True Crime Campfire - Freefall: The Crimes of Emile Cilliers

Episode Date: July 3, 2026

In his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde tells the story of a handsome young man who makes a deal with the Devil—his soul, in exchange for eternal youth and beauty. But there is a portrait of Dorian in the attic of his house, and as he moves through the years with his handsome face not aging, the portrait ages—and it also begins to show the poison seeping through him as he lives his life in soulless, selfish pursuit of hedonistic pleasures. He drives a young woman to suicide and doesn’t feel bad about it. He becomes more and more of a toxic force in the lives of the people around him. And when his friend finally calls him out on it, Dorian murders him. He couldn’t bear the fact that his best friend could see him for what he really was—the true, monstrous face behind the handsome façade. It’s a hell of a metaphor, and it’s what we’ve said so many times on our show about narcissists: that they want to indulge themselves at the expense of everybody else, but would rather die than be exposed for it. Today’s story is about a real-life Dorian Gray, a man who used his charm and charisma to lure in a talented, intelligent woman, only to throw her life into chaos and leave broken wreckage behind. Join us live at Wet Hot Bad Magic Summer Camp in Equinunk, PA, September 10-13th! Visit ⁠badmagicproductions.com⁠ for more info and to buy tickets. Tickets are on sale now for CrimeWave 2.0! Visit crimewaveatsea.com/CAMPFIRE to get your discount code for $100 off your cabin and a private meet-and-greet with us! The cruise is Feb. 8-12, 2027. Sources: I Survived: A True Story, Victoria Cilliers ITV, "The Parachute Murder Plot with Fiona Bruce" NPR: https://www.npr.org/2018/06/16/620531854/former-british-army-sergeant-sentenced-after-parachute-murder-attempt-of-wife https://www.aetv.com/articles/victoria-cilliers-skydive-murder-plot The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/may/24/shocking-betrayal-the-soldier-the-lover-and-the-sabotaged-parachute-emile-cilliers Winchester Crown Court, Judge's Sentencing Remarks: https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/r-v-cilliers-mr-justice-sweeney-sentencing-remarks-winchester-crown-court-15-june-2018.pdf Follow us, campers! Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfire https://www.truecrimecampfirepod.com/Facebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/truecrimecampfire/?hl=enEmail: [e-mail]! https://true-crime-campfire.myspreadshop.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, campers, grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. In his novel, the picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde tells the story of a handsome young man who makes a deal with the devil. His soul, an exchange for eternal youth and beauty.

But there is a portrait of Dorian in the attic of his house. and as he moves through the years with his handsome face dot aging, the portrait ages. And it also begins to show the poison seeping through him as he lives his life in soulless, selfish pursuit of hedonistic pleasures. He drives a young woman to suicide and doesn't feel bad about it. He becomes more and more of a toxic force in the lives of the people around him. And when his friend finally calls him out on it, Dorian murders him.

He couldn't bear the fact that his best friend could see him. for what he really was, the true monstrous face behind the handsome facade. It's a hell of a metaphor, and it's what we've said so many times on our show about narcissists that they want to indulge themselves at the expense of everybody else, but would rather die than be exposed for it. Today's story is about a real-life Dorian Gray, a man who used his charm and charisma to lure in a talented, intelligent woman, only to throw her life into chaos and leave broken wreckage behind. This is Freefall, the crimes of Emil Silliers. So, campers, for this one, were in Wiltshire, England, Easter Sunday, 2015. Victoria stood at the open door of the little

plane in her skydiving gear, ready to jump. She'd done this over 2,000 times before, taught other people how to do it, but for some reason this time felt wrong. That feeling of free fall, there was nothing else like it in the world, and usually it was a thrill for her. But now, she just had a sick feeling in her gut. I shouldn't be here, she thought, I should be home with the kids. Victoria was just six weeks postpartum after having her second baby, and her marriage to husband, Emile, was not going great. She strongly suspected he was being unfaithful to her. Just recently, he told her he needed to think about whether he still wanted to be in their marriage. He said he thought they'd gotten married too fast. It might have been a mistake.

She'd been feeling like a failure of a wife. It hurt. It was Emil who set up this jump for her. They were supposed to do it together, but at the last minute he told her he couldn't find a babysitter for the children. You go ahead, he'd said, this will be good for you. Now, as she leapt into the bright blue sky, she could tell something was different about this jump. She was falling for too long. Her main parachute hadn't deployed. But she knew what to do. She cut away the useless shoot and deployed the reserve. But right away, she knew there was something wrong there, too. The chute had gotten twisted up somehow, and it was only barely inflated.

