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Tonight on Dateline. Something awful had happened. Fire emergency. We got a patient here who's fallen upstairs.
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I got the call from Scott. He said, Suzanne is dead. Scott was a fertility doctor.
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He had made some TV appearances. We had some questions our first day there. He seemed heartbroken.
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It was an accident. What do you told us? Something about it wasn't quite right. She fell.
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She never fell. There were some text messages. that showed that there was some tension sometimes in the marriage.
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I'm on Facebook, and I get a friend request. Scott sent an email to her. It looked like he was in love with her.
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There was a scarf sitting on the floor. We found stains on it that looked like blood.
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We did DNA testing on the scarf, which produced what? Pig DNA. Your reaction was the same as mine.
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I know the wheels of justice are very slow. I should have known. I should have been more suspicious.
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When you find out the real story of the staircase, it really leaves you breathless.
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He was a doctor who helped create life. Then he was accused of ending one. Was it an accident or murder?
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I'm Lester Holt, and this is Dateline. Here's Keith Morrison with If These Walls Could Talk
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If These Walls Could Talk Oh, the story they would tell Oh, whoo-hoo-hoo! Alright, let's do it. Dinner is on!
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About a family of four, all their chaos and clamor. You suck! I love you, and you are so good!
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The mother, full of life, and dancing like she doesn't have a care in the world.
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Enjoying time with her daughter, acting out little scripted videos. Mom, Aaron, don't give me my computer back!
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Okay, you tell him. If he can't share, the computer goes in time out. Yes, Suzanne and Scott Sills were building quite a life here.
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He was a respected fertility doctor, helping couples realize the dream that all their efforts and their hope had failed to achieve.
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He helped them make babies, families of their own. I call them a miracle worker.
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He truly was. And she was her husband's business partner and office manager and a busy mom to twins Eric and Mary Catherine
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with big dreams for the future in their California home. She's telling me these plans she has when Mary Kate gets married.
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Plans to one day throw a spectacular wedding for her daughter. She's going to come down that beautiful staircase
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and it's going to be the most fantastic entrance. That wasn't going to happen, though.
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Not ever. That beautiful staircase would not be fantastic for them at all. It was November 2016, a weekend to celebrate.
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Supposed to be. The twins were in seventh grade. Mary Catherine in a public middle school,
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Eric at the Army and Navy Academy. Friday, a Veterans Day weekend, was the Academy's annual military review,
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and Eric was in the band. So, of course, Scott and Suzanne made plans to attend,
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said Suzanne's mother, Teresa Newbar. He had rescheduled his office hours, and they had gone down to this parade.
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As it turned out, they didn't see Eric. He had broken his trumpet and he wasn't even in the parade.
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And Suzanne had to sit out there in the broiling sun. By the time the family returned home, Suzanne had a migraine, a bad one.
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Still had it the following night, a Saturday. And then, Sunday morning, Dr. Scott Sills called 911.
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I don't have a pulse and she's cold. Okay, so she's not breathing? No, she's not breathing.
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She's not breathing. Okay, sir, I've got help being sent while we're talking. Dr. Sills was in a life-and-death battle.
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Only this time the patient was his wife, Suzanne, lying face down at the bottom of the staircase.
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Is there anybody else there with you? Oh, yes. Our whole family's here. Meaning Dr. Sills and Eric still upstairs,
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and Mary Catherine, who at that moment stood right next to her father, beside her mother.
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Dave Holloway from the Orange County Sheriff's Department has listened to the 911 call.
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On the call, you could hear Mary Catherine. She was the one holding the phone on speakerphone so that the dispatcher could talk to Scott.
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God, that must have been bad for her. Yeah. They found her down at the bottom of the stairs?
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Yeah, partially on the stairs. Okay. Looks like her shoe come off or something. So you want me to put her on her back?
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Right, on her back, flat on her back. She coached the doctor through CPR. I want you to tilt her head back, look in her mouth to see if there's any food or vomit in the mouth.
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There's not any food, though. Mary Catherine there, watching, listening, terrified.
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She's making a sound. Is she moving or responding at all? Well, minimally. Minimal, but it was something.
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Let me know if you feel or hear any air going in and out or you see the chest moving at all Hold on a minute Hold on a minute
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Just continue the compressions until paramedics arrive and take over. She's making noises out of her mouth.
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Okay, but if she's not pushing you away, continue with the compressions. Okay, they're driving with lights and sirens, so you just continue with the compressions.
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Whoever else is there, get the front door opened up. Oh, yeah, yeah. Keep going, keep going.
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Okay, I'm going to get this way. Minutes into the call, help arrived. Firemen should be pulling.
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Yeah, they're here now. When paramedics entered the Sills' home, they could tell this was bad.
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Suzanne was motionless at the bottom of her staircase. What was she found? About five minutes ago.
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They tried everything to get Suzanne breathing again. But nothing. It was too late.
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Suzanne was dead. Would there have been any chance to revive her by the time anyone got there?
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No. What a sudden and strange way for her to die. A mysterious fall down the stairs in the middle of the night.
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Her doctor husband unable to save her. A terrible, tragic accident. Wasn't it? Sunday morning on this normally quiet street in San Clemente, California, was anything but.
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There were five or six police officers' cars parked in the street. That's not something you see in this neighborhood.
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Never. You do not see that in this neighborhood. Rochelle and John Brannan lived right next door.
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I walked up the street and the front door was open and there was the blanket covering her body at the bottom of the stairs, which is right at the front door.
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Suzanne Sills was just 45 years old, dead at the bottom of the very stairs she once imagined her daughter walking down at her wedding.
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Investigators arrived, as they do whenever someone dies so suddenly and unexpectedly.
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Suzanne was lying on her back with a blanket covering her body when I arrived. Eric Hatch and Dave Holloway from the Orange County Sheriff's Department
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knew this part would be difficult, and always is. But of course they had to question Suzanne's family,
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find out what they knew, like, was there an intruder? Was there any sign of a break-in in the house?
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Were the doors locked or unlocked? No, there was no sign of any break-ins. The family told us that there was, you know, locks on the doors.
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And they locked their doors. Burglar alarm, yeah, there was no break-in. Well, the family as a whole was very calm.
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Even the 12-year-olds? Yes, the two children were very calm, very smart, not emotional at the time.
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and I don't draw any conclusions necessarily from that because everyone grieves differently
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and a 12-year-old may not grasp what's going on. They did appear sad. Mary Catherine cried a little bit.
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Can you tell me what it's like to have to put somebody in a familiar room of their house
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and interview them about somebody who was very recently deceased and, in fact, is still lying over there by the stairs?
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It's difficult. It's a difficult position to put someone in. Very difficult, but also very enlightening.
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The family told investigators about something that happened just before Suzanne died,
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something that could explain how she ended up at the bottom of those stairs. It's the story you already know.
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Two days before she died, Suzanne attended that military parade for Veterans Day.
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It was a hot and sunny day. According to the family, that was a known trigger for Suzanne to get migraines is the sunlight and the noise and everything.
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So that night, Friday night, and then going into Saturday, and then all day Saturday, Suzanne was afflicted by this migraine headache that pretty much put her out of commission.
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Saturday night, Suzanne went to Mary Catherine's room where she could sleep by herself in a dark room
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and make herself as comfortable as possible to help herself with the migraine. The family walked detectives through the events of that night.
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Before going to bed, Mary Catherine left a pink post-it note on her door with this message for her mom.
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I know you are tired, but you need to know that I love you and your iPad is charging.
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Please sleep well and sleep in. The family told them all was quiet when they turned in for the night.
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Eric in his room, Mary Catherine in her parents' bedroom with her dad to give Suzanne a quiet space.
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But later on that night, Suzanne was on her computer or her iPad sending some emails with some clients in China
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and Scott went in to check on her. Scott said Suzanne still wasn't feeling well, so he urged her to put the work away.
