"I truly don't know why he didn't kill me," Nancy Tyler said in yesterday's editions of the Day of New London. "I was lying against the wall thinking, 'I'm going to let him do it."'

Tyler, 57, and a lawyer, spent most of Tuesday handcuffed to Richard Shenkman, some of that time in a basement bunker he had created in the South Windsor house. She said he had piles of paperwork downloaded from the Internet on how to kill himself and told police negotiators he would blow up his two-story house with 65 pounds of explosives.

"He kept saying, 'We've got to blow the house and we're going to do it from the bunker and we'll live,"' Tyler said in a telephone interview Wednesday with the newspaper.

Tyler was in seclusion with family members yesterday and her lawyer, John Harvey Jr., said she would have no further comment.

"[She] just needs time to get through this," he said.

Police reports show Shenkman intended his 13-hour standoff with police to be a "suicide mission."

It ended after his ex-wife escaped from the home by unscrewing an eyebolt to which she was handcuffed from the basement wall while he was upstairs checking on police activity.

Shenkman then allegedly set the house ablaze and taunted police by using the cover of the growing flames to dart in and out of view.

Police said he would point his handgun at himself or outside to fire off shots, at one point shouting "Shoot me! Shoot me!"

Shenkman was taken into custody after police shot beanbag rounds at him and knocked the gun out of his hand around midnight, authorities said.

He is being held in lieu of $12.5 million after being arraigned Wednesday at a hospital on charges of kidnapping, arson, reckless endangerment and the illegal discharge of a weapon. He was later transferred to prison and is due in court July 14.

It is not clear if he will be able to post bond. Shenkman is the brother of Mark Shenkman, president of Shenkman Capital Management - one of the nation's largest money management firms with over $5 billion under management.

In 2004, Mark Shenkman donated $2.5 million to the University of Connecticut to build its Mark R. Shenkman Training Center, an 85,000-square-foot practice facility for the school's football team.

Voice mail messages left at Mark Shenkman's home in Greenwich were not returned.

During his arraignment, Shenkman was ordered placed on a suicide watch after a state doctor testified that Shenkman was in the midst of a "psychotic episode."

Shenkman and Tyler married in 1993. Court records show it was a third marriage for him and a second for her.

After three years of contentious divorce proceedings, a judge granted the divorce last year, but Shenkman has been appealing. On Tuesday, the state Appellate Court rejected Shenkman's appeal.

Tyler told police that during the standoff, Shenkman monitored video feeds that were wired into televisions in three rooms and talked of suicide.

"He had stacks of paperwork downloaded from the Internet on how to die ranging from [carbon-monoxide] poisoning, hanging and blowing up a house with explosives," she told police. He also rigged a propane tank to create "propane pockets" that were conducive to explosion. *