The Staircase Mystery: Unraveling the Death of Susann Sills

September 2, 2024

In this episode, Payton and Garrett explore the perplexing case of Susan Sills, a woman discovered lifeless at the base of her staircase under suspicious circumstances. Was it a tragic accident, or is there a darker truth lurking beneath the surface?

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AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

You're listening to an Oh No Media podcast.

Hey everybody, welcome back to the podcast! This is Murder With My Husband. I'm Payton Moreland.

And I'm Garrett Moreland.

And he's the husband.

And I'm the husband. Merch is still up! It'll be up for a few more days, then it'll be gone. Thank you guys so much! We know it seems like quite a bit has sold out, but thank you for supporting us.

What did I say? My favorite merch drop, honestly. I love it. I know you guys are going to love it. Thank you, thank you so much for supporting, and yeah, we know you guys will love this one!

Just a reminder, we do two bonus episodes a month. Ad-free content as well, on either Apple subscriptions, Spotify subscriptions, or Patreon. You can get that extra content. If not, thanks for being here. We appreciate it, and we love you. Thank you for supporting us and just listening!

All right, G, I think we are ready for your 10 seconds.

Well, I posted something a little controversial on my story. I feel like it got a little contentious, so sorry everybody! That's not what I'm here to talk about. Actually, I think what I'm here to talk about is—

Was that just like a mysterious plug for them to go follow your Instagram?

Yeah. Yep, that was pretty good though, huh?

Yeah, I mean, it's not going to be up by the time they hear this, but—

But you had no idea! Maybe something else controversial will be up. You had no idea. If you are watching on YouTube, if you look to my right, you will see how pretty Payton looks today.

Okay, thanks, thank you.

You're welcome! And if you look straight ahead at me, you'll see me not looking too pretty. That's okay!

But I will say that for my 10 seconds, I've been eating a lot of protein. I've been getting pretty serious about the gym. I don't want to hear it, okay? No one come at me, no one laugh at me.

You should take your shirt off.

I'm not taking my shirt off, okay? Everyone leave a comment: #TeamGarrettShirtOff. I'm starting to get some muscle. Feels good to see some progress, not gonna lie.

Looks good too!

But I have been pretty dedicated.

Looks good too, I just gotta add that in.

Anyways, what I was going to say is—

Thanks, babe.

What I was going to say next is, I've been eating a lot of protein, and I forgot that with eating a lot of protein, you also get a lot of gas. So yeah, it kinda sucks.

Let’s hop into today's case.

Our sources for this episode are NBCNews.com, CBSNews.com, WAVNBC.com, TheSun.com, TheDailyBeast.com, Distractify.com, SportsK.com, People.com, KTLA.com, and Oxygen.com.

Okay, so I think a lot about how stressful a job in the medical field must be. Like, we cover true crime cases, and while that's definitely important—to make sure you're being ethical and respectful and telling the story accurately—at the end of the day, I'm not doing surgery here, right? If I do something wrong, I take it on the chin. I'm not accountable for someone else's life. Which is why I think it takes a certain kind of person to become a doctor, to be able to trust themselves with someone else's life in their hands. That's gotta take a lot of guts, a lot of confidence.

Which may be why there's this psychological phenomenon that's said to happen to some doctors. It's happened to enough that it's a real thing. It doesn’t happen to all, just a few. And it's called a "God complex."

Sometimes it comes with a great sense of guilt when something goes wrong. But other times, it comes with this sense of superiority—like, if I can give life, I could also take it. This seemed to be the case with our perpetrator today: a fertility doctor who brought a lot of life into this world, but when things weren’t going his way, he also felt like he had the power to take life from the person he was supposed to love the most.

The problem was, despite how intelligent he might have been, a PhD in medicine does not help you get away with murder. It doesn't.

So, Susan’s story starts on July 30, 1971, in the city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, as one of four children. Growing up, Susan was an active kid—always witty, sarcastic, smart, and honestly, athletic. Like many little girls, she dedicated herself to ballet and gymnastics, which was probably a welcomed distraction when her parents decided to get divorced right before her teenage years.

Now, Susan's parents both went on to remarry, which meant new step-siblings were ushered into her life. Meanwhile, Susan moved with one of her parents down to Florida. But she didn’t miss a beat when it came to athletics and school. Growing up, she became a varsity cheerleader and was the vice president of her class when she graduated in 1989.

