The Parachute Murder Plot
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One of the most popular activities listed on people's bucket list is to go skydiving to free fall at over 100 miles per hour. And contrary to the belief that jumping out of a perfectly good airplane is dangerous, the fatality rate of skydiving is the lowest it's ever been in history. Just .006 per 1,000 jumps completed.

On April 5th, 2015, experienced free fall instructor Victoria Siliers was set to complete her 2,650th jump. The jump was actually a gift from her husband, Emil, as a celebration to welcome their second child together. This would be Victoria's first jump in over a year.

But at 4,000 feet, Victoria pulled her main chute, but quickly realized it was tangled. She started spinning out of control. She cut away the main chute and attempted to deploy her reserve as she was trained to do. Just like the main chute, her reserve failed.

Sending Victoria free-falling to the ground over 100 miles per hour with only a freshly plowed field to catch her fall. Was this some freak accident? Or was there someone behind those cut wires of her parachute? This is Forensic Tales, Episode 31, The Parachute Murder Plot. ♪

Welcome to Forensic Tales. I'm your host, Courtney Fretwell.

Forensic Tales is a weekly true crime podcast that discusses real, bone-chilling true crime stories and how forensic science has been used in the case. Some cases have been solved through cutting-edge forensic techniques, while other cases remain unsolved.

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Now, let's talk about the parachute murder plot. Hi, Forensic Tales listeners. This week's case has a lot of firsts for the show. It's the first case we've covered that the victim is still alive. A story that involves a husband who not only tried to kill his wife once, but twice.

This is going to be the first episode in which I give you my opinion as a forensic psychologist why I believe this case features a textbook psychopath disguised as a husband and as a father. Emile and Victoria Siliers are from the United Kingdom.

Victoria attended a really nice and expensive private school and from a very young age fell in love with parachuting. In fact, she started parachuting at the age of just 16 years old. As an adult, she became an accelerated free fall instructor. So needless to say, she was extremely experienced in parachuting. One of the best in the UK.

Just to give you an idea of just how good Victoria was, she was trained to deal with out-of-control or just inexperienced jumpers, chase them down in the air, catch them, and then get them into the right position all while free-falling herself.

Victoria met Emile Siliers after Emile sustained a pretty bad knee injury from skiing that required him to seek out physical therapy, where Victoria worked as a physiotherapist for the military of defense. Victoria and Emile had both served in the British military, and Victoria had even reached the rank of captain.

Before she met Emile, Victoria married her first husband in 2004, who was also a captain in the military. But they weren't married long after she found out he was unfaithful in the marriage. So they separated and soon after divorced. Victoria married Emile in September 2011 in South Africa.

Like Victoria, this also wasn't Emil's first time being married. Although his past relationships were a little different from Victoria's. Emil was born in South Africa and grew up in a really, really religious household. As a teenager, Emil was quite the ladies' man, or at least that's how he saw it.

So I guess that whole religious thing didn't have too much of an influence on him. At age 16, Emil had his first girlfriend, Nicolene, who at the time was just 13 years old. Nicolene would be pregnant with their first child together by the age of 16. Emil and Nicolene went on to have another child soon after that.

But shortly after the kids were born, Emil basically just up and left his family and decided that he wanted to move to the UK. In the UK, Nicolene finds out that Emil has actually married another woman, Carly, and that they also end up having two children together.

By this point, Nicolene, his first wife, wants nothing to do with him. Can't say that I blame her. But Carly, well, Carly sticks around. Not only does Emil run off and have two more children with Carly, but he also regularly hires escorts and has countless affairs with other women during his marriage.

The be faithful, be a good person thing didn't seem to rub off on Emil. Now, I don't think you're going to be surprised with this one either. Emil and Carly don't stay together and they don't live happily ever after. By 2009, Emil and Carly's marriage and relationship came to an end. And later that same year is when he would meet Victoria.

