It was the most terrifying and shameful moment of Kellie Maloney’s troubled life, buried deep in her subconscious – until today.

And she shudders as she relives for the first time the chilling night she tried to STRANGLE the woman she loves.

Kellie takes us back to her former self, boxing promoter Frank Maloney, and is with then wife Tracey at their holiday home in Portugal.

He is drowning in a sea of booze after decades of secret denial and pent-up frustration over his sexuality.

Getting undressed for bed, Tracey tells him the only time she sees him happy is when he is drinking.

The red mist descends. He snaps and lunges at her, closing his hands around her neck. He sees fear flood her face. Then their two young daughters burst into the room screaming…

Kellie takes a deep breath as the ­flashback to 2005 subsides. “Who knows what could have happened,” she says.

“I think it was anger at myself coming out. The frustration. I knew I wasn’t the person she thought I was.

"I was living a total lie, I couldn’t face the truth.

“I couldn’t tell her. I totally lost it. I crossed a boundary of sanity. I thank God the kids did come in at that point.”

(Image: Sunday Mirror)

Revealing the horror of that night 10 years ago is part of Kellie’s final steps towards confronting her past and accepting who she is today – the woman she has secretly dreamed of being since the age of four.

She completed painful gender ­reassignment surgery in January after revealing her secret desire to the world through the Sunday Mirror last summer.

But despite her transition, she tearfully admits to her lasting love for air ­stewardess Tracey, her ex-wife of 20 years and now her best friend.

They shop for clothes together, chat numerous times a day and regularly sit in Kellie’s flat having a gossip and a giggle.

But Kellie, who once managed boxing greats including Lennox Lewis, recently revealed her struggle to get over her feelings for the petite blonde even though they split in 2012.

She still refuses to meet 48-year-old Tracey’s new partner.

Kellie says: “It’s just hard –it’s difficult for the feelings. They don’t switch off. I don’t think I could ever love anyone the way I love Tracey.”

And it was those deep emotions – combined with the anguish of feeling too scared and trapped to tell Tracey the truth – that triggered the attack on her four years before Kellie finally told her ­everything.

Talking ahead of the publication of her autobiography, Kellie, 61, recalls how that night in Portugal was a landmark on her journey to where she is now.

“We were at our holiday house and we’d been out drinking with other people, everyone was cheerful and happy and I wasn’t,” says Kellie.

(Image: Sunday Mirror)

“I had bottled everything up, lying to everyone for so long. I’d painted a picture of someone who didn’t care that night, I was buying drinks for everyone.

“Tracey said I shouldn’t be doing that. We were in the bedroom and she was getting undressed and so was I.

"She said the only time I seemed to be happy was when I was drinking. I was depressed on the holiday and she said that’s not how I used to be. That’s not the person she remembered.

“I just lost it. I said ‘You don’t love me, you wish I wasn’t in your life’. Then I grabbed her and had my hands around her neck. I remember the fear in her face. In that split second I was like a man possessed. The outside world didn’t exist, and the fact that I was acting like a madman meant nothing to me.”

Sophie and Libby, then 10 and four, rushed into the room just in time.

Kellie says: “What brought me back to my senses was the sound of their frightened voices. If they hadn’t come into the room at that point I dread to think what might have happened.

“I broke down crying, walked out and walked the streets of Portugal the rest of the night.”

When Kellie returned in the morning she broke down and repeatedly ­apologised. “Tracey told me I needed help. She looked scared,” says Kellie. “I caught a plane home and checked myself into a clinic.”

She still didn’t tell a soul about her gender issues, but was given counselling for anger management. She and Tracey tried to move on, and Kellie admits she attempted to blank the incident out. Incredibly, it was only as she sat down to write her book that Tracey reminded her what happened.

Kellie never got physically violent with Tracey again, but she confesses she was a “verbal bully” as she continued to battle her inner turmoil. And, she admits, she did explode at work.

“Anger would build up in me. It was more anger with myself and I’d take it out on people around me,” says Kellie. “I grabbed a couple of people in the office round the neck, pushed them up against the wall and threatened them.”

In desperation, she even secretly took Tracey’s contraceptive pills in an attempt to quash her temper.

“I had read somewhere that if you took a small dose it would help balance your moods and keep you calm,” she says. “I thought if I could just feel a little more feminine I would be happier. But I panicked I would develop breasts.”

Kellie reveals the extent of her pent-up feelings, admitting she secretly dressed in her aunt’s “sequinned dresses” at 11.

At 19, she plucked up courage to confide in her gay flatmate who ­encouraged her to go out in women’s clothes. She regularly did, and called herself Frances. But after 18 months her father came to visit.

“I was half living as a woman, I was halfway there, but I panicked and had my hair cut,” she says. “I felt if I let him see me like that I would lose his love and respect.”

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Even when she married first wife Jackie at 21, Kellie would try on her clothes and cry.

Repeatedly suppressing her desires, she became so desperate to dress as a woman she enticed one-night stands into cross-dressing in the guise of playing ‘sex games’.

“They were never girls I would be serious with, one or two-nighters,” she says. “In my head I would feel contented, more comfortable and more relaxed in the bedroom.”

She admits: “I always feared failing in the bedroom because of what I was going through.

“It did become a problem on and off, more so in long-term relationships. But I never suggested cross-dressing in my marriages.”

Now, embracing a new life as Kellie, she feels she has finally conquered her years of frustration. And she says writing her life story is the final piece in the jigsaw.

“I had to recall things I had shut out in my mind,” she says. “Things like that night in Portugal. It’s the best therapy I’ve ever had.”