My fairytale husband tried to kill me by sabotaging my parachute (2024)

For skydiver Victoria Cilliers, it has taken almost a decade to be able to say, without shame or doubt, that she knows her husband tried to kill her by sabotaging her parachute.

The fact that Army Sergeant Emile Cilliers tried to murder his wife, the mother of his toddler daughter and newborn son, in search of hot sex and hard cash, seemed clear to detectives, a jury, and a fascinated public.

He had entangled the lines of her main chute and removed critical fastening links from her emergency reserve.When an unsuspecting Victoria leapt out of the plane both parachutes failed and she plunged 4,000ft, her survival a testament to her brilliance as a skydiver, her bird-like frame and the good luck of landing on soft, newly ploughed soil.

Besides, it was only a week since he’d tried to blow her up by staging a gas leak.

But accepting she’d married a man willing to watch her freefall to a ‘certain’ death was much harder for Victoria herself. Now a three-part Channel 4 documentary goes beyond her plunge to examine what led up to it and what happened after.

The result is a devastating account of coercion and control that extended even beyond Cilliers’s conviction in 2018.

It depicts the lying, the cheating, the gaslighting, the undermining, the 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.

Victoria, who gives her first in-depth TV interview in the programme alongside reconstructions of the events, appears on our screens in a red shirt and a bold lipstick, warmer, more glamorous and more relaxed than we’ve seen her.

It’s clear she’s a different person to the woman who was so in thrall to Cilliers that Wiltshire police feared she might wait while he served his life sentence.

‘I didn’t know truth, reality, from what was false,’ she says. ‘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.’

She’d seen Cilliers as the perfect husband. ‘I thought I had my fairytale ending. He seemed to be everything I wanted. He almost morphed himself into my perfect man, everything that I’d lost.’

It’s why, even as he stood in the dock of Winchester Crown Court accused of two counts of attempted murder, she struggled to accept it.

‘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,’ she says, an admission of deep loneliness and mental dislocation as much as toxic loyalty.

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.

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.

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.’

Hearing the detail of how he behaved towards Victoria, his second wife, it’s hard not to concur. While she jumped to what he planned to be her death on Easter Sunday 2015, he was texting his mistress, an Austrian blonde.While she lay unconscious in intensive care he was Googling for prostitutes.

And since he wasn’t going to get the £120,000 insurance payout he’d banked on, he went through her wallet for her credit card to resume the spending sprees that had blighted their marriage.

By now you have a sense of the monster Victoria had married. The documentary also gently probes what made this Sandhurst graduate and military physiotherapist so vulnerable to him.

Her mother died of cancer when she was just 15. An early first marriage was detonated by her husband’s infidelity. Divorced in her 30s, she was anxious she might not meet someone in time to have children. It’s why she went all in with Cilliers, and it’s why she could not believe she’d got it so wrong.

Her uncertain testimony in court resulted in a hung jury in 2017. On the stand she said, ‘I cannot categorically say’ the main parachute was malfunctioning. At a retrial the following year, a barrister spent three days reading out 200 A4 pages of text messages, WhatsApps and online searches that incriminated Cilliers.

They even included an internet hunt for a wet nurse to breastfeed his newborn son – made before his wife was due to jump.

This was the only way DI Franklin could convey to a jury that Victoria was a victim of coercive control. The police detail in the documentary how Cilliers, banned from contacting his wife, posted YouTube videos of himself singing love songs to influence her.

He was convicted and sentenced to life in prison with a minimum term of 18 years. Yet even then he was promising Victoria the future she’d always longed for – and she nearly fell for it.

‘He knew how to manipulate me right to the core, it felt like I was being sucked back in,’ she admits. But she fought back. ‘He asked me, “What do you want?” And I said, “I don’t want to be with you. I don’t want this marriage any more.”’

What the documentary doesn’t say is that she’s now in a new relationship with an old friend whom she will marry this year. She yearns for privacy for them both but first she must deal with her ex-husband’s attempts to control her from behind bars, whether that’s in relation to their children’s futures, or their shared finances.

‘It’s freeing,’ she says of opening up on screen and returning for the first time to the field where she landed. ‘A happy place,’ she calls it, because she survived. And her opinion of her ex-husband? ‘A sad, sick individual.’ How does she feel about him hearing her say so? ‘The truth hurts,’ she shrugs, and you know that she knows, at last, that he’s guilty.

• The Fall: Skydive Murder Plot, Tuesday, 9pm, Channel 4.