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You know, you shouldn't be doing this. You should get some rest, you know. You have this migraine.
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Then Scott returned to bed. And by dawn, he said, he awakened to find Suzanne dead.
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Investigators looked at the area where her body was found. And they discovered some items that seemed curious to them.
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Off to the side there was a stainless steel kind of spaghetti pot that was near her body along with her purse and an empty bottle of medication
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Scott had told them Suzanne had taken medication for her migraine the night before.
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And as for the pot, he explained that she sometimes kept it nearby in case she got sick.
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Investigators wondered if Suzanne, groggy from the medicine, tripped on the stairs and dropped the pot as she fell.
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But they'd have to wait for toxicology results. Suzanne's husband, meanwhile, had a difficult call to make.
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I got the call from Scott. It was late. By the time Dr. Scott Sills was able to phone Suzanne's mother, Teresa,
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across the country in Georgia, it was very late. He sounded very, very choked up.
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and he said, Suzanne is dead. And I said, no, she isn't. It came from nowhere. Dead from what?
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There's nothing wrong with her. And I said, Scott, I have to talk to you in the morning.
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I can't talk to you now. And I slept on and off that night waiting for a phone call to come back for him to say,
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well, she's not really dead. And by morning, I knew that, yes. And I called him immediately.
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First thing I did when I got up, I said, what happened? I was thinking maybe she had an aneurysm.
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What else could have taken her? Now, Teresa had to phone Suzanne's brother, Frank, with the awful news.
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I just remember being in shock, and it took me a long time to process it. It was just kind of like not real.
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But I remember going out and going for a jog, even though it was at nighttime, just thinking about it and cried.
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And I just couldn't believe that it was just over like that. Suzanne's other brother, Peter Arswaga, was living in Florida
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when he heard that his older sister, a former high school cheerleader, had fallen down the stairs and died.
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First you don't believe it. So, I mean, it takes a while to set in. And this was a weird, I mean, this was really odd.
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That seemed plausible? Odd for the acrobat. I mean, you know, the cheerleader that does all the flips on every cheerleading squad, that was my sister.
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So, I mean, that was odd that she would be, you know, clumsy like that. Nothing about Suzanne's death made sense to her family.
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It had to be something sudden, something unexpected. But just how unexpected? They had no idea.
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Good girl. Good girl. The mother of Suzanne Sills, Teresa Neubauer, wondered all manner of things as she traveled to California
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after her daughter was found dead at the bottom of her staircase. The only explanation that made any sense was maybe a brain aneurysm,
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something that caused her to lose consciousness and fall. When Teresa arrived in San Clemente, her son-in-law Scott met her at the front door.
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He gave me a big hug and he was crying and shaking. Teresa had plenty of questions for Scott.
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She wanted to know everything, every detail. Like, was there anything unusual that happened that night?
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He said he heard noise in the house during the night. But, he says, with two kids that are 12 years old and two big dogs and two big cats,
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there's always noise in the house at night. Somebody's always doing something. So it didn't concern him.
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He did not get up and check on the noise. Teresa found that odd. No sounds from Suzanne?
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She was especially agile and graceful. and for her to have fallen without screaming,
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without trying to grab onto the banister in some way. I mean, I'm a clunker, and I would have tried to stop myself if I were falling.
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It was a shattering end to the family Suzanne had worked so hard for. Having kids did not come easily for her.
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Frank and his wife, Samantha, had watched Suzanne struggle with infertility when she was younger.
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She had a lot of miscarriages. She was amazing around kids, and so it probably ate her up that she was not able to have kids of her own for so long.
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Oh, yeah. And if you have a lot of miscarriages, too, every one is a heartbreak.
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Yeah. She wanted that more than anything in the world. That was back when Suzanne was married to another man.
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They decided to go for fertility treatments. She went to the IVF doctor, who happened to be Scott Sills in Atlanta.
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and that's how she met Scott. Something sparked between Suzanne and her new doctor
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and before long she divorced her husband and married Scott. She continued to be his patient and finally with the help of IVF,
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the dream she had longed for, not just one baby but two twins, Eric and Mary Catherine, were born.
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She loved those kids. She was a wonderful mother. And the way that she would take care of those, like, she's like two kids and she's like feeding them both and juggling it and just looking amazing and perfect.
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Her world revolved around them. She was a passionate person and she was always enthusiastic about what she was doing And it seemed that most everything the kids did you know was something that fascinated her that she wanted to share
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As the kids flourished, so did their dad's career. His work taking them all over the world.
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Suzanne and Scott lived in Atlanta. They lived in North Carolina. They lived in New York.
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They lived in Ireland and then California. Once in Southern California, Dr. Sills eventually opened up his own clinic in Carlsbad,
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and his research began getting more attention. He even made appearances on the TV show The Doctors.
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This is exciting research. It is exciting because there are people whose driver's license says that they're 29,
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but their ovaries are acting 59, and that's a very big struggle. Suzanne, remember, helped run his growing medical clinic.
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She was very happy in California with the practice. But she was his partner. That is correct. And she loved it.
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Teresa knew her daughter would be good at it. She had a business degree from the University of Miami and had worked in marketing.
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But more than that, she connected with the patients because she knew their heartbreak personally.
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She had a good perspective on it because she herself had been through IVF. Suzanne had plenty of interests outside of work, too.
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She was the person who was good at everything. She was physical. She was good at sports.
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You know, anything she applied herself to, she accomplished. She's a very driven person, always.
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Wow. Good at everything. Yes. She was just Energizer Bunny. Absolutely. Would that be right?
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Yes. My name is Suzanne Sills. I'm from San Clemente, California, and I'm 43 years old.
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Two years before her death, she made this home video to audition for the show Survivor.
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Here she jokes around with her daughter about how far she'd go to win. We all know that there's an ugly part of Survivor.
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And, you know, this is where we don't always play well with others. And, you know, we don't want to do it, but we do it because, let's face it, this is a game for a million dollars.
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so of course we're gonna do it. What happened to my cookie? Mary Catherine, once her mother's sidekick in an audition video,
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now had to face life without her. Her family still had so many questions, but there weren't any clear answers.
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Not yet, anyway. But this house? It was about to give up some secrets. We found bloodstains that was obviously suspicious.
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bloodstains, how obvious were those? Well, to me it stood right out. Suzanne's mother veered from disbelief to acceptance and back again. How could her vibrant,
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healthy, athletic daughter, Suzanne Sills, be gone forever? And how, All things could she have died from a freak tumble down the stairs.
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The fall, just that she just fell. It was eating at you. Yeah, niggling at you, you know, just there all the time.
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She fell. She never fell. She didn't fall when she was a child. Teresa shared that niggling feeling with one of the investigators.
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I wanted him to know how physically capable this woman was, as if she were much younger than she was.
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and he said yes, well, but accidents do happen, which of course is true. Once she heard the word accident,
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that was that, apparently. That's the way it seemed to me. And I had no reason to think
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they would not have done a thorough investigation. So I thought it was done, and it was over.
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Oh, it was far from over. Did you have any inkling at all that there was an investigation underway?
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No, I did not. As is typical in any death investigation, detectives were careful about what they shared.
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Communications with the family was sympathetic and just to inform them that we were doing all we could.
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Standard procedure. Correct. You don't tell them very much, but you keep investigating.
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Yes. It turned out there was quite a bit they hadn't shared with Teresa. Starting with what they discovered in the hours after Suzanne died
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as they searched the seal's house, room by room. Was that a big job? Is that a, you know, you're searching for what?
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You don't really know, right? You don't know, because it's an accident. Upstairs, they searched the four bedrooms.
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We weren't seeing anything obvious. For instance, in Eric's bedroom, we didn't see anything obviously involved in what happened the night before.
