Woman smashed into ground from 4,000ft and survived – then terrifying truth emerged

Daily Mirror

3 days ago

A woman who miraculously escaped death after her parachute failed discovered that her horrific fall was no accident – and that her husband had tried to kill her twice
After seeing a woman jump from an aircraft 4,000 feet up, onlookers could only watch in horror as her body slammed into the ground. In what at first appeared to be a freak accident, both the main and reserve chutes that keen skydiver Victoria Cilliers had been using that day failed to open.
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Speaking on the documentary SkyDive Murder Plot, Rob Camps, secretary of the parachuting club at Nertheravon Airfield in Witfield, said that it looked almost as if a 'bag of washing' had been thrown out of the plane. He added that it was 'sickening' to watch as Victoria fell for around 25 seconds.
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He had assumed that her fall would be fatal, and had even grabbed a body-bag before running to the field where she had landed. But what Paul discovered in the days following the horrific incident revealed that Victoria's fall had been no accident – but attempted murder.
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Victoria was an experienced skydiver, an accredited accelerated freefall (AFF) instructor with 2,654 jumps to her name, but nothing she could do during that terrifying 25-second fall could have prevented that bone-crushing impact.
But miraculously, Victoria survived. She had suffered severe spinal and internal injuries, as well as a broken pelvis and five broken ribs, but was well enough to be interviewed by police a few days later.
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Police took an interest in Victoria's accident after an examination of her parachutes had revealed that the soft links – important components known to insiders as 'slinks' – seemed to be missing from both of parachutes. Without them, jumping out of an aircraft from 4,000 feet would mean almost certain death.
Rob Camps had called in the police after he checked her parachute and realised what had happened. Investigators' suspicions quickly fell upon Emile Cilliers, Victoria' husband and the father of her two children.
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He had been with her the previous day, when a planned parachute jump had been called off due to bad weather, and had inexplicably carried her parachute with him into the loos when one of their children said she needed to use the toilet.
Study of the 38-year-old army officer's phone records indicated that he had not only been cheating on his wife with another woman, an Austrian skydiving instructor he'd met on Tinder, but had also amassed significant debts due to his regular use of sex workers.
But the problem for detectives investigating the case was that Victoria was unable to accept that the father of her two children could ever want to kill her. She remained under the charismatic South African's spell even after evidence emerged that the sabotage of Victoria's parachute was not Emile's first attempt on her life.
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Six days before that fateful parachute jump, Victoria had noticed a strong smell of gas in her kitchen. Emile had not been at home, telling his wife he was staying at the army barracks so he could get an early start in the morning.
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Examination of the gas pipes leading into the house showed irrefutable evidence that Emile had tampered with the valve – and that he had been perfectly willing to kill his children, as well as his wife.
A check of his internet search history showed that he had been researching the availability of wet-nurses to feed their newborn baby before his wife's expected death.
Still, Victoria found it hard to accept the truth, even after police presented her with the irrefutable evidence of her husband's guilt. She did eventually agree to testify against him, but in a huge twist changed her evidence on the witness stand, raising the possibility that she might somehow have been responsible for the accident.
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She testified that she had misled police in her initial interviews, and had exaggerated the time that he had been in the ops with her parachute: 'I made it sound worse than it was because I was humiliated. I wanted him to suffer."
Emile consistently denied attempting to kill his wife throughout a seven-week trial at Winchester Crown Court and the jury eventually sent a note to the judge stating they would be unable to reach a verdict.
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With the prospect of a retrial, DI Paul Franklin and DC Maddy Hennah were sent back to the drawing-board. They doggedly assembled more evidence, interviewing Emile's ex-wife, Carly Cilliers, mother to two of his older children. They discovered that he had also rekindled his relationship with her.
DI Franklin said that Emile's ability to lie so smoothly to all of the women in his life was the hallmark of a psychopath. He continued: 'He can have a conversation with his wife about picking up the children or a bit of shopping at the same time as arranging to meet someone he knows from Fabswingers for some weekend fun, and ringing someone from Adultwork to see if they are available.
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'Three totally separate conversations at the same time, managed in such a way that there was never a wrong phone call to the wrong person. When you see that repeated constantly for years, you see what kind of person he was.'
Even after Victoria's near-fatal fall, Emile was texting sex workers from her hospital bedside and arranging to meet them nearby.
But Emile's lies began to unravel at his retrial and he was found guilty of two counts of attempted murder, as well as a third charge of recklessly endangering life. He received a minimum 18-year sentence.
Meanwhile – at the same parachute club where she so narrowly escaped death – Victoria met former Royal Marine Simon Goodman and the two were married in October 2024.