Victoria Cilliers had jumped out of an aeroplane dozens of times before. It meant that, when her main parachute failed to open during an Easter Sunday jump in 2015, she didn’t panic.
Following her training she cut it away to free up her reserve parachute. But then that failed to properly open too: Victoria plummeted 4,000 feet to the ground.
The horrendous nature of the fall meant that people below went to retrieve Victoria with a body bag. The 38-year-old physiotherapist and mother of two broke her spine, pelvis and fractured some of her ribs – but miraculously survived. She had landed on recently ploughed farmland which softened her impact.
Victoria was an accelerated freefall instructor, had made the jump over 2,600 jumps before, and knew that the odds of it all going wrong were minimal. Not for a second could she have guessed that someone may have tampered with her kit, nor that the perpetrator of this attempted murder was the love of her life, her husband of four years, Emile.
Now this astonishing story and the investigation into her husband’s secret lives, debts, wild sex life and crimes, is the focus of a new three-part docuseries, which is landing on Channel 4 this evening. Weaving together interviews with Victoria and others involved in the story, with dramatisations and recordings, the series is set to shine a light on the case which gripped the nation.
Who is Emile Cilliers?
Emile Cilliers, an instructor in the Royal Army Physical Training Corps, was born in South Africa in 1980. When he moved to the UK in the early 2000s he already had two children.
He worked first in pubs and on farms before eventually signing up to the army. He met his first wife Carly and the couple had two children. Carly lived just a mile from Amesbury where he would end up living with Victoria, and the two families would sometimes share childcare.
Emile and Victoria met at the physiotherapy treatment centre where Victoria worked after Emile popped in, trying to get some therapy for his knee, which he had hurt in a skiing accident in 2009. Although Emile was still married, soon after, they got together.
Emile divorced Carly and married Victoria in South Africa in 2011. According to one report, Emile saved enough money for the wedding by packing parachutes.
The couple was, seemingly, incredibly happy. They had a lot in common, both loving sports, and had two children. Emile lived an enviable life: he regularly travelled abroad, drove a nice car, was always smartly dressed. By all appearances he lived the perfect life with Victoria in the picturesque Wilshire village just two miles from Stonehenge.
Sex, lies, debt and deception
But Emile, who Victoria would later describe as “a passionate, intense alpha-male soldier”, lived a double life. He lived well beyond his army sergeant's means and was £22,000 in debt.
He was constantly moving money around to appease various people in his life, as well as financial bodies: he owed money to everyone from payday lenders and banks to former work colleagues, and borrowed £19,000 from Victoria. He took a further £6,000 from her without asking, claiming that her account had been hacked.
Naturally, Victoria followed this up with the bank, who found that the IP address that had been used to make the transaction could be traced to their home computer. Secretly, she reacted: Victoria cut her husband out of her will in 2014.
Emile was also a master philanderer, explaining in court that he was a “very sexually active person”. He continued his sexual relationship with Carly, used a casual sex site called Fabswingers, and would find sex workers on Adultwork.
He then started an affair with Austrian skydiving instructor Stefanie Goller who he met on Tinder when he was on an army skiing trip. He told Goller a clever version of the truth: he said that his marriage with Victoria was all but over and that although she was heavily pregnant, he was not the father.
Naturally, Emile was regularly absent from home or busy, and Victoria found condoms in the car and house. “He was constantly on his phone, it was ridiculous,” said Victoria in court. “I wasn’t allowed anywhere near it.”
Victoria, who was madly in love, felt sad and confused, as the relationship began slipping away. “I was scared, panicky, everything seemed to be going massively pear-shaped and I didn’t really understand why, I didn’t understand what I had done wrong,” she said later. The couple argued as Victoria would question Emile when she found clues of his infidelities, such as restaurant bills for meals, clearly eaten by two people, she hadn’t been to.
The murder plot
Emile saw a clear path to a new life: he planned to kill his second wife, use her £120,000 life insurance to settle his debts, and then start over with Goller.
Emile first attempted to kill Victoria by meddling with the gas at their home. He loosened a nut on a valve, hoping to cause a leak which would result in an explosion. Emile spent the evening at his army barracks, claiming he wanted to avoid the morning traffic, leaving his wife and children at home.
Luckily, nothing happened. Victoria woke to a strong gas smell and called an engineer who found a loose nut on a gas isolation valve.
During the police investigation, dried blood belonging to Emile was also found on the pipe; Emile explained he had tried to tighten the nut.
But some suspicions must have been lurking in the back of Victoria’s mind because after the gas incident she texted her husband, “Are you trying to kill me?”. It took place just one week before Victoria’s fateful jump – which Emile had organised and booked.