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So then they moved on to the daughter's room. Mary Catherine and there on the curtains
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they saw what looked like blood once we saw blood in Mary Catherine's room we knew that
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we were on to something we were going to have to spend some time on this was the room
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Suzanne slept in the night before she died a place for peace and quiet while she recovered from her migraine
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blood stains how obvious were those? well to me it stood right out because Mary-Kate's bedroom was pretty well kept.
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Other than that, the room was in perfect order. The bed was made. It was neat. Nothing was tossed around.
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Nothing was really disturbed, but the bloodstains kind of stood out. And then as you got closer, you noticed there were some bloodstains
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on the nightstand next door bed and on the wall. On the curtains, on the bedside table, on the wall?
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Yes. What a strange place to find blood, on curtains. Yeah. In my opinion, I thought the bloodstains,
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They were like four, they almost looked like the finger impressions, like somebody was touched on.
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Of course you didn't know whose blood it was. We didn't know. And they couldn't tell if the blood was old or new.
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But something on the floor caught their attention too. There was hair on the floor?
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Yeah, there was some clumps of hair on the floor. Clumps? Clumps. I remember there was a clump of hair on the floor in front of Mary Kate's bed.
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Was it clear whose hair it was? Not at the time. We didn't know. You know, it looked like it was longer hair, a woman's hair.
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What did that say to you when you went into the room and you saw those things? Something happened in there.
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Maybe a struggle. Mm-hmm. They noticed something else that morning, too. At the bottom of the stairs, not far from Suzanne's body,
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they saw what looked to them like a clue, a woman's scarf. What attracted you to the scarf to pick that up?
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It was just lined by itself. In the middle of the floor? Off to the side, but it was close proximity to Suzanne.
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Did you hear anything about the scarf being involved in this incident on that first day?
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Yeah, we had heard from the family that the scarf had been around Suzanne's neck and that Mary Catherine removed it.
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She told detectives she took it off when her father started CPR. And when the detectives looked closely at the scarf, they saw blood-like stains on it,
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just like the ones in Mary Catherine's room on the curtains, the nightstand, the wall.
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All the blood evidence was collected by our forensic specialists and forensic scientists,
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sent to the Orange County Crime Lab where it was examined by forensic scientists there.
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The questions were adding up. Results from the lab would take quite a while, though investigators were about to get some answers.
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The deputy coroner did a preliminary body exam. She had injuries on her face, on her ears, on her neck, on her hands.
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Four days after Suzanne Sills was found dead at the bottom of her staircase, the Orange County Medical Examiner joined the investigation.
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Was either of you at the autopsy? I was there. Do you remember what your impressions were?
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The day of the autopsy as well as the Sunday we were at the house, my impression was a striking number of injuries to her body.
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He thought it was plausible to sustain all those injuries from a fall down a flight of stairs.
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But then... The deputy coroner did a preliminary body exam on Suzanne. And, you know, she had injuries on her face, on her ears, on her neck, on her hands.
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She had defensive wounds. on her arms bruising on her forearms and hands and i think she had some injuries on her feet and
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her shins too so but the one that caught the yes and the one that caught the deputy coroner's
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attention was the ligature mark across her neck that injury seemed to be the hardest to attribute
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to a fall but if it didn't happen while tumbling downstairs how did it happen well there was that
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We still didn't know. But there were plenty of things about her death that didn't seem quite right,
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and had detectives taking another look at her husband, the renowned fertility doctor,
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beginning with his call to 911. 911, do you need police or paramedics? Paramedics.
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When the 911 call begins, you could hear him whisper, where's my pulse oximeter?
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Okay, hold on, where's my pulse oximeter? A device that measures oxygen level in the blood.
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The dispatcher repeatedly instructed Suzanne's husband to administer CPR, but investigators thought the doctor seemed fixated instead on the oximeter.
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Mary-J, can you say, wait a minute, please, is that the problem? He was focusing attention on other things instead of what the priority was,
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administering CPR and starting chest compressions at Suzanne. And when we were actually there at the scene, when we arrived,
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you could see the pulse oximeter on her finger. In all of our years, I've never heard of anybody attaching a pulse oximeter to somebody to render CPR.
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The investigators conceded that everyone reacts differently in an emergency. Still, it wasn't the only thing they noticed about Dr. Sills.
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He was wearing a beanie throughout the course of the day, and he never took it off.
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So at some point he agreed to be photographed, which is normal. and he took off his beanie and he had a laceration on his forehead that kind of stood out.
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That was kind of odd. In addition, he had an abrasion on one of his forearms and there was some stains on his shirt which he claimed was chocolate milk.
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Dr. Sills explained that he got the cuts while he and his son were fixing his car a few days earlier.
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He said he banged his head on the hood while he was making some kind of maintenance repair on it.
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Could those wounds be the source of the blood found in Mary Catherine's bedroom?
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On the morning her mother died, Investigator Holloway asked Mary Catherine about that.
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She didn't know anything about any blood in her room. She said before last night there had been no blood in her room on the walls or on the curtain And it was apparent and super obvious You could see it from the hallway You didn have to go looking for it Investigators also learned something from Suzanne son Eric about the night his mother died
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He told us that he heard his parents arguing. The argument was loud enough to wake up Eric in the next bedroom.
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He woke up. He didn't hear what the argument was about. Just heard him yelling. Just heard him yelling.
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Something woke him up. So he ended up going into the master bedroom and sleeping with Mary Kate.
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Later, said Eric, his father ended up back in that same bedroom with him and his sister.
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Investigator Holloway and his partner asked Mary Catherine about sleeping with her brother in a recorded interview.
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Is that normal for you guys to sleep together? No, no, very normal. It's very unusual?
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Very unusual. That was the first time in maybe like eight years. Like, never happened.
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It's never happened. Which made the investigators think the argument between Suzanne and Scott must have been heated.
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And according to Eric, it happened in the middle of the night. By 6.30 a.m., said Scott, he found Suzanne face down at the bottom of the stairs.
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The investigators knew the forensics would help tell them what happened. And so they waited.
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What did you send away for testing that you took from the scene? We collected clothing from both Suzanne and Scott.
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We collected the drapes from Mary Kate's bedroom, collected swabs from the wall and the dresser, the hair, the scarf.
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And you'd have things like also fingernail clippings and all of that? Yes. But apparently it wasn't simple.
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More studies were needed. And a year went by, a full year, before the final toxicology and forensic results finally arrived.
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And? The cause of death was determined to be homicide. By November 2017, a full year had passed and Scott still found his wife Suzanne dead at the bottom of their stairs.
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Her family was still trying to come to terms with it. Brother Frank described a deep emptiness and something else.
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I feel the sadness and the loss, but there's also that regret behind it. You know, kind of like I'm reading a novel that's just starting to get good,
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and then I flip the page and it's a blank page, and then there's nothing but blank pages for the rest of the book.
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Suzanne's family didn't know it then, that investigators were busy filling in pages of their own report about how Suzanne died,
00:32:49
waiting for the final forensic and toxicology results, and for the medical examiner to determine Suzanne's cause of death.
00:32:57
Scott, the highly regarded fertility doctor, had told deputies he assumed Suzanne must have taken medication for her migraine,
00:33:05
lost her balance, and fallen. He said... There was an accident and she appeared to have fallen down the stairs.
00:33:13
But now the results were in, and they told a very different story. The toxicology report showed Suzanne did take some pain medication that night,
00:33:23
but the amount was considered therapeutic. Didn't appear to be enough to affect her balance.
00:33:29
And there was more. What can you tell me about the evidence that came back from the testing,
00:33:34
the blood on the walls, the DNA that you collected from her, from him? Eventually, they were able to tell us that, in layman's terms,
00:33:43
the blood on the wall in Mary Catherine's room was both Suzanne's and Scott's blood.
00:33:52
And one smudge in particular was a mix of both. Suzanne's clothes had many spots of blood.
