The woman whose husband tried to murder her by cutting her parachute ropes before a skydive is to remarry another skydiver.
Vicky Cilliers, 48, will marry later this year, with her 11-year-old daughter as bridesmaid, in front of the family and friends who supported her after her horrific fall from 3,000ft.
Her fiancé is a 53-year-old former marine, now training to be a paramedic, who got down on one knee during a romantic meal in Edinburgh last summer. Vicky chose not to name him, but she says she was at Netheravon airbase, Wiltshire, on Easter Sunday 2015 when her ex-husband, Army Sergeant Emile Cilliers, tried to kill her.
Cilliers, who was serving a life sentence, planned to start a new life with his Austrian mistress using a £120,000 life insurance payout following Vicky’s death. However, even as the brave mother-of-two tries to build a new future, she reveals that Cilliers is still trying to control her from behind bars, launching court action seeking tens of thousands of pounds worth of the family home in Amesbury, Wiltshire. .
“He’s suing me for a share of the house; that’s all he cares about; he still sees me as his source of income,” says Vicky. “She is still trying to control the narrative from prison. The divorce took so long and was so exhausting that I stopped there. I did not get an agreement regarding the children’s arrangements or my finances. I just assumed that, under the circumstances, that would never be a problem.
Emile Cilliers and his wife Victoria Cilliers on their wedding day in South Africa in 2011. Emile twice tried to kill his wife to claim her £120,000 life insurance policy.
Victoria in hospital days after her skydiving accident, wearing the brace she was forced to wear for five months
Vicky is also terrified that if something were to happen to her, Cilliers, a former army physical training instructor, would have increased parental rights over her children, so she returns to court on the eve of her wedding in a bid to finally escape. of the. .
They met when Cilliers was referred to Vicky for rehabilitation treatment after a skiing injury. They began dating in 2010 and married in his native South Africa in 2011. She had no idea (as it later emerged) that he was a sex addict, a compulsive spender, deeply in debt and a user of sex clubs, prostitutes and websites. Dating sites.
In March 2015 he tried to kill Vicky by tampering with a gas pipe in the family home. When that plan failed, he came up with the idea of a skydiving “accident.”
Vicky was a senior skydiving instructor with thousands of jumps logged, so when she did what was going to be a quick ‘jump and pop’ (a low altitude jump) and found her canopy and rope tangled, she stuck to it. better position. chances than most of getting out alive. She calmly cut off her main parachute and reached for her reserve, only to discover that the links connecting it to her harness were missing.
By then he was already falling at 100 mph, so his only option was to use his canopy to break his fall.
When he hit the ground he was still traveling at 60mph and survived only because he was lightly built and had landed in a freshly plowed field. The fall also shattered his pelvis, broke several vertebrae and several ribs.
Three weeks later, her husband was charged with attempted murder, accused of sabotaging his parachute to make his death look like a freak accident. Vicky wrote a book about her ordeal and will appear in a documentary this autumn on Channel 4. There is also a suggestion that her story could be turned into a three-part drama series. However, what she really craves is anonymity.
Cilliers, who was serving a life sentence, planned to start a new life with his Austrian mistress.
Army sergeant and keen skier Emile Chilliers
“The brutal truth is that I have had to stick my head above the parapet from time to time to raise money for the legal fees I need to fight Emile,” he says. “I wouldn’t do it if it weren’t for that. I long to get on with my life.”
Vicky has known her fiancé as a friend and neighbor for more than a decade, but it took a surprise match on dating app Bumble to discover the other was looking for more. He was at her side when, in October 2018, she made his only parachute jump from which she nearly killed her.
She says: “I tried chatting with other men, but as soon as they asked me questions about past relationships, I froze.” It was just too much to try to explain my situation. With my current partner he already knew everything, there was a trust that was incredibly reassuring after everything that had happened.’
She and her children will take the name of her new husband. “The name Cilliers gives me chills every time I see it,” she says.
The ceremony will take place in a large house in the West Country, and Vicky says her children are “ecstatic, literally jumping with excitement”.
She admits she’s worried about making her plans public. “Part of me worries about other people’s reactions,” she says. “I’ve been married twice before, but I think if the person you’re married to tries to kill you, that kind of negates it.”