From there, Susan went on to study at George Mason University in Virginia. Then, in 2000, she graduated from the University of Miami with an MBA in International Studies.

It was during that period of her life that Susan met someone and fell in love, as is normal at that point in life. The two married and moved out to California. But when they decided to start a family, Susan had a hard time getting pregnant. This was a pretty devastating blow for her. Having kids was always something Susan pictured in her future, and not having them just didn’t feel like an option for her.

So, she began looking into fertility treatment, and she found herself setting up an appointment at the offices of Dr. Eric Scott Sills.

Now, Scott, as he went by, had grown up in a small town called Hermon in Tennessee. Those who knew him back in high school said they were certain he would be successful, even back then. They claimed there was something about Scott that was just special. His friends said it might have been his incredible sense of humor, the three-piece suits that he’d show up to school in, his flamboyant, larger-than-life personality, or the fact that Scott was an overly generous friend.

Scott's old buddy, Jamie Akin, said that growing up, his family had a hard time giving him lunch money, but Scott was always the one to pull out his wallet and buy Jamie a slice of pizza or a sandwich.

Scott fulfilled many of the expectations his friends had for him when he left high school. He had actually been accepted to both law and medical school, but as we know, Scott chose the latter. He received his bachelor’s degree in 1987 from Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, then went on to get an MD from the University of Tennessee in 1992, and a PhD from the University of Westminster in London.

At some point along the way, Scott realized he had an interest in becoming an OB-GYN. So, he became a resident in the OB-GYN department at NYU's Downtown Hospital in New York City.

Fun fact—when I was in 10th grade, I thought, "I kind of want to be an OB-GYN."

Why? It’s a genuine question.

I don’t know. I thought it’d be cool to deliver babies, to be honest. Then I quickly realized I needed to be a lot... I’m not going to say 'more smart,' because I consider myself smart, but I needed to be more disciplined. And a lot more book-smart.

Attentive?

We can stop. We don’t need to keep coming up with words. But it’s up to you.

Anyway, let's roll back into the case.

So, Scott was working his way up the ladder at several prominent hospitals before eventually transitioning into an even more specialized field of medicine—reproductive medicine and infertility. At this point, Scott got married and had two children, but over time, his marriage fell apart.

When Susan walked into his office in the early 2000s, she certainly caught his eye. And it seemed that Scott had caught Susan’s eye as well.

Now, I’m not sure if Susan ended up using Scott as her doctor to try and get pregnant during her first marriage, but I do know she never actually had a child with her first husband. Shortly after meeting Dr. Scott, Susan divorced her first husband, and she and Scott started dating.

Susan even brought Scott along to her 20-year high school reunion, where the two danced the night away. Everyone thought Susan had finally met her match. They seemed perfect for each other, and a year or so later, they tied the knot themselves.

Before long, Dr. Scott was working his medical magic on his new bride. In 2004, Susan got pregnant through IVF with twins, whom she named Mary Katherine and Eric Scott Jr. It really seemed like the universe was finally starting to work in Susan's favor. Scott's career was also taking off. While they were together, he authored dozens of peer-reviewed journal articles, wrote several books on infertility, aided in the discovery of three different gene mutations (according to his online biography), and made televised appearances as an expert on the show The Doctors.

Meanwhile, Susan maintained her own good health, staying the athletic and agile woman she always was. At one point, she even sent in audition tapes in hopes of appearing on the show Survivor.

By the way, that used to be Payton's favorite show—she was obsessed!

It takes a certain kind of person to want to go on Survivor.

100%.

Things were going incredibly well for the couple, who were now living in an upscale neighborhood in San Clemente, California. This was probably why they decided to combine forces. With Susan’s MBA in business and Scott’s PhD in medicine, they felt it was the right time to start their own fertility clinic. He's a fertility doctor, and she got pregnant with twins through IVF.

In April of 2015, the Center for Advanced Genetics opened its doors in Carlsbad, California. Carlsbad! We did a case on Patreon—yeah, it was our Patreon bonus—in Carlsbad. So, the practice actually received a lot of praise and recognition. Not only did the couple run the place together, but they also did it well, and they were the poster children for the clinic's success.

