Taken Hostage: 'It Was Stay and Die or Go'

July 20, 2009 — -- More than once during the 12 hours that Nancy Tyler's ex-husband held her hostage, he pressed a gun to her head and made her beg for her life as he counted down to her execution.

"He had my head pressed to the desk with the gun at my temple, holding me down, making me beg," Tyler told "Good Morning America" today.

Tyler, handcuffed to a bolt in the wall, said she had no doubt that her husband would interrupt her pleading and pull the trigger during one of the many menacing countdowns. When he handcuffed her to a bolt in the wall, she was convinced that her only real chance to live was to escape.

Tyler's ex-husband, Richard Shenkman, took her hostage July 7 and issued several demands to the police and a judge to remarry the couple and then a priest so the priest could read Tyler her last rites. She was allowed to pray with rosary beads throughout the day, because as her husband told her, she "would need them."

During her terrifying ordeal, Tyler, 57, pleaded when she had to, prayed when she could, and rested her head on her former husband's shoulder at one pont in an attempt to soothe his rage.

Tyler told "GMA" that when she got a chance to escape, she took it. Shenkman said he rigged all the doors in the house to explode, but Tyler said when she pulled the bolt out of the wall, it was a chance she had to take.

"He started the countdown. 'She's going to be dead in 20 seconds.'... At that moment it was stay and die or go," Tyler said. "It was either die with a gun to my head or die by going out a door. So I ran."

After freeing herself from the wall, Tyler ran out the house, over a fence and into the arms of a nearby SWAT officer who looked to her "like an angel."

Minutes later, flames from a fire allegedly started by Shenkman, 60, engulfed the house the couple once shared. It was the end to an experience that Tyler said left her so exhausted that near the end of the 12 hours she was "almost ready to let him do it."

"I couldn't stand up; I could barely walk," she said. But she said what needed to be said and did what needed to be done to survive the day.

"That was one of the things I did to get him off the rampage he was on. ... That was a very frightening moment, but it was what I need to do to stay alive," she said.