So I mentioned that Emil and Victoria met at a physical therapy clinic that Victoria was working at. And the two of them really seemed to hit it off. Especially when Emil found out that Victoria was a skydiving instructor. Emil was super into adrenaline sports. So when he found this out about Victoria, he was like, where do I sign up?

Emile and Victoria would also have two children together. In case you've lost track, this guy now has six children in total. Two kids with three different baby mamas. So fast forward our story to April 4th, 2015.

Emile had arranged for the entire family, including their two children, to come watch Victoria complete her 2,650th jump. It was basically like Emile's present to Victoria. She had just had their second baby, and it was just getting back into doing what she loved. This would be her first jump in nearly a year.

So he had arranged for Victoria to make this very special jump. Emil had brought along their two children, their newborn son, who at the time was just a few weeks old. I think he was maybe five or six weeks old. And they also brought along their three-year-old daughter to the airfield, which was only about a 10-minute drive from their home.

Well, on the morning of April 4th, the weather was really, really bad. Definitely not the kind of weather that you'd want to fall out of the sky in. So the group of jumpers, including Victoria, kind of waited around the airfield to see maybe if the weather would improve or not so they could still do their jump. During this kind of waiting around period,

Emil and Victoria's three-year-old daughter needed to use the restroom. So Emil goes with their daughter to the restroom and he takes Victoria's parachute with him.

Now Emil would later say that he took the parachute because he didn't want to leave it unattended in the hangar, which is actually against all kinds of protocol here. I mean everybody leaves their parachutes in the hangar and you leave them there until you are ready to strap it on and you're ready to get on the plane.

You don't just take your parachute anywhere and everywhere you go, especially not the toilet. So Emil takes the parachute with him to the bathroom. And when he comes out, they all learn and realize that the cloud layer is just too low for a safe jump. And the entire thing is called off for the day.

So the group decides that they'll just wait until tomorrow and they'll try the jump again, hoping that the weather will improve. Emil tells Victoria that he's just going to go put her parachute in her locker. That way it would save some time in the morning, which again goes against every protocol. So the following day, Easter Sunday, April 5th,

The group of 12 jumpers, including Victoria, returned to the airfield to try the jump once again. This time, though, Emile and the two kids stay home. Victoria even told Emile that morning that she just had a bad feeling, that she didn't feel like she should jump that day, and maybe she should just go back home and just spend the day with her kids.

But Emil is like, no, no, no, no. I arranged this for you, honey. You need this. You'll thank me later. The weather really isn't that much better. So the group decides to do what is called a hop and pop, which basically means that pretty much right after you jump out of the plane, you deploy your parachute. There really isn't any free fall.

Victoria and her group of jumpers decide that the weather will allow for a hop-and-pop type jump at 4,000 feet, which is much lower than a standard jump. So your typical skydive is anywhere from about 10,000 to 15,000 feet.

which would give you a few seconds of that free fall. And then it would give you another several minutes, five, six minutes under the parachute. I'm obviously nowhere as experienced as Victoria is with her 2,000 plus jumps. But I've been skydiving three times. I've done three jumps, which were all around 12,500 feet.

So this 4,000 foot jump looks a lot different than your standard skydive. But let's be 100% clear here. Victoria was a very experienced jumper. She was a skydive instructor. This is what she did. And the group of jumpers that she was with were all very experienced jumpers. So this hop and pop wouldn't be any issue for any of them.

The jumpers in Victoria's group all went out of the plane in pairs, meaning two people went out at the exact same time. Right before the jump, Victoria was seen by members in her group fist bumping, giving some high fives, like she always did before a jump. Victoria and her partner would be the last people out of the plane that morning.

So when it came time for Victoria to jump, she jumped with a fellow group member. Victoria exits the plane and immediately goes to pull her main chute. But there was a problem with the main chute. It was tangled.

But that's okay. Remember, Victoria is an instructor for these very type of situations. She, of all people, knows what to do. Victoria cut the lines of the main shoot and went to her reserve, which also fails. The man that jumped with Victoria, one of her friends, was able to watch this entire thing happen.

