If These Walls Could Talk

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Speaker 1 Tonight, on Dateline.

Speaker 2 Something awful had happened.

Speaker 3 Fire emergency.

Speaker 1 We got a patient here who's fallen offstairs.

Speaker 4 I got the call from Scott. He said Suzanne is dead.

Speaker 5 Scott was a fertility doctor. He had made some TV appearances.
We had some questions our first day there.

Speaker 1 He seemed heartbroken.

Speaker 6 It was an accident.

Speaker 1 What do you told us?

Speaker 7 Something about it wasn't quite right.

Speaker 4 She fell. She never fell.

Speaker 5 There were some text messages that showed that there was some tension sometimes in the marriage.

Speaker 9 I'm on Facebook and I get a friend request.

Speaker 10 Scott sent an email to her. It looked like he was in love with her.

Speaker 5 There was a scarf sitting on the floor. We found stains on it that looked like blood.

Speaker 11 We did DNA testing on the scarf, which produced what?

Speaker 1 Pig DNA.

Speaker 11 Your reaction was the same as mine.

Speaker 7 I know the wheels of justice are very slow. I should have known.
I should have been more suspicious.

Speaker 4 When you find out the real story of the staircase,

Speaker 4 it really leaves you breathless.

Speaker 12 He was a doctor who helped create life. Then he was accused of ending one.
Was it an accident or murder? I'm Lester Holt, and this is Dateline.

Speaker 1 Here's Keith Morrison with: If These Walls Could Talk.

Speaker 1 If these walls could talk, oh, the story they would tell.

Speaker 1 All right, dinner is on.

Speaker 1 About a family of four, all their chaos and clamor. You're sock!

Speaker 1 I love you, and you are so good.

Speaker 1 The mother,

Speaker 1 full of life, and dancing like she doesn't have a care in the world.

Speaker 1 Enjoying time with her daughter, acting out little scripted videos. Scott, Eric will give me my computer back.

Speaker 1 Okay, you tell him.

Speaker 9 If he can't share, the computer goes in time out.

Speaker 1 Yes, Suzanne and Scott Sills were building quite a life here. He was a respected fertility doctor, helping couples realize the dream that all their efforts and their hope had failed to achieve.

Speaker 1 He helped them make babies, families of their own.

Speaker 13 I call them a miracle worker. He truly was.

Speaker 1 And she was her husband's business partner, an office manager, and a busy mom to twins Eric and Mary Catherine, with big dreams for the future in their California home.

Speaker 4 She's telling me these plans she has when Mary Kate gets married.

Speaker 1 Plans to one day throw a spectacular wedding for her daughter.

Speaker 4 She's going to come down that beautiful staircase and it's going to be the most fantastic entrance.

Speaker 1 That wasn't going to happen though, not ever.

Speaker 1 That beautiful staircase would not be fantastic for them at all.

Speaker 1 It was November 2016, a weekend to celebrate, supposed to be.

Speaker 1 The twins were in seventh grade. Mary Catherine at a a public middle school, Eric at the Army and Navy Academy.

Speaker 1 Friday, a Veterans Day weekend, was the Academy's annual military review, and Eric was in the band. So of course Scott and Suzanne made plans to attend, said Suzanne's mother, Teresa Newbarr.

Speaker 4 He had rescheduled his office hours and they had gone down to this parade.

Speaker 1 As it turned out, they didn't see Eric.

Speaker 4 He had broken his trumpet and he wasn't even in the parade and Suzanne had to sit out there in the broiling sun.

Speaker 1 By the time the family returned home, Suzanne had a migraine, a bad one. Still had it the following night, a Saturday.
And then, Sunday morning, Dr. Scott Sills called 911.

Speaker 1 I don't have a pulse, and she's cold.

Speaker 3 Oh, okay, so

Speaker 3 she's not breathing?

Speaker 6 No, she's not breathing. She's not breathing.

Speaker 3 Okay, sir, I've got help being sent while we're talking.

Speaker 1 Dr. Sills was in a life-and-death battle.
Only this time the patient was his wife, Suzanne, lying face down at the bottom of the staircase.

Speaker 3 Is there anybody else there with you? Oh, yes.

Speaker 1 Our whole family's here.

Speaker 1 Meaning, Dr. Sills and Eric still upstairs, and Mary Catherine, who at that moment stood right next to her father, beside her mother.

Speaker 1 Dave Holloway from the Orange County Sheriff's Department Department has listened to the 911 call.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 1 God, that must have been bad for her. Yeah.

Speaker 3 So you found her down at the bottom of the stairs?

Speaker 1 Yeah, partially on the stairs. Okay.
Looks like her shoe came off or something. So you want me to put her on her back? Right, on her back, flat on her back.

Speaker 1 She coached the doctor through CPR.

Speaker 3 I want you to tilt her head head back, look in her mouth to see if there's any food or vomit in the mouth. Here's Connie Food.

Speaker 1 Mary Catherine, there, watching, listening, terrified. She's making a sound.

Speaker 3 Is she moving or responding at all?

Speaker 3 Well, minimally.

Speaker 1 Minimal, but it was something.

Speaker 3 Let me know if you feel or hear any air going in and out or you see the chest moving at all.

Speaker 1 Um

Speaker 1 hold on a minute. Hold on a minute.

Speaker 3 Just continue the compressions until paramedics arrive and take over.

Speaker 3 She's making noises out of her mouth.

Speaker 3 Okay, but if she's not pushing you away, continue with the compression.

Speaker 3 Okay, they're driving with lights and sirens, so you just continue with the compressions. Whoever else is there, get the front door opened up.
Oh, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 Keep going, keep going. Okay, I'm gonna get this way.
Keep doing that. Minutes into the call, help arrived.

Speaker 3 Firemen should be pulling.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah, they're here

Speaker 1 When paramedics entered the Sill's home, they could tell this was bad. Suzanne was motionless at the bottom of her staircase.

Speaker 1 They tried everything to get Suzanne breathing again,

Speaker 1 but nothing. It was too late.
Suzanne was dead.

Speaker 1 Would there have been any chance to revive her by the time anyone got there? No.

Speaker 1 What a sudden and strange way for her to die. A mysterious fall down the stairs in the middle of the night.
Her doctor husband unable to save her. A terrible, tragic accident.

Speaker 1 Wasn't it?

Speaker 1 Sunday morning on this normally quiet street in San Clemente, California was anything but

Speaker 14 there were five or six police officers' cars parked in the street, which was something you see in this neighborhood. You do not see that in this neighborhood.

Speaker 1 Rochelle and John Brannon lived right next door.

Speaker 14 I walked up the street and the front door was open and there was the blanket covering her body at the the bottom of the stairs, which is right at the front door.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Investigators arrived, as they do whenever someone dies so suddenly and unexpectedly.

Speaker 10 Suzanne was lying on her back with the blanket covering her body when I arrived.

Speaker 1 Eric Hatch and Dave Holloway from the Orange County Sheriff's Department knew this part would be difficult, and always is.

Speaker 1 But of course, they had to question Suzanne's family, find out what they knew, like,

Speaker 1 was there an intruder? Was there any sign of a break-in in the house? Or were the doors locked or unlocked?

Speaker 5 No, there was no sign of any break-ins. The family told us that there was, you know, locks on the doors.

Speaker 1 And they locked their doors.

Speaker 5 Burglar alarm, yeah,

Speaker 5 there was no break-in.

Speaker 1 Well, the family as a whole was very calm.

Speaker 1 Even the 12-year-olds.

Speaker 5 Yes, the two children were very calm, very smart, not emotional at the time.

Speaker 5 And I don't draw any conclusions necessarily from that,

Speaker 5 because everyone grieves differently and a 12-year-old may not grasp what's going on. They did appear sad.
Mary Catherine cried a little bit.

Speaker 1 Can you tell me what it's like to have to put somebody in a familiar room of their house and interview interview them about somebody who is very recently deceased, in fact, is still lying over there by the stairs.

Speaker 5 It's difficult.

Speaker 5 It's a difficult position to put someone in.

Speaker 1 Very difficult, but also very enlightening.

Speaker 1 The family told investigators about something that happened just before Suzanne died, something that could explain how she ended up at the bottom of those stairs. It's the story you already know.

Speaker 1 Two days before she died, Suzanne attended that military parade for Veterans Day. It was a hot and sunny day.

Speaker 5 According to the family, that was a known trigger for Suzanne to get migraines is the sunlight and the noise and everything.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 Saturday night, Suzanne went to Mary Catherine's room where she could sleep by herself in a dark room

Speaker 5 and make herself as comfortable as possible

Speaker 5 to help herself with the migraine.

