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A violent ex-con charged with brutally beating and stabbing his girlfriend and mom of three to death inside her own car was nabbed thanks to an eagle-eyed off-duty cop, prosecutors said Wednesday.
Michael McHenry, 40, was only out of jail for two months when he allegedly attacked 30-year-old Juliann Bachmann on May 16 in her black sedan, repeatedly slugging her and stabbing her in the neck and chest in front of witnesses before he sped off from a Long Island auto shop parking lot.
Around 7:20 a.m. he began tailgating another car at high speeds on Victory Avenue in Yaphank — not realizing the other driver was a Suffolk County police captain who was off the clock, county prosecutors revealed as they announced a murder indictment against McHenry.
The alert cop spotted blood on the passenger’s side headrest and trailed McHenry to a local Speedway Gas Station, where the accused killer allegedly dragged the dying woman out of the car.
McHenry was arrested by police at the gas station.
“A young mother of three was brutally killed, allegedly by this defendant,” Suffolk District Attorney Ray Tierney said in a statement. “This office will pursue every avenue available under the law to deliver justice to her, her family, and her three children.”
McHenry moved in with Bachmann two months before her death.
The deadly drama began early on the morning of the attack, when prosecutors said Bachmann and her friend picked McHenry up in Long Beach before dropping off her pal in Shirley around 6:30 a.m.
About 45 minutes later, an eyewitness reported seeing a man in the passenger seat of the car grabbing a woman’s hair, smashing her in the face and screaming he was going to kill her, prosecutors said.
The car sped away before cops responded to the bystander’s 911 call — but minutes later a different witness saw the bloodied woman screaming for help inside the car on Montauk Highway before the goon pulled into a Shirley auto shop parking lot.
The horrified witness then spotted the thug get out of the car “and pull a female out of the driver’s seat as she was clutching the left side of her neck,” prosecutors said.
McHenry allegedly sped away — but didn’t get far before road-raging the unnamed cop did him in.
Records show that he was paroled from state prison in March, where he was serving a sentence of two to four years on a second-degree attempted assault conviction.
Bachmann, a home care aide, was rushed to NYU Langone Hospital in Suffolk but could not be saved.
On Wednesday, McHenry was arraigned on a second-degree murder charge and ordered held without bail by Supreme Court Justice Steven Pilewski, the DA’s office said.
“I thought we would grow old together,” the slain woman’s kid sister, Kristen Bachmann, told The Post after the murder. “I don’t know how to process it all, and I still haven’t.”
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