Like I said, since Susan herself had gotten pregnant through IVF with Dr. Sills, it was proof of concept—total couple goals. At least, that's the way it seemed leading up to November 15, 2016.

That evening, Susan had been dealing with an ongoing issue she had been having for some time—crippling migraines. On the night of November 15, it reared its ugly head. But Susan knew how to treat them by now. All she needed was a dark, quiet room, her medication, and a metal pot because sometimes they got so bad that she had to wake up in the middle of her rest to vomit.

Now, that evening, Susan's 12-year-old daughter, Mary Katherine, offered up her room for her mother to rest. It was quiet in her own little corner of the house. Mary Katherine even cleaned her room and made it up like a little guest suite for her mother. She also left a note on the door for her mom to find in the morning. It read something along the lines of, "I know you are tired, but you need to know I love you."

Susan's 12-year-old son, Eric, said he saw his mother put their two dogs away in their crates around midnight before she went to bed, and then he retired to his respective room. Meanwhile, Mary Katherine took her mother's spot in bed next to her father.

Now, I know some people might be like, "What?" But I will say, I used to sleep in my parents' bed whenever one of them was gone because it was always more comfy for me. Actually, Pay did that for the first couple of years of our marriage. No, I still would do it! We’d sleep over, we’d be staying at their house, and they’d leave for work. I’d wake up at 7 a.m., and Payne’s like, "I’ll be back." She would just go sleep in their bed. There's something comforting about it to me.

Okay, so now, cut to the following morning. This is what happened in the Sills family the night before. Now it's the next morning. It's a Sunday, around 6:15 a.m., when Mary Katherine wakes up next to her father. The first thing she notices is that her dad is asleep on top of the covers, which is a little strange, but not completely wild. Scott says that she didn’t leave enough room last night for him to fully get into bed, so that's why he slept on top.

So, Scott gets up at this point, goes down the hall to check on Eric, and even says to the kids, "Hey, what do you guys think about going to the pool today? Maybe we can pick up some donuts on the way?" It's just a nice Sunday morning, and the kids are stoked. Sounds like a great Sunday to them.

But when Mary Katherine heads downstairs, she notices something at the bottom of the family's staircase. It’s her mother, Susan. She's lying unconscious on the floor with a long red-and-white scarf tied around her neck.

I'm confused—did he not... wait, okay, just keep going.

She's just lying there, like in front of everybody? At the bottom of the stairs?

At the bottom of the stairs, Mary Katherine, her daughter, is the first one to come upon her. She's just in plain sight with a scarf around her neck.

So, Mary Katherine at this point obviously screams for her dad, who sees Susan lying there at the bottom of the stairs as well, and he dials 911. When the operator answers, Scott says something a little strange. He says, Now what’s happened, we’ve got a patient here who’s fallen upstairs, and I don’t have a pulse, and she’s cold.

Now, this isn’t just another one of Scott’s patients—it's his wife. It’s a little weird that he’s referring to her as a patient, but this is a moment of crisis. Maybe it’s just his typical lingo. I don’t know. Mary Katherine is also standing next to her dad during this 911 call, and she chimes in. In fact, she seems to be holding the phone while Scott is performing chest compressions on his patient.

Mary Katherine then tells the operator that she can hear noises coming from her mother’s mouth, so they think that she’s still alive. However, this isn’t completely unheard of when you're doing CPR on someone, whether they’re dead or alive. Regardless, paramedics arrive within a matter of minutes, but they find that no amount of CPR is going to help Susan Sills. They pronounce her dead at the bottom of her family’s staircase at around 6:35 a.m. that Sunday morning.

To detectives, their immediate gut instinct is that this was an accident. The stairs were pretty steep, about 13 and a half feet from top to bottom. While Susan was only 45 years old and in pretty good shape, she had been suffering from crippling migraines, and accidents do happen. So for now, they are treating it as if she fell down the stairs in the middle of the night, especially because that is 51-year-old Dr. Sills' theory. He believes his wife might have been a little loopy on her migraine meds, maybe stumbling through the house in the night, and unfortunately, no one woke up to help her.