00:33:58
Scott's clothes, where he had claimed that spots might be chocolate milk, that was Suzanne's blood.
00:34:05
Suzanne's fingernails had Scott's blood underneath them. More than just might be gained from a normal living with a husband and wife situation.
00:34:14
Right. Yeah, more than that. But the blood, the DNA, wasn't the most disturbing part of it.
00:34:21
The cause of Suzanne's death, the thing that actually killed her? What was the ruling? The medical examiner's opinion.
00:34:29
Eventually, the cause of death was listed as ligature strangulation. And determined to be homicide.
00:34:34
The report confirmed what the investigators already suspected. Suzanne's death was no accident.
00:34:41
She had been murdered. Armed with this new information, more than a year and a half after Suzanne's death,
00:34:49
Holloway and Hatch went back to Dr. Scott Seale's house and knocked on the door.
00:34:55
We believed he killed her, and so wanted to interview him again with what we discovered and what was...
00:35:03
With all this evidence to present to him and have him explain it. Scott was there, invited us in again, and we went and interviewed him for the second time in his office, in his home office.
00:35:15
And he was cooperative. They asked him to explain how his blood ended up in Mary Catherine's bedroom and why his DNA was found under Suzanne's fingernails.
00:35:28
And he didn't have an answer. He continued to deny that he had anything to do with Suzanne's death, that it was an accident, or she fell down the stairs.
00:35:40
Dr. Sills was calm, apparently unshakable, until the detectives told him they knew for certain it wasn't an accident, that the medical examiner ruled Suzanne's death a homicide by strangulation.
00:35:54
and then he seemed like he kind of changed all of a sudden because he started sweating in his office with his was to the wall Dave and I were in front of him across from the desk And unexpectedly he said can I take a break
00:36:06
I need to get some water. My feeling was officer safety. Is he going to go and get a gun or a knife and do something to himself or do something to us?
00:36:13
It was totally... It was that intense. It was unexpected. So we got up and followed him into the kitchen just to make sure nothing happened.
00:36:19
Then he grabbed his water bottle, drank about a half bottle, and he came back in the office and resumed the interview.
00:36:25
The detective showed him pictures, Suzanne's injuries, Mary Catherine's bedroom.
00:36:32
And asked him how this could have happened, you know, emphasizing it was strangulation and what about this blood on the wall and everything else?
00:36:39
And he, you know, he couldn't explain it. Instead, he reverted to the calm, cool man who'd answered the door.
00:36:47
What else can I help you with? I remember saying that. Who is it? Yeah. The investigators left empty-handed.
00:36:54
They were convinced Dr. Scott Sills was their man, but they had a gaping hole in their case.
00:37:00
There was no evidence of a motive, no reason why Scott would kill his wife. And without that, they were reluctant to arrest him.
00:37:08
And from what they'd heard, Scott and Suzanne had a solid marriage. Teresa said from everything her daughter told her,
00:37:15
she thought all was well. If there was a problem there, she never brought it up.
00:37:20
And she was not the meek kind of person. If she were being mistreated, I think she would have been very loud about that.
00:37:29
We would have known. She spoke to her daughter weekly, hours at a time. Suzanne did most of the talking.
00:37:35
She liked to talk, right? Oh, yes. I liked to talk, but when she called, my husband always knew
00:37:41
Suzanne was on the phone because I wasn't saying words. But she had a lot to say.
00:37:46
She was very enthusiastic about what she did. So things, as far as you knew, everything was ticking along pretty well in her life.
00:37:53
Yes, it was. She never talked about any difficulty with Scott. The most minor things, for example, I asked Scott to water something and I went out there and there's the hose.
00:38:02
He didn't roll it up when he was through. The detectives heard the same thing from Suzanne's brother, Peter, about a happy marriage,
00:38:09
even though he wasn't exactly sure what his sister saw in Scott. What was your impression of Scott?
00:38:16
He was a doctor. So, you know, socially, I always felt that doctors just didn't develop those skills well.
00:38:25
And so that's kind of the way I looked at Scott, was he, you know, he was a doctor who just never developed the social skills well.
00:38:31
But he said Suzanne had a different view of her husband. Suzanne used to tell me how funny he was, and she thought he was hilarious, and she found him very humorous.
00:38:41
I do know that. As far as I could tell, everything was going great for them. A solid marriage and a reputation for kindness didn't sound like a man who would suddenly snap and kill his wife.
00:38:53
But soon investigators would discover cracks in this seemingly picture-perfect marriage involving him.
00:39:02
Did he want to have sex with you? He wanted probably to have sex with me, but he didn't come on.
00:39:06
He wasn't, and I hate to say this, he had no game or anything. was very... I mean, no game at all.
00:39:15
And involving her. So she fulfilled her portion of the bet and she took a picture and posted it.
00:39:36
Not long after Suzanne died, Dr. Scott Sills seemed to be getting on with his life.
00:39:41
He went back to work. He sounded enthusiastic, promoting an upcoming radio show.
00:39:47
Hi, everybody. This is Dr. Scott Sills from CAG Fertility in Carlsbad, California.
00:39:51
I'm very excited to announce that in the near future, I will be live on Sin City Heat with the amazing cat.
00:39:59
And he continued to raise his 12-year-old twins in the same house where his wife was found dead,
00:40:05
at the bottom of the stairs. John and Rochelle Brannan said neighbors tried to support Scott and his kids.
00:40:13
The neighborhood kind of came together, doing prayers and dropping off meals and really feeling bad for the family, and the kids especially.
00:40:20
Sure. No one knew police suspected him of killing his wife, that investigators Holloway and Hatch were convinced Dr. Sills, in a fit of rage, had strangled her.
00:40:31
but they still didn't know why and had no evidence that the doctor had a deadly temper
00:40:38
from everything they had seen and heard he came across as calm and collected that's how Kim Gadbury remembers him
00:40:48
a miracle worker the first doctor to give her hope after years of trying to have a baby
00:40:53
I left his office the first time around like in tears and I sat in my car before I pulled away
00:40:59
and he came, the nurse must have told him that I left heartbroken and he came and knocked on my car window
00:41:07
and he's like, don't worry about it, we will figure this out. And he did. Dr. Sills helped Kim and her husband have their own biological children,
00:41:17
first a daughter and then a son. I called him a miracle worker, he truly was. Dr. Sills had developed his craft over decades.
00:41:27
He held degrees from Vanderbilt, the University of Tennessee, and the University of Westminster in London.
00:41:34
He had also traveled the world as a fertility specialist, published books and papers, and had spoken at conferences.
00:41:41
We're happy to have you, Dr. Sells. Here he is on a panel in Los Angeles, speaking about the impact of genetics on pregnancies.
00:41:49
Thank you very much, Dr. Hill, for moderating this august group. And I feel like I on National Press Club And on the syndicated talk show The Doctors sharing his expertise about this couple struggle with infertility And showing his generosity by arranging for their entire treatment to be free
00:42:09
All of the colleagues that are working together would like to make this treatment for you at no cost.
00:42:18
Another inspiring story courtesy of Dr. Sills. the man with a reputation for success and kindness.
00:42:26
But investigators wondered if there was another side to him. And as we learned, this patient certainly thought so.
00:42:34
Christy Christensen said it all started out fine when, in 2011, she signed up to be an egg donor
00:42:41
and was connected with Dr. Sills. I just thought it was going to be, like, the best, most exciting thing
00:42:48
I'd probably done to date. The plan was for her to take fertility medication for a month before having her eggs retrieved.
00:42:57
Two weeks and two days into this, I start really having some severe pains in my abdomen,
00:43:03
up the side of my neck, and around my heart. Her condition deteriorated quickly.
00:43:09
Dr. Sills gave her a drug to help reduce the swelling and pain, and she said it didn't work.
