How DOES it feel to jump out of a plane when the last time you did it your husband sabotaged your parachute to try to murder you?
Victoria knew it was the only way to heal her mental scars. And we j oined her for the bravest skydive in history
TVictoria with her husband Emile Cilliers HE only thing Victoria Cilliers remembers about falling 3,000ft to earth was not letting herself look down. Every decision she needed to take, every piece of kit she had to work with, everything which would determine whether she lived or died, was above her head.
It was 4pm on Easter Sunday 2015. She was airborne for what’s called a quick hop and pop – a low-altitude jump beneath a sullen bank of cloud. But three seconds after she’d exited the aircraft, when she tried to open her parachute, she found only a tangled mass of canopy and cord.
She hurled herself around the sky trying to unravel it before making the heart-stopping decision to cut it away. Still in free fall and already dangerously close to the ground, she reached for her reserve.
And then the unthinkable happened, a catastrophe unseen in British parachute history for 30 years: her second parachute failed, too. The links connecting it to her rugged black nylon harness were missing.
In that instant she knew she was doomed to fall all the way. The anger of the first malfunction turned to terror and between them they ignited an absolute will to live. Spiralling down at 100mph she worked frantically to save herself, wresting a fractional amount of drag from her useless canopy and slowing her descent to around 60mph. She recalls a huge bang, the metallic taste of blood filling her mouth and an enveloping blackness as she crashed into a field. The first rescuers to arrive on the scene brought a body bag to collect her corpse.
The skydive at Wiltshire’s Netheravon airfield had been a surprise present to Victoria from her husband, Army Sergeant Emile Cilliers. It marked her return to her hobby after a year’s absence because of pregnancy. She had just given birth to their second child, a son, and Cilliers remained at home that day caring for him and their toddler daughter. Three weeks later on April 28, 2015, he was arrested at his barracks in Aldershot. He would be charged with attempting to murder Victoria by sabotaging her rig.
He had hoped to replace his wife with his secret mistress and clear his crushing debts with her life insurance payout.
Victoria was at the family home still in a body brace when detectives broke the news. Unsurprisingly, she thought she would never parachute again.
That’s why this jump, the first since she fell, was such a leap of faith. It was the day she reasserted her dominion not just over the sky, but over her own life, too.
She jumped from two miles up, her goggles, helmet and lipstick firmly in place, and a few anxious tears wiped away – an exultant, life affirming act of bravery. In the first ten seconds she plummeted 1,000ft. Accelerating, she covered the same distance again in the next five.
Her altimeter would eventually show she’d reached a top speed of 138mph. When her royal- blue parachute canopy deployed 49 seconds after she left the plane, it was without a single jerk or twist. Instead it billowed textbook style above her head, turning her canonballing free fall into a peaceful, controlled descent.
‘There’s a fine line between bravery and stupidity,’ says the 42-yearold physiotherapist from Amesbury, Wiltshire. ‘ But I did feel that, although I had made a fantastic physical recovery, in psychological terms my head was lagging behind.
‘Jumping was an integral part of fixing that. It was as if I had to overwrite my memory of the fall. I had to jump again to put my history behind me.’
She began by washing the mud off the navy and turquoise trainers she had been wearing last time. They’d been in a cupboard for three and a half years, still caked in clods of earth from the freshly ploughed field which absorbed just enough of the impact of her landing to make it survivable.
‘What are they if not my lucky parachuting shoes?’ she asks. ‘I’m still here and still walking. I was always going to lace them back up, if ever this day came.’
Her original jumpsuit was cut off by medics so she chose instead an old skydiving team suit, one leg spangled with stars, to celebrate her return to the heavens. But for all her optimism and good-heartedness, this has not been an easy decision to make – or to stick to.
‘Putting the date of the jump in my diary made the memories of my fall come rushing back, far more vividly than before. There have been many nights when I couldn’t sleep, or when I would wake with my heart racing, jumping out of my chest, and flashbacks playing on a loop in my head.
‘If I didn’t jump, I couldn’t fall. It was that straightforward. Suddenly there was a time and a date and a place and I had to deal with the emotional impact of the promise I’d made to myself.
