Parachute fall survivor speaks out
SA-born husband barely visited her in hospital and faced earlier murder rap
THE WIFE of a South African-born army sergeant accused of sabotaging her parachute told British police that her husband barely visited her in hospital, after she survived a 1 200m fall.
Victoria Cilliers told police in a video interview shown to the Winchester Crown Court in the UK that he also refused to say to her that he loved her as she recovered from major surgery.
Cilliers’s husband Emile has been charged with attempted murder after her main and reserve parachutes failed.
This is the second attempt murder charge he is facing. The first relates to an incident where the prosecution alleges he caused a gas leak in the couple’s house to blow up his wife.
In the interview, Cillliers also said she believed her fall was not a mistake, that the chance of both a main and a reserve parachute failing was “one in a million”. The prosecution is arguing that Emile removed slinks from her parachute which connect the harness to the lines.
She said in the interview: “It’s not really a conceivable accident; you can’t categorically say it was not an accident; you can’t categorically say it was, but never in the history of parachuting worldwide has it happened.
“Those slinks do not just disappear, even when wrongly assembled. I shouldn’t have survived that and that was a real shock which I was finding it pretty hard to deal with.”
Emile is accused of tampering with Cilliers’s parachutes after he took them to the hangar toilets, where he allegedly twisted the lines of the main chute and took the slinks off the reserve.
On Thursday, in a police interview played to the jury, Cilliers told of those frantic moments on Easter Sunday 2015, when she realised after leaving the plane that there was something wrong with her parachute.
The skilled skydiver said the parachute canopy was twisted and she had to make the decision to cut away the main parachute. “I can’t remember if I pulled the reserve or it deployed automatically. Either or, I could feel the reserve fly and again straight away I felt something wasn’t right and it was very twisted,” she said.
“The last thing I remember is trying to get some kind of control over it, trying to open as many cells as I could, then everything went black, I do not know if it was the G force or the impact but everything cut out.”
She survived the fall after landing in a ploughed field, but suffered a broken pelvis, broken ribs and fractured vertebrae.
The court also heard that Cilliers did initially lie in an interview with police. She said she overestimated the time her husband was in the toilet with the parachutes in an attempt to get back at him. A demonstration by a parachute expert revealed that the two parachutes could have been tampered with in five minutes.
The couple had married in Cape Town in 2011 at the Twelve Apostles Hotel. Emile is said to have been having affairs with another skydiver and his ex-wife, and to have been after life insurance.