00:43:15
Despite that, a few days later, he instructed her to give herself a shot in preparation for egg retrieval the next day.
00:43:22
That night when I had the trigger shot, I couldn't sleep. I was sweating. I could feel my heartbeat, like, in my eyes and in the side of my face.
00:43:34
Dr. Seals went ahead with the retrieval and told her the swelling would go down,
00:43:38
but that didn't happen. So the next day, he surgically removed the built-up fluid
00:43:43
and almost immediately the swelling came back. He told her he'd have to do another surgery.
00:43:50
By this time, she'd had enough and questioned him. Why don't we fix the problem instead of just treating the symptom repetitively?
00:43:58
When I said this, he got vicious, his face changed, and he just lost it on me and told me that I was being dramatic
00:44:09
and that I was the worst donor he's ever dealt with. She reluctantly agreed to the second surgery, she said, but that night she was rushed to the ER with fluid in her lungs, contracted pneumonia, and required a blood transfusion.
00:44:27
Christy filed a lawsuit and had to face Dr. Sills one more time. I was sitting in a waiting room, and he came in, and he made sure to go really close to me.
00:44:39
He just had murder, the look of murder on his face. And then he went and sat down on his bench, and he literally spread his legs and put his hands on his legs, and he went like this.
00:44:49
And he had, like, his teeth bared, like he was a wild animal. It's one of the craziest things I've ever seen.
00:44:55
Christy settled the lawsuit, and Dr. Sills paid her an undisclosed amount of money, but denied any wrongdoing.
00:45:02
And even though I won, he was still allowed to openly treat people still. There was no mark on his record. Nothing.
00:45:15
It was just swept under the rug like it never happened. So if Dr. Sills behaved that way with Christy,
00:45:23
maybe something set him off that last night with Suzanne. But what? Investigators had no idea.
00:45:31
until they learned about a secret. Trouble behind closed doors. The old saying is true, isn't it?
00:45:40
It's not about the murder, it's about the marriage. One year passed, and then two years passed.
00:46:00
without an arrest for the murder of Suzanne Sills. All that time, her mother had no idea
00:46:07
Suzanne's death was being investigated as a murder. She still thought her daughter died in a tragic accident.
00:46:15
There's just bouts of days where you just feel so down. And you went on, just went on with your life.
00:46:21
Well, as I said, we tried to include the children. Teresa was determined to remain in her grandchildren's lives.
00:46:29
During summer breaks, she arranged to take the twins on vacation, and she kept in regular contact with her son-in-law, Scott.
00:46:37
I felt sorry for the man. I, you know, it is very hard to be a single parent. But, you know, then there were things that were peculiar that would pop up.
00:46:48
The children never mentioned her. Never. They never talked about her at all? Never.
00:46:53
Too hard? I don't know. From what I understood from Scott, that it used to make him feel bad when they talked about her.
00:47:04
So they stopped. She and Suzanne's brother, Peter, just chalked up Scott's behavior as Scott being Scott.
00:47:11
The thing that concerned me, he started removing all social media of my sister and that.
00:47:16
So that started bothering me a bit. Removing all social media? Yeah, removing anything that had to do with her picture.
00:47:23
pictures. From his practice, from his life, basically. Yeah. And I thought that was really
00:47:29
odd. By now, investigators had found plenty of odd things about Scott and about the Sills'
00:47:36
marriage. When they searched Suzanne and Scott's phones and computers, they discovered the signs
00:47:42
of trouble. There were some text messages between Suzanne and Scott that showed that there was some
00:47:48
tension sometimes in the marriage. Texts like these Suzanne sent to Scott, I will never be free
00:47:54
ever. You are killing me. Don't you see that? I just want out. The old saying is true, isn't it?
00:48:00
It's not about the murder, it's about the marriage. In time, Investigator Hatch would learn just how troubled the marriage was.
00:48:09
There was an interesting tidbit in the files about a woman Scott had been in touch with.
00:48:15
A person named Marie Dalton. And I came to learn that Scott sent a manifesto to her regarding their relationship.
00:48:25
A kind of love letter. Dr. Sills called it the most important manuscript he'd ever written.
00:48:33
And basically it looked like he was in love with her. And this email was sent approximately two weeks after she, Suzanne, passed away.
00:48:42
When investigator Hatch called Marie, a former nurse from Tennessee, she said her relationship with Dr. Sills started about a year and a half before Suzanne died.
00:48:54
So I made arrangements to go out to Knoxville, Tennessee and interview her and find out what happened.
00:49:03
Well, thanks for coming down and meeting with us. We appreciate it. They met at a local police station.
00:49:08
Hatch and his partner, Jamie Vogel, recorded the interview with the woman, who told them that Dr. Sills found her on Facebook, said his parents lived in Tennessee.
00:49:18
How'd you guys meet? Okay, June of 2015, I'm on Facebook, and I get a friend request.
00:49:27
And it says, Eric S. Scott Sills, and I've accepted. And he says, oh, hello, you know, I see you were a nurse.
00:49:36
Then I'd post a picture, and he'd like it and comment. And then eventually, you know, started texting each other with their phones and talking to each other.
00:49:45
I've always been, you know, kind of had a thing for doctors. It's horrible. Marie said it began innocently enough.
00:49:53
She knew he was married to Suzanne, and they had two children together. I think it just got out of control as far as the texting.
00:50:04
Do you know what I'm saying? According to Marie, Dr. Sills made it seem like his marriage was in trouble.
00:50:10
He told her Suzanne was seeing a man she met on Patrick.net, a conservative-leaning online message forum used mostly by men.
00:50:19
You're saying she might have been having an affair, too. That's what he said, but I don't think she would ever do that.
00:50:24
She seemed like a very nice woman. I think he was just trying to make him look bad.
00:50:28
That's what I think. Make himself feel better. Make himself feel better, by the way.
00:50:32
Yeah. Marie admitted the relationship progressed from the phone to in-person. A few months before Suzanne died, they made plans to meet and have sex.
00:50:44
In August or September of 2016, Scott flew out the Knoxville area to visit his parents,
00:50:53
and he met with Marie at a Mexican restaurant. She said that almost from the start, she knew the date would not end well.
00:51:04
Did he want to have sex with you? He wanted probably to have sex with me, but he didn't come on.
00:51:08
He wasn't, and I hate to say this, but he had no game or anything. was very... I mean, no game at all.
00:51:17
So she got up and left. You're saying at the restaurant you just left them that night?
00:51:22
I left. We did not do anything. Marie said she never saw Scott in person again. They kept in touch
00:51:30
on and off after that, but when he sent her that love manuscript, she gently, slowly cut him off.
00:51:38
She couldn't get over that he was bearing his love for her so soon after Suzanne died.
00:51:44
This email was disgusting. Dr. Sills in love with another woman? Sounded like a possible motive.
00:51:51
The problem was Marie had deleted most of their texts and emails. She deleted her Facebook account and her Instagram,
00:51:58
so I couldn't find any photos. There was no trails to follow, so it was basically her words.
00:52:07
Wow, what a story. And there was another story about the marriage police have been investigating.
00:52:14
It started with something they found while searching Dr. Seale's office the day Suzanne died.
00:52:19
We had a piece of paper on his printer that was something from Patrick.net. It had something to do with Suzanne.
00:52:26
That's the online message forum Suzanne liked to post on. She belonged to this forum, a chat room, and she frequented it.
00:52:36
The printout was a message from someone using the handle 10-pound bass. It read,
00:52:43
All I've got to say is you must have a super cool husband. At first, the comment didn't make any sense to investigators.
00:52:51
And then they learned what it was all about. A topless photo Suzanne had posted on the site.
00:52:58
She made a bet about Donald Trump winning the presidential nomination. So she fulfilled her portion of the bet,
00:53:04
and she took a picture of her breasts and posted it. So the note was from this other user,
00:53:10
and he was referring to the breast picture. And Suzanne replied to him, saying, He's exhausted, actually.
