Every year, thousands of people cross an item off their bucket list by leaping out of an aeroplane above Netheravon airfield’s broad, flat grass plain. It’s the largest parachute drop zone in the UK, but unremarkable to look at: military land, little more than two blue and white Cessnas waiting to take off, a few billowing orange windsocks and some picnic tables. There’s an enormous khaki hangar with a corrugated iron roof. This is where the kit room is, where the toilets are, and where Emile Cilliers tried to get away with murdering his wife.

On Saturday 4 April 2015, he took Victoria Cilliers’ parachute rig into the toilets and sabotaged it. The next day, Easter Sunday, Vicky leapt from one of the Cessnas and fell like a rag doll underneath her flailing canopy, 4,000ft (1,200m) to the ground at 60mph, to what should have been her death: the first people on the scene were so sure of it that they brought a body bag. But she was found alive, with a broken spine, fractured ribs and a shattered pelvis, surviving only because her small frame had landed in a soft, newly ploughed field.

It was Cilliers’ second attempt to kill Vicky in less than a week. But it took two criminal trials to prove it, and even after Cilliers was found guilty of two counts of attempted murder in May, and given a life sentence with a minimum term of 18 years in June, the victim herself says she refuses to believe her husband tried to kill her. When someone survives an attempt on their life, it should be a huge advantage for the police investigation. But Vicky Cilliers’ survival made it difficult to prosecute; Emile Cilliers was convicted in spite of her evidence, rather than because of it.

Why did a 38-year-old army officer want to kill his wife, the mother of his toddler and newborn baby? Why do it in such a far-fetched, complicated way? And how close did he come to getting away with it?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Emile Cilliers arranged the jump as ‘a treat’ for Victoria just weeks after she gave birth to their second child. He had first added her to his life insurance policy, giving her the maximum cover. Photograph: Getty Images

Mark Bayada is fed up with answering questions. The chief instructor and boss of the Army Parachute Association, which runs Netheravon, Bayada has spent three years being questioned about that Easter weekend, first by the police, then during cross-examination by defence barristers in two successive trials (the first collapsed when two members of the jury had to be dismissed with stress-related illness). I am the first journalist he has agreed to speak to. He cares about getting things right, down to the last detail – that’s what makes him good at his job – but he has been ground down by being interrogated for days on end. Still, if it weren’t for him, the attempted murder of Victoria Cilliers would never have been considered a crime at all: it was his decision to call the police, at a time when everyone else assumed she had been injured in a freak parachuting accident.

He was clever. He covered the points he knew we’d discover from his phone, and assumed he’d never see the police again

“I’m the fun police,” he says, deadpan, as he leads me inside the hangar. “It’s my job to protect people from themselves.” Parachuting has been Bayada’s life since his first jump in 1992. He is ex-military and looks it, with a greying grade one haircut and beard, and faded tattoos peeking out of the sleeves of his T-shirt; he has the tanned skin of someone who is happiest outside. The hangar is a vast space filled with soldiers learning to land on blue crashmats (on weekends, and certain afternoons, it’s open to the public, and anyone can jump here). He shows me to the kit room, where more than 100 parachute rigs hang on neat metal racks ready to go, organised according to the weight and level of experience of the jumper who might use them. Then he points out “the dreaded toilet” where Cilliers disappeared with Vicky’s rig, and “the dreaded locker” where he stashed it overnight.

Vicky was a Netheravon regular, an accelerated freefall (AFF) instructor with 2,654 jumps to her name. She was trained to deal with out of control, inexperienced jumpers, and was able to chase them around the sky during freefall, catch them and get them in the right position mid-air. “A real, hardcore skill,” Bayada says, solemnly.

She worked as a physiotherapist for the Ministry of Defence, and met Cilliers, an instructor in the Royal Army Physical Training Corps originally from South Africa, when she treated him for a skiing injury. By April 2015, they’d been married four years and lived in Amesbury, a 10-minute drive from the airfield, with their three-year-old daughter and five-week-old son. Bayada says he knew them both only in a professional capacity; having sat through both trials he now knows far too much about their personal lives.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Victoria Cilliers struggled to accept that her husband tried to kill her. Photograph: Solent News & Photo Agency

It was Cilliers who had arranged Vicky’s jump that weekend, her first for nearly a year, telling her it was a treat after having their baby. He brought both their newborn and their three year old along to watch their mother jump. He offered to collect a parachute from the kit store, and then disappeared into the toilet with it, claiming later that he only did so because his daughter needed the loo and he didn’t want to leave Vicky’s rig unattended. As Bayada points out, everyone leaves their kit out in the hangar; it would be absurd to take a three year old into the tiny toilet cubicle with a cumbersome parachute on your back. Once it was decided that the weather was too bad for anyone to jump on the Saturday, Cilliers did not return the rig to the kit store like everyone else; he stashed it in Vicky’s locker.



