The victim in a vicious July 12 rape in Banff is sharing her story in the hope it will lead to the capture of her attacker.

CALGARY - He was smiling as he sexually assaulted her, his leering face just inches away from hers, his eyes filled with evil glee.

And so Kristen mustered all the courage she could, conquering her pain and terror -- and then she jammed her fingers into her assailant's eyeballs.

"I managed to reach his eyes with my fingers and did the best I could to poke at them. Luckily for me I must have done a little damage as he pulled his face away from me, thus loosening his grip.

"I then grabbed his head with my hands and gorged my thumbs into his eye sockets."

If fighting back was already brave, it's taken immense courage for 27-year-old Kristen to finally tell the story of the night she was sexually assaulted and savagely beaten on a Banff street, before her rapist fled.

That was last July 12, and the coward who attacked Kristen as she walked home at 2:30 a.m. has never been caught.

As long as he's free, it could happen again, to some other innocent woman -- and that's why Kristen, now living more than 13,000 km away, can no longer stay silent about a night she'd sooner forget.

"It terrifies me what this man is capable of, and makes me sick to think about what he is going to do to the next girl before he is caught," Kristen told the Sun from her home in Australia.

"Although baring my soul like this is by far the last thing I want to be doing, if it helps to catch this monster then it will be worthwhile."

The "monster" is Caucasian, between 23 and 28 years old, and standing about 5-ft. 7-in. with a stocky build.

At the time, he had a short, dark crew-cut hairstyle and a receding hairline, and was probably boasting some nasty injuries to his eyes, thanks to Kristen and her thumbs.

Kristen was working in Banff at the time, and she still professes a love for the mountain town and the many friends she made while travelling in Alberta.

Indeed, it was a friend from Banff, Trish Gayton, who convinced Kristen to tell her story: Gayton survived a rape in Edmonton in 2004, and has since become an outspoken supporter of sexual assault victims.

And so, with the help of her friend, Kristen has put her story down on paper. It's a graphic and terrible account of the fateful few minutes which changed the young woman's life.

Fighting back probably saved her from an even more brutal attack -- his eyes wounded, the enraged rapist started to punch Kristen, knocking her senseless with blows to the face, before he suddenly ran off.

"The most common reaction during a sexual assault is to freeze up, but lucky for me I'm in the minority that didn't -- I cannot begin to fathom in my mind what would have happened if I did," Kristen told the Sun.

It's hard not to think of Julianne Courneya, the 25-year-old Banff hotel worker who remains in a coma, after been raped and left for dead by a deranged drifter, who's now serving an indefinite sentence as a dangerous offender.

After Kristen's attacker vanished into the night, her next memory is of another man helping her stand up -- he'd witnessed the attack and come to her aid.

"I am eternally grateful to this man that found me -- he probably saved my life," she writes in her account.

Her story is about more than terror and the drama of trying to gouge a creep's eyes out his head: Kristen's account also speaks to the quiet mental anguish following a crime so personal and brutal.

"This incident has changed my life," she writes. "I have lost my passion for many things. I don't have the ability to feel excited or to anticipate, and I have forgotten what stomach butterflies feel like."

The RCMP file remains open -- whether the rapist was a local or a transient who then moved on is unknown.

Kristen says writing down her thoughts about that horrifying morning has helped, but she's more concerned with putting the monster behind bars, so no one else becomes a victim.

"I need to find a proactive way to use this experience if I'm ever going to heal properly, but more importantly I feel a responsibility to do everything I can to prevent anyone from ever going through this," she told the Sun.

"I'm not doing this for me, although of course I want to see him caught.

"I'm doing this to try and save the next girl."

michael.platt@sunmedia.ca