Everything went black
Skydiver recounts 100mph fall after husband ‘tampered with parachute’
‘Spinning quite rapidly’
THE wife of an Army sergeant accused of trying to murder her by tampering with her parachute described how ‘everything went black’ as she hurtled to the ground. In a police interview shown to jurors yesterday, Victoria Cilliers, 40, described how she desperately tried to regain control as she fell at 100mph.
Her husband Emile, 37, is accused of trying to murder her by removing links from her harness the day before the 4,000ft skydive over Salisbury Plain in 2015.
In the interview 23 days after her fall, Mrs Cilliers described the moment she realised her skydive was going wrong. ‘Straight away I knew something was not quite right,’ she said. ‘[The ropes] had a lot of twists and the canopy wasn’t floating. I got out of the twists... The canopy wasn’t flying properly so I made the decision to cut away the main [parachute]. I could [then] feel the reserve [parachute] fly and again straight away I felt something wasn’t right and it was twisted.
‘The last thing I remember is trying to get some kind of control over it, trying to open as many cells [compartments of the parachute canopy] as I could. Then everything went black, I do not know if it was the g-force or the impact but everything cut out.’
If the lines of a parachute become twisted round it stops the canopy opening fully and the skydiver must spin in the opposite direction to untangle the lines again.
Mrs Cilliers added: ‘I tried to deal with the situation as best I could which was trying to untangle it to get the twists out. I’m trying to fly something that is spinning quite fast. It’s like a centrifuge, you end up facing the ground spinning quite rapidly.
‘I thought initially the main issue was the twist, it took me a while to untwist it. I had to use quite a lot of force using the whole body to untangle the twists, which I managed.
‘Then I couldn’t work out why I couldn’t get control, it was getting worse.’
Witnesses told the court they heard Mrs Cilliers screaming before she landed in a freshlyploughed field. She suffered multiple injuries including a broken pelvis, broken ribs and fractured vertebrae.
Days earlier, Cilliers allegedly tried to loosen a gas valve at the couple’s home in Amesbury, Wiltshire, in an attempt to trigger an explosion, Winchester Crown Court heard.
The husband – who was having affairs with Austrian Stefanie Goller and ex-wife Carly Cilliers – allegedly wanted to get his wife’s £ 120,000 life insurance to pay off his debts.
Mrs Cilliers, an Army officer and physiotherapist, said she was a veteran of 2,600 successful skydives – and that the chances of her fall being an accident were ‘one in a million’.
But she also said she did not believe her husband would hurt her – and she was scared the investigation around the near-fatal fall could spell the end of their marriage.
Cilliers denies two counts of attempted murder and one of criminal damage recklessly endangering life.
The trial continues.