Victoria tried to work on the twisted lines that were preventing the shoot from opening, but she was spinning so fast and there was just no time. There was nothing she could do to save herself. She was just falling now, the ground speeding closer every second. There was the scream of the wind in her ears, then a sharp bang, and then nothing. Victoria Siliers is a true badass, a physical therapist in the British Army who served in Kosovo, and she's a very experienced skydiver. At the time of the attempt on her life, she'd done over 2,000 jumps.

She started skydiving after she lost her mom to cancer as a teenager. It was a euphoric thing for her. I read her book, I survived as part of my research for this case, and she strikes me as somebody who was always looking for ways to challenge herself, a person of great compassion for others, close with her family and friends. She'd been deeply affected by her time in war-torn areas and chose to use that experience for good by helping other soldiers heal their bodies. Her husband, Emil Siliers, was a golden boy, too.

at least on paper. He was athletic and energetic and always happy to volunteer for whatever the army needed done. And he was an adrenaline junkie. His favorite sports were the ones that could kill you, like rock climbing and skydiving. Born in South Africa,

he'd moved to England in 2000, leaving behind a girlfriend and two children, and worked odd jobs in pubs and whatnot for a while. He met a woman named Carly, and they got married, and over the next eight years, they had two kids together. And then, seemingly out of the blue one day, Emil decided to join the British Army.

He'd initially wanted to join the SAS, the Special Air Service, an elite regiment that specializes in counterterrorism, hostage situations, dramatic rescues, and the like, but he didn't. He signed up for training as a physical performance specialist instead. Aw, didn't think you could hack it in the SAS, hon. I agree. Sounds way too cool for you. Eventually he rose through the ranks as sergeant in the Royal Army Physical Training Corps and joined the Army Ski Team. In the winter of 2009, Emile hurt his knee really badly while skiing, and that was how he met Victoria. She became his physical therapist, and part of that job is to create a rapport with your patients.

In her book, Victoria talks about how she wasn't attracted to Emil at first. He was kind of a sullen, apathetic patient, and it took her a while to draw him out and get him to commit. to his physical therapy. But eventually they developed a friendship, and within a few months they were dating. It just so happened that Emile and Carly were having problems in their marriage around this time. They separated, and just like that, Amil moved Victoria into Carly's spot as his main squeeze. Victoria couldn't help but notice how he talked about his axe. Carly was lazy. She refused to get a job. He'd never really loved her. He just stayed with her as long as he did because he wanted to do right by his kids. He made it sound like Carly had baby trapped him. In hindsight, Victoria

sees this as a huge red flag, but this time she missed it. They were in the honeymoon phase of their new relationship, and Emile was love bombing the ever-loving shit out of her. And I think the first time you see something like this, it can make you feel special. Like, oh, I'm the special one. She was crazy. And after you see it, you're like, oh, wait, no, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's sucks. Yeah, if he talks about his ex like that, chances are he's going to talk about you like that someday. Yeah. She said he made her feel like the center of his universe. Victoria had been married once before and her ex-husband was the polar opposite. He was always working and he held her at arm's length. So it felt good to have a guy devote all his attention

to her. Emile seemed like a great guy. Victoria admired his energy and ambition, how he always followed through on his goals. He was like her in that respect, but there were some important things she wouldn't find out about him until later. Like the fact that he had two children from a girlfriend he had before Carly in South Africa, two kids he never saw, even though the kid's mom had moved to the UK and they now lived close by, and the fact that he was a train wreck with money and obsessed with casual sex. But for now it was all green drops on roses and whiskers on her.

kittens. Victoria and Emile were both sporty, active people, and they went on rock climbing and hiking adventures together, stuff like that. They had a lot of fun. In 2011, they got married in South Africa, so his family could all be there. In a couple of years into their marriage, they had a baby girl. Amil seemed like a model dad, proud as a peacock of his new little girl. The first trouble showed up in the mail as Victoria started getting past due notices on bills. Yo. A meal was a big spender. He liked fancy cars, expensive clothes, vacations, fine dining.

I guess that's what passed for meaning in his life. Pair those expensive tastes with a psychopath's impulsivity and inability to delay gratification. And you've got a recipe for mountains of debt. Even though he made good money in the army, a sergeant PTI makes about 40 to 45 grand a year in pounds, which is about 50,000. 55-60 grand U.S., Emil was deep in financial shit. And Victoria had had to bail him out countless times, even though he made more money than she did. Often these bailouts happened without her knowledge or consent. Emil had straight up stolen 6,000 pounds of her, and she'd loaned him almost 20,000 more,

which he pinky promise to pay back. Sometime, you know, when he gets around to it. Right. He'd stolen one of her credit cards too and lied to her about it. Several times, he explained away his blatant thefts from Victoria by telling her the account got hacked. Sure, Jan. Seems to happen to you a lot. Did you piss off anonymous or something? Fucking moron. When Victoria filed a fraud claim with the bank, they were able to track down the IP address used for the transfer,

