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M. Night Shyamalan had his heyday almost 20 years ago. He leapt out of the gate with such confidence he became a champion instantly. And then...something went awry. He became embarrassingly self-serious, his films drowning in pretension and strained allegories. His famous twists felt like a director attempting to re-create the triumph of " The Sixth Sense ," where the twist of the film was so successfully withheld from audiences that people went back to see the film again and again. But now, here comes " The Visit ," a film so purely entertaining that you almost forget how scary it is. With all its terror, "The Visit" is an extremely funny film. 

There are too many horror cliches to even list ("gotcha" scares, dark basements, frightened children, mysterious sounds at night, no cellphone reception), but the main cliche is that it is a "found footage" film, a style already wrung dry. But Shyamalan injects adrenaline into it, as well as a frank admission that, yes, it is a cliche, and yes, it is absurd that one would keep filming in moments of such terror, but he uses the main strength of found footage: we are trapped by the perspective of the person holding the camera. Withhold visual information, lull the audience into safety, then turn the camera, and OH MY GOD WHAT IS THAT? 

"The Visit" starts quietly, with Mom ( Kathryn Hahn ) talking to the camera about running away from home when she was 19: her parents disapproved of her boyfriend. She had two kids with this man who recently left them all for someone new. Mom has a brave demeanor, and funny, too, referring to her kids as "brats" but with mama-bear affection. Her parents cut ties with her, but now they have reached out  from their snowy isolated farm and want to know their grandchildren. Mom packs the two kids off on a train for a visit.

Shyamalan breaks up the found footage with still shots of snowy ranks of trees, blazing sunsets, sunrise falling on a stack of logs. There are gigantic blood-red chapter markers: "TUESDAY MORNING", etc. These choices launch us into the overblown operatic horror style while commenting on it at the same time. It ratchets up the dread.

Becca ( Olivia DeJonge ) and Tyler ( Ed Oxenbould ) want to make a film about their mother's lost childhood home, a place they know well from all of her stories. Becca has done her homework about film-making, and instructs her younger brother about "frames" and "mise-en-scène." Tyler, an appealing gregarious kid, keeps stealing the camera to film the inside of his mouth and his improvised raps. Becca sternly reminds him to focus. 

The kids are happy to meet their grandparents. They are worried about the effect their grandparents' rejection had on their mother (similar to Cole's worry about his mother's unfinished business with her own parent in "The Sixth Sense"). Becca uses a fairy-tale word to explain what she wants their film to do — it will be an "elixir" to bring home to Mom. 

Nana ( Deanna Dunagan ), at first glance, is a Grandma out of a storybook, with a grey bun, an apron, and muffins coming out of the oven every hour. Pop Pop ( Peter McRobbie ) is a taciturn farmer who reminds the kids constantly that he and Nana are "old." 

But almost immediately, things get crazy. What is Pop Pop doing out in the barn all the time? Why does Nana ask Becca to clean the oven, insisting that she crawl all the way in ? What are those weird sounds at night from outside their bedroom door? They have a couple of Skype calls with Mom, and she reassures them their grandparents are "weird" but they're also old, and old people are sometimes cranky, sometimes paranoid. 

As the weirdness intensifies, Becca and Tyler's film evolves from an origin-story documentary to a mystery-solving investigation. They sneak the camera into the barn, underneath the house, they place it on a cabinet in the living room overnight, hoping to get a glimpse of what happens downstairs after they go to bed. What they see is more than they (and we) bargained for.

Dunagan and McRobbie play their roles with a melodramatic relish, entering into the fairy-tale world of the film. And the kids are great, funny and distinct. Tyler informs his sister that he wants to stop swearing so much, and instead will say the names of female pop singers. The joke is one that never gets old. He falls, and screams, "Sarah McLachlan!" When terrified, he whispers to himself, " Katy Perry ... " Tyler, filming his sister, asks her why she never looks in the mirror. "Your sweater is on backwards." As he grills her, he zooms in on her, keeping her face off-center, blurry grey-trunked trees filling most of the screen. The blur is the mystery around them. Cinematographer Maryse Alberti creates the illusion that the film is being made by kids, but also avoids the nauseating hand-held stuff that dogs the found-footage style.

When the twist comes, and you knew it was coming because Shyamalan is the director, it legitimately shocks. Maybe not as much as "The Sixth Sense" twist, but it is damn close. (The audience I saw it with gasped and some people screamed in terror.) There are references to " Halloween ", "Psycho" (Nana in a rocking chair seen from behind), and, of course, " Paranormal Activity "; the kids have seen a lot of movies, understand the tropes and try to recreate them themselves. 

