An Orange County fertility doctor was convicted of second-degree murder Tuesday in the death of his 45-year-old wife, despite the defense’s suggestion that she had received her wounds by accidentally tumbling down the stairs during a migraine attack and then falling prey to the family’s rambunctious dogs.
Eric Scott Sills and his wife, Susann, ran a fertility clinic in Carlsbad, he as medical director and she as managing partner. They lived with their 12-year-old twins in a $1-million home in San Clemente.
On the morning of Nov. 13, 2016, Sills called 911 and said he had woken up to discover his wife unconscious at the bottom of a staircase.
“We’ve got a patient here who’s fallen off the stairs and I don’t have a pulse,” Sills told the emergency dispatcher, in a recording played for jurors in Orange County Superior Court in Santa Ana. “I think she tripped because it was dark.”
More than two years later, after an investigation by the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, prosecutors charged Sills with her murder. Two pathologists identified strangulation as the cause of death.
“This man killed his wife and hid it, and he hid it pretty well, because it took a while to bring him to justice,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Jennifer Walker told jurors. While the couple presented a facade of normalcy, she added, “people do not know what is going on in the privacy of relationships.”
Walker argued that the doctor had strangled Susann Sills during an argument and then, realizing his children were asleep in the house and he could not dump her body, scrambled to stage her death as an accident.
Walker emphasized the position of her body when authorities found it, supine below the staircase with her right foot splayed on a lower stair. The emergency dispatcher had instructed Sills to place his wife on a flat, hard surface to attempt CPR, but the prosecutor said he deliberately left her foot on the stair because “he wanted that connection to the stairway.”
Walker argued that as rescue workers were en route, “this doctor who helps people create life” burned time by pointlessly searching for his pulse oximeter rather than trying to save his wife.
“Oh Lord, where is my pulse ox?” Sills is heard saying on the 911 call, his distraught children audible in the background.
What Sills did not have time to do, the prosecutor argued, was to clean up the signs of a bloody struggle elsewhere in the house. In one room, the drapes were splotched with the defendant’s blood, a piece of evidence the defense suggested might have gotten there innocently at an earlier point due to an exposed nail on a nightstand.
Sills, 58, did not take the stand in his defense. His attorney, Jack Earley, sought to persuade jurors there was an alternate explanation for Susann Sills’ death.
“She’s had a migraine for two days, three days,” Earley told jurors, arguing that she had not eaten in a day or two and had the benzodiazepine Valium and the opioid painkiller tramadol in her system, which might have left her disoriented on the stairs. “We don’t know how she fell.”
The couple’s son, Eric, initially told police that his parents had been arguing in the hours before his mother’s death. Now 19, he appeared to retreat from that claim when he took the stand at trial.
The defense attempted to explain the signs of apparent strangulation on the victim’s body: As Susann Sills lay at the bottom of the stairs, one or both of the family’s dogs, somehow loosed from their overnight kennels, had tugged at a rayon scarf around her neck.
Walker, the prosecutor, pointed out that it would have taken minutes to kill her in this way, that the scarf had no tears or holes, and that Eric Sills had made no mention of dogs in his 911 call.
She derided the defense’s account that his wife had fallen down the stairs — as if “in a soundproof pinball machine” — without waking the family, and “then was strangled by her dogs.”
Prosecutors did not provide a motive for the killing, a weakness in the case the defense repeatedly emphasized.
According to the couple’s text exchanges, however, there were signs that they had fought bitterly in the months preceding Susann Sills’s death. There was friction about work, friction about her husband’s children from a prior marriage, and friction about his temper.
“I will never be free, ever,” she wrote at one point. “You are killing me, don’t you see? … I just want out.”
Another source of discord, the prosecutor argued, was his apparent chagrin that she had posted a topless photo of herself online after losing a bet.
“Is that the reason he killed her? I don’t know,” Walker said — but perhaps “he is done with her embarrassing him.”
The jury deliberated for a day before reaching its verdict of second-degree murder, rejecting the prosecutor’s argument that it was first-degree murder involving premeditation.
Sills, who had been free on bail, was taken into custody after Tuesday’s verdict. He faces 15 years to life in prison at his sentencing hearing, scheduled for March 15 before Superior Court Judge Patrick Donahue.
This story originally appeared on LA Times
