‘I needed female company,’ husband tells murder trial
THE Army sergeant accused of trying to murder his wife by sabotaging her parachute 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 because he needed ‘female company’.
Scots-born Victoria Cilliers miraculously survived despite her parachute failing to open correctly in a 4,000ft jump two years ago.
The skydiving instructor, from Haddington, East Lothian, suffered a broken pelvis, broken ribs and fractured vertebrae after landing in a field on Salisbury Plain.
Cilliers told jurors he and his 42year-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 your marriage”?’ The defendant replied: ‘Yes.’
He had met mistress Stefanie Goller 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 and Miss Goller didn’t know each other but 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 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 near-fatal 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’ – women who breastfeed babies when the mothers are unable – online before the skydive incident. Mrs Cilliers had given birth two months before the search.
Cilliers, who was also having an affair with Carly Cilliers, 38, his exwife, allegedly wanted to get his hands on Victoria’s £120,000 life insurance to pay off debts.
The trial continues.