The accused serial sex offender charged with attacking three women in Manhattan before being busted was hiding in plain sight during the police manhunt for him, locals told The Post on Monday.

Carl Phanor, 29, was “a fixture in [the] neighborhood” on Manhattan’s West Side for months, even after cops learned he allegedly sexually molested a jogger near Hudson River Park in March and were searching for him, an area couple told The Post.

Phanor went on to assault another early-morning runner on the East Side in October and then rape a tourist jogger back on the West Side earlier this month before being caught, according to police.

“The line that he vanished is bull—t,” said a local woman who asked to be identified as Elaine — responding to a top cop’s comments last week saying the suspect dodged detectives by possibly sleeping at construction sites and even going out of state.

“If [police] actually put posters up, I would have seen them every day because I run on the river,” she insisted. “I would see this guy somewhat regularly sitting on the benches by the river. In October, he was hanging out on Barrow and Washington [streets] and would use it as a bathroom.”

Elaine and her husband said cops never interviewed them, nor did they see officers canvassing their neighborhood before Phanor allegedly struck two more times after the March attack.

Elaine and her husband David said they frequently saw Phanor throughout the neighborhood during his time on the lam, including on park benches and under scaffolding, where he occasionally went to sleep.

“I was there with my dog on the river between Barrow and Christopher,” Elaine said of one sighting in late May. “I noticed he had an erraticness to him and distinctively remembered he was wearing a blue zip sweatshirt. He was a small guy. I because very aware of him.”

She said she began avoiding jogging after dark.

“We always avoided him,” David said. “It was shocking to see his face when he was caught, but it wasn’t surprising.

“The fact that he committed two crimes around here says that he’s around,” he said. “It’s not like someone got robbed or had their wallet stolen — they were raped.”

On Oct. 6, Phanor sexually assaulted and robbed another woman, then raped a tourist from Illinois on Nov. 3 — hours before he was finally busted, cops said.

Cops arrested him as he was about to board a bus at the Port Authority terminal.

Police said they believe Phanor fled the city after the first attack.

But Elaine and David suggested that the suspect was hanging around their neighborhood enough afterward that he could have been caught.

“He was recognizable enough that if police put up fliers or posters in our lobby, I think it would have been pretty easy to identify him,” David said. “I don’t think the police did enough.”

The NYPD said cops did blanket the area in their search for Phanor, including by distributing his photo — and fliers — to station houses for dissemination locally and by checking local homeless shelters.

“The NYPD worked night and day to locate and arrest this suspect, placing physical fliers in many, many locations associated with these crimes,” the department said in a statement to The Post on Monday.

“The department also issued digital CrimeStoppers rewards and appealed to the public and the media for assistance.

“Placing fliers was one part of a holistic strategy the NYPD pursued in this case, grateful for the help of New Yorkers who were trying to identify a dangerous criminal with certainty despite the challenges of working from surveillance photos and trying to match that to random sightings in the street — often at night or inclement weather,” it said.

“Even the seasoned NYPD detectives who captured Mr. Phanor immediately after his last alleged attack preferred waiting for a positive fingerprint match before definitively identifying him because he had changed his appearance and claimed to be someone else.”