and surprise, surprise, it was Emil and Victoria's home computer. Victoria stressed out a lot about his debts. She was drowning, trying to work hard enough to pay everything off while he spent his own money on God knows what. In addition to her physical therapy work, she made extra money as a skydiving instructor at a local airfield. Once, a debt collector from a payday loan company showed up at their house while she was home alone with the kids and it really freaked her out. When the guy left, she called Emil, who just said, who cares? They can't do anything to us. okay payday loans y'all i absolutely cannot now don't get me wrong this isn't to shade anybody who's used those payday loan places in times of need okay sometimes you got to do what you

got to do but the interest rates on those loans are insane like insane insane insane like 300 400 percent sometimes it should be illegal yeah and if you can't pay your loan off right away, you can easily get yourself into a position where you are never going to dig yourself out of that hole ever. I mean, just think about it. That percentage of interest, that's like, you're screwed. So, Emile using them just for fun stuff, like fancy dinners and trips is bananas. And as if all this theft and overspending was not enough, Victoria was starting to realize that there was another storm on the horizon. The first sign was something she would never have seen coming in a million years. She and Emil had hired her.

one of their friends' 16-year-old daughter to babysit for them a few times, and one day the mom called Victoria and said that this was going to be awkward to talk about, but they had a problem. Emil had been sending some really inappropriate text to her daughter. Stuff like, do you have a boyfriend, and you looked really nice today? Y'all, imagine how humiliating this would be for your friend to have to call you up because your creepo husband is harassing her 16-year-old daughter, Just, ugh. And when Victoria tried to talk to him about it, Emil gas littered just like he had about the money stuff. My phone must have been cloned, he said.

I'd never send messages like that. How could you possibly think that about me? Uh-huh. Cloned, really? Now, we can sit here as bystanders and think, girl, come on, get the hell out of there. But Victoria was a new mom, in love with a husband who, for the most part, had been Prince Charming so far. He was a loving dad to their little girl. He was always doing little sweet things for her like cooking special dinners.

She really did not want to believe that he would creep on a teenage girl. It just didn't seem to fit with the man she knew. So she let herself be persuaded. You have to remember that with abusive relationships, there are big, big highs and big, big lows. A lot of the time, Emil acted like a great husband, so when stuff like this popped up, Victoria could convince herself it was an anomaly. But that confidence didn't last long. Soon, she started to get a sinking feeling that Emil might be cheating on her. For one thing, he was always on his phone, and if she picked it up or tried to look at it, he'd snatch it away quick as lightning. That's always a red flag, right? He was very secretive in general. He seemed to resent her questioning him in any way about anything. And then one day, an email came in for Emil on their family computer, and Victoria just happened to glitory.

glance over at the subject line, and it was from a sex club. Emile tried to hand her some wadda bullshit about it, like, oh, that's just spam, but it wasn't. Like, it was obviously like, hello Emil member of the sex club, you know? Hello, gold member, Emil. Yeah, he was definitely like in the platinum club and the sex club. Oh, and it got worse. There were other emails too, like one from a woman who wrote, I had a great time tonight. Yeah, me too, Emile wrote back. It's just as well there was that security camera in the car park. Otherwise, who knows what would have happened.

Ew. Like, I don't know whether that's like rapy or just an indication that he likes to have parking lot sex, but, ew. What was his answer to this one, you might ask? My account got hacked. Emil, buddy, really? He has one move. You gotta give it to him. Another time, she found a receipt in his pants pocket while she was doing laundry. It was from a nice restaurant and showed the bill for a dinner for two. The other person had ordered a salad and a white wine.

Not to be stereotypical, but it felt like something a woman would get. That's okay. I'm sure the receipt just got hacked something. Well, definitely, definitely for sure. Victoria's previous husband had had a couple of affairs, and it traumatized her as it would anybody. And like any good narcissist, Emil used that to maximum advantage, scoffing at her for thinking he was cheating, calling her too emotional, too emotional, says the man baby who threw a tantrum when she asked him a simple question about their joint bank account. I know, right? Victoria may have been emotional at the prospect that her husband was cheating, but her suspicions most definitely didn't come out of nowhere.

Classic narcissist playbook, right? Oh, yeah. Emile had once been loving and attentive. Now he was increasingly cold and aloof. He lied to her a lot, like when she found cigarette ash in her car after he'd borrowed it and she asked him not to smoke in there. I wasn't smoking, he said. and he was always so offended that she dared to question him. He'd sulk like a toddler for days, punishing her for like having the audacity to like question him or be upset with him.

How emotional of him. Right? Like this is total like Darvo, deny, argue, reverse. Yeah, reverse victim and offender. Like to a T every single time. Absolutely. In Toronto, every arrival is a statement and nothing says it better than this. Cadillac Optic was the number one selling luxury EV in Canada for 2025.