But detectives need to consider all of the possibilities. Upon closer inspection, some things just feel a little out of place. For starters, the pot that Susan carried around with her when she had migraines, because she might vomit, was also with her at the bottom of the stairs. As was an empty bottle of her migraine medication. But the way these objects are laying there—it doesn’t look like they fell down the stairs with her. It’s not like she was holding them when she fell. They’re placed next to her.

Yes, they aren’t upside down, they aren’t leaning against anything. The pill bottle is literally standing upright, and the pot is next to her. Even stranger, Susan’s shoe was on one of the stairs, looking as if it came off when she tripped. Now, I don’t know about you, but if I’m getting up in the middle of the night to pee, grab a glass of water, or more medicine, I’m not putting on my shoes. She’s in her own house. She was in bed, and there’s a shoe on the stair.

The police are like, okay, this just looks weird. It's not necessarily screaming murder, but it's also just not really making sense. There's also that red and white scarf that Mary Catherine spotted on her mother that morning. Only now, it was off to the side, which Mary Catherine explains was because they had to remove it when they were doing CPR.

When police go to question Dr. Sills, he says he did hear a strange noise the night before, but I couldn't find much on what the noise was exactly—only that Dr. Sills sort of wrote it off and went back to bed. He said the dogs were always making sounds in their crate at night, so he just figured maybe it was that, which, okay, fair. But detectives also interviewed Mary Catherine and Eric that morning, and as far as they claimed, there weren't any issues between their parents that they were aware of. They were like, "No, our parents are good. We come from a loving home."

However, Eric did say the night before his parents were having an argument. He said he noticed it when he woke up around 4 a.m., so it wasn't before everyone fell asleep; it was after they fell asleep. He says, "No, it wasn't violent. He didn't hear anything violent—more of just a hushed argument happening between his parents." But he was able to make out some of their discussion. It sounded like they were fighting over an email, maybe something work-related. The kids couldn't tell.

So, the police question Dr. Sills about that. They're like, "Hey, we talked to your son, and he's saying that he heard you arguing at 4 a.m. Why didn't you tell us this when we were first talking to you?" And he's like, "Oh, okay, yeah, yeah. So we did fight a little, but only because I caught her up looking at work emails on her laptop, and she knows that that makes her migraines worse." He was like, "I was just trying to help her. I was like, 'What are you doing? Put that away.'"

Now, the detectives essentially say, "All right, look, that's not enough for us to think this is murder, but a fight before an accidental fall down the stairs is a little bit suspicious. It doesn't look great." Neither does the fact that Susan had some injuries that kind of weren't exactly consistent with a fall down the stairs. When they finally get to examine her body more, Susan had some weird bruises around her face and on her arms and legs. Plus, there's a ligature mark around her neck where they're saying that scarf was earlier that morning.

Now investigators consider: Could her scarf have just gotten caught on her fall down the stairs and hit her neck hard, leaving a mark? Yeah, but until they have more evidence, it's just something that they have to consider.

At first, the line handed down by investigators to Susan's family is, "Accidents happen," and unfortunately, that's all her family has to go off of because detectives are kind of keeping the investigation pretty close to the chest.

Now, Susan's mother knows her daughter was athletic and healthy, but the migraines make her think it's definitely possible she got confused and fell in the middle of the night. She doesn't suspect any foul play was involved at all. In fact, Susan's mother and Scott are as close as ever after Susan dies. They even planned a family vacation with the kids to the Caribbean, just to have a little bit of peace—something to look forward to during this awful time.

And meanwhile, Scott's neighbors offered their sincere condolences, brought the family food, and lent a hand when needed. Scott continued his public appearances, including going on a Las Vegas radio show to lend his expertise on a medical subject. He even returned to work literally the day after Susan died.

The office manager said she was shocked to see Dr. Sills walk in the morning after her death to treat his patients. I understand that work can be a welcome distraction at times, but the manager said it was more bizarre just how composed Scott seemed. He didn't seem like, "I have to come into work because I own my own business; no one else is going to show up; I need the distraction, but my wife just died." It was more that he came in and then never mentioned Susan—never talked about her death, never talked about her.

But something even weirder starts happening with Dr. Scott Sills as the investigation goes on. He begins to change his appearance little by little after his wife dies. It starts with his clothes. Dr. Sills begins dressing in a flashier, more expensive style than before. Then the once balding doctor seemingly gets a hair transplant and grows his hair back.

