A former California fertility doctor was sentenced to 15 years to life in state prison for murdering his wife and staging it to look like she fell down the stairs.
E. Scott Sills, 58, was found guilty in December in the murder of Susan Sills, 45, as CrimeOnline reported.
Sills was arrested in 2019, more than two years after his wife’s November 13, 2016, death. On that date, he called 911 to say he’d found her at the foot of the stairs in their San Clemente home.
During his trial last year, jurors heard that Susann Sills had been unhappy in her marriage and had told her husband in a text that she “wants out.” But the key incident, prosecutors said, was Scott Sills’ obsession over a topless photo his wife posted in a chatroom after she lost a bet that Donald Trump wouldn’t win the Republican nomination for president.
Prosecutors said Sills had become “fixated” on the incident and that detectives had found a printout of the conversation she had in the chatroom talking about what her husband would think about it.
An autopsy found that Susann Sills had been strangled to death, and detectives testified they found blood stains on the wall and curtains in the couple’s daughter’s bedroom, where she slept the night she died because of a migraine. A clump of her hair was also found in the room, the district attorney’s office said, “indicating that there had been a violent struggle between the couple.”
“Mr. Sills not only killed his wife but he went one step further and tried to cover up his horrific crime,” Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer said in a statement announcing the sentence. “His actions have irreparably torn apart his family as his children have to grapple with the immeasurable pain of losing their mother at the hands of their father. This was the ultimate betrayal by their father and now he will spend his remaining days in state prison.”