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to get out of the house for a few days. He'd volunteer for extra work, sign up for trips with his various sports teams. One time, he won on a trip to a skydiving competition, and Victoria saw pictures of him on Facebook, obviously drunk and looking awfully cozy with another woman. Great. When a Tinder match came up on his phone one night, and Victoria confronted him about it, Emile pulled his usual bullshit. My friend signed me up for that as a joke.

you don't trust me. How can we have a marriage when you don't trust me? Hey, at least he's got another line, you know. He's got two now. Yeah. Technically, I do feel like that's like a subset of the hacking. Like my friend hacked my phone and signed up for Tinder on my phone. Like, your friend signed you up for Tinder on your phone and you didn't delete it.

Sure, whatever. And I know y'all are like banging on the windows and yelling at your phones right now. But like a lot of people in these types of relationships, Victoria fell under the spell of all that gaslighting in denial. She'd get a bad feeling about something, but most of the time she'd stop short of confronting him about it. It just wasn't worth the tantrum he would throw. Or the days of cold silence he'd put her through afterward.

Like it was like in her head, the peace was the reward. So he had made it so uncomfortable to live with him. Yeah, absolutely. being mad. And you have to remember, too, that for a lot of the time that the worst of this was going on, she was a new mom, she was postpartum, some of it she was pregnant, like heavily pregnant. And she was working her ass off to try to support him and his freaking spending addiction. So, you know, I mean, she wasn't necessarily getting enough sleep or in the right state of mind to really think this stuff through. And he took full advantage of that. And probably not financially stable enough to leave him because. She was trying to dig him out. Like, psychopaths are good at this shit. We have to remember he was creating these circumstances for her to be trapped. This is what he was doing.

And he was doing it to some extent on purpose. Sometime around 2013, despite the red flags flapping in the breeze, Victoria and Emile started trying for another baby. But after a lot of trying, they weren't having any luck. So Victoria decided to see a fertility doctor. and as part of the treatment, the doctor sent her home with a little cup for a meal to, you know, deposit a sample in for testing. Amil was with a different health care network than Victoria was, so the fertility doctor said he could just get his sample tested with his doctor and have the results sent over. Amil told her he'd get it done, and when she asked about it a while later, he told her his results had been totally normal.

Well, she said, my doctor needs you to give me something in writing from yours so we can move forward with the treatment. I don't have anything, the meal said. He swore up and down if they hadn't given him any paperwork and there was no way he could get any. Sure, bud, makes perfect sense. He should have just gone ahead and gotten it done because, you know, if there was anything wrong, he could have just said his balls got hacked. You know, it's perfectly believable. God, you're right. Because, you know, his issue with it was, it can't be me. I can't be my problem. God forbid.

It was a sack hack. It was a hashtag sack hack. Actually, campers make that a thing. Good on the internet right now. Hashtag sack hack. So, you know, Victoria was suspicious, but then a few days later, boom, she was late for her period. She'd gotten pregnant anyway, even before she'd started any fertility treatments. She was over the moon about it, of course, but Emil seemed weirdly detached. A few days after she got her positive pregnancy test, Victoria was looking for something in their car when she opened the glove box and out came the sample container from the fertility clinic. He'd never even turned in a sample. She thought about confronting him about it, but she figured, well, I'm pregnant anyway now. Is it worth the fight? Now, I know you're not asking me, Victoria of the past, but yes. Yes, it's worth the fight. I know you

know that now, but like, yes. In November of 2014, with Victoria's six months pregnant with their second child, Emil went on a trip to Austria with the Army ski team. Hey, why not, right? It's not like his wife needed him or anything. And this is twice as gross as you think it is, too, because Victoria had a really difficult, scary time with her first pregnancy, but who cares, right? I'm sure she'll be fine. Emile's first priority was his ski trip. And it was there against her. It was there against the romantic backdrop of mountains and snow and hot toddies by the fire that he met Stephanie Guller. And when I say met, what I mean is he went on Tinder and matched with her and they went on a date. God, this guy sucks. Stephanie was attracted to Emil, but she told him she wasn't about to be

involved with a married guy. Emil told her he understood that, but yeah, it was complicated, you see, his wife was horrible. She'd had an affair on him, gotten pregnant by the guy. So they were technically still married, yes, but they'd been separated for months. A divorce was coming down the pike soon. Despite this being a line older than those prehistoric cave paintings in France, Stephanie believed he was sincere. One night during that Austria trip, Emil texted Victoria. I need to decide whether I want to be in this marriage. I think we may have got married too soon. Victoria was gutted. She cried so hard she was afraid she might hurt the baby, which just breaks my heart. That was the saddest scene in the book, like, oh, it's just so sad.

