I needed some female company
Husband in parachute plunge case tells court he had joined dating website because he was lonely
THE Army sergeant accused of trying to murder his wife by sabotaging her parachute had told his mother he ‘wanted out’ of the marriage, a court heard yesterday.
Emile Cilliers, 37, also said he started using a dating app while on a trip away from his wife because he needed ‘female company’.
Victoria Cilliers, a skydiving instructor, miraculously survived despite her parachute failing to open correctly in a 4,000ft jump two years ago.
She suffered a broken pelvis, broken ribs and fractured vertebrae after landing in a field on Salisbury Plain.
Cilliers told jurors he and his 42-year- old wife were having ‘difficulties’ when he contacted his mother at the end of an Army trip to Austria in November 2014. Elizabeth Marsh QC, defending, said: ‘Forgive me for paraphrasing but your mother’s response was: “Pull yourself together and get on with Victoria and Emile Cilliers your marriage”?’ The defendant replied: ‘Yes.’
He had met mistress Stefanie Goller, also a parachutist, through smartphone dating app Tinder during the Austria trip, six months before his wife’s skydiving incident, the court heard.
Cilliers, of the Royal Army Physical Training Corps, told Winchester Crown Court he had started using Tinder on the trip because he felt ‘far away from home’ and needed ‘female company’.
He told jurors while he and Miss Goller did not know each other they were ‘ in the same skydiving circles’ and went on a dinner date. Asked about his frame of mind, he said: ‘I was having trouble thinking about what I really wanted, at the time. I didn’t feel happy in my marriage and Stefanie was something new.’
The court heard he spent five days with his lover in Berlin for the New Year celebrations that winter, after telling his wife, a former Army officer, he had to go away with work. Yesterday he told the jury the Austrian had stayed at his barracks about five times in the months leading up to his wife’s nearfatal skydive.
The defendant is accused of twisting the lines of the main parachute and removing some slinks – nylon strips that fasten the parachute to the harness – from the reserve, meaning Mrs Cilliers was sent spinning to the ground at 100mph. The South African, who is father to six children from various relationships, also denies a second attempted murder charge relating to a gas leak at their family home in Amesbury, Wiltshire, and a third charge of damaging a gas valve, recklessly endangering life.
The court also heard that Cilliers had researched the term ‘wet nurses’ – used to describe women drafted in to breastfeed babies when the mothers are unable – online before the skydive incident. Mrs Cilliers had given birth two months before he made the search.
Asked why he looked up the term, he said he did not know and it was probably something he was watching on television at the time. Cilliers, who was also having an affair with Carly Cilliers, 38, his ex-wife, allegedly wanted to get his hands on Victoria’s £120,000 life insurance to pay off debts.
But he told the court he did not object to signing a postnuptial agreement which had been proposed by his spouse. He said he signed on the understanding she owned the house but he would be in line for a pay-out should the marriage fall apart.
The trial continues.
‘Pull yourself together’