Army sergeant on attempted murder charge after wife’s parachute fails
AN Army sergeant has been charged with trying to murder his wife after her parachute failed during a jump from 4,000ft.
Mother-of-two Victoria Cilliers only survived because her reserve canope partially opened but she hit the ground at 28mph and suffered multiple broken bones.
The 40-year-old had only given birth to her second child less than two months before the jump over Wiltshire and her South African-born husband Emile Cilliers, 36, was later arrested.
It was reported that police were alerted to the possibility her parachute could have been sabotaged before the jump on Easter Sunday last year.
Nearly 18 months after the event, Cilliers, an instructor with the Royal Army Physical Training Corps, has now been charged with two counts of attempted murder.
One count accuses him of attempted murder between April 3 and April 6 last year. The other accuses him of attempted murder between March 28 and 31 last year.
He is also charged with criminal damage and recklessly endangering the lives of their two children, between March 28 and 31. The detail of the charge says that without lawful excuse he damaged a domestic gas fitting belonging to his wife.
Mrs Cilliers suffered broken ribs, a broken collarbone, a broken leg and spinal injuries in the fall at Netheravon Airfield. She spent three weeks in hospital before returning home.
She had jumped alone from a Cessna Caravan light aircraft at 4,000ft but her main canopy failed to unfold at 3,000ft.
Eyewitnesses told how that sent her into a violent spin known as ‘going down the plughole’.
Her reserve chute partially opened and she managed to slow her fall from 37mph to around 28mph. Police said it was miraculous she wasn’t killed.
It also emerged that she may owe her survival to the fact that she landed in a recently ploughed field. Mrs Cilliers and her husband, who wed in South Africa in 2011, have a daughter Lily, then three, and an infant son, Ethan, and had lived together in Amesbury, Wiltshire.
Detective Inspector Paul Franklin, of Wiltshire Police, said at the time that she ‘would have been dead if her chute hadn’t partially opened’.
He said: ‘This woman survived this fall miraculously but despite her experience she very nearly lost her life.’
Ian Harris, head of Complex Casework Unit at the Crown Prosecution Service Wessex, yesterday said the decision to charge was made in line with the Code for Crown Prosecutors. He said: ‘We have decided that there is sufficient evidence for a realistic prospect of conviction and that a prosecution is in the public interest.’
Cilliers is on bail and due to appear at Salisbury Magistrates’ Court in Wiltshire on October 14.