IT IS AN encounter you see at least ten times a year — in the movies. A desperate gunman on the run. Nothing to lose. Already facing charges of multiple murder and rape. A female hostage, alone and seemingly helpless. The outcome, it seems, horribly inevitable. Yet somehow the woman gains the man’s confidence, talks him out of inflicting further suffering, appeals to his better nature, and convinces him to give himself up without a fight.

But the astonishing incident that took place in a young woman’s flat in the early hours of last Saturday morning was no movie plot. By the time he had burst into Ashley Smith’s apartment, Brian Nichols had been on the run for 17 hours after allegedly shooting dead four people. He was being tried for rape in an Altanta courthouse when, on Friday morning, he had apparently seized a gun and shot dead the judge, a sheriff’s deputy and a court reporter.

He then fled. Later that day, the police believe, he also murdered a customs agent. Then, despite a massive manhunt across five states, he disappeared.

Until, at about 1am on Saturday morning, he crashed into Smith’s life. The 26-year-old single mother, who had drifted between jobs in the four years since her husband had died in a knife fight, had popped out to buy cigarettes. Nichols, thrusting his gun in her ribs, accosted her as she returned. He forced his way into her flat, bound her with tape and electrical cord, put a towel over her head, and made her sit in the bathroom while he showered.

The outcome was utterly predictable: another rape; another violent death. Except that this didn’t happen. About eight hours later, after talking through the night with Smith, Nichols gave himself up. Against all the odds, a young woman with no training in counselling, psychiatry or negotiation — with, indeed, few formal qualifications of any sort — had worked what seems little short of a miracle. How did she do it? And what lessons can be learnt from this remarkable encounter?

Her first, intuitive reaction had probably saved her life. She didn’t scream. She didn’t panic, or struggle. From the first moment, it seems, she managed to muster a heroic calm. That was crucial. In situations of intense danger or stress, the psychologists tell us, our emotional antennae flare up like the hairs on a cat’s tail, and one person’s mood “infects” another’s with lightning speed.

Given what had happened in the preceding 17 hours, Nichols must have been as volatile as an unexploded bomb when he burst into the flat. But he was also, it seems, desperately tired, utterly confused, in need of comforting. Psychologically, he wanted to find a “safe place” in more than the physical sense. “I’ve had a really long day,” he told Smith. “I don’t want to hurt anybody any more. I want to rest.”

Somehow, either through instinct or deduction, Smith gave him not the revulsion that he must have been anticipating, but exactly the sort of empathy that calmed him down. Of course, she held a trump card not available to many people. She told him, quite truthfully, that her husband had bled to death in her arms, and that she had a five-year-old daughter who would be orphaned if she, too, came to a violent end. She even showed him her photo album.

If she had been trained to deal with hostage situations, she could not have adopted better tactics. “It’s the early stage that is the most dangerous,” says Professor David Canter, director of the Centre for Investigative Psychology at the University of Liverpool. “The rules haven’t been established. There’s no framework for knowing what to expect of each other. This woman did all the right things. Most importantly, she became a person. The criminal will tend to regard the hostage as an object to serve their purposes. But the more the hostage can become a full person — with a relationship, a family, and feelings — the more difficult it is for the offender to treat them as an object.”

That’s exactly what happened in Atlanta. Smith ceased to be, in Nichols’s eyes, just one more victim. Instead, and perhaps for the first time in a long time, he had found someone who seemed to offer understanding, compassion, even sympathy. “The fact that she is a woman is probably relevant,” Professor Canter says. “It meant she was probably less threatening and also more willing to discuss on an emotional level what was going on.”

But then Smith did something which, in retrospect, seems like a terribly dangerous strategy. Risking the possibility of triggering more violent thoughts in her captor’s mind, she got Nichols to talk about the shootings that day. Why had he done what he had done? Did he not realise what appalling distress he had caused? She showed him the post-mortem report on her own husband. “That’s what a lot of people will have to go through now because of what you’ve done, ” she apparently told him. “You need to turn yourself in.”

Incredible though it seems, she had transformed herself in the space of a few hours from being Nichols’s helpless victim into his comforting friend and, now, his trusted adviser. What on earth gave her the confidence to do that?

The answer seems to be, at least in large part, her faith. After her husband had died, Smith had become a born-again Christian. Though much maligned in “sophisticated” circles, bible-belt Christians do subscribe to at least three beliefs that might be useful (to put it mildly) in such life-or-death situations. The first is that everything — even the terrible twist of fate that brings an alleged multiple-murderer into your home — is the will of God. And since God is loving, something good must inevitably come out of all horror, all tragedy.