Speaker 1 The family walked detectives through the events of that night. Before going to bed, Mary Catherine left a pink post-it note on her door with this message for her mom.

Speaker 1 I know you are tired, but you need to know that I love you. and your iPad is charging.
Please sleep well and sleep in.

Speaker 1 The family told them all was quiet when they turned in for the night. Eric in his room, Mary Catherine in her parents' bedroom with her dad to give Suzanne a quiet space.

Speaker 10 But later on that night, Suzanne was on her computer or her iPad sending some emails with some clients in China.

Speaker 10 And Scott went in to check on her.

Speaker 1 Scott said Suzanne still wasn't feeling well, so he urged her to put the work away.

Speaker 10 You know, you shouldn't be be doing this. You should get some rest, you know, you have this migraine.

Speaker 1 And then Scott returned to bed. And by dawn, he said, he awakened to find Suzanne dead.

Speaker 1 Investigators looked at the area where her body was found, and they discovered some items that seemed curious to them.

Speaker 10 Off to the side, there was the stainless steel kind of spaghetti pot that was near her body, along with her purse and an empty bottle of medication.

Speaker 1 Scott had told them Suzanne had taken medication for her migraine the night before. And as for the pot, he explained that she sometimes kept it nearby in case she got sick.

Speaker 1 Investigators wondered if Suzanne, groggy from the medicine, tripped on the stairs and dropped the pot as she fell,

Speaker 1 but they'd have to wait for toxicology results. Suzanne's husband, meanwhile, had a difficult call to make.

Speaker 4 I got the call from Scott. It was late.

Speaker 1 By the time Dr. Scott Sills was able to phone Suzanne's mother, Teresa, across the country in Georgia, it was very late.

Speaker 4 He sounded very, very

Speaker 4 choked up, and he said, Suzanne is dead. And I said,

Speaker 4 no, she isn't. It came from nowhere.
Dead from what? There's nothing wrong with her.

Speaker 4 And I said, Scott, I have to talk to you in the morning. I can't talk to you now.

Speaker 4 And I slept on and off that night, waiting for a phone call to come back for him to say, well, she's not really dead. And by morning, I knew that,

Speaker 1 yes.

Speaker 4 And I called him immediately. First thing I did when I got up, I said, what happened? I was thinking maybe she had an aneurysm.
What else could have taken her?

Speaker 1 Now, Teresa had to phone Suzanne's brother, Frank, with the awful news.

Speaker 6 I just remember being in shock, and it took

Speaker 6 me a long time to process it. It was just kind of like not real.

Speaker 6 But I remember going out and going for a jog, even though it was at nighttime, just thinking about it and cried, and I just couldn't believe that it was just over like that.

Speaker 1 Suzanne's other brother, Peter Arswaga, was living in Florida when he heard that his older sister, a former high school cheerleader, had fallen down the stairs and died.

Speaker 7 At first, he don't believe it. So, I mean, it takes a while to set in.

Speaker 7 And this was a weird... I mean, this was really odd.

Speaker 1 That seemed plausible?

Speaker 7 Odd for the acrobat. I mean, you know, the cheerleader that does all the flips on every cheerleading squad, that was my sister.

Speaker 7 So, you know, that was odd that she would be, you know, clumsy like that.

Speaker 1 Nothing about Suzanne's death made sense to her family.

Speaker 4 Had to be something sudden, something unexpected.

Speaker 1 But just how unexpected. They had no idea.

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Speaker 1 Good girl. The mother of Suzanne Sills, Teresa Neubauer, wondered all manner of things as she traveled to California after her daughter was found dead at the bottom of her staircase.

Speaker 1 The only explanation that made any sense was maybe a brain aneurysm, something that caused her to lose consciousness and fall.

Speaker 1 When Teresa arrived in San Clemente, her son-in-law Scott met her at the front door.

Speaker 4 He gave me a big hug and he was crying and shaking.

Speaker 1 Teresa had plenty of questions for Scott. She wanted to know everything, every detail.
Like, was there anything unusual that happened that night?

Speaker 4 He said he heard noise in the house during the night.

Speaker 4 But he says, with two kids that are 12 years old and two big dogs and two big cats, there's always noise in the house at night. Somebody's always doing something.
So it didn't concern him.

Speaker 4 He did not get up and check on the noise.

Speaker 1 Teresa found that odd. No sounds from Suzanne.

Speaker 4 She was especially agile and graceful, and for her to have fallen without screaming, without trying to grab onto the banister in some way.

Speaker 4 I mean, I'm a quonker, and I would have tried to stop myself if I were falling.

Speaker 1 It was a shattering end to the family Suzanne had worked so hard for. Having kids did not come easily.
for her.

Speaker 1 Frank and his wife, Samantha, had watched Suzanne struggle with infertility when she was younger.

Speaker 13 She had a lot of miscarriages.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 1 Oh yeah. And if you have a lot of miscarriages too, every one is a heartbreaker.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 4 She wanted that more than anything in the world.

Speaker 1 That was back when Suzanne was married to another man.

Speaker 1 They decided to go for fertility treatments.

Speaker 4 She went to the IVF doctor, who happened to be Scott Sills in Atlanta.

Speaker 4 And that's how she met Scott.

Speaker 1 Something sparked between Suzanne and her new doctor. And before long, she divorced her husband and married Scott.

Speaker 1 She continued to be his patient, and finally, with the help of IVF, the dream she had longed for-not just one baby, but two twins, Eric and Mary Catherine, were born.

Speaker 13 She loved those kids. She was a wonderful mother.

Speaker 13 And the way that she would take care of those, like, like, she's like two kids and she's like feeding them both and juggling it and just looking amazing and perfect.

Speaker 1 Her world revolved around them.

Speaker 4 She was a passionate person and she was always enthusiastic about what she was doing.

Speaker 4 And it seemed that Most everything the kids did, you know, was something that fascinated her that she wanted to to share.

Speaker 1 As the kids flourished, so did their dad's career, his work taking them all over the world.

Speaker 4 Suzanne and Scott lived in Atlanta, they lived in North Carolina, they lived in New York, they lived in Ireland, and then California.

Speaker 1 Once in Southern California, Dr. Sills eventually opened up his own clinic in Carlsbad, and his research began getting more attention.
He even made appearances on the TV show, The Doctors.

Speaker 1 Damn, this is exciting research. It is exciting because there are people whose driver's license says that they're 29, but their ovaries are acting 59.
And that's a very big struggle.

Speaker 1 Suzanne, remember, helped run his growing medical clinic.

Speaker 4 She was very happy in California with the practice.

Speaker 1 She was his partner.

Speaker 4 That is correct. And she loved it.

Speaker 1 Teresa knew her daughter would be good at it. She had a business degree from the University of Miami and had worked in marketing.

Speaker 1 But more than that, she connected with the patients because she knew their heartbreak personally.

Speaker 4 She had a good perspective on it because she herself had been through IVF.

Speaker 1 Suzanne had plenty of interests outside of work, too.

Speaker 7 She was the person who was good at everything. She was physical.
She was good at sports. You know, anything she applied herself to, she accomplished.
She's a very driven person, always.

Speaker 1 Wow. Good at everything.
Yes. She was just energizer bunny taps.
That'd be right. Yes.

Speaker 9 My name is Suzanne Sills. I'm from San Clemente, California, and I'm 43 years old.

Speaker 1 Two years before her death,

Speaker 1 she made this home video to audition for the show, Survivor.

Speaker 1 Here she jokes around with her daughter about how far she'd go to win.

Speaker 9 We all know that there's an ugly part of Survivor. And, you know, this is where we don't always play well with others.

Speaker 9 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. So, of course, we're gonna do it.
What happened to my cookie?

Speaker 1 Mary Catherine, once her mother's sidekick in an audition video, now had to face life without her.

Speaker 1 Her family still had so many questions, but there weren't any clear answers. Not yet, anyway.

Speaker 1 But this house, it was about to give up some secrets.

Speaker 10 We found bloodstains that was obviously suspicious.

Speaker 1 Bloodstains? How obvious were those?

Speaker 10 Well, to me, it stood right out.

Speaker 1 Suzanne's mother veered from disbelief to acceptance and back again.

Speaker 1 How could her vibrant, healthy, athletic daughter, Suzanne Sills, be gone forever? And how, of all things, could she have died from a freak tumble down the stairs?

Speaker 4 The fall, just that she just fell.

