A British Army sergeant is on trial for allegedly trying to kill his wife twice, after she nearly died when her parachute failed to deploy while she was skydiving in 2015.
She had just jumped from 4,000 feet on a skydiving excursion when she realized there was trouble with her parachute.
“Straight away I knew something was not quite right, it had a lot of twists and the canopy wasn’t floating,” said Victoria Cilliers, 40, according to the BBC .
And now her husband, 37-year-old British Army sergeant Emile Cilliers, is on trial for two counts of attempted murder — charged in Winchester, England, southwest of London, for allegedly tampering with his wife’s main parachute and her backup before her near-fatal dive, the Guardian reports.
The husband has denied wrongdoing, the BBC reports.
“The last thing I remember is trying to get some kind of control over it, trying to open as many cells as I could,” Victoria Cilliers testified at her husband’s trial this week, according to the Evening Standard.
She says she tried to untangle the twisted lines, but was not successful, the Evening Standard reports.
“Then everything went black,” she said. “I do not know if it was the G force or the impact but everything cut out.”
The incident occurred on April 5,2015, which was Easter Sunday. The wife sustained serious injuries — including broken ribs, pelvis and vertebrae — but survived the 4,000-foot fall because she happened to land in a field, according to the Independent.
Her husband allegedly had taken the parachute into the bathroom before the jump at an airfield in Wiltshire, the Independent reports. Prosecutors say that’s when he twisted the main parachute lines and removed critical parts from the back-up chute.
However, his wife did admit in court that she had lied to police about some of her husband’s actions — in particular about the length of time her husband had taken her parachute into the bathroom.
“I said he was away for a couple of minutes, then the second time was five minutes, which was probably an exaggeration,” Victoria Cilliers testified, the Independent reports.
That wasn’t the first time he allegedly tried to kill his wife, though, according to the Guardian. British prosecutors also say that her husband loosened the gas pipe in the couple’s kitchen in hopes that a gas leak in their shared home would lead to an explosion.
“Are you trying to kill me?” she texted her husband when she smelled gas in their home, the Guardian reports.
He allegedly asked his wife what she meant by the text.
She responded that she had been kidding, according to the Guardian, musing that she was reading too many stories about wives being killed by their husbands.
Emile Cilliers was allegedly engaging in two affairs in the months before his wife’s parachute failed to deploy, according to the Salisbury Journal — one with his ex-wife, and another with a woman Cilliers had connected with over the dating app Tinder, prosecutors said.
The Telegraph reports that she “despised” her husband for those affairs, and testified as much in court — saying that she even threatened suicide.
She was a seasoned parachuter, the Telegraph reports, and had gotten her husband interested in the sport. Her first jump was at 16.
“I did one jump and was absolutely hooked, it became an obsession,” she said, according to the Telegraph. “It’s an addiction and it’s not dissimilar to drugs, it takes over your life and for 15 years that’s pretty much all I did.”
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