He said later on that he knew that she was going to die. He watched her main chute fail and now her reserve fail. He said that he watched Victoria just go in and out of consciousness as she made her way down to the ground. He thought for sure that this was going to be the very first accident and certainly the first death that the group has ever experienced before.

At 4.27 p.m., Victoria hit the ground after falling 4,000 feet from the airplane. But she wasn't the group's first accident or first death. She was alive. She had a broken pelvis, several broken ribs, serious leg and spine injuries, and also a collapsed lung.

But she was very much still alive. Victoria was lucky enough to have landed in a freshly plowed field of dirt that day, which essentially was able to break the fall. I mean, the best it could, considering she fell 4,000 feet. And Victoria's partner, the one who jumped with her,

immediately started looking at her parachute to try and figure out exactly what could have gone wrong here. And right away, he saw that the lines had been cut. Now, they weren't frayed or anything like that. No, these lines had been cleanly cut.

So the group of jumpers that Victoria was with immediately called the police, and they told them about what they observed with her parachute. Again, they were all experienced jumpers, and for something like this to happen, where the main chute and the reserve fail, is just unheard of. It doesn't make any sense.

Within hours of Victoria's accident, suspicions were starting to be raised that this was no accident. The police got their hands on Victoria's parachute and they sent it to the British Parachute Association to have them inspect the chute and provide a report on what could have caused the accident and failure of both of Victoria's chutes. But,

The police don't have to wait for the report to start learning about Victoria and her husband Emil. Because just five days after the accident, friends of Victoria start calling the police to let them in on some secrets behind Victoria and Emil's marriage.

Victoria's friends tell police about some of the comments that Victoria has made about her marriage and that things weren't exactly all lovey-dovey in their relationship. That they were actually having some pretty bad issues. Issues that Victoria didn't know if they could fix. Her friends even told police that they thought Victoria and Emil were in a toxic relationship.

And even though they couldn't necessarily prove domestic violence, they suspected that something bad was going on in the relationship. The police went to go talk to Victoria in the hospital because at this point, all fingers are being pointed at her husband possibly having something to do with what happened. Only one who had access to Victoria's parachute except for Victoria herself

And during this conversation with the police, Victoria tells detectives that about one week before the accident, they had a gas leak in the house. Police go to the house and they discover that a pipe had been loosened on the side of the house, which I certainly don't know much about pipes at all, plumbing, or anything related to gas pipes.

But even I can tell you that a loose gas pipe isn't good. When police found the pipe that had been loosened, they also noticed a pretty substantial blood stain on the pipe. A blood stain that could help police figure out who had loosened the gas pipe and why. The blood sample found on the pipe was sent for forensic DNA testing to be done.

And let's just say it wasn't a very tough job because the blood came back as a positive match to Emil. Forensics proved that Emil was the one who cut the gas pipe to the house and in the process of doing so, cut his finger. Police now started to think Emil may not have just tried to kill his wife once, but he's tried twice.

One month after the fall, the British Parachute Association delivered their report to the police. In their report, they found clear and convincing evidence that the parachute displayed signs of tampering. Both the main chute and the reserve had both been tampered with.

They reported that there were 2.3 million sports jump in the 10 years before Victoria's accident. Of those, there were 2,900 cases in which the reserve chute had to be deployed and not a single incident where there was also a problem with the reserve.

In fact, the only known incident where both the main and reserve chutes had issues was the 2003 case where a 20-year-old cadet fell to his death after both of his chutes failed. But what was different about this case was that it was ruled a suicide, that he had actually cut both of his chutes.

The British Parachute Association also included in their report a complete record of the maintenance and inspection done on the chute over the years. They found that Victoria's chute had been inspected 10 times over its existence and showed no signs of any issues or mechanical problems. The last inspection on the chute was just two months before the accident.

the ultimate finding by the association, that there was no mechanical failure of either shoot. This was intentional. But what the association found was just as important as what they didn't find.

