My fairytale husband tried to kill me by sabotaging my parachute – but even when he was sentenced to life, I was nearly sucked back in by his promises

It took nearly a decade for paratrooper Victoria Cilliers to say without shame or doubt that she knew her husband was trying to kill her by sabotaging her parachute.

The fact that Army Sergeant Emile Cilliers tried to kill his wife, the mother of his toddler daughter and newborn son, in search of hot sex and hard cash seemed obvious to detectives, a jury and a fascinated public.

He had snared the lines of her main parachute and removed crucial attachment links from her emergency reserve. When an unsuspecting Victoria jumped from the plane, both parachutes failed and she fell 4,000 feet. Her survival was a testament to her genius as a parachutist, her bird-like stature, and her luck in landing on soft, freshly plowed ground.

Besides, it had only been a week since he had tried to blow her up by causing a gas leak.

But for Victoria herself it was much harder to accept that she was married to a man who was willing to watch her free-fall to a ‘certain’ death. Now a three-part Channel 4 documentary goes beyond her quest and explores what came before and what happened after.

Victoria Cilliers (pictured) in 2018, fresh from her first parachute jump after the assassination attempt

The result is a devastating account of coercion and control that extends even further than Cilliers’ conviction in 2018.

It shows the lying, the deception, the gaslighting, the undermining, the manipulation of one human being by another, and the evil that can exist in a four-bedroom executive home when your partner is a narcissistic psychopath.

Victoria, who gives her first in-depth TV interview in the program alongside reconstructions of the events, appears on our screens in a red shirt and bold lipstick, warmer, more glamorous and more relaxed than we have ever seen her.

It is clear she is a different person to the woman who was so captivated by Cilliers that Wiltshire Police feared she would wait while he served his life sentence.

“I didn’t know the truth, the reality, of what was untrue,” she says. “Everything I thought was the truth started to fall apart. I felt like a prisoner in my own house and in my own head.’

She had seen Cilliers as the perfect husband. ‘I thought I had my fairy tale ending. He seemed to be everything I wanted. He almost turned himself into my perfect man, everything I had lost.”

That’s why she struggled to accept it, even as he stood in the dock at Winchester Crown Court, charged with two counts of attempted murder.

‘I was always very aware of every answer I gave, of the impact it could potentially have on my future. I don’t think I lied much. I think I’ve kept a lot of secrets, a lot of them to myself,” she says, an acknowledgment of deep loneliness and mental disruption as well as toxic loyalty.

In The Fall: Skydive Murder Plot, actors Victoria, Cilliers and investigating officers play Detective Inspector Paul Franklin and Detective Inspector Maddy Hennah of Wiltshire Police, whose work would bring military PT instructor Cilliers to justice.

Using police transcripts, they recreate key scenes from the couple’s wedding, the horror jump at Netheravon Airfield in Wiltshire and the two trials that followed.

Victoria believed she had found the perfect husband in Emile Cilliers (pictured) and the couple had two children together

The real officers also speak on camera, and we also see the actual moment when skydiving club investigators, filming themselves examining Victoria’s parachute, realize they may have a potential killer in their midst.

Victoria, now recovered from a shattered pelvis, broken spine and internal injuries, appears alongside two other women with illuminating experiences with Cilliers.

One is DC Hennah and the other is his previous partner, the mother of his two eldest children, Nicolene Shepherd. They make a fascinating fraternity: the woman he dumped, the woman he tried to kill, and the one he expected to deceive.

DC Hennah reveals that Cilliers tried to flirt with her during a police interview, and that she was considered so dangerously manipulative that she was not allowed to be alone with him from then on.

‘He was clearly trying to win me over and use his charms on me. He didn’t come across as the typical guy you chase down the road with a machete, but he was very subtly sinister.’

As for Nicolene, she became his girlfriend when she was 13 and he was 16, in their native South Africa. She gave birth to his first child at 16 and he left for Britain when she was expecting their second. His mother later told her that he had settled here and married another woman.

Years later, when Nicolene herself moved to Britain, Cilliers followed her like a heat-seeking missile. “It felt like we had never been apart, like I was a kid again,” says Nicolene, now a married mother of five.

‘I thought things had come full circle; we’ve had ups and downs and ended up together!’ Except Cilliers was still with his first wife, the woman he had abandoned Nicolene for.

“He builds you up, breaks you down, builds you up, breaks you down, you don’t recognize it as control because he doesn’t say, ‘You don’t do that,’” Nicolene says. “You just know you don’t do that because there are consequences.”

She agrees with the police’s description of Cilliers as a ‘psychopath’. ‘I would use that word freely. And a sociopath. Anything that ends with the word path, I would associate with that man. His name should be Emile Path.”

When you hear the details of how he behaved towards Victoria, his second wife, it’s hard not to agree. As she transitioned to what he planned to be her death on Easter Sunday 2015, he texted his mistress, an Austrian blonde. While she lay unconscious in intensive care, he googled prostitutes.

And since he wouldn’t get the £120,000 insurance payout he had bargained for, he searched her wallet for her credit card to resume the spending that had destroyed their marriage.

By now you have an idea of ​​the monster Victoria was married to. The documentary also gently explores what made this Sandhurst military physiotherapist graduate so vulnerable.

Her mother died of cancer when she was only 15. An early first marriage was shattered by her husband’s infidelity. She divorced in her 30s and worried that she might not meet someone in time to have children. That’s why she went all in with Cilliers, and that’s why she couldn’t believe she got it so wrong.

Her shaky testimony in court resulted in a hung jury in 2017. On the stand, she said, “I can’t say categorically” that the main parachute was defective. During a retrial the following year, a lawyer spent three days reading out 200 A4 pages of text messages, WhatsApps and online searches that incriminated Cilliers.

They even included an internet search for a wet nurse to breastfeed his newborn son – made before his wife was about to jump.

This was the only way Inspector Franklin could convey to a jury that Victoria was a victim of coercive control. Police describe in the documentary how Cilliers, who was not allowed to contact his wife, posted YouTube videos in which he sang love songs to influence her.

Channel 4’s The Fall: Skydive Murder Plot, featuring Victoria’s first in-depth TV interview and reconstructions of the events, airs Tuesday at 9pm

He was convicted and sentenced to life in prison with a minimum term of 18 years. But even then, he promised Victoria the future she had always longed for – and she almost fell for it.

“He managed to manipulate me to the depths of my heart, it felt like I was being sucked back in,” she admits. But she fought back. ‘He asked me, “What do you want?” And I said, ‘I don’t want to be with you. I don’t want this marriage anymore.”

What the documentary doesn’t say is that she is now in a new relationship with an old boyfriend whom she will marry this year. She longs for privacy for both of them, but first she must deal with her ex-husband’s attempts to control her from behind bars, whether that’s in relation to their children’s future or their shared finances.

“It’s liberating,” she says as she opens up on the screen and returns for the first time to the field where she landed. “A happy place,” she calls it, because she survived. And her opinion about her ex-husband? ‘A sad, sick individual.’ How does she feel about him hearing her say that? “The truth hurts,” she shrugs, and you know she finally knows he’s guilty.

• The Fall: Skydive Murder Plot, Tuesday, 9pm, Channel 4.