Fugitive killer was turned in by brother

Turned in by his own terrified brother, Nikolay Soltys was captured hiding under a desk in his mother’s California garden after a 10-day manhunt for the Ukrainian immigrant accused of butchering six relatives.

Soltys, 27, had apparently slipped into the garden during the night despite round-the-clock surveillance of the home by detectives. He was carrying a backpack containing a knife authorities suspect was the weapon used to kill his pregnant wife, three-year-old son and four others.

Soltys was barefoot, unshaven, dirty and "looked like he could have been hiding in a field somewhere", Sacramento County Sheriff Lou Blanas said.

The sheriff said Soltys was speaking freely to prosecutors, though he did not yet have a lawyer.

The capture just a few miles from the scenes of the grisly murders ended a manhunt that had reached all the way to the US East Coast. Authorities said they believe Soltys never left the Sacramento area, with its large Ukrainian and Russian communities.

Deputy Sheriff Bill Samuelson said Stepan Soltys was eating breakfast at around 7.45am when he looked through a glass back door and saw his fugitive brother under the desk.

Nikolay motioned for Stepan to be quiet, but Stepan instead assembled relatives in the garage, where police had installed a panic button. Neither the alarm nor a phone police had given the family worked, so the family fled in their car, Samuelson said.

Surprised detectives saw the garage door fly open and the car speed away.

The family drove several blocks to a framing shop, where employee Jennifer Murphy helped Stepan call police.

"A man came up to me with his cell phone and he was all shaky. He kept pushing buttons 1-1-9, so I knew he wanted to dial 911," the police emergency number, Murphy said. "I brought him into the store and dialled 911 for him."

Dozens of deputies stormed into the cluttered yard and arrested Soltys without a struggle.

The manhunt began the morning of August 20, when authorities say Soltys slashed the throat of his 23-year-old wife, Lyubov, at their North Highlands home, then drove to another suburb to the home of his aunt and uncle, Galina Kukharskaya, 74, and Petr Kukharskiy, 75.

Police say Soltys killed the two and their nine-year-old grandchildren, Tatyana Kukharskaya and Dimitriy Kukharskiy, who lived next door.

Soltys allegedly went to his mother’s house an hour later and cleaned up before fleeing with his three-year-old son, Sergey. The boy was found dead a day later in a cardboard box on a rubbish heap.

Soltys had left notes in his abandoned car leading police to the body and offering a rationale for the killings, investigators said. All were stabbed to death because they or other relatives "spoke out" about topics Soltys considered private, authorities said. They did not elaborate.

Soltys, a former shoemaker in his homeland, had been rejected by the Ukrainian army as mentally unfit before he moved to the United States, and had a history of domestic violence in Ukraine. At the time of the slayings, he was unemployed and on benefits.

During the manhunt more than a dozen of Soltys’ relatives were put under police protection.