The association and the police couldn't find any fingerprints or DNA on the parachute that would suggest Emil had either touched or handled it before the jump. They couldn't find any direct forensic evidence to suggest Emil was the one who tampered with it.

They just knew by his own omission that Emil took the shoot with him inside of the bathroom the day before the jump. People who were also calling into the police about Emil and Victoria's marriage said that Emil had made several statements to people about not wanting to be in the marriage anymore. That he didn't see himself staying married to Victoria in five years, ten years, forever.

which is extremely problematic and just terrible timing when your wife suddenly has a near-fatal parachuting accident. Police ordered a forensic search to be done on Emil's cell phone. Now, we've talked about forensic searches in a couple episodes on the show, and they can be really helpful to investigators.

Because forensic searches of digital devices don't just allow the police to see what's on a device like a cell phone or a computer, but more importantly, they can also find what's been deleted. A lot of people have this misconception that once you hit delete off your phone or whatever, that it's gone forever. But it's not.

In reality, it's actually really, really hard to completely wipe away a forensic trail. So heads up, just because you delete your search history on your work computer each day before you clock out doesn't mean a forensic search couldn't reveal every last Google search you made.

So police uncovered a lot about Emil from the forensic search on both his cell phone and his home computer. The biggest thing forensics found was that Emil had a girlfriend by the name of Stephanie Galler. And during their six-month relationship, Emil and Stephanie exchanged over 32,000 text messages.

And of the 32,000 messages, one of the most valuable messages to the police came just weeks before Victoria's accident. In one of these text messages between Emil and his girlfriend, he told her that, quote, from April onwards, I can be random and spontaneous. Now keep in mind, Victoria's accident was on April 5th.

But the forensic search of Emil's cell phone didn't just recover messages between him and his girlfriend Stephanie. Oh no. The digital forensics team discovered that he was also sleeping with his ex-wife Carly, that he was a frequent flyer at a local swingers club,

And there was also digital forensic evidence that he still continued to contact and meet up with sex workers that he would meet online. But it wasn't just Emile's infidelity that made him look bad. It was also the fact that at the time of Victoria's accident, Emile was in at least $22,000 in debt.

And actually the amount was suspected to be a lot higher. But he had this reputation of moving money around to different accounts and just doing kind of weird financial stuff. So it's unclear how much or how little money he actually had at the time.

He owed money to payday lenders, to former co-workers of his, and he even owed money to Victoria. It's reported that over the course of their seven-year relationship, Emil borrowed over $19,000 from Victoria, to which he's paid back next to nothing.

There's been an allegation that he even secretly took $6,000 from her savings account and when confronted about it, said that her account, well, her account must have been hacked. But when the bank investigated the fraud claim, the IP address of the withdrawal came, guess where? It came from Emile's own computer.

So in the months leading up to Victoria's accident, Emil made sure to make all of the life insurance payments on Victoria's policy. He wanted to make sure that that policy was paid to date. But little did he know, she had already removed him from her will when they started having financial problems in late 2014.

So really, the only money Emil was going to get was from her life insurance policy. He wasn't going to get a single penny of her own personal money. So what about the gas leak incident just six days before the parachuting accident? The police believed this was a key part of establishing their case against Emil.

On the day of the gas leak, Emil was far away from the house on the barracks. So that morning, Victoria reported smelling a strong odor of gas from inside the house. When Victoria went to go investigate the gas pipes, she herself noticed the bloody drops on the pipe.

And the forensics search of Emil's cell phone found a text message that day from Victoria to Emil that said, quote, are you trying to bump me off? End quote. But the police were able to use the forensics to test the blood on the pipe and link it to Emil. They also found the pliers inside of the garage that were used to loosen the gas pipe.

And the police knew they were the same pliers used to loosen the pipe because of the unique tool marks that it left. The police had more than enough digital forensic evidence and circumstantial evidence to make an arrest. And that's exactly what they did. Emil was arrested on April 28, 2015, for attempting to murder his wife, Victoria.