Speaker 1 She was eating at you.

Speaker 4 Yeah, niggling at you. You know, just there all the time.
She fell. She never fell.
She didn't fall when she was a child.

Speaker 1 Teresa shared that niggling feeling with one of the investigators.

Speaker 4 I wanted him to know how physically capable this woman was, as if she were much younger than she was. And he said, yes, well, but accidents do happen, which of course is true.

Speaker 1 Once she heard the word accident, that was that, apparently.

Speaker 4 That's the way it seemed to me.

Speaker 4 And I had no reason to think they would not have done a thorough investigation.

Speaker 4 So I thought it was done, and it was over.

Speaker 4 Oh.

Speaker 1 It was far from over. Did you have any inkling at all that there was an investigation underway? No.

Speaker 4 I did not.

Speaker 1 As is typical in any death investigation, detectives were careful about what they shared.

Speaker 5 Communications with the family was sympathetic and just to inform them that we were doing all we could.

Speaker 1 Standard procedure. Correct.
You don't tell them very much, but you keep investigating.

Speaker 5 Yes.

Speaker 1 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 as they searched the Seal's house, room by room.

Speaker 1 Was that a big job? Is that a, you know, you're searching for what? You don't really know, right?

Speaker 10 You don't know, because it's an accident.

Speaker 1 Upstairs, they searched the four bedrooms.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 1 So then they moved on to the daughter's room, Mary Catherine.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 there on the curtains, they saw what looked like blood.

Speaker 5 Once we saw blood in Mary Catherine's room, we knew that we were onto something we were going to have to spend some time on.

Speaker 1 This was the room Suzanne slept in the night before she died. A place for peace and quiet while she recovered from her migraine.

Speaker 1 Bloodstains?

Speaker 1 How obvious were those?

Speaker 10 Well, to me, it stood right out because Mary Kate's bedroom was pretty well kept.

Speaker 1 Other than that, the room was in perfect order.

Speaker 10 The bed was made. It was neat.
Nothing was tossed around,

Speaker 10 nothing was really disturbed, but the bloodstains kind of stood out. And then as you got closer, you noticed there were some bloodstains on the nightstand next to her bed and on the wall.

Speaker 1 On the curtains, on the bedside table, on the wall. Yes.

Speaker 1 What a strange place to find blood on curtains. Yeah.

Speaker 10 In my opinion, I thought the bloodstains, there were like four, they almost looked like the

Speaker 10 finger impressions, like somebody was touched them.

Speaker 1 Of course, you didn't know whose blood it was. We didn't know.

Speaker 1 And they couldn't tell if if the blood was old or new.

Speaker 1 But something on the floor caught their attention, too.

Speaker 1 There was hair on the floor?

Speaker 10 Yeah, there were some clumps of hair on the floor.

Speaker 1 Clumps?

Speaker 10 Clumps.

Speaker 10 I remember there was a clump of hair

Speaker 10 on the floor in front of Mary Kate's bed.

Speaker 1 Was it clear whose hair it was?

Speaker 10 Not at the time. We didn't know.
You know, it looked like it was longer hair, a woman's hair.

Speaker 1 What did that say when you went into the room and you saw those things?

Speaker 10 Something happened in there.

Speaker 1 Maybe a struggle.

Speaker 1 They noticed something else that morning, too. At the bottom of the stairs, not far from Suzanne's body, they saw what looked to them like a clue.
A woman's scarf.

Speaker 1 What attracted you to the scarf to pick that up?

Speaker 10 It was just lying by itself

Speaker 1 in the middle of the floor.

Speaker 10 Off to the side, but it was...

Speaker 10 Close proximity to Suzanne.

Speaker 1 Did you hear anything about the scarf being involved in this incident on that first day?

Speaker 5 Yeah, we had heard from from the family that the scarf had been around Suzanne's neck and that Mary Catherine removed it.

Speaker 1 She told detectives she took it off when her father started CPR.

Speaker 1 And when the detectives looked closely at the scarf, they saw blood-like stains on it, just like the ones in Mary Catherine's room on the curtains, the nightstand, the wall.

Speaker 5 All the blood evidence was collected by our forensic specialists and forensic scientists, sent to the Orange County Crime Lab where it was examined by forensic scientists there.

Speaker 1 The questions were adding up.

Speaker 1 Results from the lab would take quite a while, though investigators were about to get some answers.

Speaker 10 The deputy coroner did a preliminary body exam. She had injuries on her face, on her ears, on her neck, on her hands.

Speaker 1 Four days after Suzanne Sills was found dead at the bottom of her staircase, the Orange County Medical Examiner joined the investigation.

Speaker 1 Was either of you at the autopsy?

Speaker 5 I was there.

Speaker 1 Do you remember what your impressions were?

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 1 He thought it was plausible to sustain all those injuries from a fall down a flight of stairs. But then...

Speaker 10 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.
She had defensive wounds on her arms.

Speaker 1 Bruising on her forearms and hands.

Speaker 10 And I think she had some injuries on her feet and her shins, too. So, but the one that caught the, yes, and the one that caught the deputy coroner's attention was the ligature mark across her neck.

Speaker 1 That injury seemed to be the hardest to attribute to a fall, but if it didn't happen while tumbling downstairs, how did it happen?

Speaker 1 Well, there was that one clue, the scarf found near Suzanne's body. So had to be considered.
Was it possible the scarf tightened around her throat as she fell?

Speaker 1 Or did she get that nasty mark around her neck some other way? It was all a guessing game.

Speaker 1 The coroner hadn't gotten the results back from forensics and toxicology, so Suzanne's cause of death was pending.

Speaker 10 We still didn't know.

Speaker 1 But there were plenty of things about her death that didn't seem quite right, and had detectives taking another look at her husband, the renowned fertility doctor, beginning with his call to 911.

Speaker 13 911, do you need police or paramedic?

Speaker 10 Paramedic. When the 911 call begins, you could hear him whisper, where's my pulse oximeter? Okay, hold on.
Where's my pulse ox?

Speaker 1 A device that measures oxygen level in the blood. The dispatcher repeatedly instructed Suzanne's husband to administer CPR, but investigators thought the doctor seemed fixated instead on the oximeter.

Speaker 1 Mary, can you explain which original?

Speaker 10 He was focusing attention on other things instead of what the priority was administering CPR and starting chest compressions at Suzanne.

Speaker 10 And when we were actually there at the scene when we arrived, you could see the pulse oximeter on her finger.

Speaker 10 In all of our years, I've never heard of anybody attaching a pulse oximeter to somebody to render CPR.

Speaker 1 The investigators conceded that everyone reacts differently in an emergency. Still, it wasn't the only thing they noticed about Dr.
Sills.

Speaker 10 He was wearing a beanie throughout the course of the day, and he never took it off. So at some point, he agreed to be photographed,

Speaker 10 which is normal. And he took off his beanie and he had a laceration on his forehead that kind of stood out.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 1 Dr. Sills explained that he got the cuts while he and his son were fixing his car a few days earlier.

Speaker 10 He said he banged his head on the hood while he was making some kind of maintenance repair on it.

Speaker 1 Could those wounds be the source of the blood found in Mary Catherine's bedroom? On the morning her mother died, Investigator Holloway asked Mary Catherine about that.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 You could see it from the hallway. You didn't have to go looking for it.

Speaker 1 Investigators also learned something from Suzanne's son, Eric, about the night his mother died.

Speaker 5 He told us that he heard his parents arguing.

Speaker 10 The argument was loud enough to wake up Eric in the next bedroom. He woke up.
He didn't hear what the argument was about.

Speaker 11 Just hear them.

Speaker 10 Just heard him yelling. Something woke him up.
So he ended up going into the master bedroom and sleeping with Mary Kate.

Speaker 1 Later, said Eric, his father ended up back in that same bedroom with him and his sister.

Speaker 1 Investigator Holloway and his partner asked Mary Catherine about sleeping with her brother in a recorded interview. Is that normal for you guys to sleep together? No, no, Mary, no.
It's very unusual.

Speaker 9 Very unusual. Like, that was the first time I made you, like,

Speaker 9 eight years,

Speaker 1 like, never happened.

Speaker 1 Never happened.

Speaker 1 Which made the investigators think the argument between Suzanne and Scott must have been heated.

Speaker 1 And, according to Eric, it happened in the middle of the night.

Speaker 1 By 6.30 a.m., said Scott, he found Suzanne face down at the bottom of the stairs. The investigators knew the forensics would help tell them what happened, and so they waited.

