A California fertility doctor was found guilty Tuesday of second degree murder, eight years after he allegedly strangled his wife to death and staged the crime to look like a fall at their San Clemente home.
E. Scott Sills faces a maximum of 15 years to life in prison when he is sentenced on March 15, 2024, the Orange County District Attorney’s Office said.
Sills was arrested in 2019, more than two years after he called police on November 13, 2016, and said he found his wife dead at the foot of the stairs, as CrimeOnline reported. Sills and his wife reportedly founded the fertility clinic together.
During the trial, prosecutors presented evidence that Susann Sills had grown discontented in the marriage and told her husband in a text that she “wants out,” The Orange County Messenger reported. But the key, prosecutors said, was 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 a conversation she had in the chatroom talking about what her husband would think about it.
The state also presented evidence from an autopsy that said Susann Sills’ cause of death was strangulation and that detectives 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.”
“Think of how diabolical you have to be – not only to kill your wife but to make it look like she had fallen down the stairs. It took calculated planning to commit this crime and worse of all he ruthlessly and selfishly murdered the mother of their children who now are left without their parents,” District Attorney Todd Spitzer said after the jury’s verdict.
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[Featured image: Scott Sills/Orange County Sheriff’s Office and Susann Sills/Facebook]
