WITH PARACHUTE
Daughter’s wish as death plot father jailed
Posing with his teenage daughter, Emile Cilliers looks quite the doting dad. But that charming smile is the mask of a would-be killer and weeks after this picture was taken he tried to murder his wife Victoria by sabotaging her parachute.
Now, as Cilliers starts a life sentence for attempted murder, Cilene, the eldest of the six children he had by three different women, tells how she grew up a victim of his lies, duplicity and cold-hearted abandonment.
Cilene, 18, says: “He might be my dad, but I wanted that jury to find him guilty as much as anyone else. His conviction was justice not only for Victoria, but for everyone who has crossed paths with him and been hurt, me included.”
The trial in October exposed her father as a debt-ridden sex addict who had cheated on Victoria throughout their marriage, having sex with prostitutes and even his first wife, Carly.
He had plotted to kill Victoria to clear his debts and start a new life with Austrian Stefanie Goller, a Tinder date.
The trial and its revelations brought one positive for Cilene, finding out about the four brothers and sisters Cilliers had kept secret from her. She says: “Dad did manage to achieve something good – his children. I’d love to get to know them all properly. They’re my half brothers and sisters and have lost their father, just like me.”
Cilene’s mum Nicolene Shepherd was just 13 when she started dating Cilliers, who is three years older, in Ermelo, South Africa.
By 16, Nicolene was pregnant with Cilene and a year later she was expecting again, with their son, Trevor.
Cilene, who became a mum herself when daughter Eliana was born five months ago, remembers one happy period of her childhood in South Africa.
“We had a big house with grounds and a swimming pool. I remember playing in the sandpit, an old tractor tyre filled with sand, and dad chasing me around the garden with a hose pipe. It was blissful.”
Even then, Cilliers was building a double life as he flitted between South Africa and the UK for work.
Nicolene, by then his fiancee, was planning to follow him to Britain when his mother dropped the bombshell that he had secretly wed a British woman, Carly Taylor, over here. Nicolene pushed ahead with the move regardless. Her mother Anna followed a year later, in 2005, with Cilene and Trevor.
Cilene says: “I thought I was moving to the UK so we could all be together, but Dad was nowhere to be seen. I kept asking and asking Mum about him and eventually she got in touch with him through his mum.” Cilliers claimed he was now estranged from Carly, with whom he’d had two children, and got back with Nicolene. But Nicolene soon discovered his marriage to Carly was far from over. As quickly as he had come back into their lives, Emile disappeared again. Cilene says: “I was about six years old. Dad was driving me, mum and Trevor from our home in Somerset to Nan’s house in Harlow. We drove in silence. The atmosphere in the car was horrible. “When we got there, Dad gave us a hug and said goodbye. He was meant to be picking us up in three days,
VERDICT How we reported outcome of trial