00:53:17
It isn't easy being married to a woman who is partially naked, posing alluringly all the time.
00:53:24
Those comments were sitting on Dr. Sills' printer the day Suzanne died. That told me that this posting had been on someone's mind.
00:53:32
That wasn't something that just happened to be up there that day. When they asked Dr. Sills about the printout, he said he had nothing to do with it.
00:53:43
He said that he thought Susanna spread it out. A topless photo, angry text messages, a troubled marriage.
00:53:51
Was that enough to establish a solid motive and finally put Dr Sills behind bars It was up to the district attorney office to decide No matter how much evidence you have you always nervous
00:54:05
In this case, his business will be destroyed if you're wrong. His reputation will be destroyed.
00:54:10
So yeah, you want to make sure that you've got it right. Investigators looking into the case of Suzanne Sills
00:54:30
sent all their evidence over to the DA's office. But from there, things seemed to stagnate.
00:54:37
Nothing happened. The case had been sitting there for a couple years. That is when prosecutor Elise Hatcher
00:54:44
was transferred into the homicide unit. And an investigator came to see her. He said, please look at this case.
00:54:52
and pointed to two boxes that said Scott Sills. And I was just struck by a lot of things about the case,
00:55:01
starting with the crime scene, even though this was said to be an accident, right?
00:55:07
There was Suzanne's hair was in clumps on the ground. Why was there a blood stain with Suzanne's blood in the bedroom
00:55:17
if she had fallen down the stairs? and how did she get marks from ligature strangulation from falling down the stairs.
00:55:26
It's not plausible. Also not plausible that Suzanne died head down on the staircase, said Hatcher.
00:55:34
The lividity on her body was not consistent with the position where she was found.
00:55:40
What do you mean by lividity? Blood pools in the body after a person dies, and so it turns like a purplish color.
00:55:47
So there was lividity on her back. He staged her on the stairs with her head face down, and her head was lower than her feet.
00:55:55
So the lividity didn't match. While Prosecutor Hatcher didn't uncover any new evidence,
00:56:01
with her fresh set of eyes, the picture was clear. Suzanne had been murdered, and all the evidence pointed to one person.
00:56:10
I just picture her last minutes on Earth looking into Scott Sill's face and watching him kill her.
00:56:18
I think Scott Sills had a dark side, and it came out that night. More than two years after Suzanne's death,
00:56:28
Elise Hatcher filed first-degree murder charges against Dr. Scott Sills. A move, she said, that should have happened sooner.
00:56:37
I felt very disturbed for the family and for Suzanne that it took so long to get to the bottom of it.
00:56:43
But by the time I reviewed it, there was enough there. Seemed clear to you? Seemed clear to me.
00:56:51
In April 2019, Scott was on his way to work, unaware that undercover detectives had been tailing him.
00:56:59
Probably thought he was clear. And as soon as he left his house, they conducted a traffic stop on him and took him into custody.
00:57:10
Across the country in Georgia, Teresa was in the middle of her workday when she received a call.
00:57:17
It was the prosecutor, Elise Hatcher. She told me that my son-in-law had just been arrested for the murder of my daughter.
00:57:30
Tell me what it was like to be you in that very moment. In that moment, two of my co-workers were passing, and they both stopped and went.
00:57:38
so that i can just imagine what my face must have looked like in that moment i was still
00:57:46
stunned by the turn of events up until that phone call from elizabeth hatcher i thought the police
00:57:53
were satisfied with the investigation that he had nothing to do with it and he was this poor
00:57:57
single father suzanne's brother frank was equally stunned the warrant that they served i learned
00:58:04
things that I had never heard of before, you know, about there being blood in Mary Catherine's
00:58:10
bedroom on the walls, about the cut on Scott's forehead that was being covered by the beanie.
00:58:17
It seemed like very strong evidence, and it didn't make sense to me why it had taken so long for
00:58:23
there to be an arrest. And immediately the question is, you know, what was going to happen with
00:58:28
Mary Catherine and Eric. The twins, by then 14 years old, were notified of their father's arrest
00:58:36
at their high school. They were taken out of class and taken to a social worker. They were asked at
00:58:41
the care center there if they had any friends that they could call, if someone would take them. And
00:58:49
Mary Kate called a friend of hers and their mother, who herself had been adopted as a child.
00:58:55
So she went and she picked them up. Well, at the sheriff's office, Dr. Scott Sills agreed to be interviewed for a third time.
00:59:05
How did that go? He said some things that were different. He was cooperative again.
00:59:10
Really? Same demeanor. Yeah, calm, cool, answering our questions. And we kind of asked him about the room.
00:59:17
How could that blood have gotten in Mary Kate's bedroom? He recalled replacing that screen, and when he reached behind the nightstand to get the screen,
00:59:28
he caught his hand on a nail or a staple, and that's what he thought, how that blood got on the curtain.
00:59:36
And he still denied causing any harm to Suzanne. Scott pleaded not guilty and posted bail, $1 million.
00:59:45
He used his home in San Clemente as collateral. After he posted bond, Dr. Sills returned to his house here in San Clemente.
00:59:53
It was a different place now quiet The children had gone off to live with family friends The neighbors all wondered what happened in there but he did not give them an opportunity to ask
01:00:09
During the week, we'd see him. It was interesting. He would wear like the big headphones when he walked the dogs.
01:00:15
As if don't talk to me. I've got headphones. Yeah, right. Yeah. Walking the dogs around the neighborhood, but not engaging.
01:00:21
It must have been odd to live beside someone who you knew was under suspicion and might wind up being tried for murder.
01:00:31
Yes. It was unsettling. He got arrested for murder and he still lives next door.
01:00:35
Sure. Is anything ever going to happen? Right. As the doctor awaited trial, he once again carried on with his work, though the California Medical Board filed to suspend his license.
01:00:47
The court barred the twins from living with their father, so they remained with those family friends.
01:00:54
Three months after his arrest, Scott published a new book, Ovarian Reboot, which looks at a fertility technique called Ovarian Rejuvenation.
01:01:05
Here's an excerpt from the audiobook where he's quoting an Egyptian pharaoh. When virtue and modesty enlighten her charms, the luster of a beautiful woman is brighter than the stars of heaven.
01:01:17
His case was delayed even more when COVID happened. Two more years went by, and by then, Elise Hatcher was set to retire from the DA's office.
01:01:28
It was the only case that almost kept me from retiring because I felt so strongly about it.
01:01:36
I wanted to bring justice for Suzanne. You really do get invested in your cases, huh?
01:01:43
Yeah, I was probably a little too invested in this one. It was such a diabolical thing he had done to her and her whole family and her children,
01:01:54
and I wanted to bring justice. It would be up to the next prosecutor to take the case to trial.
01:02:02
As a prosecutor, you have the burden of proof, so no matter how much evidence you have, you're always nervous.
01:02:10
What could go wrong, a witness could go sideways. And that, it turns out, was exactly what happened.
01:02:19
November 2023, seven years after Suzanne Sills' death, her husband Scott Sills, the once famed fertility doctor, went on trial for murder in an Orange County courtroom.
01:02:45
Her mother, Teresa, and brother, Frank, flew to California to be there. You intended all along to attend the trial?
01:02:53
Yes. I wanted to know what happened. Nobody was sharing details. What happened? The twins, Mary, Catherine, and Eric, now 19 years old,
01:03:04
were on the witness list, so they couldn't watch. But they'd made their feelings clear.
01:03:09
How did they feel about their father and the fact that he'd been charged with this crime?
01:03:14
I know that they support him. It honestly was not a subject I wanted to bring up with them.
01:03:21
Also in the gallery was Scott's former patient, Kim Gadbury. I needed to know if he truly did it.
