The woman whose husband tried to murder her by cutting her parachute cords ahead of a skydive is set to marry 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 to earth.
Her fiance 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 airbase, Wiltshire, on Easter Sunday 2015 when her ex-husband, Army Sergeant Emile Cilliers, tried to kill her.
Cilliers, serving life in prison, planned to start a new life with his Austrian mistress using a £120,000 life-insurance payout following Vicky’s death. Yet even as the courageous mother-of-two tries to build a new future, she reveals Cilliers is still trying to control her from behind bars, launching a court action seeking tens of thousands of pounds of equity from the family home in Amesbury, Wiltshire.
‘He has taken me to court for a share of the house – that’s all he is 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 draining I just stopped there. I didn’t get a settlement in regards to the children’s arrangements or my finances. I just assumed, under the circumstances, it would never be an issue.’
Emile Cilliers and wife Victoria Cilliers on their wedding day in South Africa in 2011. Emile tried twice to kill his wife in order to claim her £120,000 life insurance policy
Victoria in hospital days after her skydiving accident, in the chest brace she was forced to wear for five months
Vicky is also terrified that if anything were to happen to her, Cilliers, a former Army physical training instructor, would have increased parental rights over their children, so she is returning to court on the eve of her wedding in a bid to finally escape him.
They met when Cilliers was referred to Vicky for rehab treatment after a skiing injury. They began dating in 2010 and married in his native South Africa in 2011. She had no clue – as would later emerge – 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 attempted to kill Vicky by tampering with a gas pipe at the family home. When that plan failed, he landed on the idea of a parachute jump ‘accident’.
Vicky was a senior sky-diving instructor with thousands of jumps logged, so when she went for what was meant to be a quick ‘hop and pop’ – a low-altitude jump – and found her canopy and cord tangled, she stood a better chance than most of coming out alive. She calmly cut away her main chute and reached for her reserve, only to discover the links connecting it to her harness were missing.
By then she was plummeting at 100mph, so her only option was to use her canopy to slow her fall.
When she hit the ground she was still travelling at 60mph, and survived only because she was lightly built and had landed in a freshly ploughed field. The fall still shattered her pelvis, broke several vertebrae and multiple ribs.
Three weeks later her husband was charged with attempted murder, accused of sabotaging her parachute rig to make her death look like a freak accident. Vicky wrote a book about her ordeal and is set to appear in a documentary this autumn on Channel 4. There is also a suggestion her story will be made into a three-part drama series. However, what she really craves is anonymity.
Cilliers, serving life in prison, planned to start a new life with his Austrian mistress
Army Sergeant and keen skier Emile Chilliers
‘The brutal truth is that I have had to stick my head above the parapet from time to time to raise money for the legal fees I need to fight Emile,’ she says. ‘I wouldn’t be doing it if not for that – I long to get on with my life.’
Vicky has known her fiance as a friend and neighbour for more than a decade but it took a surprise match on the dating app Bumble for them to discover the other one was looking for more. He was by her side when, in October 2018, she made her only parachute jump since the one which nearly killed her.
She says: ‘I’d tried chatting to other men, but as soon as they asked questions about past relationships I just froze. It was simply too much to try to explain my situation. With my current partner he already knew everything, there was existing trust which was incredibly reassuring after all that 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 at a big house in the West Country, and Vicky says her children are ‘ecstatic, literally jumping up and down with excitement’.
She admits to being apprehensive about making her plans public. ‘Partly I’m worried about other people’s reactions,’ she says. ‘I have been married twice before – but I think if the person you’re married to tries to kill you, then it kind of negates it.’