The Fall: Skydive Murder Plot — the gripping account of a bizarre attempt at murder by parachute (2024)

When done well, as they were in the BBC’s superb D-Day: The Unheard Tapes, they can enhance an already powerful story.

When done badly — think of all those Ancient Rome documentaries full of cheap, ugly-looking CGI backdrops and wooden acting — they’re an irritant.

There’s an element of both about the dramatised reconstructions in three-part docudrama The Fall: Skydive Murder Plot (Channel 4, Tuesday to Thursday, June 11 to 13; all episodes streaming on channel4.com).

In an unusual move for the true-crime genre, the producers have brought in a famous name, MyAnna Buring from Ripper Street and The Witcher, to portray Victoria Celliers, an English woman who became the victim of a singularly bizarre murder attempt.

Inevitably, Buring’s presence proves something of a distraction, although nowhere near as much of one as the peculiarly arty-farty way the series blends documentary and drama.

Rather than simply flipping between talking-head interviews and dramatised scenes, which is the norm in this kind of series, it breaks down the barrier between the two.

We see the actors walking onto the sets and getting into character. We hear the director shouting “Action!” and watch him explaining to Buring what kind of shot it’s going to be and how he wants her to react.

At one point, the real detectives who led the investigation, DI Paul Franklin and DC Maddy Hennah, are shown watching the actors who play them shooting a scene recreating their first interview with Victoria Celliers.

This needlessly fussy handling adds nothing, yet the story is so outlandish that The Fall: Skydive Murder Plot still makes for compelling viewing.

On Easter Sunday in 2015, Victoria Celliers, a highly experienced skydiver, jumped from a plane at 4,000 feet. The jump had been organised as an Easter treat by her husband, Emile, an army sergeant.

Both her main and reserve parachutes failed to open. She spiralled off course and plummeted to the ground.

Parachute club secretary Rob Camps felt certain she must be dead, as did the emergency services, who arrived at the scene with a body bag.

Had Victoria hit a nearby tarmac road instead of landing on grass at the Netheravon Airfield in Wiltshire, she surely wouldn’t have survived.

Instead, she broke her leg, collarbone, ribs and pelvis, and also incurred some internal injuries — serious and excruciatingly painful, but not life-threatening.

Within 24 hours, experts who examined the parachute declared there had been no equipment failure. The parachute had been tampered with.

Only another parachutist would have known how to sabotage it.

Other than Victoria, the only person who had handled the parachute before the jump was Emile, who’d carried it with him when taking their child to use the bathroom.

Two weeks later, police received a call from a doctor friend of Victoria’s, who told them that the Celliers’ outwardly happy marriage was in trouble, and that Emile treated Victoria appallingly. She added that they “should be suspicious”.

Emile was arrested on suspicion of attempted murder and interviewed by Franklin and Hennah for six hours. He never once requested a solicitor.

He revealed he wanted out of the marriage and was in a relationship with a woman called Stephanie, a skiing instructor he’d met on holiday. He denied tampering with the parachute.

In texts Emile had sent to Stephanie, he claimed Victoria had had an affair and that their second child was not his. “There were red flags all over the place,” says DI Franklin.

But red flags aren’t evidence. There were no witnesses, no CCTV footage, no forensics. The turning point came when Victoria, who Franklin recalled howled with anguish when told what Emile had said, opened up and told the detectives there’d been a gas leak at their home a week before she made the fateful jump.

The real Victoria finally appears at the end of episode one.

The remaining two unspool a tale of debt, deceit, multiple marital infidelities and seedy sex clubs. Tricksiness aside, it’s thoroughly riveting stuff.

​Parts two and three of ‘The Fall: Skydive Murder Plot’ air on Channel 4 on Wednesday, June 12 and Thursday, June 13 at 9pm