Speaker 1 What did you send away for testing that you took from the scene?

Speaker 10 We collected clothing from both Suzanne and Scott. We collected the drapes from the Mary Kate's bedroom, collected swabs from the wall and the dresser, the hair, the scarf.

Speaker 1 And you'd have things like also fingernail clippings and all of that.

Speaker 26 Yes.

Speaker 1 But apparently, it wasn't simple. More studies were needed.
And a year went by, a full year, before the final toxicology and forensic results finally arrived.

Speaker 1 And?

Speaker 10 The cause of death was determined to be homicide.

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Speaker 1 By November 2017, a full year had passed and Scott Sills found his wife Suzanne dead at the bottom of their stairs.

Speaker 1 Her family was still trying to come to terms with it. Brother Frank described a deep emptiness and something else.

Speaker 6 I feel the sadness and the loss, but there's also that regret behind it.

Speaker 6 You know, kind of like a, I'm reading a novel that's just starting to get good, 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.

Speaker 1 Suzanne's family didn't know it then, that investigators were busy filling in pages of their own report about how Suzanne died, waiting for the final forensic and toxicology results and for the medical examiner to determine Suzanne's cause of death.

Speaker 1 Scott, the highly regarded fertility doctor, had told deputies he assumed Suzanne must have taken medication for her migraine, lost her balance, and fallen. He said...

Speaker 10 There was an accident and she appeared to have fallen down the stairs.

Speaker 1 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, but the amount was considered therapeutic.

Speaker 1 Didn't appear to be enough to affect her balance. And there was more.
What can you tell me about the evidence that came back from the testing?

Speaker 1 The blood on the walls, the DNA that you collected from her, from him?

Speaker 5 Eventually, they were able to tell us that, in layman's terms, the blood on the wall in Mary Catherine's room was

Speaker 5 both Suzanne's and Scott's blood. And one smudge in particular was a mix of both.
Suzanne's clothes had many spots of blood.

Speaker 5 Scott's clothes, where he had claimed that spots might be chocolate milk, that was Suzanne's blood. Suzanne's fingernails had Scott's blood underneath them.

Speaker 1 More than just might be gained from a normal living with a husband-wife situation. Right.

Speaker 5 Yeah, more than that.

Speaker 1 But the blood, the DNA, wasn't the most disturbing part of it. The cause of Suzanne's death, the thing that actually killed her? What was the ruling, the medical examiner's opinion?

Speaker 5 Eventually, the cause of death was listed as ligature strangulation and determined to be homicide.

Speaker 1 The report confirmed what the investigators already suspected. Suzanne's death was no accident.
She had been murdered.

Speaker 1 Armed with this new information, more than a year and a half after Suzanne's death, Holloway and Hatch went back to Dr. Scott Seal's house and knocked on the door.

Speaker 10 We believed he killed her, and so wanted to interview him again with what we discovered and what was with all this evidence to present to him and have him explain it.

Speaker 10 Scott was there, invited us in again, and we went and interviewed him for the second time in his office, in his home office. And he was

Speaker 1 cooperative.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 10 And then he seemed like he kind of changed all of a sudden because he started sweating in his office.

Speaker 10 His back was to the wall. Dave and I were in front of him across from the desk.
And unexpectedly, he says, can I take a break? I need to get some water. My feeling was officer safety.

Speaker 10 Is he going to go and get a gun or a knife and do something to himself or do something to us? It was totally... It was that intense.
It was unexpected.

Speaker 10 So we got up and followed him into the kitchen just to make sure nothing happened.

Speaker 10 Then he grabbed his water bottle, drank about a half bottle, and he came back in the office and resumed the interview.

Speaker 1 The detective showed him pictures, Suzanne's injuries. Mary Catherine's bedroom.

Speaker 10 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. And he, you know, he couldn't explain it.

Speaker 1 Instead, he reverted to the calm, cool man who'd answered the door.

Speaker 10 What else can I help you with? I remember him saying that. That was it.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 The investigators left empty-handed. They were convinced Dr.
Scott Sills was their man, but they had a gaping hole in their case.

Speaker 1 There was no evidence of a motive, no reason why Scott would kill his wife. And without that, they were reluctant to arrest him.
And from what they'd heard, Scott and Suzanne had a solid marriage.

Speaker 1 Teresa said from everything her daughter told her, she thought all was well.

Speaker 4 If there was a problem there, she never brought it up. And she was not the meek kind of person.
If she were being mistreated,

Speaker 4 I think she would have been very loud about that. We would have known.

Speaker 1 She spoke to her daughter weekly, hours at a time. Suzanne did most of the talking.
She liked to talk, right?

Speaker 4 Oh, yes. I liked to talk, but when she called, my husband always knew Suzanne was on the phone because I wasn't saying a word.
But she had a lot to say.

Speaker 4 She was very enthusiastic about what she did.

Speaker 1 So things, as far as you knew, everything was ticking along pretty well in her life.

Speaker 4 Yes, it was.

Speaker 1 She never talked about any difficulty with Scott.

Speaker 4 The most minor things, for example, oh, I asked Scott to water something and I went out there and there's the hose. He didn't roll it up when he was through.

Speaker 1 The detectives heard the same thing from Suzanne's brother Peter about a happy marriage, even though he wasn't exactly sure what his sister saw in Scott. What was your impression of Scott?

Speaker 7 He was a doctor. So, you know, socially, I always felt that doctors just didn't develop those skills well.
And so that's kind of the way I looked at Scott.

Speaker 7 Was he, you know, he was a doctor who just never developed the social skills well.

Speaker 1 But he said Suzanne had a different view of her husband.

Speaker 7 Suzanne Suzanne used to tell me how funny he was, and I mean, she thought he was hilarious, and I mean, she found him very humorous.

Speaker 1 I do know that.

Speaker 7 As far as I could tell, everything was going great for them.

Speaker 1 A solid marriage and a reputation for kindness. Didn't sound like a man who would suddenly snap and kill his wife.

Speaker 1 But soon investigators would discover cracks in this seemingly picture-perfect marriage. involving him.
Did he want to have sex with me?

Speaker 8 He wanted probably to have sex with me, but he he didn't come on.

Speaker 28 He wasn't, and I hate to say this, we had no game or anything. It was very

Speaker 1 fulfilled her portion of the bet, and she took a picture and posted it.

Speaker 1 Not long after Suzanne died, Dr. Scott Sills seemed to be getting on with his life.
He went back to work. He sounded enthusiastic, promoting an upcoming radio show.
Hi, everybody. This is Dr.

Speaker 1 Scott Sills from CAG Fertility in Carlsbad, California. I'm very excited to announce that in the near future, I will be live on Sin City Heat with the amazing cat.

Speaker 1 And he continued to raise his 12-year-old twins in the same house where his wife was found dead at the bottom of the stairs.

Speaker 1 John and Rochelle Brannon said neighbors tried to support Scott and his kids.

Speaker 14 The neighborhood kind of came together doing prayers and dropping off meals and really feeling bad for the family and the kids, especially.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 But they still didn't know why and had no evidence that the doctor had a deadly temper. From everything they had seen and heard, he came across as calm and collected.

Speaker 1 That's how Kim Gadbury remembers him, a miracle worker, the first doctor to give her hope after years of trying to have a baby.

Speaker 13 I left his office the first time around, like in tears, and I sat in my car before I pulled away. And he came, the nurse must have told him that I left heartbroken.

Speaker 13 And he he came and knocked on my car window. And he's like, don't worry about it.
We will figure this out.

Speaker 1 And he did. Dr.
Sills helped Kim and her husband have their own biological children, first a daughter and then a son.

Speaker 13 I call them a miracle worker. He truly was.

Speaker 1 Dr. Sills had developed his craft over decades.
He held degrees from Vanderbilt, the University of Tennessee, and the University of Westminster, London.

Speaker 1 He had also traveled traveled the world as a fertility specialist, published books and papers,

Speaker 1 and had spoken at conferences.

Speaker 29 We're happy to have you, Dr. Salves.

Speaker 1 Here he is on a panel in Los Angeles speaking about the impact of genetics on pregnancies.

Speaker 29 Thank you very much, Dr. Hill, for moderating this august group.
And I feel like I'm a national press club.

Speaker 1 And on the syndicated talk show, The Doctors, sharing his expertise about this couple's struggle with infertility.

Speaker 1 And showing his generosity by arranging for their entire treatment to be free. All of the colleagues that are working together would like to make this treatment for you at no cost.

Speaker 1 Another inspiring story courtesy of Dr. Sills, the man with a reputation for success and kindness.

