‘Wicked’ love-cheat is jailed for 18 years over parachute murder bid
AN Army sergeant who tried to murder his Scots wife by sabotaging her parachute was yesterday sentenced to life imprisonment.
Emile Cilliers, 38, was told by a judge he was guilty of ‘wicked offending of extreme gravity’ after twice plotting to kill his wife Victoria.
He wanted to claim £120,000 life insurance so he could start a new life with a mistress, a retrial had heard.
The judge, who sentenced Cilliers to a minimum of 18 years, described his crimes as ‘carried out in cold blood’ and said he had been driven purely by ‘financial and sexual desires’.
A jury had found there was ‘overwhelming evidence’ Cilliers had tangled his wife’s main canopy and removed vital links from her reserve parachute, sending her plummeting to the ground when she leapt 4,000ft from a plane on Easter Sunday in 2015.
Days earlier, he had damaged a gas fitting at the home the couple shared with their two children in Amesbury, Wiltshire, in a bid to cause an explosion and kill her.
Parachute instructor Mrs Cilliers, 42, originally from Haddington, East Lothian, yesterday watched her husband being sentenced. She was flanked by a friend and her father – while a member of the jury who convicted her husband sat behind her. She said in a recent interview that she has no immediate plans to divorce him.
The retrial heard that South African-born Cilliers, who moved to the UK in 2000, was a ‘sexually active’ man who was having an affair with Austrian Stefanie Goller, who he met on Tinder, and was meeting his ex-wife Carly Cilliers for sex. He was also part of a sex club, which his wife discovered when she found messages on his computer.
Cilliers, who has been sacked from the Royal Army Physical Training Corps, was convicted by a jury of two attempted murder charges and a third count of recklessly endangering his children’s lives, following a retrial at Winchester Crown Court. A first trial jury had failed to reach verdicts.
Sentencing Cilliers, Mr Justice Sweeney said he had been motivated to kill his wife because he ‘wrongly believed’ his money problems – a £22,000 debt – would be solved by a £120,000 life insurance pay out.
The judge added: ‘Victoria had given her love to you, without reservation. However, you were leading a double life on which your only guiding compass was your own lifestyle and your financial and sexual desires.
‘It is telling that while your wife was in the early stages of labour downstairs at your home, you were upstairs exchanging loving texts with Miss Goller – telling her that she was the one you wanted.
‘Not having the courage to face the end of your marriage to your wife, you made the decision to murder her and became singleminded in your work to formulate a plan. You showed reckless disregard for the safety of your children in the process – and the fact that you were able to switch off your emotions enabled you to concentrate on your plans to end her life.
‘You present a significant risk of serious harm, not just to partners and children, but to members of the public as well – and it is not possible to realistically establish when that will stop.
‘This was wicked offending of extreme gravity. It was extremely serious, with two attempts to murder your wife. They were planned and carried out in cold blood for your own selfish purposes, including financial gain.
‘You have shown yourself to be a person of quite exceptional callousness who will stop at nothing to satisfy his own desires, material or otherwise. Nor have you shown the least sign of remorse.’
Describing the effect on Mrs Cilliers, who asked for her victim impact statement not be made public, the judge said: ‘That your wife recovered at all was miraculous. She undoubtedly suffered severe physical harm and must have suffered psychological harm in the terror of the fall and since.
‘She appears to have recovered from the physical harm – but not, having seen her in the witness box, from the psychological harm.’
‘Financial and sexual desires’