The Fall, Skydive Murder Plot: the true story behind Channel 4's shocking new docuseries
Victoria Cilliers had jumped out of an aeroplane dozens of times before. It meant that, when her main parachute failed to open during an Easter Sunday jump in 2015, she didn’t panic.
Following her training she cut it away to free up her reserve parachute. But then that failed to properly open too: Victoria plummeted 4,000 feet to the ground.
The horrendous nature of the fall meant that people below went to retrieve Victoria with a body bag. The 38-year-old physiotherapist and mother of two broke her spine, pelvis and fractured some of her ribs – but miraculously survived. She had landed on recently ploughed farmland which softened her impact.
Victoria was an accelerated freefall instructor, had made the jump over 2,600 jumps before, and knew that the odds of it all going wrong were minimal. Not for a second could she have guessed that someone may have tampered with her kit, nor that the perpetrator of this attempted murder was the love of her life, her husband of four years, Emile.
Now this astonishing story and the investigation into her husband’s secret lives, debts, wild sex life and crimes, is the focus of a new three-part docuseries, which is landing on this evening. Weaving together interviews with Victoria and others involved in the story, with dramatisations and recordings, the series is set to shine a light on the case which gripped the nation.