"The Visit" represents Shyamalan cutting loose, lightening up, reveling in the improvisational behavior of the kids, their jokes, their bickering, their closeness. Horror is very close to comedy. Screams of terror often dissolve into hysterical laughter, and he uses that emotional dovetail, its tension and catharsis, in almost every scene. The film is ridiculous  on so many levels, the story playing out like the most monstrous version of Hansel & Gretel imaginable, and in that context, "ridiculous" is the highest possible praise.

Sheila O'Malley

Sheila O'Malley received a BFA in Theatre from the University of Rhode Island and a Master's in Acting from the Actors Studio MFA Program. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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The Visit (2015)

Rated PG-13 disturbing thematic material including terror, violence and some nudity, and for brief language

Kathryn Hahn as Mother

Ed Oxenbould as Tyler Jamison

Benjamin Kanes as Dad

Peter McRobbie as Pop-Pop

Olivia DeJonge as Rebecca Jamison

Deanna Dunagan as Nana

• M. Night Shyamalan

Cinematography

• Maryse Alberti
• Luke Franco Ciarrocch

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Well, it's not in the same league as The Sixth Sense , but director M. Night Shyamalan ends a long dry spell with The Visit. It's a blend of mirth and malice that combines Grimm fairy tales with the found-footage gimmick of Paranormal Activity . A mom (Kathryn Hahn) sends her two kids (Olivia DeJonge and Ed Oxenbould), both experts with digital cameras, to visit her estranged parents. It's all smiles until Grandma (Deanna Dunagan, wowza) gets naked and Grandpa (Peter McRobbie) does strange things with his adult diapers. No spoilers, except to say that cheap thrills can still be a blast. Not enough to make up for Shyamalan's awful After Earth , but it's a start.

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Peter McRobbie

• Born January 31 , 1943 · Hawick, Borders, Scotland, UK
• Height 5′ 11″ (1.80 m)
• Peter McRobbie was born on January 31, 1943 in Hawick, Borders, Scotland, UK. He is an actor, known for The Visit (2015) , Lincoln (2012) and Brokeback Mountain (2005) . He has been married to Charlotte Susan Bova since September 10, 1977. They have two children.
• Spouse Charlotte Susan Bova (September 10, 1977 - present) (2 children)
• Frequently cast in Woody Allen films.
• He played the father to both Jake Gyllenhaal and his sister, Maggie Gyllenhaal, in the films, "Brokeback Mountain" and "World Trade Center", respectively.
• He has played the same character (Judge Walter Bradley) on four different series: Law & Order (1990) , Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (1999) , Law & Order: Trial by Jury (2005) and Conviction (2006) .
• He immigrated to the U.S. as a child in the early 1950s, and settled in Milford, Connecticut. In 1965 he graduated Yale University as a drama major and attended one year of graduate school at Tulsa University while serving basic training in the Army. He would have been drafted into Vietnam, if not for medical file conflict.
• Served in the U.S. Armed Forces.
• He has appeared in eight films directed by Woody Allen : Zelig (1983) , The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) , Shadows and Fog (1991) , Bullets Over Broadway (1994) , Mighty Aphrodite (1995) , Deconstructing Harry (1997) , Celebrity (1998) and Small Time Crooks (2000) .

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Review: ‘The Visit’ Is ‘Hansel and Gretel’ With Less Candy and More Camcorders

• Share full article

By Manohla Dargis

• Sept. 10, 2015

In “The Visit,” an amusingly grim fairy tale, floorboards creak, doors squeak and lights lower and sometimes shriek to black. The story, a “Hansel and Gretel” redo for Generation Selfie, has the virtue of simplicity and familiarity: A young brother and sister travel into the deep, dark woods, but where they once innocently held hands, they’re now holding camcorders to record an adventure quickened by anxious laughs, yelps and screams and one shivery long knife. These children don’t need someone else to immortalize their once-upon-a-time; they just point and shoot.

The director M. Night Shyamalan has a fine eye and a nice, natural way with actors, and he has a talent for gently rap-rap-rapping on your nerves. At his best, he skillfully taps the kinds of primitive fears that fuel scary campfire stories and horror flicks; at his worst, he tries too hard to be an auteur instead of just good, letting his overwrought stories and self-consciousness get in the way of his technique. After straining at originality for too long, he has gone back to basics in “The Visit,” with a stripped-down story and scale, a largely unknown (excellent) cast and one of those classically tinged tales of child peril that have reliably spooked audiences for generations.