Speaker 1 But investigators wondered if there was another side to him. And as we learned, this patient certainly thought so.

Speaker 1 Christy Christensen said, it all started out fine when in 2011 she signed up to be an egg donor and was connected with Dr. Sills.

Speaker 24 Well I just thought it was going to be like the best, most exciting thing I'd probably done to date.

Speaker 1 The plan was for her to take fertility medication for a month before having her eggs retrieved.

Speaker 24 Two weeks and two days into this I start really having some severe pains in my abdomen, up the side of my neck, and around my heart.

Speaker 1 Her condition deteriorated quickly. Dr.
Sills gave her a drug to help reduce the swelling and pain, and she said it didn't work.

Speaker 1 Despite that, a few days later, he instructed her to give herself a shot in preparation for egg retrieval the next day.

Speaker 24 That night when I had the trigger shot, I was, I couldn't sleep. I was sweating.
I could feel my heartbeat like in my eyes and in the side of my face.

Speaker 1 Dr. Sills went ahead with the retrieval and told her the swelling would go down, but that didn't happen.

Speaker 1 So the next day, he surgically removed the built-up fluid, and almost immediately the swelling came back. He told her he'd have to do another surgery.

Speaker 1 By this time, she'd had enough and questioned him.

Speaker 24 Why don't we fix the problem instead of just treating the symptom repetitively?

Speaker 24 When I said this, he got vicious, his face changed, and he just

Speaker 24 lost it on me and told me that I was being dramatic and that I was the worst donor he's ever dealt with.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Christie filed a lawsuit and had to face Dr. Sills one more time.

Speaker 24 I was sitting in a waiting room and he came in and he made sure to go really close to me. He just had murder, the look of murder on his face.

Speaker 24 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. And he had like his teeth bared like he was a wild animal.

Speaker 24 It's one of the craziest things I've ever seen.

Speaker 1 Christy settled the lawsuit and Dr. Sills paid her an undisclosed amount of money, but denied any wrongdoing.

Speaker 24 And even though I won,

Speaker 24 he was still allowed to

Speaker 13 openly treat people still.

Speaker 24 There's no mark on his record, nothing. It was just swept under the rug.
Like it never happened.

Speaker 1 So if Dr. Sills behaved that way with Christy,

Speaker 1 maybe something set him off that last night with Suzanne, but what?

Speaker 1 Investigators had no idea until they learned about a secret. Trouble behind closed doors

Speaker 1 the old saying is true isn't it not about the murder it's about the marriage

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Speaker 13 I turned off news altogether. I hate to say it, but I don't trust much of anything.

Speaker 31 It's the rage bait.

Speaker 3 It feels like it's trying to divide people.

Speaker 5 We got clear facts.

Speaker 1 Maybe we can calm down a little.

Speaker 11 NBC News brings you clear reporting.

Speaker 31 Let's meet at the facts.

Speaker 11 Let's move forward from there. NBC News, reporting for America.

Speaker 1 One year passed. And then two years passed without an arrest for the murder of Suzanne Sills.

Speaker 1 All that time, her mother had no idea Suzanne's death was being investigated as a murder. She still thought her daughter died in a tragic accident.

Speaker 4 There's just bouts of days where you just feel so down. And you went on.

Speaker 1 Just went on with your life.

Speaker 4 Well, as I say, we try to include the children.

Speaker 1 Teresa was determined to remain in her grandchildren's lives. During summer breaks, she arranged to take the twins on vacation, and she kept in regular contact with her son-in-law, Scott.

Speaker 4 I felt sorry for the man.

Speaker 4 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.
Like the children never mentioned her.

Speaker 1 Never. They never talked about her at all.
Never. Too hard?

Speaker 23 I don't know.

Speaker 4 From what I understood from Scott, that it used to make him feel bad when they talked about her, so they stopped.

Speaker 1 She and Suzanne's brother Peter just chalked up Scott's behavior as Scott being Scott.

Speaker 7 The thing that concerned me, he started removing all social media of my sister and that, so that started bothering me a bit.

Speaker 1 Removing all social media?

Speaker 7 Yeah, removing anything that had to do with

Speaker 1 her pictures. From his practice, from his life, basically.

Speaker 7 Yeah.

Speaker 7 And I thought that was really odd.

Speaker 1 By now, investigators had found plenty of odd things about Scott and about the Sills' marriage. When they searched Suzanne and Scott's phones and computers, they discovered the signs of trouble.

Speaker 5 There were some text messages between Suzanne and Scott that showed that there was some tension sometimes in the marriage.

Speaker 1 Texts like these, Suzanne sent to Scott, I will never be free, ever. You are killing me, don't you see that? I just want out.
The old saying is true, isn't it?

Speaker 1 It's not about the murder, it's about the marriage.

Speaker 1 In time, Investigator Investigator Hatch would learn just how troubled the marriage was.

Speaker 1 There was an interesting tidbit in the files about a woman Scott had been in touch with.

Speaker 10 A person named Marie Dalton. And I came to learn that Scott sent a manifesto to her

Speaker 10 regarding their relationship.

Speaker 1 A kind of love letter. Dr.
Sills called it the most important manuscript he'd ever written.

Speaker 10 And basically, it looked like he was in love with her. And this email was sent approximately two weeks after she, Suzanne, passed away.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 10 So I made arrangements to go out to Knoxville, Tennessee and interview her. and find out what happened.

Speaker 10 Well, thanks for coming down and meeting with us. We appreciate it.

Speaker 1 They met at a local police station. 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.

Speaker 10 How'd you guys meet?

Speaker 28 Okay, um

Speaker 28 June of 2015. I'm on Facebook and I get a friend request and it says

Speaker 28 Herrick S. Scott Sills and I accept it and he says, oh, hello, you know, I see you were a nurse.
Then I'd post a picture and he'd like it and comment.

Speaker 10 And then eventually, you know, started texting each other with their phones and talking to each other.

Speaker 8 I've always been,

Speaker 28 you know, kind of had a thing for doctors. It's horrible.

Speaker 1 Marie said it began innocently enough. She knew he was married to Suzanne and they had two children together.

Speaker 28 I think it just

Speaker 28 got out of control as far as the texting. Do you know what I'm saying?

Speaker 1 According to Marie, Dr. Seals made it seem like his marriage was in trouble.

Speaker 1 He told her Suzanne was seeing a man she met on Patrick.net, a conservative-leaning online message forum used mostly by men.

Speaker 5 You're saying she might have been having an affair, too.

Speaker 28 That's what we said, but I don't think she would ever do that. She seemed like a very nice woman.
I think he was just trying to make him look bad. That's what I think.
Make himself feel better.

Speaker 28 Make himself feel better.

Speaker 28 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Marie admitted the relationship progressed from the phone to in person.

Speaker 1 A few months before Suzanne died, they made plans to meet and have sex.

Speaker 10 In

Speaker 10 August or September of 2016, Scott flew out the Knoxville area to visit his parents, and he met with Marie at a Mexican restaurant.

Speaker 1 She said that almost from the start, she knew the date would not end well.

Speaker 1 Did he want to have sex with her?

Speaker 8 He wanted probably to have sex with me, but he didn't come on.

Speaker 28 He wasn't, and I hate to say this, but he had no game or anything. It was very...

Speaker 15 I mean, no game at all.

Speaker 1 So she got up and left.

Speaker 1 You're saying at the restaurant you just left them that night?

Speaker 8 I left. We did not do anything.

Speaker 1 Marie said she never saw Scott in person again. They kept in touch on and off after that, but when he sent her that love manuscript, she gently, slowly cut him off.

Speaker 1 She couldn't get over that he was burying his love for her so soon after Suzanne died.

Speaker 28 This email was disgusting.

Speaker 1 Dr. Sill's in love with another woman?

Speaker 1 Sounded like a possible motive. The problem was Marie had deleted most of their texts and emails.

Speaker 10 She deleted her Facebook account and her Instagram, so...

Speaker 10 There was no, I couldn't do much. Find any photos or yeah, there was no trails to follow.
So, you know, it's just basically her words. Wow.

Speaker 1 What a story.

Speaker 1 And there was another story about the marriage police have been investigating. It started with something they found while searching Dr.
Seal's office the day Suzanne died.

Speaker 10 He had a piece of paper on his printer that was something from Patrick.net.

Speaker 10 It had something to do with Suzanne.

Speaker 1 That's the online message forum Suzanne liked to post on.

Speaker 10 She belonged to this forum,

Speaker 10 a chat room, and she frequented it.

