232. The Staircase Mystery: Unraveling the Death of Susann Sills
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Using the new map has actually been very eye opening for me. The daily lessons are great and I enjoy the coaching. It is so flexible and motivating. Noom is also psychology and biology based, which honestly, the relationship you have with your body and food is a lot about psychology. So it's great they approach it in this way. Today, Noom has helped over 5.2 million people lose weight by focusing on progress, not perfection. You can even enjoy your favorite foods without the guilt.

So why not start focusing on what's important to you with Noom's approach? Sign up for your trial today at Noom.com. You're listening to an Ono Media podcast. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the podcast. This is Murder With My Husband. I'm Peyton 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.

and 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, 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. And thank you for supporting us and just listening. All right, Kerr. I think we are ready for your 10 seconds.

Well, posted something a little controversial in 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. That was pretty good though, huh? Yeah. I mean, it's not going to be up by the time that they hear this. 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 our pretty Peyton looks today. Okay, 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. Everyone leave a comment. Hashtag team. Garrett shirt off. Starting to get some muscle. It feels good to...

See some progress. Not going to lie. Looks good too. But I have been pretty dedicated. It looks good too. I just got that. Anyways, 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. Yeah. So yeah, it kind of sucks.

Let's hop into today's case. Our sources for this episode are NBC news.com, CBS news.com, wavy.com, NBC.com, the sun.com, the daily beast.com, distractify.com, sports, keto.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, um,

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 going to 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.

Doesn't happen to all, just a rare few. And it's called a God complex. All right. 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, which is what 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. 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 30th, 1971 in the city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. As one of four children growing up, Susan was an active kid. She was 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 go on to remarry, which meant new step siblings were ushered into her life.

And meanwhile, Susan moved with one of her parents down to Florida. But she didn't miss a beat when it came to athletics in school. And growing up, she became a varsity cheerleader. She was the vice president of her class when she graduated in 1989.

So from there, Susan goes on to study at George Mason University in Virginia. And then in 2000, she graduated from the University of Miami with an MBA in international studies. Now it's during that period of her life.

that Susan met someone and fell in love. And this is like a normal period of life to do this. So the two married and they moved out to California. But when they decided to start a family, Susan had a hard time getting pregnant. And this was a pretty devastating blow for her. Having kids was always something Susan pictured in her future. And not having them just

It 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 Harriman in Tennessee. And those who knew him back in high school said they were certain that 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 it might have been the fact that Scott was an overly generous friend. Scott's old buddy, Jamie Akins, said 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 those expectations his friends had for him when he left high school. He had actually been accepted to both law and law school.

and medical school. But as we know, Scott chose the latter. He received his bachelor's degree in 1987 from Vanderbilt University in Tennessee. And then he went on to get an MD from the University of Tennessee in 1992 and a PhD from the University of Westminster in London.

Now, at some point along the way, Scott realized he had an interest in becoming an OBGYN. So he became a resident in the OBGYN department at NYU's Downtown Hospital in New York City. I don't know if I should be saying this, but fun fact, when I was in like 10th grade, I was like, I kind of want to be an OBGYN. Why?

It's a genuine question. I just, I don't know. I thought it'd be cool to deliver babies, to be honest. And then I realized quickly I had to be a lot, I'm not going to say more smart because I consider myself smart. Disciplined? Disciplined and a lot more book smart and intellectual than I am. Attentive? We can stop. We don't need to keep coming up with words, but it's up to you.

Anyways, we can roll back into the case now. Okay. So before working his way up the ladder at a series of other prominent hospitals, Scott was eventually transitioning into an even more specialized field of medicine, reproductive medicine and infertility. So Scott himself at this point got married. He had two children, but over time his marriage fell apart. So when Susan Seals came into his office in the early 2000s,

She certainly caught his eye.

And it seemed that he'd caught Susan's eye as well. Now, I'm not sure whether Susan ended up using Scott as her doctor to try and get pregnant during her first marriage, but I do know that she never actually ended up having a child with her first husband. I know that they got divorced shortly after she had met Dr. Scott, and then she and Scott started dating.

So Susan even brought him along to her 20 year high school reunion. The two danced the night away and everyone felt like Susan had finally met her match. They seemed perfect for one another. And a year or so later, the two tied the knot themselves. So before long, Dr. Scott was working his medical magic on his new bride. And in 2004, Susan finally got pregnant through IVF with twins.

