Sandra Sully on her most frightening moment: “I thought, ‘Bloody hell, I am going to die'."

On an otherwise nondescript November night in 1997, Sandra Sully pulled into her own apartment building’s car park.

There was a man there waiting for her. He had a gun in hand and a balaclava covering his face.

Recalling the incident in a recent interview with Stellar, Sully says she remembers a man grabbing her by the shoulders, then her hair. She did not know who he was, what he wanted or where he came from.

“I started fighting,” she told the magazine. “He put a gun to my head.”

As she fought, they fell to the ground. He held the gun to her head and pulled the trigger.

“I thought, ‘Bloody hell, I am going to die. I am going to die on the floor of a car park. This is it.’”

The gun, it so happens, didn't fire.

“He was aware he couldn’t shut me up. I kept fighting and, at some point, he just decided he had to run.”

As he ran away, she caught a glimpse of what he looked like. He had blonde hair, she told Stellar, and she looked for him for a very long time. He was never caught, never went away, though police theorise it was an attempted abduction.

“I am not convinced he was a stalker. I think he had cased the joint and thought I was gettable.

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“It was at least 10 years before I was ready to talk about it to anyone other than my family and probably 15 years before I felt like I could put it behind me. I still don’t like to be surprised. If someone makes a loud noise, I jump. I am always aware in a car park. You realise life can be snuffed out in an instant.”

She says it's only, almost exactly 20 years later, that she feels she can talk about it and share her experience.