The woman who survived a 3,000ft fall after her cheating husband tried to kill her by tampering with her parachute has revealed that he had tried to kill her weeks earlier by telling her to “check the stove” during a gas leak.
Amazingly, Victoria Cilliers survived her fall with only a shattered pelvis, broken spine and internal injuries after her then-husband Emile Cilliers sent her to the ground.
Emile Cilliers was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum sentence of 18 years for the plot in which he hoped to pay off his mounting debts by collecting on Victoria’s £120,000 life insurance.
Cilliers had first attempted to kill Victoria by turning on the gas at the family home in Wiltshire in the hope of blowing up Vicky, while also recklessly endangering the lives of her young son and young daughter who were with her at the time. moment.
Speaking in a new three-part Channel 4 documentary series about the events and subsequent trials, Victoria said her ex-husband’s cruelty in planning the gas tap leak defied belief.
Victoria Cilliers survived her fall with only a shattered pelvis, broken spine and internal injuries after her then-husband Emile Cilliers tampered with her parachute (pictured together).
Victoria said her ex-husband’s cruelty in planning the gas tap leak was incredible
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
Emile Cilliers is pictured above on holiday with Vicky in 2011.
Speaking on the show, Victoria said: “The idea that someone you married and just had children would be so cruel to me and the children defied belief.”
Victoria’s survival from the fall was a miracle: she fractured nearly all of her ribs in the fall, broke her pelvis, and collapsed her right lung.
His slim build and the softness of the freshly plowed field that cushioned his fall saved his life.
But it took Victoria several years to accept that her husband, whom she knew was an inveterate cheater and womanizer, was also guilty of trying to kill her. In fact, it wasn’t until the judge at Cilliers’ trial called him “a person of quite exceptional callousness who will stop at nothing to satisfy his own desires, material or otherwise,” that the truth began to dawn on Victoria. .
The “charming” man she had married was, in fact, an “evil” psychopath who had hatched an elaborate plot to get her shot so he could pocket her £120,000 life insurance policy and start a new life. with a lover
Cilliers, who still maintains his innocence and has not shown an ounce of remorse, was sentenced to life in prison in 2018. He will serve at least 18 years.
Victoria, who offers her first in-depth television interview in the new program along with reconstructions of the events.
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 and her husband Emile skydived in 2011. It was something the couple often did together.
Victoria believed she had found the perfect husband 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.
Mrs Cilliers in hospital with a chest brace after her husband’s attempt to murder her
Victoria would go skydiving again after the incident.
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.