She named them Mary Catherine and Eric Scott Jr. And it really seemed like the universe was finally starting to work in Susan's favor. And Scott's career was also taking off. In the time they were together, he had authored dozens of peer-reviewed journal articles. He wrote several books on infertility. He aided in the discovery of three different gene mutations, according to his online biography. And he made televised appearances as an expert on the show, The Doctors.

So meanwhile, Susan maintained her own good health and stayed the athletic, agile woman that she always was. At one point, she even sent in audition tapes in hopes of making her own TV appearance on the show Survivor. Oh, by the way, Peyton's...

Favorite show. Not as much anymore, but used to be obsessed with it. And I think like, that's all you need to know. It takes a certain kind of person to want to go on Survivor. A hundred percent. Yeah. So things were going incredibly well for the couple who was now living in an upscale neighborhood in San Clemente, California, which is probably why they actually decided to combine forces. So with Susan's MBA in business and Scott's PhD in medicine, they

they felt it was a good time to start their own fertility clinic. He's a fertility doctor. She got pregnant with twins through IVF. So in April of 2015, the Center for Advanced Genetics opened its door in Carlsbad, California. - Carlsbad, we did a case on Patreon. - Yeah, it was our Patreon bonus in Carlsbad, yeah. So the practice actually received a lot of praise and recognition. Not only did the couple run the place together, they actually 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 15th, 2016. So that evening, Susan had been dealing with an ongoing issue that she had been having for some time. She had a problem with crippling migraines. And on the night of November 15th, it reared its ugly head. But Susan knew how to treat them by now. All she needed was a dark, quiet time.

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 now 12-year-old daughter, Mary Catherine, offered up her room for her mother to rest. It was quiet in her own little corner of the house. Mary Catherine 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 get 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. And meanwhile, Mary Catherine took her mother's spot in bed next to her father. Now, I know some people might be like, 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, Payne did that like the first couple years of our marriage. No, I still would do it if I was there. Yeah, we'd sleep over. We'd be staying at their house, and they'd leave for work, and we'd be visiting. And all of a sudden, I'd wake up at like 7 a.m., and Payne's like, I'll be back. And 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 has 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 Catherine wakes up next to her father. And the first thing she notices is that her dad's 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. Oh, okay. So Scott gets up at this point, goes down the hall to check on Eric and even says to the kids, Hey,

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 Catherine heads downstairs, she notices something on 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 conf... Wait, I'm confused. Did he not think... Wait, okay, just keep going. - Huh? - She's just lying there like in front of everybody?

At the bottom of the stairs. At the bottom of the stairs. Mary Catherine, her daughter, is the first one to come up upon her. Yeah, but she's just in plain open. Plain sight. Yes. Okay. With a scarf around her neck. Okay. In a quiet suburb, a community is shattered by the death of a beloved wife and mother. But this tragic loss of life quickly turns into something even darker. Her husband had tried to hire a hitman on the dark web to kill her, and she wasn't the only target.

Because buried in the depths of the internet is the kill list

A cache of chilling documents containing names, photos, addresses, and specific instructions for people's murders. The Kill List podcast is a true story of how one writer ended up in a race against time to warn those whose lives were in danger. Follow Kill List on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to Kill List and more Exhibit C true crime shows like Morbid early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus.

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So Mary Catherine 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. Now when the operator answers, Scott says something a little strange. He says, quote, Now what's happened? We've got a patient here who's fallen off stairs, and I don't have a pulse, and she's cold.

Now, this isn't just another one of Scott's patients, obviously. It's his wife. It's his wife. So it's a little weird that he's referring to her as a patient, but also this is a moment of crisis. Maybe it's just his typical lingo. I don't know. No. But Mary Catherine 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 Catherine then tells the operator that she can hear noises coming from her mother's mouth. So they think that she's still alive. However, I guess this isn't completely unheard of when you're doing CPR on someone, whether they're dead or alive.

Regardless, paramedics are there within a matter of minutes, but they find that no amount of CPR is going to help Susan Sills, and they pronounced her dead at the bottom of her family's staircase at around 6.35 a.m. that Sunday morning. Now, to detectives, their immediate gut instinct is, this was an accident.

The stairs were pretty steep, about 13 and a half feet from top to bottom. And while Susan was only 45 years old and in pretty good shape, she also was suffering from crippling migraines and had one the night before. Accidents do happen. So for now, they are treating it as she fell down the stairs in the middle of the night.

especially because that is 51-year-old husband Dr. Seals' theory that his wife might have been a little loopy on her migraine meds, she was maybe stumbling through the house in the night, and unfortunately, no one woke up and could help her. But detectives need to consider all of the possibilities, and upon closer look, some things just feel a little out of place. For starters, that pot that Susan carried around with her when she was having her 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 like she was holding them when she fell down the stairs. They're like placed next to her, is what I'm guessing. Yes, they aren't upside down. They aren't leaning against anything.