This was followed, obviously, by a new sense of confidence for Dr. Sills. He starts posting selfies on social media. (Wait, I can't smile because I know he killed her, but oh man...) Well, I mean, okay, I don't know that yet. Maybe he's just like, "I got to get back out in the dating scene, and I'm in my—what is he? In his 50s? 60s? Yeah." I don't know. He also is working out at the gym, driving around in fancy sports cars. Oh jeez, dude. And pretty soon after, he's also spotted with other women around town.

Now, this could just be a midlife crisis: "My wife just died; I'm having an identity crisis; what do I do?" Yeah, but if that's the case, we probably wouldn't be covering this story, 100%. So that's why I'm here.

Now, from what I can tell, Scott doesn't realize that he's under close watch from investigators. He's like, "Okay, they're saying it's an accident, and that's all they're really telling us, so that's what they must think." That's not really what they're thinking. And if he does know that they're onto him, he's not letting it show. But they have conflicting results from the preliminary autopsy and the forensic pathologist that are making things confusing even for investigators.

The preliminary autopsy said that she had a bunch of injuries, including what appeared to be defensive wounds on her arms and, of course, that ligature mark on her neck. But the forensic pathologist argued with those initial findings, saying she also had injuries on the rest of her body that could be consistent with a fall, including a fractured vertebra at the base of her neck, which could have been the fatal blow. But the forensic pathologist also noted the ligature marks around the neck and burst blood vessels in the eyes, suggesting strangulation could have been the cause of death. Confusing.

So basically, detectives don't have a concrete answer on how she died. Did she die from falling down the stairs and hitting the back of her head, or was she strangled to death? Or did she fall and get caught with her scarf on the way down, making it look like she was strangled and fell down the stairs?

This is why, in the months after Susan's death, detectives returned to the Sills house several times to speak with the kids and Scott, hoping to get the full story. I mean, there were three people in this house when this incident occurred, but it's hard because whenever they ask, both Scott and the kids are like, "No, we've told you we did not hear our mother fall down the stairs that night." Which—oh, that's crazy. That's crazy because I hear one little creak in my house, and I am wide awake.

Well, and also—why? I mean, I get it, I'm sure the kids didn't hear anything, but Scott, man. Also, you have to think, if the crime scene is correct, then that really loud metal pot also went tumbling down the stairs in the middle of the night. I didn't think about that as well—that's true.

So this gets investigators thinking back to that November morning when they first examined the scene. That day, Scott was wearing a beanie over his head in the morning when first responders arrived, but the beanie wasn't doing a very good job of concealing an injury on Scott's forehead. And that day, when police asked him about it, he said that he had hurt himself working on his car in the garage, and his son Eric was there to back him up. He's like, "Yeah, that was how my dad got that injury. We were in the garage working on the car together a few days earlier," he says. But actually, "I did leave for a minute, so I didn't actually see him get the injury."

So, okay, we have a suspect with an injury. The son is saying, "Yeah, we were in the garage, but I didn't see him get the injury; I just know that we did work in the garage together." And we have an argument overheard by the kids and injuries on the victim that might suggest strangulation, maybe even some defensive wounds. But that's not all the detectives uncovered back on that November morning because in Mary Katherine's bedroom, where Susan had slept that last night, they actually found bloodstains on the curtains and the wall near her window—blood that was eventually run through DNA analysis and came out to be consistent with Scott's blood.

Okay, here we go. When this happens, we're getting somewhere. Now police are like, "Dude, you got to explain. Why is your blood in your daughter's bedroom?" And he says he had cut himself while changing Mary Katherine's window screen, which even if that were true, didn't explain how they also found Susan's blood in that bedroom, along with a clump of her hair in the exact same spot where Scott's blood was.

But look, until they have a more concrete cause of death from the coroner's office, police don't feel like they can arrest him because they're not even saying it's murder at this point. So they wait for an entire year—oh gosh—while Scott and Susan's families go about their lives, unaware that Scott is even being considered a suspect in Susan's murder. But in November of 2017, a year later, that changed. The coroner's office finally announced Susan's cause of death. They concluded it was ligature strangulation, which means now, officially, the manner of death is homicide.