Speaker 1 The printout was a message from someone using the handle 10-pound bass. It read, all I've got to say is you must have a super cool husband.

Speaker 1 At first, the comment didn't make any sense to investigators. And then they learned what it was all about.

Speaker 1 A topless photo Suzanne had posted on the site. She made a bet about Donald Trump winning the presidential nomination.

Speaker 10 So she fulfilled her portion of the bet, and she took a picture of her breasts and posted it.

Speaker 5 So the note was from this other user and he was referring to

Speaker 5 the breasts picture.

Speaker 1 And Suzanne replied to him saying, he's exhausted actually. It isn't easy being married to a woman who is partially naked, posing alluringly all the time.
Those comments were sitting on Dr.

Speaker 1 Sills' printer the day Suzanne died.

Speaker 5 That told me that this posting had been on someone's mind. That wasn't something that

Speaker 5 just happened to be up there that day.

Speaker 1 When they asked Dr. Sills about the printout, he said he had nothing to do with it.
He said that he thought Suzanne must print it out.

Speaker 1 A topless photo, angry text messages, a troubled marriage? Was that enough to establish a solid motive and finally put Dr. Sills behind bars? It was up to the district attorney's office to decide.

Speaker 13 No matter how much evidence you have, you're always nervous. In this case, his business will be destroyed if you're wrong.
His reputation will be destroyed.

Speaker 13 So yeah, you want to make sure that you've got it right.

Speaker 1 Investigators looking into the case of Suzanne Sills sent all their evidence over to the DA's office. But from there, things seemed to stagnate.
Nothing happened.

Speaker 13 The case had been sitting there for a couple years.

Speaker 1 That is when prosecutor Elise Hatcher was transferred into the homicide unit. And an investigator came to see her.

Speaker 13 He said, please look at this case. And pointed to two boxes that said Scott Sills.
And I was just struck by a lot of things about the case,

Speaker 13 starting with the crime scene. Even though this was said to be an accident, right, there was Suzanne's hair was in clumps on the ground.

Speaker 13 Why was there a bloodstain with Suzanne's blood in the bedroom if she had fallen down the stairs? And how did she get

Speaker 13 marks from ligature strangulation from falling down the stairs? It's not plausible.

Speaker 1 Also not plausible that Suzanne died head down on the staircase, said Hatcher.

Speaker 13 The lividity on her body was not consistent with the position where she was found.

Speaker 1 What do you mean by lividity?

Speaker 13 Blood pools in the body after a person dies, and so it turns like a purplish color. So there was lividity on her back.

Speaker 13 He staged her on the stairs with her head face down, and her head was lower than her feet. So the lividity didn't match.

Speaker 1 Well, Prosecutor Hatcher didn't uncover any new evidence. With her fresh set of eyes, the picture was clear.
Suzanne had been murdered, and all the evidence pointed to one person.

Speaker 13 I just picture her last minutes on earth, looking into

Speaker 13 Scott Sills' face and watching him kill her. I think Scott Sills had a dark side, and it came out that night.

Speaker 1 More than two years after Suzanne's death, Elise Hatcher filed first-degree murder charges against Dr. Scott Sills.
A move, she said, that should have happened sooner.

Speaker 13 I felt very disturbed for the family and for Suzanne that it took so long to get to the bottom of it. But by the time I reviewed it,

Speaker 13 there was enough there.

Speaker 1 Seemed clear to you.

Speaker 13 Seemed clear to me.

Speaker 1 In April 2019, Scott was on his way to work, unaware that undercover detectives had been tailing him.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 1 Across the country in Georgia Teresa was in the middle of her workday when she received a call.

Speaker 1 It was the prosecutor, Elise Hatcher.

Speaker 4 She told me that my son-in-law had just been arrested for the murder.

Speaker 1 of my daughter. Tell me what it was like to be you in that very moment.

Speaker 4 In that moment, two of my coworkers were passing, and they both stopped and went.

Speaker 4 So

Speaker 4 I can just imagine what my face must have looked like in that moment. I was still stunned by the turn of events.

Speaker 4 Up until that phone call from Elizabeth Hatcher, I thought the police were satisfied with the investigation, that he had nothing to do with it, and he was this poor single father.

Speaker 1 Suzanne's brother, Frank, was equally stunned.

Speaker 6 The warrant that they served, I learned things that I had never heard of before.

Speaker 6 You know, about there being blood in Mary Catherine's bedroom on the walls, about the cut on Scott's forehead that was being covered by the beanie.

Speaker 6 It seemed like very strong evidence, and it didn't make sense to me why it had taken so long for there to be an arrest.

Speaker 6 And immediately the question is, you know, what was going to happen with Mary Catherine and Eric.

Speaker 1 The twins, by then 14 years old, were notified of their father's arrest at their high school.

Speaker 4 They were taken out of class and taken to a social worker. They were asked at the care center there if they had any friends that they could call, if someone would take them.

Speaker 4 And Mary Kate called a friend of hers and their mother, who herself had been adopted as a child. So she went and she picked them up.

Speaker 1 Well, at the sheriff's office, Dr. Scott Sills agreed to be interviewed for a third time.
How did that go?

Speaker 10 He said some things that were different. He was cooperative again.
Really?

Speaker 10 Same demeanor. Yeah, calm, cool, answering our questions.
And we kind of asked him about the room. Well, how could that blood have gone, gotten in Mary Kate's bedroom?

Speaker 10 He recalled replacing that screen, and when he reached behind the nightstand to get the screen, he caught his hand on a nail or a staple. And that's what he thought, how that blood got on the curtain.

Speaker 10 And he still, you know, denied causing any harm to Suzanne.

Speaker 1 Scott pleaded not guilty and posted bail, $1 million.

Speaker 1 He used his home in San Clemente as collateral.

Speaker 1 After he posted Bond, Dr. Sills returned to his house here in San Clemente.
It was a different place now, quiet.

Speaker 1 The children had gone off to live with family friends.

Speaker 1 The neighbors all wondered what happened in there,

Speaker 1 but

Speaker 1 he did not give them an opportunity to ask.

Speaker 13 During the week, we'd see him.

Speaker 24 It was interesting, he would wear like the big headphones when he walked the dogs.

Speaker 1 As if, don't talk to me, I've got headphones on.

Speaker 14 Yeah, right. You know, walking the dogs around the neighborhood, but not engaging.

Speaker 1 Must have been odd to live beside someone who you knew was under suspicion and might wind up, you know, being tried for murder.

Speaker 4 Yes.

Speaker 2 It was unsettling.

Speaker 14 He got arrested for murder and he still lives next door. Sure.

Speaker 1 Is anything ever going to happen? Right. Right.

Speaker 1 As the doctor awaited trial, he once again carried on with his work, though the California Medical Board filed to suspend his license.

Speaker 1 The court barred the twins from living with their father, so they remained with those family friends.

Speaker 1 Three months after his arrest, Scott published a new book, Ovarian Reboot, which looks at a fertility technique called Ovarian Rejuvenation.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 13 It was the only case that almost kept me from retiring because I felt so strongly about it.

Speaker 13 I wanted to bring justice for Suzanne.

Speaker 1 You really do get invested in your cases, huh?

Speaker 13 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, and

Speaker 13 I wanted to bring justice.

Speaker 1 It would be up to the next prosecutor to take the case to trial.

Speaker 13 As a prosecutor, you have the burden of proof, so no matter how much evidence you have you're always nervous what could go wrong a witness could um go sideways

Speaker 1 and that it turns out was exactly what happened

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Speaker 27 On the night before Halloween in 1975, 15-year-old Martha Moxley was murdered, but police failed to make an arrest. Until, in 2000, her one-time neighbor, Michael Scakel, was arrested.

Speaker 27 He was also a cousin of the Kennedys. The Kennedy connection is the reason that most people know about this case.
But the deeper I dug, the more I came to question everything I thought I knew.

Speaker 27 Search Dead Certain the Martha Moxley Murder on Amazon Music to listen to the latest episodes each week.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Her mother, Teresa, and brother Frank flew to California to be there.

Speaker 1 You intended all along to attend the trial? Yes.

Speaker 4 I wanted to know what happened. Nobody was sharing details.

Speaker 1 What happened?

Speaker 1 The twins, Mary Catherine, and Eric, now 19 years old, were on the witness list, so they couldn't watch. But they made their feelings clear.

Speaker 1 How did they feel about their father and the fact that he'd been charged with this crime?