Victoria jumped out of the plane on April 5, 2015 over the Netheravon airfield. She loved jumping usually, and was extremely skilled – as an instructor she would chase after new jumpers through the sky, helping them to reposition – but today she felt off. She had given birth to their second child just five weeks earlier.
The weather hadn’t been great all day long, so she and 11 other jumpers decided to do a lower, 4000 f altitude jump. Despite everything, still happy for the opportunity after a year’s hiatus, she went for it. Then neither parachute opened properly and she sped through the air at 60mph, hitting the ground with considerable force.
“It was just getting faster and faster and faster,” said Victoria later. “The speed was unreal. The last thing I remember is trying to get some kind of control, then everything went black.”
Unbelievably, she survived, and was airlifted to hospital where she stayed for 17 days as doctors and nurses cared for her. Emile sat by her bed, but was texting his new girlfriend the whole time: “I can’t imagine anything like that happening to you, all I can think about is you,” he said in one of the messages.
The investigation
An investigation was immediately launched into what happened. The fact that slinks – the part of the parachute that links the canopy with the body – were missing pointed to the fact that a crime, rather than an accident, had taken place. Army Parachute Association head Mark Bayada alerted the police.
Between 2005 and 2014, 2.3 million parachutes were made in the UK, and during this period there’d never been even one incident of both the main and backup parachutes failing (only 2,900 reserve parachutes had even needed to be deployed).
Victoria’s reserve parachute, which had never been used, had been inspected 16 times by 10 different highly-trained packers since it had been first manufactured. Someone had tried to kill Victoria.
The police looked to Emile as a possible culprit, and, with his debts and affairs, it did not take long before they were able to build a picture of the case. Emile had taken Victoria’s pack into the bathroom the previous day claiming their daughter needed the loo.
This was an incredibly odd thing to do – he could have left the pack outside, which was what everybody else did. Emile had also searched wet nurses online before the jump – suggesting he knew his wife would die, and he would need help feeding their newborn baby.
The police interviewed Emile, who was extremely calm and confident throughout. He said that Victoria “never sexually satisfied” him, and admitted to having an affair with Goller.
After the police eventually arrested Emile, he was not allowed to contact Victoria and their children, nor leave the barracks. Following two criminal trials (the first failed to reach a verdict), Emile was found guilty of two counts of attempted murder in May 2018. He was given a life sentence with a minimum term of 18 years.
During the trial Emile, who showed no remorse, had suggested that perhaps a “random killer” had possibly tampered with his wife’s kit, and even went so far as to posit that Victoria had even sabotaged the kit herself, trying to kill herself. Even while in the docks, Emile kept on updating his Facebook page, posting pictures of army expeditions and family outings.
“This was wicked offending of extreme gravity,” said the judge during his judgement. “Your offending was extremely serious with your two attempts to murder your wife. They were planned and carried out in cold blood for your own selfish purposes.
“That your wife recovered at all was miraculous; she undoubtedly suffered severe physical harm and she must have suffered psychological harm in the terror of the fall and since. She appears to have recovered from the physical harm but not, having seen her in the witness box at length, from the psychological harm.”
The chief police investigator of the case, DI Franklin said: “Emile Cilliers is dangerous; he’s a cold, callous, selfish man who cares only about money and his sexual conquests. Today’s sentencing means that society is a little safer with him locked away.”
Victoria’s loyalty to Emile
Victoria remained loyal to Emile, even as the evidence started to stack up against him; and even after he was found guilty for her attempted murder.
Although she had been angry and upset with Emile – “I didn't know truth, reality, from what was false. Everything I thought was the truth they were starting to blow apart. I felt like a prisoner in my own home and in my own head,” says Victoria about the marriage in the upcoming docuseries – she also loved her husband.
During the first trial, which took place two years after the jump, Victoria sometimes played down the testimony she had given earlier to the police, saying she had simply been deeply distressed by his affairs.
She said perhaps her husband took the parachute into the bathroom because he didn’t notice it was around his shoulders, and went so far as to suggest that she herself may have damaged the parachute.
Discussing her testimony later, Victoria said: “I was always very aware every answer I gave, the impact that, potentially, it could have on my future. I don’t think I lied a lot. I think I kept a lot of secrets, I kept a lot to myself.”
After hearing the verdict, Victoria gave two interviews. In one she said: “He’d been unfaithful, he’d had issues with money, but that is not attempted murder. Yes, I’m hurt and angry, but can I see him as capable of murder? No.”
Victoria went to visit Emile in prison where, according to reports, he played down the affairs and tried to get back together. But something seems to have eventually shifted in her, because during one call with Emile, she asked for a divorce.
Six years after Emile’s sentencing, Victoria can now start to see the actions of her husband more clearly. “This person, and what they've done to me... I don't know how you can do that to someone who you loved and had children with,” she says in the new series.
