A “wicked” and sex mad South African working in the British army who cheated on his British wife and then tried to murder her for her £120000 (more than R2.1million) life insurance was jailed for life on Friday.
Emile Cilliers will serve a minimum of 18 years for trying to gas his wife Victoria at home, before he tampered with her parachute sending her plummeting from 1200m three days later in 2015.
Victoria Cilliers was at Winchester Crown Court to see him sentenced for two counts of attempted murder.
She somehow survived the fall and said since he was a “kind and loving” man, had refused to accept he did it and admitted she had no plans to divorce him.
Sentencing Cilliers, Justice Sweeney said: “This was wicked offending of extreme gravity.
“Your offending was extremely serious with your two attempts to murder your wife. They were planned and carried out in cold blood for your own selfish purposes which include financial gain.”
Describing the impact on Victoria, the judge continued: “That your wife recovered at all was miraculous, she undoubtedly suffered severe physical harm and she must have suffered psychological harm in the terror of the fall and since.
“She appears to have recovered from the physical harm but not, having seen her in the witness box at length, from the psychological harm.”
Cilliers first tried to gas his wife with their children in the house but the smell alerted her to the danger and she later jokingly texted him to say, “are you trying to kill me?!”.
Three days later he suggested his wife, an experienced parachutist, go skydiving over the Easter weekend in 2015 and then sabotaged her kit on the eve of her 1200m jump at Netheravon Airfield, Wiltshire.
Cilliers tangled her main canopy and removed vital links from her reserve in a toilet cubicle after he told her one of their children needed the loo.
The father-of-six, who the prosecution called a “charmless unfaithful penniless scoundrel”, was also sleeping with his ex-wife Carly, Victoria and a Tinder lover named Stefanie Goller.
The soldier, described as a “boobaholic” by his wife who knew he was part of a sex club, also contacted prostitutes about meeting up on the proviso sex was unprotected and he could film the liaison - but cancelled after they tried to charge £60 instead of £50.
He also signed up to a sex club and swingers’ site to find a “f*** buddy”. His first six-week trial collapsed last year when the jury couldn’t reach a verdict after his wife became a “hostile witness” and admitted she had lied to police about her husband to “get her own back”.
But a jury found him guilty of two counts of attempted murder after a retrial that ended last month.
In an extraordinary interview after his convictions she even appeared to defend him, suggesting the jurors failed to see his “kind and loving side”. - Daily Mail