Essig said. “When a transient person [is] like this, especially when they change their appearance and they have fictitious names, which he did give us when we stopped him, [they] are very hard to locate.”
Phanor was caught on surveillance video at the bus terminal trying to buy a Greyhound ticket with a stolen credit card that was declined.
“He was on his way out of New York City again,” Essig said.
Sometime later, eagle-eyed Port Authority cops spotted him and placed him under arrest.
Once he was in custody, he again tried to evade capture by providing police with a fake name, Chino Kudo, and a fictitious birthdate that matched the date and month of his own date of birth — but the year was 10 years earlier, Essig said.
