Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
SA man guilty of trying to kill wife
Cilliers wanted £120 000 life insurance for debt
REGAINING consciousness after miraculously surviving a fall of more than 1 200m after her parachute malfunctioned during a skydive, Victoria Cilliers opened her eyes to see her husband, Emile, beside her hospital bed.
“I love you,” the 42-year-old whispered to him. He did not reply. As she recovered from a broken pelvis, broken ribs and fractured vertebrae, his visits were infrequent, although he was granted compassionate leave, Victoria recalled following her skydive on April 5, 2015.
“One day he brought in the insurance paperwork and said to me: ‘you should sign this because we need to get the ball rolling (on a personal injury claim)’.”
But her South African-born husband was far worse than just neglectful. In fact, he tampered with her parachute to make it fail. On Thursday Cilliers was found guilty of two counts of attempted murder in a bid to claim her £120 000 (R2 million) life insurance, following a retrial in the Winchester Crown Court.
He remains in custody until his sentencing on June 15.
The six- week trial heard that Cilliers, who was £22 000 in debt, was having affairs with his ex-wife Carly, 38, Tinder girlfriend, Stefanie Goller, and seeing “a number” of prostitutes, all while plotting his wife’s murder.
The youngest of the couple’s two children was just weeks old when Victoria jumped from that aircraft.
But as he sat beside his wife’s hospital bed, Cilliers was making plans with his girlfriend.
“We are separated. Legally!” he lied in a WhatsApp message.
After two weeks, Victoria was well enough to go home.
But her husband, a sergeant in the Royal Army Physical Training Corps, said he was too busy at work to care for her.
“I got the impression he did not want me home,” she said.
In September 2011, they had a romantic sunset wedding in Cape Town, where Cilliers went down on one knee to recite his vows. Yet by 2015, Cilliers twice tried to kill his wife – first on March 29 that year, by damaging the gas fitting at the family home in Wiltshire, hoping it would lead to an explosion.
When that failed, he tampered with her parachute in a toilet cubicle at Netheravon Airfield in Wiltshire a week later, tangling the main canopy to prevent it from deploying correctly and removing vital links from her reserve so it was not properly connected to her harness.
In 2009, divorced Cilliers, who already had two children with South African Nicolene Shepherd and a further two with his British ex-wife, Carly Taylor, met divorced physiotherapist Victoria at the Army gym. An experienced skydiver, she offered to teach him to parachute and their relationship blossomed.
He proposed on holiday in South Africa in 2011, marrying there months later.
Victoria had attended the £17 000-a-year Edinburgh Academy, but a shadow fell over her childhood when she lost her mother to cancer in 1992.
As her mom battled the disease, 16-year-old Victoria did her first parachute jump for a cancer charity. She qualified as an instructor and completed more than 2 600 jumps.
She joined the Royal Army Medical Corps, training as a physiotherapy officer and rose to the rank of captain.
The first cracks in the Cilliers marriage centred on finances. Cilliers ran up debts of £22 000. By the time she was pregnant with their second child, Victoria had found condoms at home and in his car and noticed messages on his phone from other women.
Meanwhile Cilliers created a profile on a swinging website called Fab Swingers, saying he was looking for single women and couples aged 18 to 55.
Cilliers admitted to having “casual sex”, but not a proper “affair” until November 2014 when he met skydiving instructor, Goller, via Tinder.
One day in March 2015, Victoria discovered the gas leak.
She messaged Cilliers to jokingly suggest he was trying to kill her.
Days later, she took to the skies for that fateful parachute jump and that day, Cilliers sent 250 messages to Goller in a matter of hours. – Daily Mail