By Erin Calabrese
The New York Post
SOUTH WINDSOR, Conn. — A crazed Connecticut ad exec held his ex-wife hostage yesterday, threatening to blow up his house unless a priest gave her last rites and their divorce judge remarried them.
The terrified woman, Nancy Tyler, somehow was able to leave the house at 8:30 p.m., some 9 1/2 hours after her ordeal began.
Dozens of gunshots and explosions were then heard at the home, which was soon engulfed in flames.
Power was cut to the neighborhood shortly before 9 p.m., and cops used a bullhorn to urge Richard Shenkman, still inside, to escape the inferno while he could. But he defiantly refused to leave, at one point telling cops to shoot him, a source said.
He finally left about midnight, giving up when the flames reached the basement where he was hiding. He was taken away by ambulance. Cops said he would likely face kidnapping and arson charges, but would not describe his injuries. A source said they were not life threatening.
The standoff erupted as Shenkman, 60, was slated to turn over the South Windsor home to Tyler, 57.
Cops said Shenkman had intercepted Tyler, a medical malpractice lawyer, on her way to court for a contempt hearing on his failure to turn over the house.
Shenkman — whose former ad and media firm produced a TV show for Oprah pal Gayle King — made his demands public in calls to the New London Day.
At one point, he told a reporter, “I believe this is going to end in violence, not that I want it to.”
The drama marked the second time Shenkman has resorted to violence over his divorce. In 2007, he was charged with arson after burning down Tyler’s East Lyme vacation house the day he was ordered by the court to get out.
Shenkman warned yesterday that his home was wired with 65 pounds of explosives. Cops saw wires in the area of the house, but it’s not clear if they were attached to anything inside.
He told the Day reporter he’d given police a list of 12 demands. The first, he said, was for a priest to administer last rites to Tyler. Cops brought one to the scene.
He also wanted Judge Jorge Simon, who presided over their divorce, to come in and remarry them.
It wasn’t clear whose services he’d planned to use first.
Shenkman told the Day he wanted to be “put out of [his] misery.
“This life I live now is unbearable,” he said. “I can’t do this anymore. The only one I want to die is the cops. I get my 12 demands and Nancy walks out of here . . . They enter the property, they’re dead.”
Shenkman also put Tyler on the phone with the Day.
“I don’t want either of us to be hurt,” she said. “I want both of us to come through this and move on.”
Tyler and Shenkman married in 1993. She filed for divorce in 2006, and he bitterly fought it. Once he checked himself into a Texas mental hospital to stop the divorce trial, court records show.
He also left Tyler more than a dozen threatening voice-mail messages, according to court papers.
“We are not getting divorced,” he said in one. “You can only get your divorce one way, and that’s death. You can only be unmarried by death.”
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