A BOLTON businesswoman has told of the day a wild-eyed gunman threatened her life as he robbed her town centre shop.

"He put the gun right inside my mouth. I accepted that I was going to die, and wondered if the bullet would go right through the back of my head or would there just be blackness," she said.

On Monday, the robber - convicted rapist Stuart Partington - was jailed for life with a recommendation that he serves at least eight years when he appeared at Manchester Crown Court charged with robbery and indecent assault.

In a six-hour rampage, he attacked and robbed women staff in four Bolton shops.

The 24-year-old woman, who has a degree in business studies, was serving alone in the lingerie shop Bare Cheek in Churchgate which she had opened only a couple of months earlier as the realisation of a long-held dream.

It was around 4pm when a scruffily-dressed, tall, thin man with deep-set brown eyes came into her shop one Tuesday afternoon last November.

"He smelt of cigarette smoke and a sweet smell of too much spirits," she recalled. "He didn't seem to know what he wanted, but moved to some very expensive underwear at the back of the shop. I asked him if I could help him a few times, then he said "What I really want...." and lunged at me.

"He grabbed me by the throat, and he had a gun whch he put at the other side of my jaw. Then he put the gun in the small of my back, and grabbed my hair (which was very long then) and pushed me into a corner by the stairs."

After asking the woman if there was anyone upstairs, he pushed her up the stairs into a small office. "He kicked over the chair and pushed me onto the floor, then he knelt beside me with one knee in my back and put a knife to my throat.

"He said 'If you scream, I'll slit your throat.' Then he stood up, and pressed his foot down so hard on my back that he left an imprint of his shoe on my skin.

" He tied my hands together tightly with a dressing gown cord from some stock.

"I thought then that he was going to rape me. I knew that if he was going to rape me, he would have to kill me first. There was no doubt in my mind." The man was speaking to her throughout in a slurred voice. "He seemed forgetful, and I had to say things twice. He asked me where the money was kept and I told him there was a till key downstairs.

"He pulled me up, dragged my head back with my hair again and pushed me downstairs. At the till, he shoved me again, and I fell, hitting my cheek on a shelf.

"I was a bit out of it by then, but he got the keys and told me to open the till. But he wouldn't untie my hands, and I was fumbling behind me, trying to open the till. When I did get it open, he bundled all the money (about £150) into a carrier bag."

He took a bank book and £25 from the woman herself, then the robber pushed her into a changing cubicle. "He started to worry then about the fact that I'd seen his face.

"He spotted a green and white dishcloth I'd used to mop up some spilt coffee and he threw the cloth over my head, saying 'you've not seen me, you don't know me.'"

Still agitated, Partington then dragged the woman upstairs once more, righting the chair and making her sit down. "He was still going on about me not recognising him - that's when he put the gun in my mouth. "Somehow I shut myself off. He said that if I did recognise him again, he would come back and kill me."

Telling the woman to "count to 500" after he had gone, he finally left the shop, after a terror ordeal which had lasted 20 minutes.

Staff from the next-door music shop, Booth's, who saw the man leave, came in and found the distraught woman upstairs. Police later captured Partington.

"I was very numb afterwards," she said. "I could not bear to be left alone, and I just shook for several days. I jumped at sounds like the telephone or a car-alarm and I had trouble sleeping, with frightening nightmares."

She was badly bruised and had a red weal around her throat where Partington had pressed in the knife. But the mental scars lasted far longer.

Unable to serve male customers herself any longer, she had to employ other staff. Eventually, she felt she could not carry on and in February this year, she became bankrupt and was forced to close the business. Fortunately, counselling and the support of her family and long-term boyfriend have helped her rebuild her life. She is now teaching and says that she is "coping quite well."

"I look back now at that day and still can't believe it happened to me.

"It doesn't seem real that in Bolton, in the town centre, on a quiet, ordinary afternoon a man with a gun could do all that."

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