Like literally pill bottle standing up and pot next to her. Oh, here. Oh, here. Okay. I think that's good. And even stranger, Susan's shoe was on one of the stairs looking as if it had come 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 or grab a glass of water, maybe even grab more medicine, I'm not putting on my shoes. Like she's in her own house. Yeah. She was in bed.

and she's wearing a shoe. There's a shoe on the stair. Police were like, okay, it 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 that they had to remove it when they were doing CPR.

So when police go to question Dr. Sills, he says he did hear a strange noise the night before and I couldn't find much on what the noise was exactly. Only that Dr. Scott 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

He said he noticed it when he woke up around 4:00 AM. So it wasn't before everyone fell asleep. It was after they fell asleep. And he says, no, it like 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 questioned Dr. Sills about that. You know, 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. Like, I was like, what are you doing? Put that away. Now,

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 like hit her neck hard and left a mark? Yeah, but until they have more evidence, it's just something that they have to consider. So 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 closest 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, lended 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.

he went back to work. Now, the office manager said she was shocked to see Dr. Sills walk in the morning after her death to treat his patients. And I understand that work can be a welcomed 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 like he came in and then never mentioned Susan ever. 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. Seals 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. Okay.

This was followed obviously by a new sense of confidence for Dr. Seals. He starts posting selfies on social media. I can't smile because I know he killed there, 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 fifties, sixties? Yeah. I don't know. He,

He also like is working out at the gym. He's driving around in fancy sport cars. 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. A hundred percent. 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, 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 pathologists 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

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 vertebrae at the base of her neck, which could have been the fatal blow. But the forensic pathologist also clocked the ligature marks around the neck and burst blood vessels in the eyes, saying,

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? - Yeah.

Or did she fall and get caught with her scarf on the way down and now it looks like she's been strangled and fell down the stairs? Which 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... Wide, I mean, I get it. I'm sure the kids didn't hear anything, but...

scott man well also you have to think like if the crime scene is correct then that really loud metal paw 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 that was how my dad got that injury. He's like, we were in the garage working on the car together a few days, 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. 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 Catherine'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. 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 Catherine's window screen, which even if that were true, didn't explain how they also found blood.

Susan's blood in that bedroom, along with a clump of her hair in the exact same spot where Scott's blood is. 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 conclude it was ligature strangulation, which means...

Now officially, the manner of death is homicide. That is so long. So long for them to come to that conclusion. I don't understand how it takes... That's...

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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. Like we think we have the suspect for this homicide. We need a motive. So the police subpoenaed Susan's phone records and they discovered some text messages that suggest

Things weren't going great in the Sills marriage. Susan had texted Scott saying stuff like, quote, 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. And Rick was like, nah, 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 that he spoke to Susan, he said that Susan told him she was considering leaving Scott and

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 a hundred percent a lie. I mean, obviously, but so back again on 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.

That 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. 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, quote, all I've got to say is you must have a super cool husband. And Susan replied back on the form 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. And 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? Yep. And on top of all this, there is an even more obvious motive. And it's that there's a life insurance policy. Dr. Seals 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 25th, 2019, this is two 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, your egg retrieval surgery is canceled because your doctor just got arrested for murdering his wife. Yeah, that'd 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 schedule programming. Mother trucker, dude. Exactly.

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. But 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,

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. Okay.

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 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. They would play tug of war on stuff. Even Mary Catherine, 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 like, okay, to strangle someone. Oh yeah. 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 piss poor job of trying to cover up his own crime, which is why after only three 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 if he set out to kill her. Yes. No. So during Scott's sentencing hearing in March of 2024, Mary Catherine gave a pretty heartbreaking speech to the courtroom. 2024, this is...

Yeah. 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 to 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's, 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 nine 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. You can't kill someone. The blood evidence in the bedroom. Both their blood. Him having a cut on his head.

No, no. Like he killed someone. The pot and the pill bottle being placed at like up. The fact that he's probably going to get out in 12 years. Like, 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.

Well, this was second degree according to the jury. It was second degree, but maybe it shouldn't have been. Okay. So Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer summarized the case best after the verdict. And that's 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 and

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...

So, 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, I think 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, 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 I know. 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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