That is so long—so long for that. How it takes that, that's—but now, with the pathologist saying, "Hey, we are declaring this a homicide," police feel a little bit better about arresting someone for the murder. Because before, no one was even saying it was a murder. But police are like, "Okay, we kind of need to find a motive now. We think we have the suspect for this homicide; we need a motive."

So, the police subpoena Susan's phone records, and they discover some text messages that suggest things weren't going great in the Sills' marriage. Susan had texted Scott saying stuff like, "I am trapped. You are killing me. I want out. We're not right for each other." She'd also left voicemails to a friend of hers named Rick Leeds, who the police tracked down for more information about this relationship—specifically his relationship with her, but also Susan's relationship with her husband.

Rick was like, "Nah, we're platonic, like we're just friends." But he tells them Susan and Scott were in a really bad place the last time he spoke to Susan. He said that Susan told him she was considering leaving Scott. One message he'd received from Susan about a month before her death sounded like she was whispering, like she was keeping her voice down. He also said Susan no longer sounded like her upbeat, usual self. And when Rick asked her what they were fighting over this time, Susan said it was a photo—a photo that was also included with some evidence collected on the morning of Susan's death.

I was going to say, this whole email thing at the very beginning is 100% a lie. I mean, obviously. So, back again in November when she was murdered, police bagged and tagged a printed-out conversation that they found in the couple's home office. It was an exchange between Susan and a user of a website called patrick.net. It's a conservative political forum.

And here's what the exchange was about: In August 2016, Susan had supposedly entered into a wager on the website. If Donald Trump won the election in November, she would take a topless photo of herself and post it on this website. Okay, well, as we know, Donald Trump does go on to win that election year, and Susan makes good on her promise on this website that she is a part of.

So from there, people start to comment. One user says, "All I've got to say is you must have a super cool husband," and Susan replied back on the forum saying, "He's exhausted, actually. It isn't easy being married to a woman who is partially naked and posting alluringly all the time." It was this exchange that police found printed out and sitting in the family's home office the morning of Susan's death.

Now, perhaps this is not the sole catalyst for murder, but this definitely seemed like Dr. Sill's final straw. And that wasn't all. They also discovered a message Scott had sent to a woman on Facebook just two weeks after Susan's death. He said to her, "This is probably the most important manuscript I have ever written. I am asking you to seriously rethink our suspended but once intense relationship." So he's basically saying, "Hey, can you keep quiet?"

And on top of all this, there is an even more obvious motive, and it's that there's a life insurance policy.

Dr. Scott had tried to claim Susan's $250,000 policy after her death, which of course is hard to do when the official cause of death was ruled a homicide. Now finally, by April 25, 2019—this is 2 and a half years after Susan's murder—police decide they have enough to arrest Scott. On his drive into work to perform a surgery, police pulled him over and put him in handcuffs. And I mean, can you imagine being his patient that morning? You get a call that your egg retrieval surgery is canceled because your doctor just got arrested for murdering his wife. Yeah, that would be nuts.

So, Scott Sills would not be returning to the operating room anytime soon because it took until November of 2023.

Holy heck, seven years—what is going on? I didn't know what word to say there, so guess what? I kept it clean, everybody. Thank you very much. Let's continue on with the normal scheduled program.

Exactly. Um, and so seven years after his wife's death, he gets his day in court, and the district attorney argued that Scott had battered and strangled Susan, then placed her at the bottom of the stairs to stage her death as an accident. 100%. What do you think?

Scott's defense took a rather interesting approach to his rebuttal. They said Scott was innocent. You know, Susan had tripped either going up or down the stairs, and then they say that the dogs had pulled on her scarf around her neck, and they strangled her to death. I mean, not the craziest defense I've ever heard. I think there's a better way to explain the ligature marks, which is the police's first theory, which is maybe it just got stuck when she was falling down the stairs.

I guess they could have used that one instead, but no, they had to blame the family dogs. The dang dogs, man. That’s crazy, right?

So this wasn't totally out of the blue because the defense did have the scarf tested for dog DNA, and it came back positive. So maybe that's why they were like, "We have to explain this," but also, like, Daisy's DNA would be over the majority of our stuff in our house. And apparently, there was testimony from other witnesses that said they had seen her two dogs, which looked like a Golden Retriever and maybe a Rottweiler mix, playing tug-of-war on stuff.