During the initial interrogation, Emil, well, he was cool, calm, and collected. He admitted his affair with Stephanie. He admitted to being in a lot of personal debt with payday loan companies. And he even told police that, yeah, I did take her parachute into the bathroom with me that morning. But no, I didn't do anything to it. During the interview, he seemed to have an answer for everything.

But the police weren't buying it. During the time leading up to trial, Emil remained out on bond with the condition that he stay away from Victoria, their two kids, and the house they shared together. Now, I want to mention here that Emil did receive some money from the accident. The exact amount, I am not sure. I wasn't able to locate the number, but

But he did get some money. And what did he do while awaiting trial with that money? Well, he bought a PlayStation. So by June 2016, the Crown Prosecution Service had enough evidence to officially charge Emile with two counts of murder and one count of reckless endangerment.

They were charging him with the gas leak incident and tampering with her parachute. Now, the one count of reckless endangerment charge was for loosening the gas pipe at the house while their two young children were also inside of the house. Now, it was more than two years from the time of the accident when the case finally made it to trial.

Mostly because it took the police over nine months to fully be able to go through the digital forensic evidence on Emile's cell phone and home computer. But where was Victoria while all this was happening? We haven't really talked about what she was doing after the accident. Well, to put it frank, she stood by Emile's side.

She didn't believe that her husband tried to kill her not just once but twice. She didn't believe the gas leak was on purpose. And she certainly didn't believe he cut her parachute. And at trial, she was called to the stand to testify as a witness and a victim, which should have been a slam dunk for the prosecution's case.

But there was no slam dunk here. Because at trial, Victoria told the jury that she didn't believe her husband tampered with her parachute. She said that she exaggerated her story about the troubles she had with her main parachute.

Now, keep in mind, she's a world-class skydiving instructor. And here she is on the stand telling the jury that she basically made a mistake by cutting away her main parachute and that she, quote-unquote, exaggerated it. So Victoria 110% stood by her husband.

Regardless of everything she heard about his affairs, his personal debt, his dirty little secrets with sex workers, she stood by his side. She even said that she lied to police about the amount of time Emile spent in the bathroom with her parachute that day. At first, she told police it was about 10 minutes, but on the stand, she said it was merely moments.

Not nearly enough time to do anything to her parachute. Well, this is obviously a huge problem for the prosecution. Here we have the victim, who's also the star witness, who also happens to be a skydiving instructor, on the stand saying that she made a mistake that day and that what happened to her main parachute wasn't as bad as she originally claimed.

This doesn't look good for the prosecution or in the eyes of the jury. But the prosecution continued on and they continued to argue that Emil was in a ton of debt. He was standing to get over $120,000 in life insurance if Victoria died that day. They said that he was clearly unhappy in his marriage,

And that he not only had the motive, but he also had the opportunity to tamper with her parachute that morning. Okay, well, what does Victoria say about the gas line incident just one week before the skydiving accident? Well, she tells the jury that she must have loosened the pipe herself.

that her husband Emil is innocent of the gas leak as well. The jury deliberated for four days but couldn't reach a verdict. So on November 23rd, 2017, the court had no choice but to declare a mistrial in the case. So although a mistrial doesn't mean a guilty verdict in the case...

However, it does mean that the state can retry the case in hopes of securing a guilty verdict a second time around. It's kind of like a do-over, which is exactly what they decide to do. The prosecution decided to take a different approach, though, for this second trial. This time, they didn't put Victoria on the stand.

They didn't want her persuading the jury and telling them that she believed her husband's story. They wanted the jury to rely on the digital forensic evidence and the mountain of circumstantial evidence. They wanted to highlight the over 50,000 messages that had shown the timelines, the relationships he had outside of his marriage, the debt he was in.

They wanted the jury to see who Emil really was. The second trial lasted for six weeks, and after three days of jury deliberation, this time, the jury came back with a guilty verdict. They found Emil guilty on all counts. Two counts of attempted murder and one count of reckless endangerment.

