Wife who stood by husband after he tried to kill her sees him jailed
WHEN Army sergeant Emile Cilliers tried to kill his wife by tampering with her parachute, even hardened police officers were shocked at his calculating callousness.
But one person who appeared unable to accept the enormity of his crimes was his intended victim.
Yesterday, as the 38-year-old was jailed for life with a minimum of 18 years after being convicted on two charges of attempted murder, Victoria Cilliers sat in court and watched as her husband of seven years was led away.
Officers said she had been the victim of her husband’s “subtle and coercive” behaviour, leaving her “deeply traumatised”. Even after the guilty verdict was returned last month, following a retrial, she seemed to struggle to accept he wanted to kill her and suggested that the jury had failed to see his “kind and loving side”.
“It’s hard to conceive someone so close to you would want to cause you some kind of harm,” she told ITV’S
Good Morning Britain. “I never had any indication that there was another side to him. I love the husband I had and I’m grieving for that marriage. The side that they don’t see is that he was a kind and loving husband.”
It appears Mrs Cilliers has not yet told the couple’s two children that their father tried to kill her, limiting herself to saying they cannot see him for a while because he “has done a bad thing”. She said: “One of the hardest things to deal with has been our daughter’s questions and her hurt. She still asks regularly, “Where’s daddy? When am I going to see him? Why can’t I speak to him on Facetime?”’
In a separate interview she said: “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.”
Police described Cilliers as a “cold, callous, selfish man” who heaped years of psychological abuse on his wife.
Speaking after sentencing, Det Insp Paul Franklin said: “Wiltshire Police is dedicated in bringing offenders like Cilliers to justice as well as giving help to those who find themselves in subtle abusive and coercive relationships, like the one highlighted here.”
He added: “Often, the abuse is not obvious because there may be no physical telltale signs or injuries. However, a victim suffering emotional and financial abuse, as in this case, can be just as deeply traumatised.”
Psychologists yesterday described the case as a disturbing example of Stockholm syndrome, by which victims of physical and mental abuse come to identify entirely with their abusers, to their own detriment.
Prof Rod Dubrow-marshall, a psychologist at the University of Salford, told The Daily Telegraph: “I come across this sort of thing all too often. The abusers make the victim doubt their own sanity so that when bad things like attempted murder happen the victim will want to blame themselves or look elsewhere for a reason, away from the real perpetrator.”
Mrs Cilliers, 42, an experienced parachuting instructor, suffered severe injuries when her main and reserve parachutes failed during a jump in Netheravon, Wilts, on Easter Sunday 2015. She fell 4,000ft but survived.
Winchester Crown Court heard that Cilliers – who visited prostitutes and had run up a £23,000 debt by taking his lover, Stefanie Goller, on expensive holidays – had earlier tried to kill his wife by tampering with a gas valve at their home in Amesbury, Wilts, in March 2015.
Sentencing Cilliers, who was sacked from the Royal Army Physical Training Corps, High Court judge Mr Justice Sweeney described him as wicked and dangerous, driven by sexual desire who would “stop at nothing” to get his own way, even putting his children’s lives at risk.
Mrs Cilliers, who asked for her victim impact statement to be kept private, was allowed to sit in the well of the court to see her husband led away to prison.
She returned home last night, but refused to comment further.