Yelena Bulchenko (via Facebook)

Authorities are still trying to make sense of triple murder suspect Maksim Gelman's 28-hour stabbing spree. Gelman is accused of stabbing his stepfather, his ex-girlfriend and her mother to death on Friday, as well as stabbing four others (two carjacking victims, a livery cab driver, and a subway passenger) and fatally striking a pedestrian with a car. Before he stabbed his last victim on the train, he allegedly said, "My girlfriend ruined my life!", referring to ex-girlfriend Yelena Bulchenko. But according to Bulchenko's friends and relatives, it seems that Gelman was barely her boyfriend, and mostly obsessed with her from afar.

According to the Post, Bulchenko and Gelman only briefly dated, but her heartbroken boyfriend Gerard Honig says Gelman became obsessed with pursuing her, constantly phoning: "He was stalking her. He would call her a lot. He harassed her on the phone." Bulchenko's neighbor Gabriel Kiernan says that he heard him once furiously pounding on her apartment door, "Open the door! I'm gonna kill you if you don't answer the door!"

Another friend, Andrey Andriyak, a boarder at Bulchenko's Brooklyn home last summer, said, "They hadn't even spoken in two months. He was really obsessed with her, he really liked her, but she didn't want to be with him." Honig was incredulous at the suggestion that she had seriously dated the suspected murderer: "She was not his girlfriend ever. Ever! That kid was a piece of s--t and he needs to die in jail."

Sadly, the Post says that one of Bulchenko's friends called her up a half-hour before she was killed to warn that Gelman had just butchered his mother's boyfriend. Honig, who had been dating Bulchenko on-and-off for 18 months, told the News that he had been planning to give her a diamond heart necklace and take her to dinner for Valentine's Day. "She just loved to live life. She would never judge anybody. She was just always sweet and kind to everybody."