Featured Image Credit: Channel 4/ITV
Topics: Crime, True Crime, Channel 4, TV and Film, Documentaries
Joe Harker
Topics: Crime, True Crime, Channel 4, TV and Film, Documentaries
A woman who narrowly survived the 'most unusual murder plot ever' has revealed what her thoughts were as she dropped out of a plane towards what was supposed to be her death.
Victoria Cilliers came within a hair's breadth of death on Easter Sunday, 2015 when she went skydiving and didn't know that her husband Emile had sabotaged her parachute in an attempt to murder her.
She dropped 4,000ft to the ground and hit the ground at 60mph, landing in a soft, freshly ploughed field where she suffered serious injuries including a broken back and a shattered pelvis.
It's possible that her slightly softer landing might have saved her life, and it hadn't even been the first time her husband had tried to murder her that week.
Advert
Just days earlier, he'd tried to kill Victoria by causing a gas leak.
Emile tried and failed to kill his wife and the mother of his two children as she miraculously survived, though her road to recovery was long.
Victoria is part of new Channel 4 docudrama The Fall: Skydive Murder Plot, which covers her husband's attempt on her life and stars MyAnna Buring as her in dramatic recreations of certain moments.
The 44-year-old remembered that fateful Easter Sunday in 2015 where she leapt out of a plane and had no idea it was part of an attempt on her life by her very own husband.
Advert
As she fell 4,000ft to the ground and discovered that both her parachute and reserve chute weren't working the one thought going through her mind was: "My children need me."
She'd completed over 2,600 successful jumps from planes before, but as she fell to what was very nearly her death, it was her kids she thought of.
Victoria said: "As the ground loomed ever closer, I forced myself to push fear from my mind.
"I just have to fix this, I told myself, as I fought for my life. My children need me."
Advert
In 2018 Emile was sentenced to life in prison and a judge told him he'd have to spend at least the next 18 years behind bars before the possibility of freedom was on the table.
Mr Justice Sweeney said the man was a 'danger to the public'.
The judge said: "This was wicked offending of extreme gravity. You have shown yourself to be a person of quite exceptional callousness who will stop at nothing to satisfy his own desires, material or otherwise."
Victoria's story is being told by the Channel 4 documentary The Fall: Skydive Murder Plot which is showing in three episodes starting tonight (11 June) and continuing tomorrow and Thursday.