Woman out safe from husband’s Conn. home standoff

SOUTH WINDSOR, Conn. — A woman held hostage for hours by her estranged husband at their former home got out safely Tuesday, said police, who surrounded the house as it was engulfed in flames with the defiant man still inside.

Several dozen gunshots were fired at the South Windsor house shortly after power was cut to the neighborhood and a SWAT team geared up. Police, who didn’t provide details on how the woman got out, used a bullhorn to tell the man, Richard Shenkman, to leave the house because it was on fire, but he wouldn’t leave.

A fire truck crew sprayed water on the home late Tuesday, but other firefighters were being held back as gunshots echoed through the neighborhood.

There were no immediate reports of injuries.

Shenkman claimed the house was booby-trapped with explosives, police said. A bomb squad had been on the scene since the standoff began Tuesday morning.

Authorities say Shenkman abducted Nancy Tyler from a parking garage after he missed a court hearing. His attorney said the hearing was related to an order that he vacate the suburban Hartford home.

Tyler is a medical malpractice lawyer who worked for Shenkman’s advertising firm in Bloomfield, according to divorce records. The firm produced “The Gayle King Show,” hosted by Oprah Winfrey’s best friend and a longtime Hartford TV anchor, and did commercials for state government, the records say.

A local newspaper reported when Tyler was still in the home that Shenkman had given it a list of demands, including that a priest be brought in to give her last rites. A priest was on the scene.

Shenkman’s attorney, Hugh Keefe, said he hoped for a peaceful ending without any more violence.

Police blocked off streets near the home that the couple used to share around 11 a.m.

South Windsor police Cmdr. Matthew Reed said there was no confirmation of explosives in the house even though there were indications, such as “some wires and some other odd items.”

Shenkman made several demands, said Reed, who would not elaborate. The Day newspaper, of New London, reported they included summoning the priest and asking that Judge Jorge Simon, who presided over the couple’s divorce case, remarry them. It reported he also requested a copy of the SWAT team procedure handbook and asked that police “back off the property,” which he said they did.

Shenkman, 60, and Tyler, 57, have shared three years of contentious divorce proceedings, Keefe said. They married in 1993; a judge granted the divorce last year, but Shenkman has been appealing.

The state Appellate Court, in a decision released Tuesday, rejected Shenkman’s appeal. Shenkman had sought to delay the divorce proceedings until an arson case against him was resolved.

He is accused of burning the couple’s beach home in East Lyme in 2007 hours before he was to hand it over to Tyler. The case is pending in New London Superior Court.

Shenkman also has other pending criminal charges, including threatening, violating a protective order and forgery, according to the state Judicial Branch.

Tyler’s lawyer, Norm Pattis, said Shenkman’s behavior during the divorce trial was “menacing, threatening, nothing short of bizarre.”

“The reports that he abducted Ms. Tyler … is consistent with the level of irrationality that he displayed throughout the proceedings,” Pattis said. “I hope the police will take prompt and decisive action to make sure no harm comes to Ms. Tyler.”

The Appellate Court file includes a cassette tape of more than a dozen voice mail messages from Shenkman to Tyler, which contain numerous threats.

“We are not getting divorced,” he said in one message. “It is not going to happen. Listen to my words. We’re not divorced. We’re not getting divorced. We were married ’til death do us part. We made vows in front of God. He was our witness, and you can only get your divorce one way, and that’s death. You can only be unmarried by death.”

Shortly before the trial, the records how, Shenkman was hospitalized because his lawyer thought he might be a danger to himself.

Associated Press writers Dave Collins and Katie Nelson in Hartford and John Christoffersen in New Haven contributed to this report.