In the months after the Austria trip, Emil and Stephanie saw each other as often as possible. Emil went back to Austria to visit her. He spent New Year's with her in Berlin while Victoria went to a friend's party, alone and depressed. They met up in Prague for a long weekend. Emil was smitten. He told Stephanie he'd do anything to be with her, that she was everything he needed. But he was worried about how his wife would react if she'd. found out he was already seeing another woman.

She could damage his career, he told Stephanie. My marriage was a stupid mistake, he texted her in January. I regret it every day, and I'm going to get out of it soon. In another text, he asked, Can I be your Mr. Gray? Ugh. As in Christian Gray from 50 Shades. Yeah, take a moment to vomit, if you need to.

Emil often spent the night at his army barracks. His excuse to Victoria was that the comedian, it was a pain in the ass. It was 45 minutes, BFD. But of course, this left him free to do whatever he wanted for the night without his wife knowing. And in February of 2015, the week of Valentine's Day, Stephanie came and visited him there, stayed for a week. And Victoria had no idea. The very next week, she gave birth to their son. Instead of reveling in his new baby, Emil focused on staying in touch with Stephanie, telling her over and over how much he loved her. how she was the one he wanted.

This is what this prick was doing while his wife was in labor. Like he was in the room texting his mistress. This man needs a date with the woodchipper. At some point in here, the lovebirds must have had a conversation about a meal not being free to be spontaneous

with Stephanie because one of the text messages investigators uncovered from around this time said, from April onwards, I'll be able to do random and spontaneous. Remember what month this episode began in. Was it April? Yes, yes, it was. Seems like our guy already had a plan. Why do these dork-ass losers always give their mistresses their murder timeline?

Like, this is, this is like the 80th episode we've done like this, where the guys like, don't worry, baby, on April 30th of next year, after that date, we'll be together. And then he doesn't think that she's going to maybe look at that a little bit of scantz when she sees that his wife just die. Like, really? I'm assuming, I'm assuming maybe in his head she'll think it's romantic. But first of all, okay. Yeah. No judgment to Stephanie, maybe a little judgment to Stephanie.

This man has six kids. This man has six kids and has left every single one of their mothers. That is the red flag. I can't judge Victoria because she didn't know about two of them. But this woman knows about four of them at least. I don't know if she did or not. I mean, it's not clear. I mean, maybe, but, you know, he lies every time he opens his mouth.

God, I just, lady, if he has a fresh new, brand new baby and he's talking to you, fucking run. But see, he told her that the baby wasn't his. because he told her that Victoria cheated on him, remember? Yeah, you're right. I just, I don't know. I guess I'm just, I'm running on the, the mentality of everything he says is a lie. So I'm just like, why is she believing of anything?

If he's, if he's still at the house with his wife, why is he at the house with his wife? If she's a cheating, if she's a cheating woman that made him a cuck in his own home and is bearing another man's baby, why is he still there? Yep, absolutely. Put his feet to the fighter, Stephanie. Now, the most amazing thing about all this is that his infidelity was not limited to his new squeeze Stephanie. Emile was also sleeping with his ex-wife Carly. And he hired sex workers like it was his second job. He didn't use condoms with the sex workers either.

He'd text him stuff like fancy some bearback fun. No, Emil, I fancy street. strapping you onto a trebice and launching you into the sea. Gross. That's like asking a lifeguard if they're down for some skinny dipping fun. Fun for you, a nightmare for them. So at this point, this champs banging his ex-wife Carly, his girlfriend, Stephanie, his wife, and a seemingly endless parade of sex workers and kinky folks from the Swingers Club he liked to visit, which we watched this one documentary about the case where they went to that swingers club to interview the staff about a meal and y'all all i could think about was what it would look like if somebody hit

the switch on a black light in there it looked well warm oh yeah like you hear sex club right and you probably think like either like a dungeon or some like sleek eyes wide shut kind of joint oh no this place was grim as hell there was cracks in the leather I just can't. Oh, yeah. And he's not even cute, y'all. It's just ridiculous. If you want to see just how not cute he is,

look up his YouTube channel. It's just Emil Siliers. Lots of videos of him butchering various early 2000s pop songs on the guitar. It is cringe as hell. And after all, you're my wonder. Shut the fuck up. I saw a post that was like, the average American can't understand the British connection to Wonderwall.

And I was like, maybe not, because I think that song's annoying. Like, but maybe they should listen to Meal Cilliers listen to it or sing it, butcher it. Also, who the hell has time for this? Who has the energy? We've said it before. narcissism must be like meth because these people are always like this. Just flitting over here and flitting over there. Like little psychopath hummingbirds.

It's wild. How are there enough hours in the day for him? I don't know. I really, that's the most amazing thing to me about these stories, about these like serial cheaters. How do you have the energy? Like, he's maintaining like 16 different relationships and he has a job. And he has hobbies. Yeah.

