It has taken almost a decade for skydiver Victoria Cilliers to be able to say, without shame or doubt, that she knows her husband tried to kill her by sabotaging her parachute.
That Army Sergeant Emile Cilliers attempted to murder his wife, the mother of his young daughter and newborn son, in search of hot sex and cash, seemed clear to detectives, the jury and the public. fascinated.
He had tangled the lines of his main parachute and removed critical attachment links from his emergency reserve. When an unsuspecting Victoria jumped from the plane, both parachutes failed and she plummeted 4,000 feet, her survival a testament to her brilliance as a skydiver, her birdlike frame, and the good fortune of landing on freshly plowed soft ground.
Besides, it had only been a week since he had tried to blow it up by simulating a gas leak.
But accepting that she had married a man willing to see her fall freely to a “certain” death was much more difficult for Victoria herself. Now a three-part Channel 4 documentary goes beyond her immersion to examine what led up to it and what happened after it.
Victoria Cilliers (pictured) in 2018, fresh from her first parachute jump after the assassination attempt.
The result is a devastating tale of coercion and control that extended even beyond Cilliers’ 2018 conviction.
It represents the lying, deception, deception, undermining, manipulation of one human being by another and the evil that can exist in a four-bedroom executive home when your spouse is a narcissistic psychopath.
Giving her first in-depth television interview on the show along with reconstructions of the events, Victoria appears on our screens in a red shirt and bold lipstick, warmer, more glamorous and more relaxed than we’ve seen her.
It is clear that she is a different person to the woman who was so enslaved by Cilliers that Wiltshire Police feared she might wait while he served his life sentence.
“I didn’t distinguish the truth, the reality, from what was false,” he says. ‘Everything I thought was the truth, they were starting to explode. I felt like a prisoner in my own house and in my own head.’
She had seen Cilliers as the perfect husband. ‘I thought she had my fairy tale ending. It seemed to be everything I wanted. He almost became my perfect man, everything he had lost.
That’s why, even while he was in the dock at Winchester Crown Court charged with two counts of attempted murder, she struggled to come to terms with it.
‘I was always very aware of every answer I gave, of the impact it could potentially have on my future. I don’t think I lied much. “I think I kept a lot of secrets, I kept a lot of secrets from myself,” she says, admitting to both deep loneliness and mental dislocation and toxic loyalty.
In The Fall: Skydive Murder Plot, actors play Victoria, Cilliers and investigating officers Detective Inspector Paul Franklin and Detective Maddy Hennah of Wiltshire Police, whose work would bring PT military instructor Cilliers to justice.
Using police transcripts, they recreate key scenes from the couple’s marriage, the horror jump at Netheravon airfield in Wiltshire and the two court cases that followed.
Victoria believed she had found the perfect husband in Emile Cilliers (pictured) and the couple had two children together.
The real officers also speak on camera, and we also see the real moment when the skydiving club investigators, filming themselves examining Victoria’s parachute, realize they might have a possible killer in their midst.
Victoria, now recovered from a shattered pelvis, broken spine and internal injuries, appears alongside two other women with Cilliers’ enlightening experiences.
One is DC Hennah and the other is his previous partner, the mother of his two eldest children, Nicolene Shepherd. They form a fascinating sisterhood of women: the woman he left, the woman he tried to kill, and the woman she hoped to deceive.
DC Hennah reveals that Cilliers attempted to flirt with her during a police interview and was deemed so dangerously manipulative that she was not allowed to be alone with him from that point on.
‘He was clearly trying to win me over and use his charms on me. He didn’t look like the typical guy who would chase you down the road with a machete, but he was very subtly sinister.
As for Nicolene, she became his girlfriend when she was 13 and he was 16, in their native South Africa. She gave birth to her first child at 16 and he left for the UK when she was expecting her second. Her mother later told him that she had settled here and married another woman.
Everything I thought was true began to fall apart. I felt like a prisoner in my own house, in my own head.
Years later, when Nicolene moved to the UK, Cilliers pursued her like a heat-seeking missile. “I felt like we had never been apart, like I was a child again,” says Nicolene, now married and a mother of five.
‘I thought maybe it had come full circle; We had ups and downs and then we ended up together!’ Except Cilliers was still with his first wife, the woman he had abandoned Nicolene for.
“He builds you up, he tears you down, he builds you up, he tears you down, but you don’t recognize it as control because he doesn’t tell you, ‘You’re not doing that,'” Nicolene says. “You just know you’re not doing that because there are consequences.”
He agrees with police’s description of Cilliers as a “psychopath.” ‘I would use that word freely. And a sociopath. Anything that ends with the word path, I would associate with that man. His name should be Emile Path.
Hearing the details of how he behaved with Victoria, his second wife, it’s hard to disagree. As she leaped toward what he planned to be her death on Easter Sunday 2015, he was texting her lover, a blonde Austrian. While she lay unconscious in intensive care, he searched for prostitutes on Google.
And because he was not going to receive the £120,000 insurance payout he had bet on, he reached into his wallet for his credit card to resume the excessive spending that had ruined his marriage.
By now you have an idea of the monster Victoria married. The documentary also gently explores what made this Sandhurst graduate military physiotherapist so vulnerable.
Her mother died of cancer when she was only 15 years old. An early first marriage was triggered by the infidelity of her husband. Divorced when she was 30, she worried she wouldn’t meet someone in time to have children. That’s why she opted for Cilliers and that’s why she couldn’t believe that she had made such a mistake.
His rocky court testimony resulted in a hung jury in 2017. On the stand, he said, “I can’t say categorically” that the main parachute was not working properly. At a retrial the following year, a lawyer spent three days reading 200 A4 pages of text messages, WhatsApp and online searches incriminating Cilliers.
They even included an Internet search for a wet nurse to breastfeed his newborn son, conducted before his wife jumped.
This was the only way Inspector Franklin could convey to the jury that Victoria was a victim of coercive control. Police detail in the documentary how Cilliers, who was banned from contacting her wife, posted YouTube videos of himself singing love songs to influence her.
Channel 4’s The Fall: Skydive Murder Plot, featuring Victoria’s first in-depth television interview along with reconstructions of the events, airs on Tuesday at 9pm
He was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison with a minimum sentence of 18 years. However, even then he was promising Victoria the future he had always longed for…and she almost fell for it.
“He knew how to manipulate me to the core, I felt like I was being sucked back in,” she admits. But she defended herself. “He asked me: ‘What do you want?’ And I said: ‘I don’t want to be with you. I don’t want this marriage anymore.’
What the documentary doesn’t say is that she is now in a new relationship with an old friend whom she will marry this year. She longs for privacy for both of them, but she must first deal with her ex-husband’s attempts to control her behind bars, whether regarding the future of her children or their shared finances.
“It’s liberating,” he says of opening up on screen and returning for the first time to the field where he landed. “A happy place,” he calls it, because he survived. And his opinion of her ex-husband? “A sad and sick individual.” How does she feel when he hears her say that? “The truth hurts,” she shrugs, and you know she finally knows he’s guilty.
- The Fall: Skydive Murder Plot, Tuesday, 9pm, Channel 4.
