The woman whose husband tried to kill her by cutting her parachute cords before a skydive is about to get married again – to another skydiver.
Vicky Cilliers, 48, will get married later this year, with her daughter, 11, as a bridesmaid, in front of the family and friends who supported her in the horrific aftermath of her 3,000ft fall.
Her fiancé is a 53-year-old former Marine, now training to be a paramedic, who got down on one knee during a romantic meal in Edinburgh last summer. Vicky has chosen not to name him but says he was at Netheravon air base in Wiltshire on Easter Sunday 2015 when her ex-husband, Army Sergeant Emile Cilliers, tried to kill her.
Cilliers, who was serving a life sentence, planned to start a new life with his Austrian mistress with the help of a £120,000 life insurance benefit after Vicky’s death. But even as the brave mother-of-two tries to build a new future, she reveals Cilliers is still trying to control her from behind bars, and launches legal proceedings seeking tens of thousands of pounds in equity from the family home in Amesbury, Wiltshire. .
“He took me to court for a share of the house – that’s the only thing he’s interested in – he still sees me as his cash cow,” says Vicky. “He’s still trying to control the narrative from prison. The divorce took so long and was so exhausting that I called it quits. I have not received any arrangement regarding childcare or my finances. I just assumed it would never be a problem under the circumstances.”
Emile Cilliers and wife Victoria Cilliers on their wedding day in South Africa in 2011. Emile tried to kill his wife twice to claim her £120,000 life insurance policy
Victoria in hospital days after her skydiving accident, in the chest brace she had to wear for five months
Vicky is also terrified that if something were to happen to her, Cilliers, a former army physical training instructor, would have increased parental rights over their children, so she returns to court on the eve of her wedding in a attempt to finally escape him. .
They met when Cilliers was referred to Vicky for rehabilitation treatment after a skiing injury. They started dating in 2010 and married in 2011 in his native South Africa. She had no idea – as it would later turn out – that he was a sex addict and compulsive spender who was deeply in debt, and a user of sex clubs, prostitutes and online. dating sites.
In March 2015 he tried to kill Vicky by tampering with a gas pipe at the family home. When that plan failed, he came up with the idea of a parachute jump “accident.”
Vicky was a senior skydiving instructor with thousands of jumps to her name, so when she went for what was intended to be a quick ‘hop and pop’ – a low-altitude jump – and found her hood and rope tangled, she was they have a better leg. then have the best chance of getting out alive. She calmly cut loose her main parachute and grabbed her reserve, only to find that the connections connecting it to her harness were missing.
By then she was descending at 100 mph, so her only option was to use her canopy to slow her fall.
When she hit the ground, she was still traveling at a speed of 60 miles per hour, surviving only because she was lightly built and had landed in a freshly plowed field. The fall still shattered her pelvis, broke several vertebrae and several ribs.
Three weeks later, her husband was charged with attempted murder, accused of sabotaging her parachute installation to make her death look like a freak accident. Vicky wrote a book about her ordeal and will appear in a documentary on Channel 4 this autumn. There is also a suggestion that her story will be made into a three-part drama series. What she really desires, however, is anonymity.
Cilliers, who was serving life in prison, planned to start a new life with his Austrian mistress
Army Sergeant and avid skier Emile Chilliers
“The brutal truth is that I have had to put my head above the ground at times to raise money for the legal fees I need to fight Emile,” she says. ‘I wouldn’t do it without that. I long to move on with my life.”
Vicky has known her fiancé as a friend and neighbor for more than a decade, but it took a surprise match on the dating app Bumble before they discovered the other was looking for more. He was by her side in October 2018 when she made her only parachute jump since the jump that almost killed her.
She says: ‘I had tried talking to other men, but as soon as they asked questions about past relationships I just froze. It was just too much to explain my situation. With my current partner he already knew everything, there was trust and that was incredibly reassuring after everything I had been through.’
She and her children will take her new husband’s name. “The name Cilliers makes me cringe every time I see it,” she says.
The ceremony will take place in a large house in the West Country, and Vicky says her children are ‘ecstatic, literally jumping up and down with excitement’.
She admits that she is afraid to make her plans public. “Partly I worry about other people’s reactions,” she says. “I’ve been married twice before, but I think if the person you’re married to tries to kill you, it kind of undoes it.”