‘I won’t be consumed with hate after husband tried to kill me’
● Effect on their children is what upsets wife most
A skydiving instructor whose husband twice attempted to kill her by tampering with her parachute and sabotaging a gas valve has vowed not to let her life be “eaten up with hate and bitterness”.
Victoria Cilliers, 42, said she still finds it difficult to believe the “passionate, intense” army sergeant she married could do what he did.
Emile Cilliers, 38, was convicted at Winchester Crown Court last week of two counts of attempted murder and is due to be sentenced next month.
The court heard how he had debts of £22,000 and wanted to use money from his wife’s life insurance policy, worth £120,000 in the event of her accidental death, to start a new life with his lover, Stefanie Goller.
Ms Cilliers, who is originally from Haddington, East Lothian, said: “I have to go with, I suppose, the verdict. It’s too big to get my head around. It’s hard to comprehend that someone you get married to and have children with would be capable of that.
“I just don’t really want to cope with it.
“I love the husband I used to have and not the one he became.”
She described how she had enjoyed a “passionate” marriage with Cilliers, and their six-year-old daughter had been “his world”.
But in 2015, after she became pregnant with their son, who is now three, Cilliers had gone on an army skiing holiday and returned “a completely different person”.
It later emerged he had contacted skydiving instructor Stefanie via dating app Tinder and was also secretly sleeping with his first wife, Carly Cilliers, 37, and also messaging prostitutes.
Ms Cilliers said: “I knew there was stuff – other women on chat sites he contacted and I had seen messages on his laptop.
“I also knew he had met up with women and I was planning on confronting him.
“But you have to fight your battles at the right time and, being heavily pregnant, it wasn’t the right time.”
She survived a 4,000ft fall at Netheravon airfield in Wiltshire with a broken pelvis, ribs and vertebrae. The lines to the main canopy of her parachute had been twisted and her reserve chute had crucial parts missing.
She described her shock when police explained the full extent of her husband’s double life.
“I remember taking off my rings and throwing them across the room. I was angry, incredibly angry,” she said.
But she felt little emotion when seeing him in court.
“I felt quite detached really,” she said. “I didn’t feel like I acquainted that person with my old husband.”
The children have not seen their father since he was charged.
Ms Cilliers said: “That’s what upsets me and hurts me more than anything – the effect on the children. You want your children to grow up untainted.”
But she believes she can build a “normal family life” for them.
“I try and keep any minor meltdowns I’m having to when the children are asleep.
“I just don’t want to spend my life being eaten up with hate and bitterness. I’ve got to move on and draw a line under it.”
“It’s hard to comprehend that someone you get married to and have children with would be capable of that”
VICTORIA CILLIERS