The recent tragic suicide by parachute jump of experienced skydiver Jade Damarell, widely reported in the media, brought to mind the Cilliers case of a few years ago, which Victoria Cilliers goes into in this autobiographical work.
This is an extraordinary book, and one I would never have come across had it not been one of the paperbacks left in a holiday cottage we recently rented. I picked it up idly just after we had unpacked, and was still glued to it at the end of the day. An account of what became known as ‘the parachute murder plot’, it really was impossible to put down. Like the best of thrillers, it keeps you turning those pages – but this is all true.
Victoria did her first parachute jump as a young woman, a charity jump for cancer, and it changed her life. Suddenly, she knew exactly what she wanted to do. Addicted to the buzz and the high, she went on become a parachute instructor – successfully completing thousands of jumps – and to join the MoD as a physiotherapist. Although successful professionally, Victoria had had a somewhat chequered private life: an earlier engagement had been called off because things didn’t feel right, followed by a marriage in which her husband lied and cheated on her. That marriage failed. And then she met Emile.
Emile Cilliers was a charismatic South African-born army sergeant and physical education instructor. He wooed Victoria with charm and attention until she felt herself fall heavily for him, secure and confident that this was meant to be. They had two children together. Money was tight – Emile was never very good at budgeting, and seemed to run through what little they had. He also started behaving strangely, exhibiting a kind of slipperiness and cold fury which had Victoria baffled. He seemed to need to be elsewhere suddenly, taking her car and using her credit card. Then the gas supply in her home suddenly leaked after Emile had been fiddling with it under the sink. Odd, but maybe not so out of the ordinary as a household accident. Victoria jokingly asked Emile if he was trying to bump her off: his indignant self-justification to the quip seemed out of proportion. To help the money situation, Victoria suggested he do some part-time work packing and checking parachutes to earn a little extra money.
One fateful day in 2015, Victoria went up and did a perfectly standard 4,000 foot jump from Netheravon airfield in Wiltshire. Both her main and reserve parachutes failed to open. She only survived because she landed in a freshly-ploughed field nearby, rather than on the target. Suffering terrible injuries, she was recuperating when the police told her they suspected Emile of tampering with both parachutes, removing the rings from them so they could never have opened. Lines to the main canopy were twisted and essential parts were missing from the reserve. Victoria had of course checked her own kit before the jump, but Emile had taken one of their children to the toilet just minutes before, while carrying the packed chutes, and in those few minutes had managed to sabotage them both.
There followed a court case worthy of John Grisham. Gradually, the horrible truth became clear: Emile, a cold and calculating sociopath, had hoped to benefit from an insurance policy taken out on his wife’s life which he believed to be worth £120,000. He was £22,000 in debt, had other children by other relationships, was a user of prostitutes and was having an affair with an Austrian woman he was determined to marry. He had displayed, the court said, a callous disregard for both his wife and their children.
You really couldn’t make this stuff up. How he hoped to get away with all this is a mystery – yet he very nearly did. Spoiler: Cilliers was found guilty in 2018 of two counts of attempted murder and one count of recklessly endangering life by tampering with the gas supply, and sentenced to eighteen years.
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