Even Mary Katherine, who was 19 when she finally took the stand, supported that theory. She claimed she had seen the dogs tugging on her mom's scarf that morning. This is something that never came up in any of her other interviews with police. But here's why this is hard to believe: Eric had mentioned that his mom put the dogs in their crate the night before, and even if the dogs were let out at some point in the night before Susan fell, there were no bite marks on the scarf that would indicate dogs were playing with it enough to actually strangle someone.

Oh yeah, you're tugging pretty hard; you might tear a hole in it if it's a dog tooth, right? So the jury didn't get to hear about the life insurance policy or the messages Scott had sent on Facebook, but they didn't need to—not after learning about the argument and the printed topless photo discussion. Apparently, that was all they needed to make a decision. To them, it did not seem likely that Susan had fallen down those stairs and was then strangled by her dogs when you consider the blood evidence in the bedroom, the clump of hair, the scarf around the neck, and then also the printed-out conversation in the office.

To them, Scott Sills had done a poor job of trying to cover up his own crime, which is why after only 3 hours, they came to a decision. Scott Sills was not guilty of first-degree murder, but he was guilty of second-degree murder.

And let me guess, he only got 10 years in prison?

We’re going to get there, okay? The jury felt like Scott didn’t plan his wife’s death but instead, when they got in the argument over the email that he was confronting her with, he just snapped, scrambled, and tried to make it look like an accident. Which, like, I do think that's pretty believable. I mean, I don’t know. I don’t know if he set out to kill her, you know?

So during Scott’s sentencing hearing in March of 2024, Mary Katherine gave a pretty heartbreaking speech to the courtroom.

2024?

Yes, now she talked about the loss her and her brother had already suffered—I mean, they lost their mom—and how she just, she wanted her father to walk her down the aisle. Like, she doesn’t want to lose her dad too. How she wanted him to be there when she has children.

I don’t know how I feel about this one. This one's… yeah.

And she basically goes to the court on his behalf and says, "Please do not orphan me. Like, please do not take my father away."

Still, the judge knew Scott Sills had to face punishment. The jury found him guilty; he killed his freaking wife. So he was sentenced to the mandatory amount under California state law—15 years to life.

So, 15? He won’t be eligible for parole until 2033.

So, 9 years?

Okay, also I feel like I just have to say—I don’t feel bad for…

Who?

For him. For, like—I feel bad for the kids.

Yeah, I feel bad for the kids. Like, I don’t feel bad for him. Like, he killed someone.

Yeah. Like, we can’t just let...

There's just too much evidence. Blood evidence in there, blood, him having a cut on his head.

No, no. Like, he killed someone. Like, the pot and the pill bottle being placed... Like, the fact that he’s probably going to get out in 12 years? No, he should go to prison. He killed someone.

Well, he got second-degree murder, not first-degree.

You kill someone, you go to prison for the rest of your life. So I feel like I need to correct myself before I start getting attacked because I know there's first degree, second degree. I think everyone knows what I'm talking about here. First-degree murder was... this was second-degree according to the jury, but maybe it shouldn’t have been.

Okay, so Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer summarized the case best after the verdict, and this is what he said:

"Dr. Sills was sworn to care for the sick and injured, and his chosen profession as a fertility doctor helped bring so much joy to his patients. But the woman that he vowed to love in sickness and health was strangled to death by his own hands."

Yes, and that is the story of Susan Sills. I think the most complicated part about this is the kids—the family. They… you know, there's a lot of documentaries out there where kids are involved, and a lot of kids stand by the parent accused of killing the other parent. I mean, I understand it. I think from a psychological point, it's really hard to also wrap your mind around… admit, whatever word you want to use, that your parent killed your other parent.

Oh yeah, that's not something that's easy to just be like, "Okay, yeah, let me just accept that real quick."

I also think there's no wrong answer. I think if you're a child who's put in this situation unfairly, I don’t know—you can do whatever you want. Like, there's no right or wrong; you just do what you do, and we support you.

Until I'm in that situation, I won’t speak on it, because I think that's just a lot heavier than…

Yeah, I don’t think we can even comprehend that.

Yeah, sadly, it happens a lot.

Yeah, it does.

Okay, you guys, that was our episode for this week, and we will see you next time for another one.

I love it.

I hate it.

Goodbye.

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