‘ I guess my subconscious was running through the worst that could happen, the potential for another disaster. It was telling me what I might have to live through if something went wrong.’
Victoria remained committed because she knew she had to escape what she calls ‘this kind of vortex of uncertainty, of not knowing’ about the shape of her own future.
She had the added impetus of wanting to raise funds for the Wiltshire Air Ambulance which, she says, unquestionably saved her life and her legs.
‘ I owe them, my children owe them. I am alive, they have a mummy and a fully functioning mummy at that. I had two potentially fatal injuries, the burst bones in my back and a fragment of my
The memories came rushing back, far more vividly than before
pelvis which was lying right by a major artery.
‘If the first responders had been so much as a millimetre out when they dealt with it, I would be dead or in a wheelchair now.
‘Every time I wanted to abandon the idea – and there were lots of times I thought about backing out – I remembered there’s a debt to them I can never repay.’
It was 10.30am last Sunday when she boarded the Cessna at London Parachute School’s airfield in Oxfordshire. It nosed into a northerly breeze and raced down the 2.500ft grass runway towards its 90mph take off.
The plane’s wheels had barely left the ground when Victoria began to cry. Like her robust sense of humour, her tears have rarely been seen in public. Throughout her husband’s first trial, which ended in a hung jury, and the second in which he was found guilty and jailed for life, she remained curiously composed.
She was furious that her broken marriage and his multiple infidelities, the most private part of her life, were being laid bare in a court case which fascinated the country.
A proud, strong and stubborn woman, she refused to play the role of victim. It made her appear hostile in the witness box and, outside of it, aloof.
Behind closed doors however, she was living with the boundless grief of knowing the man she loved was willing to kill her and leave their two tiny children motherless.
She was recovering from massive multiple injuries, learning how to be a single parent and rebuilding the nest-egg her husband had pillaged. She was exhausted and fearful and sad. She just wasn’t going to show it.
So when she wept those few tears in t he plane, t hey counted for a lot.
‘Climbing on board and preparing for take-off was an emotionally all-encompassing experience,’ she admits.
‘I smiled because people wanted me to, but the noise of the propellers turning, the smell of the fuel, the sensation of the cold wind r us hi ng in through the door, it all made me deeply apprehensive.
‘ It t ook me right back to the last flight when I had a sixth sense that I should not be jumping, a premonition of something terrible about to happen with no notion of what it might be.’ It took ten minutes to reach jumping altitude. Even after Victoria had been strapped into her harness, even after Air Traffic Control at Swanwick had given permission for the jump, even after the Jump Master had confirmed he’d got eyes on the drop zone, and even after the red stop light in the cabin had turned to green for go, Victoria knew she could turn back. Not t hat she was ever going to bottle it. ‘ Once I was airborne, once I’d got up t here, I was only going to come down by parachute,’ she says. Although she has l ogged more t han 2,600 skydives and is a fully qualified instructor, the possibility of another catastrophic canopy failure made her choose to make her first jump since her fall a tandem. She asked seni or i nstructor Nick Brownhill to take her. ‘If I could have guaranteed a perfect jump then I would have done it alone. But in skydiving there is always the possibility of something going wrong, and I recognised that I was not ready to cut away a main parachute and deploy a reserve again.
‘I didn’t trust myself to deal with an emergency. My nerve held sufficiently to do that last time, but it used everything I had, absolutely everything, my lifetime’s supply of cool. I wanted the comfort of someone in a harness with me so I could breathe out and enjoy what I was doing. And I did. When I landed I felt the most incredible sense of relief and release.’
As she floated to the ground she was shaking, not with fear but with happy adrenaline.
Next to the drop zone, her daughter, now six, and three-year-old son were waving and shouting, thrilled to see their amazing mother coming down from the clouds.
Instructors and other members of the parachuting community were also gathered there, rooting for her. ‘I could feel the love and goodwill rising up to meet me,’ she says, sounding almost shy.
Shortly after her husband was found guilty of attempted murder in May, I asked Victoria if she would ever jump again.
‘I will if you will,’ she said, so I did it with her. I was only defying gravity. She was defying heartache and horror, and in the end her touchdown was perfect.
When I landed I felt an incredible sense of relief and release