The weather was still poor on Easter Sunday, and by the afternoon Vicky and the 11 others due to jump with her were getting restless. At 4pm they decided to do a “hop and pop” – a low-altitude jump where they would open their parachutes within seconds of getting out of the plane – at 4,000ft, as the cloud cover was too low to go any higher. Vicky was excited to be back in the sky, fist-bumping the others inside the plane. She was the last of the 12 to make the jump.

Almost as soon as Bayada reached her on the ground, he noticed strange things about her kit. “All the lines on one side of the parachute were knotted up,” he says. “When we lifted her on to the stretcher to put her into the helicopter, one of the paramedics asked if someone could look underneath to make sure no lines were still attached. That’s the first time I looked at the equipment properly, and I could see the two ends of the risers on the reserve parachute were unattached.” Bayada didn’t know it then, but Cilliers had knotted Vicky’s main canopy and removed vital parts of the reserve: the soft links, or slinks, that connect the harness to the parachute, were absent.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Skydiving suits at Netheravon airfield. Photograph: Jon Tonks/The Guardian

Bayada takes me through everything he looked for in the kit Vicky left behind: he had tried to find loose stitching in the harness or canopy; bunching on the straps to show they had been under any pressure; residues, burn marks, anything to suggest the slinks had been there and somehow come away. But he could find nothing to show a mechanical fault, and although Vicky’s reserve parachute had never before been deployed, it had been inspected 16 times by 10 different advanced packers over its lifetime, most recently two months before Easter Sunday, and each time, the slinks were there. “None of it added up,” he says.

Finding out what had gone wrong became a moral issue for Bayada. He points to a rack in his office. “That set of kit – the grey one’s mine, the one next to it’s my son’s. My whole life is this. If something has gone drastically wrong and the kit’s to blame, then it affects all my friends, not just me professionally.” He pauses. “Phoning the police wasn’t something I took lightly. But I absolutely wanted to know.”

***

Parachuting accidents happen, but they are surprisingly rare. The British Parachute Association (BPA), the sport’s national governing body, estimates there were 2.3m sport jumps in the 10 years before Easter 2015. Of those, there were 2,900 cases where the reserve parachute had to be deployed, and not a single incident where there was also a problem with the reserve. According to the BPA, the only known instance of both a main and reserve failing to operate was in the case of Stephen Hilder.

Vicky's friend said something wasn’t right, that the relationship between Victoria and Emile was quite toxic

Hilder, a 20-year-old officer cadet, fell 13,000ft to his death on 4 July 2003 in Hibaldstow in Lincolnshire. Someone had cut the risers on his reserve, and the police initially launched a murder inquiry, before concluding 10 months later that his death was probably a suicide: no DNA other than his own was found on his kit, and the scissors used to cut the risers were found in the boot of his car. It’s a story that every serious skydiver knows, and one Cilliers alluded to during his trial: he suggested his wife might have tried to kill herself.

The coroner in Hilder’s case returned an open verdict, and many in the skydiving community have long rejected the idea that Hilder intended to kill himself; it is widely believed that he was murdered. “There have been a number of suicides over the years parachuting,” says Jeff Montgomery, the BPA’s safety and technical officer. But “Stephen Hilder did everything to try and save his life: he went to operate the main but nothing happened, and then he operated his reserve. If you want to kill yourself, you don’t try to save your life.”

The skydiving community is small. Both Montgomery and Bayada knew the Cilliers for years, but none of the experienced skydivers I speak to seems to have known them very well. Montgomery is a regular jumper at Netheravon and has been on exercises abroad with Vicky. “She was dating Emile and when they married I’d had some sort of dealings with him, ‘Hi, how are you doing,’ all that sort of stuff. He kept himself to himself. I don’t remember thinking there was anything unusual about him.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Parachute harnesses at Netheravon. In the 10 years before 2015, there were 2,900 incidents in Britain in which a reserve parachute had to be deployed; there were none in which it also failed. Photograph: Jon Tonks/The Guardian

“Things like this just don’t happen here,” says DI Paul Franklin of Wiltshire police, who led the investigation. “These are regular people with regular jobs who live in a nice house in a nice part of the country.”