At Emile's sentencing hearing, Victoria was present in court. She watched and listened as her husband was sentenced to life in prison, to which he would have to serve a minimum of 18 years before he would even be considered for parole. The judge for the second trial, Justice Sweeney, made a comment later on that Victoria seemed to quote,

have recovered from the physical harm, but not from the psychological harm. Even after being found guilty of trying to kill her twice, Victoria seems to be mentally, emotionally, psychologically controlled by Emil, which sadly is just far too common with cases of domestic abuse.

Immediately following the second criminal trial, Victoria only made a couple media appearances, one of which was on Good Morning Britain, where she publicly said that she didn't accept the verdict in the case and that she still believed that her husband did not tamper with her parachute, even when the evidence supported the contrary.

Since being incarcerated, Emile hasn't displayed even an ounce of remorse for his actions. And for several weeks and months after the trial, Victoria continued to visit her husband in prison. And it wasn't until about a year and a half ago from this recording that Victoria decided that she wanted a divorce from Emile.

Now, not at all surprising, Emile has denied her request for a divorce, which just another way for this man to maintain complete and utter control over her entire life, even to this day. So according to a July 2020 article for the Daily Mail, although Emile has refused to give Victoria the divorce that she wants, she

she seems to have at least made a step forward in moving on with her life. Over the last several months, she's been dating another man who also happens to be a parachuter, and she's definitely made great strides to moving on with her life.

So when I read this about her new relationship, I honestly couldn't feel happier for her. She absolutely deserves to move on with her life and have a bright future with someone who loves her and loves her two kids. So when we think of psychopaths, we tend to think of the Golden State Killers, the BTKs of the world, etc.

When in truth, psychopaths can disguise themselves in people like Emil Siliers. Now, only about 1% of the human population is thought to have psychopathic traits. We also tend to use the terms psychopath and sociopath interchangeably. But the field of psychology does differentiate these two terms.

So the general difference in terminology is that psychopaths completely lack the ability to either feel empathy or feel remorse. Where on the other hand, we tend to classify sociopaths as those with very limited abilities to feel either empathy or remorse.

So in the case of Emil Siliers, he certainly meets what we classify as a psychopath. So it wasn't until 2016 that the APA or the American Psychological Association recognized psychopathy as a specifier of clinical antisocial personality disorder.

So meaning a psychopath or psychopathy isn't the diagnosis on someone. It's simply a trait of antisocial personality disorder. Now, Emile displays many of the common traits of a psychopath. He has displayed no empathy or remorse for any of his actions. He has absolutely no moral compass.

Throughout his life, he has always put himself first in front of others. Emile comes across as charming and he's been described by all of his past girlfriends and wives as a pathological liar. Emile displayed absolutely zero, nothing, no emotion when he learned about his wife's accident last

or during any of the subsequent police interviews, which are all recorded, they're all available on YouTube. There's also a great documentary on this story on Amazon Prime, which is also called The Parachute Murder Plot, which you can see in these videos just how Emil carries himself. So the only time that Emil cried during these police interviews, which is also captured in the documentary,

was when he said that his girlfriend, Stephanie, not his wife, Victoria, broke up with him. That is the only time since the parachuting accident that Emil cried. Since the age of 16 years old, he's engaged in what we would probably describe as promiscuous sexual behavior, including countless interactions with sex workers, which is a common behavior in psychopaths.

Emil is impulsive and irresponsible, not only with his personal relationships, but also with his finances and his personal well-being, which is another common trait. Most psychopaths have many short-term marital relationships. Emil had six children with three different women all before he celebrated his 40th birthday.

So when all of these traits are considered as a whole, Emil Siliers fits the textbook mold of a psychopath. Psychopathy explains why Emil attempted to murder his wife not just once, but twice, in extremely elaborate ways. And of course, Emil thought he was smarter, that he thought he would get away with it.

To this day, Emil has not taken responsibility for his actions and hasn't expressed any amount of remorse for what he did to Victoria, their children, and their families. And he never will. ♪

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