Theresa Neubauer had been working at a university in Georgia for five years when she received a phone call that surprised her.
His son-in-law – a prominent fertility doctor who was the author or editor of several medical books – had just been arrested on suspicion of murder in the mysterious death of his daughter, 45-year-old Susann Sills.
Susann’s body was found at the bottom of a staircase in the couple’s suburban Southern California home in 2016.
Until that April 2019 phone call, Neubauer said, his family didn’t even know authorities were investigating the death as suspicious. She saw her daughter’s husband, Scott Sills, 59, as a man who had lost his wife in a tragic accident, she said, and saw herself as her ally as he raised the couple’s twins alone.
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“I thought the police were satisfied with the investigation — that he had nothing to do with it and was a poor single father,” Neubauer told “Dateline” in his family’s first interview.
“I didn’t think of him as a threat at all,” she said. “That didn’t cross my mind.”
During Sills’ murder trial last year, the prosecutor said there was a violent struggle that ended with him strangling his wife and placing her body on the stairs. His lawyer attributed his death to an accidental fall.
Sills was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced in March to 15 years to life in prison.
At the bottom of the stairs
On the morning of Nov. 16, 2016, Sills called 911 and said he found his wife’s body at the bottom of the stairs of their home in San Clemente, about 60 miles south of Los Angeles.
“I don’t have a pulse and she’s cold,” he told the 911 operator, according to audio of the call.
Paramedics arrived minutes later and Susann was pronounced dead at 6:35 a.m., her death certificate shows.
When Sills told his mother-in-law what happened in a phone call the next day, Neubauer recalled him saying he heard a noise during the night but didn’t bother to check as the couple had two dogs and 12-year-old twins. .
“There’s always noise in the house at night — someone is always doing something — so it didn’t worry him,” she remembers Sills saying. “But then in the morning he found her downstairs.”
Sills told Orange County Sheriff’s Department investigators that he thought his wife’s death was a tragic result of a migraine medication that may have caused her to lose her balance and fall down the stairs, investigator Eric Hatch told “Dateline”.
Neubauer believed that his daughter must have suffered a sudden and unexpected illness – an aneurysm, perhaps – because she had always been especially agile and graceful. She did ballet and gymnastics as a child, Neubauer said, and as a teenager, she was a cheerleader and ran hurdles.
As an adult, Susann — who helped her husband run his fertility clinic, the Center for Advanced Genetics — even made an audition video for the reality show “Survivor.”
“She never fell,” Neubauer said. “She didn’t even fall when she was a kid.”
Neubauer said she wanted detectives to know how “physically capable” her daughter was. When reporting this information, she said, one of the investigators responded, “Yes, well, but accidents happen.”
“Which, of course, is true,” Neubauer said. “I had no reason to think they wouldn’t have done a thorough investigation. So I thought it was done and it was over.”
Another investigator looking into the death, Dave Holloway, described their communication with the family as typical of a police investigation: sympathetic but limited.
“We wouldn’t immediately tell the family that it was definitely an accident,” he said. “We wouldn’t say it was definitely a murder. We would tell them that we are conducting our investigation because at some point we may need to ask them questions and we would not want to prejudge their answers.”
A fight, injuries and a topless photo
This meant that Susann’s relatives were unaware that investigators had found possible evidence indicating that there might have been more to her death than her husband’s theory suggested.
In the bedroom where she slept the night of her death, detectives found hair and blood stains on the curtains and baseboard, Hatch said. A preliminary autopsy showed she suffered a considerable number of injuries, including what appeared to be defensive wounds to her arms and a ligature mark on her neck, he said.
Her husband also had an injury that detectives considered suspicious — a fresh laceration to his head that he covered with a beanie, Hatch said. When detectives questioned Sills about it, Hatch recalled, he said it had happened while he was fixing his car a few days earlier. He denied knowing anything about the blood in the room, Hatch said.
Investigators also found evidence that there may have been problems in the couple’s relationship. One of her children remembered her parents arguing the night of Susann’s death, Hatch said, and text messages showed her telling her husband that she was “trapped” and would “never be free.”
In Sills’ office, detectives found a cryptic note — a message they later discovered was linked to a bet Susann had placed on a conservative website that Donald Trump would win the 2016 presidential election.
