20/20: Heather Mills on McCartney, Activism

Oct. 27 -- Heather Mills is a tough and spirited fighter who writes her own rules and in doing so has defied the odds.

A fashion model and champion for the disabled, Mills lost her leg just below the knee when she was hit by a police motorcycle seven years ago. But you’d never know — with her brightly painted toenails on both her real leg and her prosthetic, it’s hard to tell the difference.

On 20/20 this Friday, she reveals to Barbara Walters the astounding details of her life’s story.

A Horrible ChildhoodHer determination propelled her to rise above her horrible childhood, a tale that sounds like something out of a soap opera. Living in a troubled home, she says she struggled to keep her family together.

“For four years,” she recalls, “I sort of brought the family up.”

After her father was jailed for allegedly defaulting on debts, Heather’s mother took her in — but not for long.

“[We] were all shipped down to live with her, and her boyfriend,” she says. “But he’d been married three times before. So he didn’t want any kids around… and he said, ‘Either Heather goes, or I go.’”

Homeless at 14, Mills says she stole clothes and food to survive, living with others around London’s Waterloo train station. She says she used her anger, turning it to positive energy, and began an uphill battle to become a model.

“Any time I was challenged and told I couldn’t do something, I would absolutely… have to prove the opposite and I did,” she says. “[And] I started to do really well in modeling.”

Life-Altering EventsMills’ commitment to helping others was cemented in Yugoslavia, where she lived when war broke out in 1991. Escaping back to England, she says she used her modeling income to aid innocent victims of war, many of them amputees.

Then on Aug. 8, 1993, while walking near London’s Kensington Gardens, her life was changed forever. As she crossed the street, a police motorcycle — responding to an alarm at Princess Diana’s apartments in Kensington Palace — hit Mills and severed her leg.