“Two-point-four children, nuclear family,” DC Maddie Hennah adds. “They looked totally normal. From the outside, anyway.”

I meet Franklin, Hennah and their colleague DS Mark Lewis at Melksham Police Divisional HQ, on an industrial estate surrounded by fields. They are smiling and relaxed. It’s a week after Cilliers has been found guilty, and they are visibly relieved to have cracked a once-in-a-career case.

But it didn’t feel like a criminal case at first. After Bayada’s call, Franklin sent an officer to the hospital to ask Vicky questions while the BPA took a second look at her parachute, but they didn’t expect much. “We thought they’d come back with some mechanical reason – very sad, very sorry, but nothing wrong here. It bumbled along for a couple of days.”

Then they got a phone call from one of Vicky’s friends. “They said something wasn’t right, that the relationship between Victoria and Emile was quite toxic,” Hennah tells me. “It was a couple of weeks before I was actually able to get a statement, but once we got it, things took a very different turn.”

The friend said Vicky was locked in a coercive relationship with Cilliers. “There were domestic abuse issues within the relationship that weren’t obvious from the outside,” Franklin says. “We’re not taking about black eyes and bruises, we’re talking about unseen stuff.” The abuse followed a typical pattern, Hennah explains. “You treat somebody like a princess, and then you do something really unacceptable and underhand, but when you get found out you treat them like a princess again. The woman keeps thinking, he’s treated me really well, I’ll let him off with that one. And then it happens again. It becomes that she is so squashed by it that she just accepts that that’s what life is.”

Psychopath, sociopath, narcissist, extreme selfishness. He only cares about himself

Then the BPA confirmed Bayada’s findings, that there was no mechanical reason for the failure of Victoria’s parachute. At the same time, there were no fingerprints or DNA on the parachute linking it to Cilliers, and allegations of a toxic relationship are not enough to convict a man of attempted murder. The investigation hinged on what Franklin calls “old-fashioned detective work” to establish that Cilliers, who appeared every inch the responsible army man, had the motivation and disposition to do something this preposterous.

On 28 April 2015, Hennah went to arrest Cilliers in his barracks in Aldershot. He had a glass-sided office that looked out over the gym where he worked as a physical training instructor, and Hennah was with military special branch when she searched it and took him into custody. When she told him she was arresting him on suspicion of attempted murder, he made no objection. He did not react at all. He didn’t want a solicitor.

Hennah interrogated him for six hours that evening. “He was very, very self-assured,” she says. He revealed that he was having an affair with Stefanie Goller, an Austrian skydiving instructor he’d met on Tinder while abroad on an army skiing trip. He admitted he was in debt to payday loan companies. He also volunteered the fact that he had disappeared to the toilets for a while on the Saturday afternoon. He offered up both a motive and a means of murder, as if he were untouchable. “He was very clever: he covered all the points he knew we were going to discover from looking at his phone. He assumed we were going to accept what he was saying, and that he’d never see us again.”

It had been a gruelling day, particularly for someone who should be worrying about his seriously injured wife. At the end of the interview, Hennah asked him if he had anything to say. “He said, ‘The worst part about today was that you arrested me in front of my subordinates.’” Hennah’s eyes are wide behind her glasses. “At that point I can remember thinking, this man’s odd.”

The better they got to know Cilliers, the more that kind of response made sense. “He displays all the traits of a psychopath,” Franklin says. “Psychopath, sociopath, narcissist, extreme selfishness. He only cares about himself.”

About 1% of the population is thought to have psychopathic traits, characterised by egotism, a lack of remorse and absence of empathy. While psychopathy is considered a personality disorder, and can go some way towards explaining why Cilliers attempted to murder his wife in such an elaborate way, it is not a mitigating factor and can’t be used as a defence; as Franklin says, “He’s not mentally ill, that’s just his character.”

He was charismatic and charming. He doesn’t like to be told no. He’s used to having his own way

Once they had established it, the police used it to their advantage: they took advice from the National Crime Agency on the best tactics to stop him derailing future interviews. “He’s like a politician: you’d ask a question and he wouldn’t give you a direct answer,” Hennah tells me. “He’d lead off somewhere else that you’d think sounded really interesting.” They made a concerted effort not to fall for his distractions.

