Everything went black
Parachute plunge wife tells jurors of moment she realised 4,000ft jump was going wrong
THE wife of an Army sergeant accused of attempting to murder her by tampering with her parachute told how ‘everything went black’ as she hurtled earthwards.
In a 90-minute police interview shown to jurors yesterday, Victoria Cilliers, 40, described how she desperately tried to regain control as she spun through the air at 100mph.
Her husband Emile, 37, is accused of trying to kill her by removing vital ‘slinks’ from her harness the day before the 4,000ft skydive at Salisbury Plain in April, 2015.
Days earlier, he allegedly tried to loosen a gas valve at their home in Amesbury, Wiltshire, in an attempt to trigger an explosion, Winchester Crown Court has heard.
Mrs Cilliers, an Army physiotherapist, told police she was a veteran of 2,600 successful skydives – and that the chances of her fall being an accident were ‘one in a million.’ She also insisted her husband wouldn’t hurt her – and that she was scared the investigation around the nearfatal fall could spell the end of their marriage.
In the interview, recorded at Salisbury Police Station 23 days after the fall, Mrs Cilliers, originally from Haddington, East Lothian, described the moment she realised her skydive was going wrong.
‘Straightaway I knew something was not quite right,’ she said. ‘It had a lot of twists and the canopy wasn’t floating.
‘I got out of the twists and one of the risers was wrapped around, which is a packing issue.
‘The canopy wasn’t flying properly, so I made the decision to cut away the main. I can’t remember if I pulled the reserve or it deployed automatically.
‘Either or, I could feel the reserve fly and again straightaway I felt something wasn’t right, it was very twisted. The last thing I rememinside ber is trying to get some kind of control over it, trying to open as many cells as I could. Then everything went black. I do not know if it was the G-force or the impact, but everything cut out.’
She added: ‘I tried to deal with the situation as best I could, which was trying to untangle it to get the twists out.
‘I’m trying to fly something that is spinning quite fast. It’s like a centrifuge, you end up facing the ground spinning quite rapidly.
‘I thought initially the main issue was the twist, it took me a while to untwist it. I had to use quite a lot of force, using the whole body to untangle the twists, which I managed.
‘Then I couldn’t work out why I couldn’t get control, it was getting worse.’
Witnesses have told the court they heard Mrs Cilliers screaming as she was violently thrown around in the air before landing in a freshly-ploughed field. She suffered multiple injuries, including a broken pelvis, broken ribs and a fractured vertebra.
Describing the moments after impact, she said: ‘I know I opened my eyes and I saw the landing area. I saw a friend of mine who is a doctor and other personnel from the APA and Paul Cain, a doctor, and lots of other people around. That’s just a brief snapshot.
‘Another brief snapshot was the helicopter about to land and then I do not remember anything until seeing Emile in A&E.’
Mrs Cilliers said her relationship with her husband deteriorated when he went away on a skiing trip in November 2014.
She said: ‘Everything seemed to be going really well until November last year. He went skiing for a long period and when he came back home it was all a bit strained. It had been for quite a while and eventually he said he wasn’t happy, wasn’t sure what he wanted.
‘I felt like we had grown in different directions.’
She said she had lent her husband £18,000 over several years and that he built up debts with loan sharks. She added she had rewritten her will to remove him as a beneficiary as she felt she could not trust him financially.
When asked if her husband had physically hurt her, she replied: ‘I have never felt uncomfortable with him, I would trust my life in his hands and I had done several times before.’
She added: ‘I am scared this could end our marriage. He has his faults but to an extent he loves me and I know doing something to me would hurt the children for the rest of their lives. He’s an amazing father.’
Cilliers denies two counts of attempted murder and one of criminal damage, recklessly endangering life.
The case continues.
‘I knew something was not right’ ‘I tried to deal with the situation’