But all of these shocking revelations were still to come as Victoria lay in hospital recovering from her horrific accident.After two weeks, she was finally well enough to go home.When, in 2006, her daughter asked if she could meet her father, she contacted him.By then he was living in Larkhill, Wiltshire, having joined the British Army. Four weeks in, Cilliers was at work when the mobile he’d left behind by mistake rang and Nicolene answered. "I said I understood she and Emile were separated, and of course she put me right," said Nicolene.

That day and night I cried." Less than four years previously Cilliers had declared his love for her at a romantic seaside wedding in South Africa.Cilliers responded immediately - claiming he was divorcing and had married to solve a visa problem. According to Nicolene, the women decided to confront Cilliers at his marital home."His jaw hit the floor," Nicolene recalled in an interview with The Mail on Sunday."I have photographed many weddings but I remember this couple," photographer Alison Cole would recall."He was so happy to be marrying her." That day marked the start of a saga that culminated in one of the most extraordinary criminal trials of recent times.Back home in the UK they had two children together, the youngest just weeks old when Victoria jumped from that aircraft.And yet Cilliers could not even bring himself to tell his broken wife he loved her. Cilliers, a serial love cheat with a penchant for prostitutes and sex clubs, wanted her dead.When he returned to South Africa in 2002 they resumed their relationship, and Nicolene was soon pregnant with their second child, Trevor.To her horror, Cilliers insisted on a paternity test for both children.London - Regaining consciousness having miraculously survived a 4,000ft fall (more than 1200 metres) after her parachute malfunctioned during a skydive, Victoria Cilliers opened her eyes to see her husband Emile beside her hospital bed. "His bosses gave him immediate compassionate leave," Victoria would recall of the events after her skydive on April 5, 2015. He will remain in custody until his sentencing on June 15. In the coming days as she recovered from a broken pelvis, broken ribs and fractured vertebrae, his visits would be infrequent. "When he came in, he did not really seem interested. One day he brought in the insurance paperwork and said to me, ‘You should sign this because we need to get the ball rolling [on a personal injury claim].’ I remember thinking, ‘It’s a little harsh, when I am lying here.’ ” But he was far worse than just a neglectful husband - in fact, it was SA-born Cilliers who had tampered with her parachute to make it fail, and on Thursday he was found guilty of two counts of attempted murder in a bid to claim her £120,000 life insurance, following a retrial at Winchester Crown Court.Three years on, he proposed with his grandmother’s diamond ring.They never actually married, and by the time daughter Cilene was born in June 2000, Cilliers was in the UK, supporting himself with farm and bar work in Oxfordshire."I thought he and I were still very much together," she would recall."I had not been unfaithful to him, but clearly he was using his own standards to judge mine." Despite this, Nicolene hoped to join Cilliers in the UK.