Speaker 6 I know that they support him. It honestly was not a subject I wanted to bring up with them.

Speaker 1 Also in the gallery was Scott's former patient, Kim Gadbury.

Speaker 13 I needed to know if he truly did it.

Speaker 1 Why?

Speaker 13 Because I couldn't believe that somebody that could give life, could take life, let alone their best friend, a man that I knew, that I felt like I had owed so much to. Did he do it?

Speaker 30 The defendant killed this victim silently by squeezing the life out of her and strangling her.

Speaker 1 Senior Deputy District Attorney Jennifer Walker, who'd taken over the case from Elise Hatcher, laid out the evidence for the jury.

Speaker 30 The physical evidence

Speaker 30 points you to one person,

Speaker 30 the defendant.

Speaker 1 Starting with that 911 call, Scott appeared cold and unconcerned, she said.

Speaker 1 He didn't even refer to Suzanne by name. We got a patient here who's fallen offstairs, and I don't have a pulse.
Scott wasn't even attempting to save her, said the prosecutor.

Speaker 1 A doctor, and yet he seemed to delay performing CPR for five minutes.

Speaker 30 Why?

Speaker 30 The evidence will show you because because he knew she was already dead.

Speaker 30 A normal reaction by anyone, let alone a doctor, would be to immediately start CPR.

Speaker 1 Walker called the medical examiner who said Suzanne had a constellation of injuries all over her body. No way those were caused by falling down the stairs, she argued.

Speaker 1 They were the result of a violent struggle that ended with strangulation.

Speaker 30 There's multiple abrasions all over her face, neck, back, hands, legs.

Speaker 30 Completely inconsistent with falling down

Speaker 30 five steps.

Speaker 1 When the prosecution showed the autopsy photos, Teresa tried her best to hold it together and not look away.

Speaker 4 Shocking. Shocking.
Shocking.

Speaker 1 But you had to see.

Speaker 4 I had to see it. For her to look like that, those pictures,

Speaker 4 how horrible was that? And there was nothing that I could do to stop it, to fix it, to make it better, to change it. Nothing.

Speaker 4 And there never will be.

Speaker 6 If I would have seen those pictures when I was first phoned about her murder, my thoughts would have been much different than they were at the time.

Speaker 1 Ligatures that made it obvious that she was strangled, in your view.

Speaker 6 100%. There's no other way it could have happened.

Speaker 1 The blood in Mary Catherine's bedroom told what happened, the prosecutor said. Blood on the curtains, blood on the nightstand, clumps of hair on the floor.

Speaker 30 He's this doctor who helps people create life.

Speaker 30 He knows that he's taking it.

Speaker 1 Kim Gadbury said a dreadful realization crept over her as she watched the trial.

Speaker 13 She did not fall down the stairs. She was strangled.

Speaker 13 Without a doubt. But even still, there was still like in my gut,

Speaker 13 did he really? Like your brain just go, like, he couldn't do this. He really, really couldn't do this.

Speaker 1 The one thing prosecutors couldn't really explain

Speaker 1 is why they believe Scott did it.

Speaker 30 I'm not required to prove any motive to you. You can consider an absence of motive as a defense.

Speaker 30 You can consider motive as something tending to show guilt. But it's not required.
It's just something you can consider. But it's here.

Speaker 1 They tried to show Scott had some reason to be angry with Suzanne.

Speaker 1 They couldn't call that Tennessee nurse, the one Scott had apparently fallen for. Investigators weren't able to locate her.

Speaker 1 But they did suggest the topless photo Suzanne posted on Patrick.net might have enraged her husband.

Speaker 30 That's kind of maddening if you're a husband, that other men are commenting that you don't care that your wife is posting a topless picture.

Speaker 30 Is that the reason he killed her? I don't know.

Speaker 1 Then came, perhaps, the most anticipated testimony for the prosecution. Scott's son, Eric Sills.

Speaker 1 He originally told investigators all those years ago that he heard his parents arguing that night.

Speaker 1 But on the stand, he said he didn't remember hearing them fight, which was a big blow for the prosecution. Dogs were put away.
The DA tried to explain it away.

Speaker 30 He didn't want to say in court that they were arguing. Makes sense? Because now, at 19, he knows that may look bad if I corroborate that my dad was arguing with my mom.

Speaker 1 It was investigator Holloway who conducted that first interview with 12-year-old Eric.

Speaker 5 I was disappointed, but he had been 12 at the time, and then he was seven years older now. So

Speaker 5 there's a chance that he remembered things differently.

Speaker 1 In the end, the prosecutor argued nothing could change the fact that Suzanne had been murdered, and no one else could have done it but Dr. Scott Sills.

Speaker 30 He was the one who strangled Suzanne. No other adult was there.

Speaker 30 It wasn't the kids.

Speaker 30 It wasn't the stairs.

Speaker 34 He murdered Suzanne.

Speaker 30 And she deserves justice.

Speaker 1 All along, the doctor sat at the defense table,

Speaker 1 listening intently to the evidence against him. Each fact.
Now it was the defense's turn.

Speaker 1 And yes, said the defense attorney, Scott's wife may have, in fact, been strangled, but if she was, Scott didn't do it.

Speaker 1 There was another culprit lurking in the house that night.

Speaker 11 We did DNA testing on the scarf.

Speaker 1 Which produced what?

Speaker 11 Dog DNA and pig DNA.

Speaker 1 Pig DNA? Yes.

Speaker 11 That's, you know, know, your reaction was the same as mine. Pig DNA?

Speaker 1 The attorney for Dr. Scott Sills, accused of killing his wife in his own home, had a simple message for the jury.
His client should not be on trial because

Speaker 1 no crime had been committed that day. What ended up happening was a horrible accident.

Speaker 1 Jack Early is Scott's attorney. He told the court that Suzanne's death was a terrible accident, a slip and fall down the staircase.

Speaker 10 This is not a murder.

Speaker 1 Consider the medication she had taken, he said, for her migraine. Early argued it was enough to make her dizzy.

Speaker 11 What did they find in her blood? An opiate, Valium, and some other substances. Most people would say those things affect your balance.

Speaker 1 The logical explanation? Suzanne got up in the middle of the night and tripped on something at the top of the stairs and tumbled all the way down.

Speaker 1 And when she fell, she suffered a spinal cord injury or a C3 fracture, said Early,

Speaker 1 which meant she wouldn't have been able to breathe. And in fact, The medical examiner had concluded that a contributing factor to Suzanne's death was a spinal cord injury.

Speaker 11 So if you have a serious C3 fracture, that stops your breathing. And you die because you get a lack of oxygen to the heart.

Speaker 1 Somewhere in there, the C3 broke, diaphragm affected, and also there was compression on the neck.

Speaker 11 There was compression on the neck.

Speaker 1 Compression?

Speaker 1 How?

Speaker 1 The defense had an explanation for those ligature marks.

Speaker 11 It's potentially the scarf that did it?

Speaker 1 The scarf. The one Mary Catherine removed from her mother's neck that morning.

Speaker 1 Hurley said something tightened that scarf, and it wasn't Scott.

Speaker 11 There was evidence that the dogs were pulling on the scarf.

Speaker 12 What was the evidence?

Speaker 11 Well, first of all, that morning Scott Sills told the fireman that when he came down, the dogs were pulling on it. And that's why we did DNA testing on the scarf.

Speaker 1 Which produced what?

Speaker 11 Dog DNA and pig DNA.

Speaker 1 Pig DNA? Yes.

Speaker 11 That's, you know, your reaction was the same as mine, pig DNA? Yeah.

Speaker 11 And then I asked the children, what did you feed the dog and pig ears? That was her favorite treat to get the dogs.

Speaker 1 How big and strong were these dogs?

Speaker 11 Well, they're 90-pound dogs.

Speaker 11 They're big dogs, so they'd be golden retriever and a Doberman mix.

Speaker 1 But you must agree that scarf must have been held very tightly around her neck for several minutes in order to facilitate her death.

Speaker 11 Well, if that was the only cause. So let's assume there was no C3 fracture,

Speaker 11 then yes, 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.

Speaker 1 But what about the clumps of hair on the ground? The hair did, in fact, belong to Suzanne. So yanked out by her enraged husband? Taking medication? No, not at all, said Attorney Early.

Speaker 31 She was taking medication. She had hair extensions.
She had a constant problem of hair coming out.

Speaker 1 As for the blood evidence in the bedroom, Early offered his own interpretation for the forensic testing. He said it was not a mixture of Suzanne and Scott's blood, like the investigators believed.

