Skydive wife: I STILL can’t believe my husband tried to murder me
Yes, my parachutes failed to open, but I can’t accept that he’s a killer Yes, I knew he was a serial cheat... but he was my husband No, I haven’t told my kids... they think he’s away at work No, I have no plans to divorce, but I’ll confront him in pris
retired pharmacist, and today they live in Dalkeith, Midlothian. Of the trial, Vicky now concedes: ‘I have to go, I suppose, with the verdict. It’s almost like peer pressure to conform. It’s got me into a whole load of hot water because I haven’t conformed, I’ve stuck to what I believe.’ When it’s pointed out to her there is no plausible alternative, she goes on: ‘I know, which makes it all the harder. But he was my husband. Yes, things might have been breaking down. He’d been unfaithful, he’d had issues with money, but that is not attempted murder.’
Last week, however, Winchester Crown Court declared it was – finding Cilliers, a 38-year-old Army sergeant, guilty of trying to kill Vicky twice in one week in April 2015.
First he had attempted to rig a gas explosion at their modern, detached home in the town of Amesbury, Wiltshire, and when that failed he secretly tangled the cords of her main parachute and removed crucial components from her reserve chute ahead of a skydive. Tampering with the gas valve led to a third charge of recklessly endangering the lives of his children who were in the house with their mother. He was also found guilty on that count and is awaiting sentencing.
Vicky has not spoken to him since he was charged three years ago and did not even look at him as she walked out of court for the final time. She doesn’t love him any more but does feel compassion as he faces decades behind bars.
‘I love the husband I used to have, not the one that he became. I don’t know the man he is today,’ she says sadly, adding: ‘I will always care for the father of my children.’ Her
priority now is to protect them from him. ‘I want to be able to put this behind me. I don’t want it to consume our lives. It’s not going to do them any favours if I’m bitter and ranting. They need a happy, well-adjusted life. I want boring and normal for us now, for them to grow up untainted.
‘One of the hardest things has been our daughter’s questions and her hurt. She still asks “Where’s Daddy? When am I going to see him?” ’
Following the conviction, Vicky must explain Cilliers is in prison ‘for doing a bad thing’, but she has no intention of revealing that Daddy tried to kill Mummy. She is anguished by the knowledge that one day both children will know the truth and that their son will also learn Cilliers told his mistress the boy was not his biological child but the product of an extra-marital affair by Vicky. ‘I can live with his lies, it’s the betrayal of my children which is the hardest to bear,’ she says.
But then Cilliers had a long history of betraying those who loved him the most. He betrayed his first partner, his South African teenage sweetheart Nicolene Shepherd by similarly denying her two children were his. (They were.) He
Skydive soldier held for attempted murder after wife’s parachutes fail
HOW MoS BROKE THE STORY: Our revelations from May 2015
‘He came back from ski trip a different person’
EMILE Cilliers sent a chilling threat to his ex-lover just months before sabotaging his wife’s parachute.
He warned Nicolene Shepherd not to contact him after she accused him of abandoning their two children.
She had texted him after discovering he had fathered six in all. ‘Six children? Really? And you can’t even take care of the first two,’ she wrote. Cilliers replied: ‘Leave me alone or I will do something [that] will make you regret talking to me again.’
Looking back after his conviction, Nicolene says it was a clear threat. ‘He is capable of absolutely anything,’ she said. ‘It makes me shudder to think what he might have done.’
Full-time mother Nicolene, 34, of Somerton in Somerset, met Cilliers in their native South Africa and followed him to Britain. But he left her to marry Carly Taylor, with whom he had two more children.
As revealed by the MoS last year, during that marriage he continued to see Nicolene.
And although they divorced in 2009 he was still having sex with Carly after marrying Victoria.
Incredibly, he cheated on both of them with his Austrian mistress – skydiver Stephanie Goller.
married his first wife Carly Taylor without breaking off his relationship with Nicolene. After they were divorced he met and married Vicky but would then cheat on her by returning to Carly’s bed and starting an obsessive love affair with Austrian Stefanie Goller whom he met on an Army skiing trip. Nobody knows how many flings, one night stands and sordid sex club parties he enjoyed along the way.
Asked to explain his attraction, Vicky says simply: ‘He’s an alpha male. He’s passionate and intense. When he’s into something, or someone, it is 100 per cent.’
Indeed, pictures taken on formal Army nights show Cilliers to be a dapper military man whose uniform fails to hide the gym-honed physique beneath. At his wedding in South Africa, Cilliers, on his knees as he makes his vows to Vicky, is depicted as a true romantic. He adored adrenaline sports such as skiing and skydiving, was good around the house and a devoted, hands-on father. He was also kind and endlessly affectionate. He would put Vicky’s favourite wine in the fridge, cuddle her and frequently tell her: ‘I love you.’
They met when he came to her for physio after a skiing accident. By the time of their wedding, she was already five weeks’ pregnant. Their first three years together, building a home, their family and careers were happy, their marital harmony marred only by Cilliers’s freespending ways. Vicky is very clear that the image of a toxic, troubled relationship which emerged from court was wrong. Their own sex life continued until the eve of the jump in which she should have died.
‘After I fell pregnant with our son, Emile went on a ski trip and came back a different person – my husband had simply disappeared,’ she says. She recognised he was having an affair but felt too vulnerable in pregnancy to fight it so she set a deadline of September 2015 for it to be over.
Cornered by debt and all the lies he had told Goller about leaving Vicky, Cilliers chose murder over divorce and ruin, trying first to ignite a gas explosion and then sabotaging her skydive. Even awaiting the return of the jury, Cilliers was denying his guilt in frantic texts to his mother, telling her: ‘My life is in ruins, and I’m totally innocent.’
Now Vicky has made a full physical recovery, although her pelvis is held together with metal pins.
‘Bones heal, but hearts, probably not,’ she says, giving a small clue as to why she can’t yet acknowledge the evil which was at work in her marriage. On the hearth in her living room stands a contemporary sculpture, a heart within a heart, formed by a loving couple leaning together above two children.
It’s all Vicky Cilliers ever wanted, and as much as she says bravely, ‘I’m not a victim, a victim would have died that day’, it’s impossible not to feel sorry for her.