Wife who survived skydive murder bid by her soldier husband tells how he tried to kill her weeks earlier with a gas leak and advice to ‘try the stove’

The woman who survived a 3,000ft fall after her cheating husband tried to kill her by tampering with her parachute has revealed he tried to kill her weeks earlier by telling her to ‘check the stove’ during a gas leak.

Amazingly, Victoria Cilliers survived her fall with only a shattered pelvis, a broken spine and internal injuries after her then-husband Emile Cilliers sent her to Earth.

Emile Cilliers was sentenced to life in prison with a minimum term of 18 years for the plot in which he hoped to pay off his mounting debts by collecting Victoria’s £120,000 life insurance policy.

Cilliers had first attempted to kill Victoria by turning on the gas tap at the family home in Wiltshire in the hope of blowing up Vicky, while also recklessly endangering the lives of their infant son and young daughter who were with her at the time.

In a new three-part Channel 4 documentary series about the events and subsequent trials, Victoria said her ex-husband’s cruelty in plotting the gas tap leak defied belief.

Victoria Cilliers survived her fall with only a shattered pelvis, a broken spine and internal injuries after her then-husband Emile Cilliers tampered with her parachute (pictured together)

Victoria said her ex-husband’s cruelty in plotting the gas tap leak defied belief

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

Emile Cilliers is pictured above on holiday with Vicky in 2011

Victoria said on the programme: ‘The thought that someone you are married to and have just had children would be so cruel to both me and the children defied belief.’

Victoria’s survival after the fall was a miracle: she broke almost all her ribs, her pelvis was broken and her right lung collapsed.

Her slight build and the softness of the freshly plowed field that broke her fall saved her life.

But it took several years for Victoria to accept that her husband, who she knew was an inveterate cheater and philanderer, was also guilty of trying to kill her. It was only when the judge in Cilliers’ trial called him ‘a person of quite exceptional callousness who will stop at nothing to satisfy his own desires, material or otherwise’, that the truth began to dawn on Victoria.

The ‘charming’ man she married was in fact an ‘evil’ psychopath who hatched an elaborate plot to shoot her so he could pocket her £120,000 life insurance policy and start a new life with a lover could start.

Cilliers, who still maintains his innocence and has shown no trace of remorse, was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2018. He will serve at least 18 years.

Victoria, who gives her first in-depth TV interview in the new program, in addition to reconstructions of the events.

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 and her husband Emile went skydiving in 2011. It was something the couple often did together

Victoria believed she had found the perfect husband 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.

Mrs Cilliers in hospital wearing a chest brace after her husband’s attempt to kill her

Victoria reportedly went skydiving again after the incident

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.”