Speaker 1 It was only Scott's blood. Remember, Scott said in his interview that he had cut his hand on a loose nail when replacing a window screen weeks earlier.

Speaker 1 Early argued that forensics had simply picked up Suzanne's traced DNA left behind from being in that room, not from any violent struggle.

Speaker 1 A lot of the allegations against him were based on the idea 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.

Speaker 1 So that combination of things made it sure look like something pretty bad happened.

Speaker 11 If you believe that there was a fight in the room, 99% of the evidence was came from him, was the blood. There was no blood from her, no other evidence that showed that she was injured in the room.

Speaker 1 The weakest part of the prosecution's case was the lack of motive, said Early.

Speaker 11 This is not a couple with history of violence, history of things getting out of control at all.

Speaker 1 After years of peace, a sudden explosion, and she's dead. Yes.

Speaker 1 Even that topless photo Suzanne posted online would not have been enough to set him off.

Speaker 11 It doesn't seem to me that that's really a motive that's going to make you kill somebody, choke them to death because they posted something three months earlier.

Speaker 1 As the defense's case was coming to a close, Dr. Scott Sills kept everyone guessing.

Speaker 1 Would the doctor address the jurors himself?

Speaker 1 Did you want him to testify?

Speaker 11 For me, it would have been an easier case with him to testify.

Speaker 1 Did you encourage him to do so?

Speaker 11 To a certain extent, but he did not want to leave his children with a negative view of either him or his wife.

Speaker 11 He had a story to tell, and until he was ready or in a position to tell it, I'm not in a, wasn't in a position to tell it.

Speaker 10 He is not responsible.

Speaker 1 The jurors were not going to hear from the defendant after all.

Speaker 1 The defense rested its case.

Speaker 1 And now it was the jury's turn to decide. Did the doctor murder his wife? Or was it a tragic accident?

Speaker 1 I

Speaker 35 didn't want to convict someone who was innocent. Like that was my biggest fear.

Speaker 1 Outside of the courthouse, Dr. Scott Sills stood quietly.
His children still very much in his corner. He and they remained calm and collected.
Now, all he could do was wait.

Speaker 1 Well, inside, 12 jurors were deciding his fate.

Speaker 1 How long were we to go? We spoke with five of them. I wouldn't keep an open mind a whole, until we walked into that juror room to deliberate because we owed it to this guy.

Speaker 4 To all of them.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 And I think everybody felt that way.

Speaker 35 I was nervous because I

Speaker 35 didn't want to convict someone who was innocent. Like, that was my biggest fear, I think, going into it.

Speaker 1 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. I don't know.

Speaker 36 He seemed very stoic, like no emotion.

Speaker 1 What did you make of her injuries? Horrific.

Speaker 36 Yeah, she looked like she had been beat up.

Speaker 1 Too much for falling down the staircase?

Speaker 36 Yeah, and just a lot on the face.

Speaker 1 And the mark on her neck.

Speaker 1 Well, let's talk about the DNA for a minute, because the prosecutor said that you can see with the naked eye, blood on the wall, there's blood on the curtains, there's blood on the side table by the bed.

Speaker 1 That's pretty suggestive, right, of a big struggle. But the defense pointed out that they had blood from him, but not necessarily blood from her.
Yeah, that was confusing.

Speaker 36 That surprised me.

Speaker 36 But I just kept thinking, why is he bleeding? If he has nothing to do with this, why is his blood everywhere?

Speaker 1 They said they quickly ruled out the defense theory that the family's dogs were somehow responsible for Suzanne's death.

Speaker 32 It's more plausible to me that there was marital strike than the dogs did it.

Speaker 1 Did the dogs seem capable of doing that sort of thing? No, no.

Speaker 36 I mean one was like a golden retriever.

Speaker 1 Well it was a kind of a dog ate my homework reasoning, wasn't it?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I thought so.

Speaker 4 It wasn't reasonable.

Speaker 1 But when it came to motive, they told us, it wasn't 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?

Speaker 36 We didn't get one. She told us we wouldn't.

Speaker 36 I wanted one.

Speaker 1 Juries tend to want one.

Speaker 35 I think they threw out a couple of potential motives that could all be strong. Like things in their marriage.

Speaker 1 I don't know if he was still mad about the topless photo.

Speaker 1 There were four options to consider. First degree murder, second degree murder, manslaughter, or not guilty.

Speaker 35 We had a packet of jury instructions with the the like legal requirements for each degree and I think the part that took longer.

Speaker 1 But not that long. Three hours in, they were ready to vote.

Speaker 10 It was fast.

Speaker 36 It was pretty fast. Real fast.

Speaker 1 You're real nervous.

Speaker 1 Is everybody going to be on the same page? So they had to

Speaker 1 work around and one by one they came to a unanimous decision.

Speaker 1 They alerted the judge. They were ready.

Speaker 1 And the jurors filed into the courtroom.

Speaker 36 My heart was about to jump out of my chest.

Speaker 10 Have you reached verdicts on this matter?

Speaker 35 Yes.

Speaker 34 We the jury find the defendant Eric Scott Sills not guilty of the crime of first degree murder.

Speaker 1 Not guilty of first degree murder.

Speaker 1 They weren't done.

Speaker 34 We the jury find the defendant Eric Scott Sills guilty of the crime of second degree murder.

Speaker 1 Guilty of second degree murder.

Speaker 1 And that was that.

Speaker 1 Dr. Scott Sills was ushered away in handcuffs.

Speaker 1 So second degree because

Speaker 1 it was kind of a moment of passion that led to a huge fight that otherwise would never have happened in that marriage.

Speaker 36 He was probably jealous about the Patrick.net

Speaker 36 connections that she had.

Speaker 35 We didn't quite have all of the evidence to place it into

Speaker 1 murder one.

Speaker 36 I felt that it was sort of a crime of passion. I don't believe he went into that room with the intention to kill her, and that was my sort of way of

Speaker 36 picking murder two.

Speaker 30 We were all in it together.

Speaker 32 Yeah. And I knew we were fair and impartial and that we did everything the way it's designed.

Speaker 35 I felt like everyone on the jury kept the open mind and very thoughtful so I felt very confident in our decision.

Speaker 1 For Suzanne's family, Scott's conviction was a moment of relief and sadness.

Speaker 6 There was no feeling of great joy when this happened. And this is a horrific situation and there are no winners and there's no happy moments to a guilty verdict.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 4 She's never going to see her children grow up.

Speaker 1 Growing up right now, and you're watching it, she can't. Yes.

Speaker 4 Scott's watching it.

Speaker 1 She can't. They supported their father.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 1 And sorrow upon upon sorrow, there was more.

Speaker 1 Two days before their father's conviction, the family friend, who'd become like a second mom to the twins, died. Heart disease.

Speaker 1 It was Mary Catherine, along with her father, who had found her mother's body at the base of the stairs. And it was she who found that family friend, too.

Speaker 6 And for that to happen in the midst of trial, you're having that happen, a conviction happen.

Speaker 6 It's unbelievable.

Speaker 5 The worst case period is now in session.

Speaker 1 Three months later, dressed in an orange jumpsuit, Dr. Scott Sills was back in court for sentencing.

Speaker 1 Mary Catherine gave a statement supporting her father and pleading with the judge for a lighter sentence.

Speaker 37 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.
I humbly ask for mercy and kindness to be shown to my father.

Speaker 1 Scott Sills was sentenced to 15 years to life.

Speaker 4 I wouldn't expect him to be serving very much time.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 she has an endless sentence.

Speaker 4 I have an endless sentence.

Speaker 1 Not a day goes by that Teresa doesn't think of her daughter Suzanne.

Speaker 1 And the house Where Suzanne dreamed of seeing Mary Catherine in a wedding dress walking down the staircase.

Speaker 1 It's been sold now.

Speaker 1 Nothing left but memories.

Speaker 4 When you find out the real story of the staircase, it's just like an extra hurt. It's like an extra blow.
She was so filled with joy. She had

Speaker 4 this wonderful dream of this great day, this great moment. to seeing her daughter on the staircase.
And

Speaker 4 what did it turn out to be?

Speaker 4 It really leaves you breathless.

Speaker 12 That's all for this edition of Dateline. And check out our Talking Dateline podcasts.

Speaker 12 Keith Morrison and Josh Mankiewicz will go behind the scenes of tonight's episode, available Wednesday in the Dateline feed, wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 12 We'll see you again Sunday at 10, 9 Central. I'm Lester Holt for all of us at NBC News.

Speaker 1 Good night.

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