My guilty pleasure is that I love reality TV. Yes, I will admit to being one of those people who love the drama. When they go low, I’m there with the popcorn. I’ve happily binged all The Real Housewives, The Bachelor, Come Dine With Me, The Great Pottery Throw Down, MasterChef, Survivor and many more. The only show I stayed away from is Keeping Up With The Kardashians. I thought it was the gateway drug to stupidity. I kinda, like, literally, still do.
I also lean towards true crime. I am obsessed: from TV doccies (Tiger King FTW!) to podcasts (S-Town is the best I’ve heard so far) to books. Give me a murder or mystery that actually happened and I am glued.
Lately, there have been a few books that have fed the monster under my bed. One of them is I Survived: I Married a Charming Man. Then He Tried to Kill Me. A True Story by Victoria Cilliers (Pan Macmillan). It’s a harrowing account, told by Victoria (Vicky), about how she was nearly killed by her husband, Emile (a South African), in 2015. Not only was Vicky a trained physiotherapist who served in the British Army and reached the rank of captain, she was also an experienced skydiver, a veteran of 2,500 jumps. But after her second baby she had doubts about continuing the extreme sport. Emile convinced her to try it one last time and that was when she nearly plunged to her death.
Vicky only realised when she was recovering from extensive injuries that police suspected her husband was to blame. Emile tampered with her parachute and its reserve.
Readers are taken through their relationship, how they met in a gym, how she fell in love with him, how he proposed to her at a cheetah sanctuary, how he started cheating on her, how he ran up thousands of pounds of debt, how he took money out of their joint account and how, through coercive control, he gaslit her into thinking her insecurity was the problem.
It was only three years later, during Emile’s sentencing in 2018, when the judge called him “a person of quite exceptional callousness who will stop at nothing to satisfy his own desires, material or otherwise”, that Vicky fully accepted he wanted to kill her.
She wanted to tell her story because “I hope by doing so I have better helped you to understand my life”. Vicky’s forthrightness, openness and vulnerability make this less schadenfreude and allow the reader to understand emotional abuse and its insidiousness.
Serial killers will always remain fascinating to most people, for many different reasons. There are two similar books on the subject that are must-reads for true-crime followers.
The first is The Killer Across the Table: Inside the Minds of Psychopaths and Predators by John E Douglas and Mark Olshaker.
They are the authors of Mindhunter, which has been adapted as a Netflix series. Douglas, a legendary FBI criminal profiler, shares the spine-chilling interviews he has had with four killers.
The second is by best-selling true-crime author Christopher Berry-Dee, Serial Killers: Dead Men Talking: Death Row’s Worst Killers — In Their Own Words. The writer also visits prisoners, six of them, and tells their grisly stories.
Both are best read in daylight. Watch The Bachelor at night.