When Trump won, Hatch said, Susann fulfilled her end of the bet and posted a topless photo of herself on the website. The message, which had been printed and was on Sills’ printer, was a response to her photo.
“All I have to say is that you must have a super cool husband,” the message read.
“That told me this post was on someone’s mind,” Holloway said. “That wasn’t something that happened there that day.”
When investigators asked Sills about the note, he denied printing it and said his wife had likely placed it there. The argument was about his wife needing to rest when she wasn’t feeling well, Hatch recalled Sills saying, and the messages were about finances in his business, according to his attorney.
A long-awaited cause of death
Despite detectives’ suspicions about Sills, the coroner had not yet determined the cause or manner of his wife’s death. This process took one year.
Elise Hatcher, a former Orange County prosecutor who later handled the case, attributed the delay to the complexity of the woman’s injuries. With gunshots or stabbings, she told “Dateline,” the cause of death is clear and it is much easier for prosecutors to bring charges in those cases.
But with Susann, Hatcher said, the case could not move forward until the medical examiner completed extensive tests looking at ligature marks and the structure of the neck.
“They’re very methodical,” Hatcher said. “In this case, it took a long time.”
In November 2017, the tests were finally complete: Susann’s death was a homicide, Hatch said. She was strangled with a ligature.
Forensic tests showed that the blood in the room belonged to both the dead woman and her husband, Holloway said. Stains on a shirt Sills wore after his wife’s death, which he attributed to chocolate milk, were actually her blood, Holloway said, and his blood was found under her fingernails.
Although a toxicology analysis found pain medication in Susann’s system, it did not appear to be enough to affect her balance, according to the report.
While investigators worked
Susann’s relatives had no idea about the coroner’s findings. Her mother was also unaware of any problems in the couple’s relationship. Neubauer said she spoke to her daughter weekly and that the only problems Susann reported to her about her husband were minor.
“If there was a problem there, she never brought it up,” Neubauer said. “And she wasn’t the meek kind of person.”
After Susann’s death, Neubauer said, she kept in touch with Sills about the twins and found that they worked well together. To vacation in the Caribbean with his wife’s family, Sills updated the twins’ passports, filled out all the paperwork for scuba diving lessons and “seemed really happy about it,” she said.
“He did nothing to stop them from leaving and staying with us,” she said.
For Sills, life continued as if he were not the subject of a homicide investigation.
Sympathetic neighbors said they organized prayers and meal deliveries as Sills continued to raise his twins in the home where his wife died. He appeared on a Las Vegas radio show to discuss the dangers of a now-discontinued contraceptive device and worked on a new book, “Ovarian Reboot: A Personal Journey to Hormone & Fertility Renewal.”
Detectives, however, returned to Sills and interviewed him again about the results of the coroner and forensic tests. He was cooperative, Hatch said, but “he didn’t have an answer. He continued to deny that he had anything to do with Susann’s death – that it was an accident or that she fell down the stairs.”
Although the investigation did not uncover a clear motive, investigators believed Sills was responsible for his wife’s murder and forwarded their findings to the Orange County District Attorney’s Office. Hatcher, the prosecutor assigned to the case, said that when he reviewed the two boxes of evidence, it had been about two years since Susann’s death.
“I was very upset for the family and for Susann that it took so long to get to the bottom of it,” Hatcher said. “But when I reviewed it, there was enough.”
Hatcher said he came to believe there was a violent struggle in the room where the blood was found. That fight ended with Sills strangling his wife and placing her body on the stairs, she said.
Her lawyer, Jack Earley, claimed Susann’s death was caused by an accidental fall and said the ligature marks may have come from her dogs pulling hard on a scarf that was found around her neck.
On April 25, 2019, while Sills was driving to work, undercover officers stopped him and arrested the doctor on suspicion of murder.
Hatcher alerted Neubauer to the news, and five years later – after Covid-related delays – she was in court when her son-in-law went on trial. A jury convicted Sills of second-degree murder.
“Initially, there is a moment of relief,” she said, recalling what it was like to hear the guilty verdict. “And after that… but there is no Susann. And there never will be.”
This story originally appeared on NBCNews.com read the full story
