MACON, Ga. -- A Macon man is charged with kidnapping and aggravated assault after deputies say he attacked his wife, tied her up and threatened to kill her.
Terry Lynn Porter is in the Bibb County Jail without bond.
His wife, Tracy Durham, never thought he could do what she says he did early Tuesday morning.
"No, no signs of it at all. It wasn't probably until, I guess, two years into us being married when all the trouble started. The abuse," Durham said.
Durham said she and her husband went to bed Tuesday night like normal. She says she fell asleep around 9:00 or 10:00 p.m., but was woken up around 3:00 in the morning to her husband brandishing a knife at her.
"He pulled out a knife and put it to my throat... He just went crazy on me," Durham said as she looked at her bloodstained floor.
She says Porter tried to clean the blood. He told her, according to an incident report, "I'm too smart. They ain't going to catch me. This place ain't going to look like no crime scene at all."
The incident report also says Porter thought his wife was hiding a money order from him.
Durham says Porter hit her in the face -- she wore sunglasses inside on Thursday because even the smallest amount of light hurt her left eye. She says Porter also tied neckties around her arms and legs so tightly they began to swell.
"He told me he was going to kill my daughter," Durham said. "And he kept telling me the other night, 'I'm not going to prison. I'm not going. I already did enough to you already, so I'm not going to prison.'"
Durham says Porter then drove her toward the Interstate, telling her he was going to drive her to Atlanta, where, according to the incident report, he knew "some people that will take care of her."
Before he could get on the Interstate, though, Durham says she was suddenly able to get herself free from the neckties around her wrists.
"It was God... It was all God," she said.
At the red light before the ramp toward I-75 North, she saw her chance.
"I popped the lock and jumped out," Durham said. "But, had I been [home], he probably would've... he would've killed me in here."
Porter was arrested Wednesday. For Durham, that means the end of a harrowing chapter in her life.
"I can live my life. Yesterday was a new beginning. A new life for me. And I feel good. I feel really good. I'm happy. I feel lighter. I feel like I could conquer the world," Durham said, smiling.
Porter was in prison from 2001 to 2005 and from 1996 and 2000, both times for simple battery and aggravated assault in Clayton County, according to the Georgia Department of Corrections.
He was later arrested in Bibb County in 2007 for kidnapping and rape and again in 2014 for aggravated stalking, according to the sheriff's office. Those three charges were all dropped.
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This article was updated to include the arrest record of Terry Lynn Porter.