The woman who survived a 3,000ft fall after her cheating husband tried to kill her by tampering with her parachute has revealed 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 just a shattered pelvis, broken spine and internal injuries after her then husbandEmile Cilliers sent her crashing to earth.
Emile Cilliers was convicted and sentenced to life in prison with a minimum term of 18 years for the plot in which he hoped to pay off his rising debts by collecting Victoria's £120,000 life insurance.
Cilliers had first tried to kill Victoria by turning on the gas tap at the family home in Wiltshire in the hope of blowing up Vicky, while also recklessly endangering the lives of their baby son and young daughter who were with her at the time.
Speaking in a new three-part Channel 4 documentary series into the events and subsequent trials, Victoria said her ex-husband's cruelty in plotting the gas tap leak defied belief.
Victoria Cilliers survived her fall with just 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 plotting the gas tap leak defied belief
Channel 4's The Fall: Skydive Murder Plot, which features Victoria's first in-depth TV interview alongside reconstructions of the events, airs on Tuesday at 9pm
Emile Cilliers is pictured above on holiday with Vicky in 2011
Speaking on the program, Victoria said: 'The thought that someone you'd married and just had children with would be that cruel to both me and the children defied belief.'
Victoria's survival from the fall was a miracle: she fractured almost all her ribs in the fall, her pelvis was broken and her right lung collapsed.
Her slight build and the softness of the newly ploughed field that broke her fall saved her life.
But it took several years for Victoria to accept that her husband, whom she knew to be an inveterate cheat and philanderer, was also guilty of trying to kill her. In fact, it was not 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 impinge on Victoria.
The 'charming' man she had married was, in fact an 'evil' psychopath who had devised an elaborate plot to be shot of her so he could pocket her £120,000 life insurance policy and begin a new life with a lover.
Cilliers, who still maintains his innocence and has not shown a scintilla of remorse, was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2018. He will serve at least 18 years.
Victoria, who gives her first in-depth TV interview in the new programme alongside reconstructions of the events.
In The Fall: Skydive Murder Plot, actors play Victoria, Cilliers and investigating officers Detective Inspector Paul Franklin and Detective Constable Maddy Hennah of Wiltshire Police, whose work would bring military PT instructor Cilliers to justice.
Using police transcripts, they re-create 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 parachuting in 2011. It was something the couple often did together
Victoria believed she'd found the perfect husband and the couple had two children together
The real officers speak on camera too, and we also see the actual moment when investigators at the skydiving club, filming themselves as they examine Victoria’s parachute, realise they might have a would-be murderer in their midst.
Victoria, now recovered from a shattered pelvis, broken spine and internal injuries, appears alongside two other women with illuminating experiences of Cilliers.
One is DC Hennah and the other his previous partner, the mother of his two oldest children, Nicolene Shepherd. They make a fascinating sorority: the woman he dumped, the woman he tried to kill, and the one he expected to hoodwink.
DC Hennah reveals Cilliers tried to flirt with her during a police interview, and was considered so dangerously manipulative she was not allowed to be alone with him from that point.
‘He clearly was trying to win me over and use his charms on me. He did not come across as your typical chap who is going to 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 his first child aged 16 and he left for the UK when she was expecting their second. His mother later told her he’d settled here, and married another woman.
MsCilliers in hospital in a chest brace following her husband's attempt to murder her
Victoria would go on to skydive again following the incident
Years later, when Nicolene moved to the UK herself, Cilliers came after her like a heat-seeking missile. ‘It felt like we’d never been apart, like I was a kid again,’ says Nicolene, now a married mother of five.
‘I thought it may have come full circle; we’ve had ups and downs and then ended up together!’ Except that Cilliers was still with his first wife, the woman for whom he’d abandoned Nicolene.
‘He builds you up, breaks you down, builds you up, breaks you down, you don’t recognise it as control because he’s not saying, “You’re not doing that,”’ says Nicolene. ‘You just know you’re not doing that because there are consequences.’
She agrees with the police’s description of Cilliers as a ‘psychopath’. ‘I’d use that word freely. And a sociopath. Anything that ends with the word path, I’d associate with that man. His name should be Emile Path.’
The first episode of The Fall: Skydive Murder Plot, airs on Tuesday June 11 at 9pm on Channel 4. The second and third episodes air on Wednesday and Thursday.