While Hennah was arresting Cilliers, DS Lewis was informing Vicky that her husband was their main suspect. She was alone with her toddler and baby, and stuck in a body brace. The news devastated her. She didn’t understand why the bail conditions prevented him from returning to the family home, Lewis tells me. She just wanted him back.

Cilliers’ phone turned out to be a treasure trove for the investigation. It had been less than six months since he’d met Goller, but the two had managed to exchange 32,000 messages during that time. He’d told her he had a heavily pregnant wife but insisted it was another man’s baby; after the birth he falsely claimed to have had a DNA test proving he wasn’t the father of his newborn son. “To be with you I would do anything,” he told Goller. “I will sacrifice and give up so much for you… From April onwards I can do random and spontaneous.”

Cilliers met Austrian skydiving instructor Stefanie Goller on Tinder and told her his youngest son was another man’s child. Photograph: Pixel

But Goller wasn’t the only person Cilliers was messaging. He was sleeping with his ex-wife, Carly Cilliers, mother to two of his older children. Carly lived less than a mile away from him and Vicky in Amesbury; the two families shared childcare. He was also a member of a website called Fabswingers, where he hooked up with partners for casual sex, as well as regularly searching for sex workers on Adultwork.

“He can have a conversation with his wife about picking up the children or a bit of shopping at the same time as arranging to meet someone he knows from Fabswingers for some weekend fun, and ringing someone from Adultwork to see if they are available,” Franklin says. “Three totally separate conversations at the same time, managed in such a way that there was never a wrong phone call to the wrong person. When you see that repeated constantly for years, you see what kind of person he was.”

The police were able to establish that Cilliers was £22,000 in debt, but they suspect the real total was far higher; he moved money around his many accounts on a daily basis, weaving a web that was almost impossible for financial investigators to unpick. He owed money to payday lenders, former work colleagues and his wife: over their seven-year relationship she had lent him more than £19,000, which he was supposed to pay back with a regular standing order, but often didn’t. After he helped himself to £6,000 from her savings account, he claimed her account had been hacked. The bank investigated, and traced the IP address used in the transaction to the family’s home computer.

Cilliers had been careful to invest in Vicky’s life insurance: he had added her to his own army policy and made sure she had the maximum possible cover. He didn’t know that this would be all he was in line to receive in the event of her death: aware of his spending problems, she had cut him out of her will in late 2014, leaving everything to their two children.

Franklin and Lewis went to visit Vicky again. They told her only that her husband was having an affair, that he had intended to leave her for his lover, and that he had denied their son was his. “I thought that would be enough for her to see that there was something seriously wrong and she needed to take a step back, trust the police and accept he couldn’t come home,” Franklin says. It worked – for that evening, at least. That was when she told them about the gas leak.

To you and me it’s a life​ – to him it’s just an object, just something in the way

One morning six days before the parachute jump, Vicky smelled gas in her kitchen. Cilliers wasn’t home: he’d left his family asleep upstairs to spend the night at his barracks (he told Vicky he’d wanted to avoid the early morning traffic, but had actually spent the evening with his ex-wife, texting his girlfriend and then contacting prostitutes). Vicky checked the gas valve in the kitchen cupboard next to the oven and saw blood on it. She messaged Cilliers, asking if he’d touched it. “Are you trying to bump me off?” she joked. Cilliers admonished her for suggesting it. But forensic examination of the valve proved the blood was his, and that force had been used only to loosen the valve, and not to tighten it. This was the only piece of forensic evidence police had that showed Cilliers had tried to kill his wife. It also showed he didn’t care if his children were killed alongside her.

It was more than two years before the case came to court. It had taken nine months for the small police team to wade through the tens of thousands of pages of data they’d extracted from Cilliers’ phone. It then took another nine months for the Crown Prosecution Service to review the investigation and decide the case was strong enough for a realistic chance of conviction.

But Vicky wanted to put the events of April 2015 behind her. By the time she gave evidence at the first trial, she was no longer cooperating with the investigation. She told the court she’d exaggerated in her initial statements to the police, that Emile had been in the toilets with the parachute for only five minutes, not 10. “I made it sound worse than it was because I was humiliated. I wanted him to suffer,” she said.

***

There were no friends or family in court supporting Cilliers during either trial, no character witnesses to challenge the prosecution’s depiction of him. His army colleagues will not comment on him, except to say he’s been discharged, “in line with normal procedure when a soldier is sentenced to imprisonment”.

But Nicolene Shepherd knows Cilliers well. She grew up with him in South Africa, was his on-off girlfriend for 10 years, and is the mother of the oldest two of his six children. They started going out when she was 13 and he was 17; it was Shepherd’s first sexual relationship.