01:03:29
Why? Because I couldn't believe that somebody that could give life, could take life, let alone their best friend,
01:03:39
a man that I knew that I felt like I'd owed so much to. Did he do it? The defendant killed this victim silently
01:03:47
by squeezing the life out of her and strangling her. Senior Deputy District Attorney Jennifer Walker,
01:03:56
who'd taken over the case from Elyse Hatcher, laid out the evidence for the jury.
01:04:00
The physical evidence points you to one person, the defendant. Starting with that 911 call,
01:04:11
Scott appeared cold and unconcerned, she said. He didn't even refer to Suzanne by name.
01:04:16
We've got a patient here who's fallen upstairs, and I don't have a pulse. Scott wasn't even attempting to save her, said the prosecutor.
01:04:25
A doctor, and yet he seemed to delay performing CPR for five minutes. Why? The evidence will show you because he knew she was already dead.
01:04:36
A normal reaction by anyone, let alone a doctor, would be to immediately start CPR.
01:04:46
Walker called the medical examiner, who said Suzanne had a constellation of injuries all over her body.
01:04:53
No way those were caused by falling down the stairs, she argued. They were the result of a violent struggle that ended with strangulation.
01:05:02
There's multiple abrasions all over her face, neck, back, hands, legs, completely inconsistent with falling down five steps.
01:05:17
When the prosecution showed the autopsy photos, Teresa tried her best to hold it together and not look away.
01:05:25
Shocking, shocking, shocking. But you had to see. Yeah. Yeah. I had to see it. For her to look like that, those pictures, how horrible was that?
01:05:38
And there was nothing that I could do to stop it, to fix it, to make it better, to change it.
01:05:44
Nothing. And there never will be. If I would have seen those pictures when I was first phoned about her murder,
01:05:51
my thoughts would have been much different than they were at the time. Ligature has it made it obvious that she was strangled in your view 100 There no other way it could have happened The blood in Mary Catherine bedroom told what happened the prosecutor said
01:06:05
Blood on the curtains, blood on the nightstand, clumps of hair on the floor. He's this doctor who helps people create life.
01:06:16
He knows that he's taking it. Kim Gadbury said a dreadful realization crept over her as she watched the trial.
01:06:25
She did not fall down the stairs. She was strangled. Without a doubt. But even still, there was still, like, in my gut.
01:06:35
Did he really? Like, your brain just goes, like, he couldn't do this. He really, really couldn't do this.
01:06:43
The one thing prosecutors couldn't really explain is why they believe Scott did it.
01:06:49
I'm not required to prove any motive to you. You can consider an absence of motive as a defense.
01:06:55
you can consider motive as something tending to show guilt, but it's not required.
01:07:00
It's just something you can consider. But it's here. They tried to show Scott had some reason to be angry with Suzanne.
01:07:08
They couldn't call that Tennessee nurse, the one Scott had apparently fallen for.
01:07:12
Investigators weren't able to locate her. But they did suggest the topless photo Suzanne posted on Patrick.net
01:07:19
might have enraged her husband. That's kind of maddening if you're a husband, that other men are commenting that you don't care
01:07:29
that your wife is posting a topless picture. Is that the reason he killed her? I don't know.
01:07:37
Then came, perhaps, the most anticipated testimony for the prosecution, Scott's son, Eric Sills.
01:07:45
He originally told investigators all those years ago that he heard his parents arguing that night.
01:07:52
But on the stand, he said he didn't remember hearing them fight, which was a big blow for the prosecution.
01:07:59
The DA tried to explain it away. He didn't want to say in court that they were arguing.
01:08:05
Makes sense, because now, at 19, he knows that may look bad if I corroborate that my dad was arguing with my mom.
01:08:15
It was Investigator Holloway who conducted that first interview with 12-year-old Eric.
01:08:20
I was disappointed, but he had been 12 at the time, and then he was 7 years older now.
01:08:26
So there's a chance that he remembered things differently. In the end, the prosecutor argued nothing could change the fact that Suzanne had been murdered.
01:08:39
And no one else could have done it but Dr. Scott Sills. He was the one who strangled Suzanne.
01:08:45
No other adult was there. it wasn't the kids it wasn't the stairs he murdered Suzanne
01:08:56
and she deserves justice all along the doctor sat at the defense table listening intently to the evidence against him
01:09:06
now it was the defense's turn and yes said the defense attorney Scott's wife may have in fact been strangled
01:09:16
But if she was, Scott didn't do it. There was another culprit lurking in the house that night.
01:09:25
We did DNA testing on the scarf. Which produced what? Dog DNA and pig DNA. Pig DNA?
01:09:32
Yes. That's, you know, your reaction was the same as mine. Pig DNA? Yeah. The attorney for Dr. Scott Seals,
01:09:54
accused of killing his wife in his own home, had a simple message for the jury. His client should not be on trial
01:10:02
because no crime had been committed that day. What ended up happening was a horrible accident.
01:10:09
Jack Early is Scott's attorney. He told the court that Suzanne's death was a terrible accident,
01:10:15
a slip and fall down the staircase. This is not a murder. Consider the medication she had taken, he said,
01:10:22
for her migraine. Early argued it was enough to make her dizzy. What did they find in her blood?
01:10:30
An opiate, Valium, and some other substances. Most people would say those things affect your balance.
01:10:38
The logical explanation? Suzanne got up in the middle of the night and tripped on something at the top of the stairs
01:10:45
and tumbled all the way down. And when she fell, she suffered a spinal cord injury,
01:10:50
or a C3 fracture, said Early, which meant she wouldn't have been able to breathe.
01:10:56
And, in fact, the medical examiner had concluded that a contributing factor to Suzanne's death
01:11:03
was a spinal cord injury. So, if you have a serious C3 fracture, that stops your breathing.
01:11:10
And you die because you get a lack of oxygen to the heart. Somewhere in there, the C3 broke, diaphragm affected, and also there was compression on the neck.
01:11:19
There was compression on the neck. Compression? How? Well, the defense had an explanation for those ligature marks.
01:11:29
It's potentially the scarf that did it. The scarf. The one Mary Catherine removed from her mother's neck that morning.
01:11:37
early said something tightened that scarf and it wasn't scott there was evidence that the dogs
01:11:46
were pulling on the scarf what was the evidence well first of all that morning scott sills told the
01:11:53
fireman that when he came down the dogs were pulling on it and that's why we did dna testing on
01:12:00
Which produced what? Dog DNA and pig DNA. Pig DNA? Yes. That's, you know, your reaction was the same as mine.
01:12:10
Pig DNA? Yeah. And then I asked the children, what did you feed the dog? And pig ears.
01:12:17
That was her favorite treat to get the dogs. How big and strong were these dogs?
01:12:22
Well, they're 90-pound dogs. They're big dogs, so they'd be very strong. Golden Retriever?
01:12:28
A Doberman mix. But you must agree that scarf must have been held very tightly around her neck for several minutes in order to facilitate her death.
01:12:37
Well, if that was the only cause. So let's assume there was no C3 fracture. Then yes.
01:12:43
Then it would take minutes to be able to suffocate someone to death. If you have a C3 fracture and your diaphragm is no longer working, then it doesn't take as much pressure.
01:12:54
But what about the clumps of hair on the ground? The hair did, in fact, belong to Suzanne.
01:13:00
So, yanked out by her enraged husband? No, not at all, said attorney Early. She was taking medication. She had hair extensions.
01:13:10
She had a constant problem of hair coming out. As for the blood evidence in the bedroom,
01:13:16
Early offered his own interpretation for the forensic testing. He said it was not a mixture of Suzanne and Scott's blood,
01:13:23
like the investigators believed. It was only Scott's blood. Remember, Scott said in his interview that he had cut his hand on a loose nail
01:13:31
when replacing a window screen weeks earlier. Early argued that forensics had simply picked up Suzanne's trace DNA
01:13:39
left behind from being in that room, not from any violent struggle. A lot of the allegations against him were based on the idea
01:13:47
that her injuries were too severe for the fall down the stairs and that blood on the curtains and on the wall, on the side table.