And he has six kids. Yeah, he's on like three or four sports teams and shit. Like I, and he must have slept like half an hour a night or something. I don't know. I don't know. We mentioned a plan. Emile's fevered little brain was firing on all cylinders, trying to think of how he could get rid of his wife.

In addition to all the extracurricular love in he was getting, he was, of course, still in mountains and mountains of debt. That meant he had two big problems. And if Victoria wasn't around anymore, it could solve them both. They had life insurance on each other. If Victoria died, he'd get a payout of 120,000 pounds. It's not a lot, really, but we've seen people kill for less. Oh, yeah.

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The whole family can listen now, wherever you get your podcasts. One morning, while Emile was at work, Victoria was going about her morning routine when she smelled gas. She went to check the kitchen valve, and there was a little bit of blood around it. What the hell? She dialed Amel's number. The gas valve is messed up, she said. Amel suggested she turned on one of the oven burners. Uh-huh.

Oh. Fortunately, for herself and her two children, Victoria knew better than to do that. Are you trying to kill me, she said? She was joking, but remember what we've said about dark humor. Sometimes jokes like that are prophetic, a way for a scary thought to find voice. Emile didn't find it funny. He went off on her. Why would you say that?

How could you ever think that? Blah, blah, blah. Oh. Victoria really had been kidding, but his reaction took her back. When she hung up with him, she called the gas company and they sent over a repair guy. The bolt had come loose, he told her. Should be fine now that he'd tightened it. Victoria looked at the little swipe of blood around the bolt and remembered how Emil had cut his finger a couple days prior.

Oh, my God. But as we tend to do when things like this happened, she put it out of her mind. She'd just had a baby. she had a toddler too. She was sleep deprived and run off her feet. And the kids were there for this. Oh my God. Over the next week or two, Emil seemed to turn over a new leaf.

He was much nicer to her, much more helpful and attentive. And one afternoon, he made a suggestion that made Victoria feel like maybe they were heading into a happier time in their marriage. He wanted them to go skydiving together, like they used to when they first got married. He'd find somebody to watch the kids for an hour or so, and they'd go have some fun together for a change. She was just thrilled. But on the day they planned to jump, Emile suddenly announced that the babysitter had fallen through. He'd have to look after the kids himself, but she should still jump. She needed to do something just for her anyway.

We'll bring the kids, he said, and we can all watch you jump. Now, I want y'all to remember this. He wanted to watch this, and he wanted his children to watch. When they got to the airfield, Victoria realized her own parachute had an expired part in there that had to be replaced before it would be okay to use, so she rented a parachute. Well, Emil rented one for her. At one point, he took their toddler daughter to the bathroom, and he was gone for a bizarrely long time. When he came back with the rented parachute slung over his shoulder, he had no explanation for why he'd been in the bathroom so long. The weather was bad that day, and after all that, the airfield management announced that they wouldn't be doing any flights for the rest of the day.

Victoria later said she felt a strange mix of disappointment and relief, but Emile told her, come back and jump tomorrow. We can just put this rental parachute in your locker. Sure, sure, she said, let's just go home for now. The next morning, Victoria went back to the airfield. She loved skydiving for years, but today she just felt this awful sense of dread. read. She did not want to jump. But when she texted Emil and told him she might just come home, he encouraged her to go ahead and do the jump. You just need to get back in the swing of it. You'll

have a great time. Come on. So with every instinct in her body screaming at her not to do this, Victoria gritted her teeth, got her rental parachute on, and boarded the plane. Emile hadn't left anything to chance. He'd disabled both of the parachutes in the rig the day before, the main one and the auxiliary. He knew how to do this because, you know, he was a skydiver too, and he'd worked for a while packing parachutes for extra cash. He removed these little connectors called slinks, crucial parts that attach the canopy lines to the harness. And we already know what happened next. Victoria quickly realized there was something wrong with the main shoot, tried to deploy the extra one and plummeted to the ground at full speed. If you can't manage to

find anything lucky in this story, it's the fact that she just happened to land in a freshly plowed field where the ground was soft enough to absorb some of the force of her fall. Her slight build helped too. A fall that would have killed most people hadn't killed her. When the witnesses reached the spot where Victoria had landed, they were shocked to find her still alive. Medical help arrived quickly in the form of a helicopter, she was airlifted to the nearest trauma center and rushed into surgery. The fall had broken her pelvis. several vertebrae and most of her ribs on the right side. It collapsed her right lung, damaged her bladder,

and for the first few days in the hospital, the doctors were afraid it had damaged her spinal cord as well. Fortunately, that wasn't the case. But she was in excruciating pain all over her body, and when she came to in the ICU, Emile was there, just kind of staring at her. He seemed annoyed. We've been waiting here for hours, he said.

