Sergeant jailed for life over parachute death plot
British Army officer also tried to kill her in blast
‘Driven by financial and sexual desires’
A CALLOUS British army sergeant was jailed for life yesterday for trying to kill his wife by sabotaging her parachute.
A judge said Emile Cilliers, 38, was motivated by sex and money and was guilty of ‘wicked offending of extreme gravity’.
Cilliers had shown ‘exceptional callousness’ for twice plotting to kill his 42-year-old wife Victoria.
Mrs Cilliers, a parachuting instructor who miraculously survived the injuries she sustained in the fall, yesterday watched her husband being jailed.
The judge said her time in the witness box during the six-week retrial had shown that, while her physical injuries had healed, she was still struggling with the ‘psychological harm’ Cilliers had caused her.
The detective responsible for bringing Cilliers to justice described the couple’s relationship as ‘subtly abusive and coercive’ and urged others in a similar position to seek help.
In a series of interviews after the verdict, Mrs Cilliers had said she could still not see her husband as a killer and had no immediate plans to divorce him.
She said she had spent three years telling their two young children their father had gone away for work and intended to visit him in prison to confront him about what happened.
The retrial at Winchester Crown Court had heard how Cilliers wanted to claim a £120,000 (€135,000) life insurance payout so he could start a new life with a mistress he had fallen ‘passionately’ in love with. The sergeant was described as a ‘reckless and single-minded’ man who is a danger to the public and would ‘stop at nothing’ to get his own way, even endangering the lives of his own children.
The judge, who said Cilliers must serve at least 18 years behind bars, described his crimes as ‘planned and carried out in cold blood’ and said he had been driven purely by ‘financial and sexual desires’.
The trial heard Cilliers, who moved to Britain in 2000, was a very ‘sexually active’ man, who was having an affair with Austrian Stefanie Goller, who he met on Tinder, and was still meeting his ex-wife Carly Cilliers for sex.
A jury had found there was ‘overwhelming evidence’ that 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 an aircraft on Easter Sunday in 2015. Days earlier he damaged a gas fitting at the home the couple shared with their children in Amesbury, southern England, in a failed attempt to cause an explosion and kill her.