A woman who survived an attack by a notorious Florida serial killer, and helped police to capture him, watched on Thursday evening as he was put to death for his crimes.

Lisa Noland looked on from the front row as Bobby Joe Long, whose 1984 killing spree claimed the lives of 10 women, was executed by lethal injection at Florida state prison.

“I wanted to look him in the eye. I wanted to be the first person he saw. Unfortunately, he didn’t open his eyes,” said Noland, who positioned herself in the witness room where she hoped Long would see her.

Long, 65, had no last words, simply closing his eyes before the execution began and he was pronounced dead at 6.55pm. Noland began to cry when she left the room afterward, she said.

Capital punishment in the US is in the midst of a long-term decline as critics raise concerns about its application, racial bias, and government overreach. Lethal injection has drawn particular scrutiny following botched procedures called inhumane.

Noland was 17 when Long abducted her outside a church. He raped her, but later let her go. Evidence she left at the scene and details she gave police helped them capture the serial killer, who received 28 sentences of life in prison and one death sentence for the murder of 22-year-old Michelle Simms.

The killer pressed a gun to Noland’s head and blindfolded her after abducting her outside a church in the Tampa Bay area, she told the Associated Press in an interview Wednesday.

She was menstruating and deliberately got blood on his car’s back seat, which she hoped police would use as evidence, and was able to tell police after her release where she was driven on an interstate north of Tampa. At Long’s apartment, she purposely left fingerprints all over the bathroom.

Until her kidnapping, authorities had little clue who was behind the bodies left around the Tampa Bay area, often in gruesome poses.

Noland had suffered years of sexual abuse by her grandmother’s boyfriend, and the day before her abduction, she wrote a suicide note.

After years of abuse, she said she knew how to deal with her abductor and was careful not to fight him, which would anger him.

“At the time he put the gun to my head, it was nothing new to me,” she said.

“I had to learn who he was, what made him tick. If I did the wrong move, could it end my life? So literally, the night before I wrote a suicide note out, and now I was in a position where I had to save my life,” she said.

Long washed his victim’s hair after raping her repeatedly, she said, and she took the opportunity to strike up a conversation and ask him what motivated him to attack women. He said he had gone through a bad breakup that left him hating women. She told him he seemed nice and maybe she could be his girlfriend, promising not to tell anyone what he had done.

The abductor eventually let Noland out of his car, telling her to leave her blindfold on for five minutes. She found herself in front of a tree in another churchyard, and has used an image of the tree in the design of a T-shirt she made to mark Long’s execution.

Noland said if she could have spoken to Long before the execution, she would have thanked him for abducting someone so well equipped to turn the tables on him.

“I would say ‘Thank you for choosing me and not another 17-year-old girl,’” she said. “Another 17-year-old girl probably wouldn’t have been able to handle it the way that I have.”

Noland is now a deputy at the Hillsborough county sheriff’s office, the same department she helped catch the serial killer. “It was comforting to know this was actually happening,” she said of Long’s execution. “The peace that came over me is a remarkable feeling.”

At the execution, another witness wore a polo shirt with a photo of one victim on the front and the words “Gone But Not Forgotten.” On the back were photos of all 10 victims who were killed and the words: “The Ones That Matter.”