Sorry. Over the next couple weeks, Victoria's family and friends visited every day. Guess who didn't? Emile's absence was so conspicuous that people commented on it. Like, if my wife was going through this, I wouldn't leave her side. You know, people were actually saying stuff to her, which was embarrassing for her. Victoria just had to lie in her ICU bed, bored and lonely and missing her babies and mortified, that her husband didn't seem to give a shit.

The only time he bothered to hang out with her in her room was the day the hospital psychologist came to talk to her. Hmm. Didn't want her spilling any marital secrets, huh, asshole? Victoria was in the hospital for three weeks, a testament to what an absolute badass she is since doctors originally told her she'd be there for months. Back home, still recovering, she was over the moon to be back with her children.

But a meal was still acting weird and detached. And then Victoria's whole world, got turned upside down. The instructors at the airfield had been baffled by the accident, and they'd gotten hold of her parachute and launched an investigation, and what they found made their blood run cold.

It looked very much like somebody had sabotaged the shoot on purpose. They contacted the police, and it didn't take long for a meal to be arrested on suspicion of attempted murder. After a while, the Crown prosecutor added a second count of attempted murder for the gas leak, which they considered his first attempt on Victoria's life.

Absolutely, it was. In her book, Victoria Chronicles the absolute hell she went through over the next few years, as prosecutors prepared for Emile's trial. He was out in the meantime, but prevented by court order from coming anywhere near her. She was raising two little kids by herself, and still very much recovering from her injuries. And as the media picked up on her story, Victoria's life got even harder. Some of her old friends sold stories to the tabloids about her. Yeah, can you freaking imagine? Like, what an absolute betrayal sold the stories. Like, oh, gross.

Yeah, what the fuck is wrong with people? Ugh. And because she didn't come out and say she thought Amil was guilty, because she argued with the prosecution about a few of the details of the case, people assumed she was standing by her man. People were rough with this woman. She was a moron. She was a simp, a disgusting liar for trying to defend him at his trial and on. and on. People sent her nasty letters in the mail, which is just so much effort. That's so crazy to me. I can't even muster the effort to leave a nasty comment on like a video that I hate. I'm like, yeah, whatever. It's fine. I can see where the bafflement came from. I mean, I remember when this happened and I remember thinking, oh my God, this poor woman actually thinks he's innocent. Yeah. I felt pity mostly. But there was a lot. is maybe a little bit of judgment in there, too. But her book does a good job of explaining why it

took her so long to realize Amil really had tried to kill her. Up until the trial, she'd had suspicions about Emile's infidelity. I mean, she knew he'd cheated on her, but she had no idea the extent of it until she watched his trial. She didn't know he'd been making plans to move in with Stephanie. She didn't know he'd told her he wasn't their baby son's father. She didn't know about Carly. She didn't know about all the sex workers. And she didn't know about how bad his financial debts were either. People need time to process this kind of stuff. It's easy for us to sit here and armchair quarterback her like, oh, I'd never stick up for him or whatever. The fact is, you don't know that unless you've been there. Victoria had been through just

monstrous amounts of trauma. And on top of that, she was raising her kids as a single mom and having to deal with the heartbreak of losing her husband. I mean, what do you want from her? She needed time. Of course she did. And I hate that people made her feel like crap for not just immediately getting on board with the idea that this man that she had loved for years had tried to murder her twice. And the first time, with the gas league, he tried to kill the kids, too. And he'd always given every indication of being a loving dad. So she needed a minute, you know, she gets it now. And it really wasn't that she was standing by her man in the time leading up to his child. That was a misperception. She definitely was not. She just needed to put all the facts together in her head, separate the

truth from the tabloids, see the evidence laid out in all its entirety, and realize what a liar and manipulator he'd always been from the day she met him. By the time Emile was convicted and He got a minimum of 18 years in prison, and the judge roasted him to ashes. It was awesome. You can read his statement online. By that time, Victoria got it. I have nothing but sympathy for this woman, and I hope she and her kids are making a wonderful life without this pathetic streak of filth that almost took him out of this world. And I wonder at the end of the day, what makes somebody like Emil get married? I mean, nobody's forcing you, dude. You know, you don't have to marry anybody ever if you don't want to. So why did he do it? twice. I'd be interested to hear y'all's thoughts about that on our socials. Like, do you think there was a

time when he thought he loved Victoria and he married her in sincerity? Or do you think she was just a useful tool for him? Somebody to bear his children and take care of him while he ran around and did whatever he felt like. What's the saying, a nurse in a purse? If that was the case, then she was just as mundane to him as a reliable car, just something to maintain so it can keep providing the service you got it for until you get tired of it and want to trade it in. Could she have just been cover for him? Part of the convincing mask that many psychopaths wear so well? I don't know, but I feel pretty sure that Emil is incapable of real love. People will say about a man like him, he doesn't love anybody but himself, but I don't think he even loves himself. He feels to me like