“He was charismatic and charming,” she tells me. We speak over the phone from her home in Somerset, where she settled more than a decade ago. “He was good looking – he had a lot more hair then. He had these nice, green eyes. A lot of girls liked him.”

They grew up in Ermelo, a small town east of Johannesburg, where the church was the centre of the community and “everybody knew everybody’s business”. Cilliers worked for his father’s construction company and had plenty of disposable cash. “He always had to have the latest gadgets. When mobile phones first came out, he was the first to have them.” The Cilliers she knew was used to getting whatever he wanted, and was always in pursuit of his next big prize, whether that was an object or a woman.

When Shepherd was 16, she gave birth to their daughter, Cilene, in 2000. She was pregnant with their son, Trevor, six months later. Cilliers left South Africa for a working holiday in England while Shepherd was pregnant with their son. He promised he’d come back and they’d be parents together, but instead met and married Carly, and joined the army. He left it to his mother to break the news to Shepherd, then made no attempt to communicate with her, or their children.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Nicolene Shepherd met Cilliers in South Africa when she was 13, and had two children with him. Photograph: Solent News & Photo Agency

Shepherd moved to the UK in March 2004. She had no intention of making contact with Cilliers, and says she only did so in 2006 when Cilene, then six, began asking questions about her father. By that time, he and Carly had two children of their own. “When he turned up, it was all about how he only married Carly because his visa was running out, and how he was in the middle of divorcing her. And then we started reminiscing about old times. He was very charming,” she says, sheepishly. “We got back together.”

But Cilliers wasn’t in the middle of divorcing Carly, as Shepherd discovered when he went to work one day and left his phone in her conservatory, and Carly rang. When the two women realised they had been lied to, they decided Shepherd should go over to Carly’s house so they could confront Cilliers together. “If looks could kill I would have been dead that day,” Shepherd says. “He asked me, in Afrikaans, ‘What the fuck are you doing here?’”

Their relationship ended the same day, but she says he kept texting her, pestering her to see him again. She met another man, got married, had three more children and changed her phone number, but Cilliers still tracked her down on Facebook.

“He doesn’t like to be told no,” Shepherd tells me. “He’s used to having his own way.” She then casually adds a detail that turns my stomach. “I was a 16-year-old girl, I’d just had a C-section, and 10 days later we were sexually active again because it was what he wanted. Looking back on that now, I know how disgusting and dangerous that is. Whether he didn’t get it or didn’t care, I don’t know. That’s what he wanted so that’s what he got.”

***

Vicky Cilliers was present when her husband was sentenced to life in prison for trying to kill her and for recklessly endangering their children, but asked that her victim impact statement wasn’t read out in open court. Victim impact statements are used to help a judge decide how to sentence a perpetrator, and while the contents of Vicky’s statement weren’t made public, it’s believed that she tried to get a more lenient sentence for her husband. Meanwhile, a pre‑sentence report on Cilliers assessed him as posing a high risk to adults, particularly partners. In sentencing, the judge, Mr Justice Sweeney, observed that Vicky seemed “to have recovered from the physical harm but not, having seen her in the witness box at length, from the psychological harm”.

In the days immediately after Cilliers was found guilty, Vicky gave paid interviews to two tabloid newspapers and appeared on Good Morning Britain, to say that she did not accept the verdict. She has said nothing since then, and declined to comment for this article.

“I have to go, I suppose, with the verdict,” she said at the time. “It’s almost like peer pressure to conform. My family, friends, everyone seems to think they know more than I do. They see different evidence to me,” she said at the time. “He’d been unfaithful, he’d had issues with money, but that is not attempted murder. Yes, I’m hurt and angry, but can I see him as capable of murder? No.” She described Cilliers as “a passionate, intense alpha male solider,” and “a sex addict”.

“I don’t think it’s addiction as such, he just likes to get what he wants,” Shepherd says. She was horrified to discover her first love was capable of murder, but not surprised. “To you and me it’s a life – to him it’s just an object, just something in the way.”

For the police, it is a bittersweet victory: they have achieved justice for a victim who doesn’t really want it, in a case that seemed almost too far-fetched to be real. “It’s like a James Bond, but more extreme,” Hennah says. “If Mark Bayada hadn’t gathered the evidence and flagged it up, and if somebody who knew her hadn’t rung us up to say, something’s not right here – he very well may have got away with it.”