Tim Joyce was piloting a chartered joyride when the woman who hired him, Ms Dudko, produced a sawn-off shotgun from her handbag, held it to his throat and said: "This is a hijack."

Speaking publicly for the first time, Ms Dudko, now 51, told The Sun-Herald : "My life was like a soap opera back then but slowly I've managed to put it all behind me. It doesn't help to relive what happened, so I try not to. I've moved on."

Today, she divides her time between a one-bedroom flat at the foot of the Blue Mountains and a Rydalmere warehouse where she produces pavlovas for McDonald's restaurants and meringues for Woolworths.

After spending seven years in jail for her crime of passion, she was released in 2006 to a media frenzy, then vanished.

In a scene straight from the 1975 Charles Bronson movie Breakout - which she'd hired a week earlier - Ms Dudko forced the chopper down on an oval inside the maximum security jail, then flew her lover, a convicted armed robber, to freedom. Guards fired shots from prison watchtowers but backed off when other inmates tried to scramble aboard.

After they landed in a North Ryde park and tied up Mr Joyce with radio cables, Ms Dudko and Killick fled for a new life on the run. The story created international headlines and as the days and weeks passed, police were swamped with possible sightings. Then, after 45 days in each other's arms, the lovestruck sweethearts were caught napping at the Bass Hill Tourist Park and Motel where they had booked a cabin under the name Mr and Mrs M.G. Brown.

A Corrective Services spokeswoman confirmed Ms Dudko is still banned from visiting Killick, meaning she will not be reunited with him until at least 2013, when at the age of 71, he will be eligible for parole. The couple had a marriage request refused in 2000 but are still allowed to communicate via letter. Ms Dudko refused to speak about their relationship today. "Does it matter?" she asked.

Before meeting Killick, "Red Lucy" as she became known, had the world at her feet. She was married to scientist Alex Dudko, with whom she emigrated to Australia, from Russia, in 1993. She had a beautiful baby daughter, Marsha, and was studying for a doctorate in history at Macquarie University. Yet she turned her back on it all for a chronic gambler and ageing criminal.

Living alone and looking a pale shadow of her former self, Ms Dudko said she was now simply doing her best to avoid others and survive in a world gone "crazy".