01:13:53
That combination of things made it sure look like something pretty bad happened.
01:13:59
If you believe that there was a fight in the room, 99% of the evidence came from him, was the blood.
01:14:06
There was no blood from her, no other evidence that showed that she was injured in the room.
01:14:12
The weakest part of the prosecution's case was the lack of motive, said Early. This is not a couple with history of violence, history of things getting out of control at all.
01:14:23
After years of peace, a sudden explosion, and she's dead. Yes. Even that topless photo Suzanne posted online
01:14:31
would not have been enough to set him off. It doesn't seem to me that that's really a motive
01:14:37
that's going to make you kill somebody, choke them to death because they posted something three months earlier.
01:14:44
As the defense's case was coming to a close, Dr. Scott Sills kept everyone guessing.
01:14:50
Would the doctor address the jurors himself Did you want him to testify For me it would have been an easier case with him testifying Did you encourage him to do so
01:15:00
To a certain extent, but he did not want to leave his children with a negative view of either him or his wife.
01:15:06
He had a story to tell, and until he was ready or in a position to tell it, I wasn't in a position to tell it.
01:15:14
The jurors were not going to hear from the defendant after all. The defense rested its case.
01:15:22
And now it was the jury's turn to decide. Did the doctor murder his wife? Or was it a tragic accident?
01:15:31
I didn't want to convict someone who was innocent. Like, that was my biggest fear.
01:15:48
Outside of the courthouse, Dr. Scott Sills stood quietly, his children still very much in his corner.
01:15:58
He and they remained calm and collected. Now all he could do was wait. While inside, 12 jurors were deciding his fate.
01:16:09
We spoke with five of them. I wanted to keep an open mind until we walked into that juror room to deliberate.
01:16:18
Because we owed it to this guy. To all of them. Yeah. And I think everybody felt that way.
01:16:25
I was nervous because I didn't want to convict someone who was innocent. Like, that was my biggest fear, I think, going into it.
01:16:33
What did you make of him? Could you make an assessment of his personality? I thought he was an odd bird just to start with.
01:16:39
I don't know. He seemed very stoic. Like, no emotion. What did you make of her injuries?
01:16:46
Horrific. Yeah, she looked like she had been beat up. Too much for falling down the staircase?
01:16:52
Yeah, just a lot on the face. And the mark on her neck. Well, let's talk about the DNA for a minute,
01:16:57
because the prosecutor said that you can see with the naked eye, blood on the wall, there's blood on the curtains,
01:17:01
there's blood on the side table by the bed. That's pretty suggestive, right, of a big struggle.
01:17:07
But the defense pointed out that they had blood from him, but not necessarily blood from her.
01:17:14
Yeah, that's confusing. That surprised me. But I just kept thinking, why is he bleeding?
01:17:21
If he has nothing to do with this, why is his blood everywhere? They said they quickly ruled out the defense theory
01:17:27
that the family's dogs were somehow responsible for Suzanne's death. It's more plausible to me that there was marital strife than the dogs did it.
01:17:37
Did the dogs seem capable of doing that sort of thing? No. I mean, one was like a golden retriever.
01:17:42
Well, it was a kind of a dog gave my homework reasonably wasn it I thought so It wasn reasonable But when it came to motive they told us it wasn so clear How important was it for you to feel as if there was some sort of motive that you could talk about for this
01:18:00
We didn't get one. She told us we wouldn't. I wanted one. Juries tend to want one.
01:18:06
I think they threw out a couple of potential motives that could all be strong. Like things in their marriage.
01:18:12
I don't know if he was still mad about the topless photo. There were four options to consider.
01:18:19
First-degree murder, second-degree murder, manslaughter, or not guilty. We had our packet of jury instructions with the legal requirements for each degree,
01:18:31
and I think the part that took longer. But not that long. Three hours in, they were ready to vote.
01:18:40
It was fast. It was pretty fast. real fast you're real nervous is is everybody going to be on the same page
01:18:48
they went around and one by one they came to a unanimous decision they alerted the judge they were ready and the jurors filed into the courtroom
01:19:01
my heart was about to jump out of my chest have you reached verdicts on this matter yes
01:19:06
we the jury find the defendant eric scott sills not guilty of the crime of first degree
01:19:12
murder. Not guilty of first degree murder. They weren't done. We the jury find the defendant,
01:19:20
Eric Scott Sills, guilty of the crime of second degree murder. Guilty of second degree murder.
01:19:27
And that was that. Dr. Scott Sills was ushered away in handcuffs. So second degree because it was kind of a moment of passion that led to a huge fight that otherwise
01:19:41
would never have happened in that marriage. He was probably jealous about the Patrick.net connections that she had.
01:19:49
We didn't quite have all of the evidence to place it into Murder One. I thought that it was sort of a crime of passion.
01:19:57
I don't believe he went into that room with the intention to kill her, and that was my sort of way of picking murder, too.
01:20:05
We were all in it together. Yeah. And I knew we were fair and impartial, and that we did everything the way it's designed.
01:20:13
I felt like everyone on the jury kept the open mind and very thoughtful. So I felt very confident in our decision.
01:20:21
For Suzanne's family, Scott's conviction was a moment of relief and sadness. There was no feeling of great joy when this happened.
01:20:32
This is a horrific situation and there are no winners and there's no happy moments to a guilty verdict.
01:20:37
As for the children Mary Catherine and Eric they are young adults now just starting their lives Mary Catherine is in college and Eric enlisted in the Navy She never going to see her children grow up Growing up right
01:20:53
now and you're watching it, she can't. Yes. Scott's watching it. She can't. And they supported their
01:20:59
father. Yes. And sorrow upon sorrow, there was more. Two days before their father's conviction,
01:21:09
the family friend, who'd become like a second mom to the twins, died. Heart disease.
01:21:16
It was Mary Catherine, along with her father, who had found her mother's body at the base of the stairs.
01:21:22
And it was she who found that family friend, too. And for that to happen in the midst of trial,
01:21:29
you're having that happen, a conviction happen. It's unbelievable. The Orskaya Superior Court is now in session.
01:21:37
Three months later, dressed in an orange jumpsuit, Dr. Scott Sills was back in court for sentencing.
01:21:44
Mary Catherine gave a statement supporting her father and pleading with the judge for a lighter sentence.
01:21:51
I want my father to walk me down the aisle at my wedding someday. I have been left orphaned, and I feel so lost without my parents.
01:21:58
I humbly ask for mercy and kindness to be shown to my father. Scott Sills was sentenced to 15 years to life.
01:22:09
I wouldn't expect him to be serving very much time. And she has an endless sentence.
01:22:18
I have an endless sentence. Not a day goes by that Teresa doesn't think of her daughter Suzanne.
01:22:25
and the house where Suzanne dreamed of seeing Mary Catherine in a wedding dress walking down the staircase.
01:22:35
It's been sold now. Nothing left but memories. When you find out the real story of the staircase,
01:22:45
it's just like an extra hurt. It's like an extra blow. She was so filled with joy.
01:22:51
She had this wonderful dream of this great day this great moment to seeing her daughter on the staircase and what did it turn out to be.
01:23:03
It really leaves you breathless. That's all for this edition of Dateline. And check out our Talking Dateline podcast.
01:23:15
Keith Morrison and Josh Mankiewicz will go behind the scenes of tonight's episode,
01:23:19
available Wednesday in the Dateline feed, wherever you get your podcasts. We'll see you again Sunday at 10, 9 central.
01:23:27
I'm Lester Holt. For all of us at NBC News, good night.