Soldier with 2 lovers ‘tried to kill skydiving wife twice’
He ‘sabotaged her parachute after failure of gas blast plot’
AN ARMY sergeant who was having two affairs tried to kill his wife by sabotaging her parachute, a court heard yesterday.
Emile Cilliers, 37, allegedly wanted to get his hands on wife Victoria’s £120,000 life insurance to pay off his debts.
He was having flings with ex-wife Carly, 38, and with Stefanie Goller, whom he met through the dating app Tinder.
Desperate to start a new life with Miss Goller, he made two attempts to murder Victoria in one week, jurors were told.
In March 2015 he loosened a gas valve at their home hoping to kill the 40-year-old in a blast, Winchester Crown Court heard.
When that failed, he suggested they go skydiving. The 4,000ft jump over Salisbury Plain on April 5 should have been routine for his wife, an Army physiotherapist, former officer and veteran of 2,600 successful skydives.
But Cilliers, a trained parachute packer, allegedly sabotaged her parachute in the toilets at Netheravon Airfield.
He is said to have removed two of its four slinks, material used to secure the jumper’s harness to the ropes of the canopy.
Victoria went into freefall when her main and reserve parachutes both failed to deploy. Incredibly she survived, saved by the soft earth of a ploughed field and her slim 5ft 3in frame. Army doctors who raced to the scene had expected to find her dead.
She spent three weeks in hospital with a broken pelvis, broken ribs and fractured vertebrae.
A check on the main canopy found it was the most tangled and knotted ever recovered by inspectors. It had been in service since 2007 and was last inspected two months beforehand, when the slinks were found to be in good working order.
The British Parachute Association said it had never come across an example of both the main and reserve parachutes failing.
The police investigation into the incident was widened and detectives discovered that a gas valve fitting in the Cilliers’ home in Amesbury, Wiltshire, had been tampered with. The court heard that after smelling gas Victoria had sent her husband a WhatsApp message asking: ‘Are you trying to kill me?’
She traced the source of the leak and found a loose valve next to their oven, which was later found to be stained with her husband’s blood.
Michael Bowes, prosecuting, said her phone message was ‘a ghastly, prescient message that, in a terrible way, turned out to be true’. Cilliers laughed off his wife’s
‘Expected to find her dead’
accusation, telling her: ‘You can’t be serious about the comment you made, you’ve been saying that a lot recently.’ She claimed she was joking and replied: ‘I read in a mag recently, brought it to the front of my mind. True life stories – my husband tried to kill me.’
Mr Bowes said a week later that Cilliers found the chance to tamper with the parachute when he went to the airfield toilets.
‘He had experience to do so as he was a trained packer and having undergone training in the checking of parachute reserve equipment,’ he said. ‘ There is no evidence that anyone in Netheravon or anywhere else wished Victoria any harm with exception of Emile Cilliers and he had already tried to kill her a few days before with the gas fitting.
‘He deliberately tampered with her parachute intending to kill her. The evidence, we submit, is that he undid the gas valve to cause a gas leak. It is the prosecution’s case he did so intending to cause an explosion that would kill her when she lit the gas in the kitchen but it would appear to be an accident.’
Jurors were also told about WhatsApp messages sent by Cilliers to Miss Goller, who he first met in November 2014.
In those messages he claimed one of his children with Victoria was not his – but the result of an affair she was having.
In another message a month before the first alleged murder attempt he promised the situation with his wife would ‘soon be water under the bridge’.
Other messages from Cilliers to Miss Goller read: ‘I do not want anything to jeopardise us’ and ‘I am not going to lose you over this, you have no idea how much you mean to me’. The court heard he claimed he and his wife had split and that he had taken a paternity test for his youngest child.
Mr Bowes said Cilliers was also having an affair with ex-wife Carly.
The QC said: ‘It is not a criminal offence but in terms of attitude towards Victoria and how much he cared about her in relation to suggesting a parachute jump, this is significant.’
Cilliers, who was £22,000 in debt, allegedly believed he would receive £120,000 from an insurance policy in the event of Victoria’s death. He apparently did not realise she had recently changed her will, cutting him out because she ‘did not have faith he would be able to manage the money himself’.
The pair married in his native South Africa in 2011.
Cilliers, who has served with the Royal Artillery and the Royal Engineer regiments since 2005, denies two charges of attempted murder and one of damaging a gas fitting, reckless to endangerment of life.
The trial, which is expected to last five weeks, continues.