a desperate man, constantly running from something just deep, deep inside himself, something that scares him to death, like Dorian Gray. Shame, probably. Insecurity. His whole life was about overcompensation. So why Victoria? Why do pick her? Well, for one thing, she's a good person and giving and selfish pricks love those, but also narcissists will often pick exceptional people as partners, people who are really good-looking or athletic or financially successful, because that's currency for them. You know, this person's impressive, They're with me, so that makes me look good. At first, the narcissist may lavish this person with attention and affection, but at some point, the novelty is going to wear off, and thus begins the next step in the cycle of narcissistic

abuse, devaluation. You go from the center of their universe to the gum on the bottom of their shoe. And then, oftentimes, the cycle begins again. Apologies, love bombing, promises to do better. Victoria got to experience this firsthand after Emil went to prison. This man had the nerve to write her letter after letter after letter, begging her to come visit him in prison, asking if she was going to stay in the marriage.

You're all I have left, he wrote to her. Yeah, take a second to yell whatever you need to yell. I'm right there with you. You're all I have. Are you kidding me? And there's nothing more infuriating to a narcissist than having the person they've worked so hard to break down, finally stand up and see them for what they are. Finally say, no more. You are irrelevant to me.

That hits them harder than anything else in this world can. And I'm happy to say that Victoria got there in the end. She stopped responding to his letters, stopped answering his calls, stopped trying to get answers out of him, because she finally realized he was never going to tell her the truth. She moved on with her life without him. And as for Emil, well, he's still sitting in prison. a pale shell of the charmer he used to be, alone with his lies. Now, before we go, don't forget about our two amazing live shows coming up. First, we've got Summer Camp, September 10th through 13th, an amazing four-day festival in Equinunk, Pennsylvania,

hosted by Dan and Lindsay Cummins of Time Suck and Scared to Death. We'll be performing live alongside them and the podcast, Astonishing Legends, in addition to a roster of awesome stand-up comedians and local bands. Go to Badmagicproductions.com for more info and to buy tickets. Then we've got our True Crime Cruise, Crime Wave 2.0, February 8th through 12, 27. If you want to come to the Bahamas with us and some of the biggest true crime and paranormal podcasts in the world, like case file, sinisterhood, true crime garage, and scared to death,

here's what you got to do. Tickets are on sale now, but they're 90% sold out at this point. So if you want to go, make sure you get over to CrimeWave at C.com. slash campfire and book your cabin. You'll get $100 off plus a private meet and greet with us. The great thing is you can pay all at once or you can pay it off over time. So get on it, y'all. That's crimewave at sea.com slash campfire. So that was a wild one, right campers? You know, we'll have another one for you next week. But for now, lock your doors, light your lights, and stay safe until we get together again around the true crime campfire. And as always,

we want to send a grateful shout out to a few of our lovely Patreon supporters. Thank you so much to Lichenlord, Claire, Jinxie, Rebecca, and Berta. We appreciate y'all to the moon and back. And if you're not yet a patron, you're missing out. Patrons of our show get every episode ad-free, at least a day early, sometimes more, plus tons of extra content, like patrons-only episodes and hilarious post-show discussions. And when you join the $5 and up categories, you get even more cool stuff. A free sticker, a rad enamel pin or fridge magnet while supplies last virtual events with Katie and me,

and we're always looking for new stuff to do for you. So if you can, come join us at patreon.com slash true crime campfire. Do you ever watch a TV show set in a historical time period and think, how accurate is this really? But also, does it matter if it's accurate or not? Nefer TV is a new podcast about shows set in ancient times. This season, we're recapping. every episode of the show, Spartacus,

Blood and Sand. I'm Anne Foster, and I have never seen this show before. And I'm Gina Barry, and I have watched this show maybe too many times. Join us every other Monday on the Nefer TV podcast as we discuss the real history behind Spartacus, Blood, and Sand.

Follow Nefert TV. That's N-E-F-E-R-T-V, wherever you get your podcasts. The world of Sonic the Hedgehog has been thrust into a not-so-dark, not-so-stormy, hard-boiled detective story that probably nobody saw coming. Follow Sonic and the Intrepid Chaotic's Detective Agency as they take on their biggest case yet. This high-flying action-packed adventure will take them across the world, fighting for every

clothing they can fight. It's one heck of a tale, which is good, because this story might be. Be the only thing that can save their lives. Well, if that's all, I can just dispose of you. Wait, what? All will be revealed in. Sonic the Hedgehog presents the Chaotics Case Files. Listen now, wherever you get your podcasts.

When the Chaotics are on the case.