This Hansel and Gretel come equipped not only with his-and-her cameras but also a Spielbergian family dynamic, featuring a loving if somewhat distracted single mother (Kathryn Hahn) and an absent father. One of those well-meaning women whose desires unwittingly unleash a world of chaos, Mom (as she’s credited) opens the movie with some yammering, squirming like a witness for the prosecution in front of a camera operated by her off-screen daughter, Becca (an appealing Olivia DeJonge). Becca and her younger brother, Tyler (Ed Oxenbould, a charmingly exuberant scene-stealer), are to stay with their maternal grandparents while Mom and her boyfriend go on a cruise, and Becca has decided to make a documentary about the trip, the first of many references to moviemaking.

Movie Review: ‘The Visit’

The times critic manohla dargis reviews “the visit.”.

In narrative terms, Mr. Shyamalan keeps it streamlined and simple. Becca and Tyler travel alone to visit their grandparents Nana (Deanna Dunagan) and Pop Pop (Peter McRobbie), whom the children have never met or seen in photos. As Mom tells Becca, she hasn’t been in touch with her parents since she left home years earlier, for reasons she refuses to explain, introducing a mystery that ignites a smoldering ember of doubt. Ms. Hahn, an appealingly disheveled blur, does a nice job of setting the enigmatic scene. With her beseeching eyes, Mom looks as if she’s asking for forgiveness, even as the laughter convulsing her mouth insists everything is all right. (Ms. Hahn, one of those screen presences who pushes and pulls at you, at times brings to mind a softer-edged Karen Black.)

Most of what follows takes place in Nana and Pop Pop’s house, an isolated storybook spread. Mr. Shyamalan sets a nice farmhouse scene, with an interior that looks copied straight from Heartland Monthly, complete with sagging armchairs, plank flooring and a rag rug as big as a Volkswagen. The grandparents, in turn, are pure Grant Wood types: gray, lean, almost stringy and a little hard. If they were older or the movie were, you could imagine them hardscrabbling their way through the Depression or driving a Model T out of Oklahoma. To that end, Ms. Dunagan and Mr. McRobbie at first play it largely straight and opaque, with the kind of tightly wound smiles and controlled gestures that suggest Puritan stock or perhaps madness.

Something weird slithers in, first in a crawlspace and then when Nana asks Becca for help cleaning the mischievously large oven, which was apparently built for roasting pigs and other juicy creatures. A total tease, Mr. Shyamalan has fun deploying such time-tested horror tricks, and conducts an entire orchestra of squeaks and screeches amid the shock cuts and Becca and Tyler’s cockeyed camera angles. He also plays with the filmmaking theme, mostly through Becca, a pretentious baby auteur who throws around terms like mise-en-scène. As the scares gather, though, and she loses directorial control, Becca becomes what she always was: every filmgoer (and critic) who thinks she knows everything about making movies, which may be why Mr. Shyamalan so enjoys tormenting her.

“The Visit” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It’s a hard world for little things.

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The Ending Of The Visit Explained

Contains spoilers for  The Visit

M. Night Shyamalan is notorious for using dramatic twists towards the endings of his films, some of which are pulled off perfectly and add an extra layer of depth to a sprawling story (hello, Split ). Some of the director's other offerings simply keep the audience on their toes rather than having any extra subtext or hidden meaning. Shyamalan's 2015 found-footage horror-comedy  The Visit , which he wrote and directed, definitely fits in the latter category, aiming for style over substance.

The Visit follows 15-year-old Becca Jamison (Olivia DeJonge) and her 13-year-old brother Tyler (Ed Oxenbould) when they spend the week with their mother's estranged parents, who live in another town. Loretta (played by WandaVision 's Kathryn Hahn ) never explained to her children why she separated herself away from her parents, but clearly hopes the weekend could help bring the family back together.

Although The Visit occasionally toys with themes of abandonment and fear of the unknown, it wasn't particularly well-received by critics on its initial release, as many struggled with its bizarre comedic tone in the found-footage style. So, after Tyler and his camera record a number of disturbing occurrences like Nana (Deanna Dunagan) projectile-vomiting in the middle of the night and discovering "Pop Pop"'s (Peter McRobbie) mountain of used diapers, it soon becomes clear that something isn't right with the grandparents.

Here's the ending of  The Visit  explained.

The Visit's twist plays on expectations

Because Shyamalan sets up the idea of the separation between Loretta and her parents very early on — and doesn't show their faces before Becca and Tyler meet them — the film automatically creates a false sense of security. Even more so since the found-footage style restricts the use of typical exposition methods like flashbacks or other scenes which would indicate that Nana and Pop Pop aren't who they say they are. Audiences have no reason to expect that they're actually two escapees from a local psychiatric facility.

The pieces all come together once Becca discovers her  real grandparents' corpses in the basement, along with some uniforms from the psychiatric hospital. It confirms "Nana" and "Pop-Pop" escaped from the institution and murdered the Jamisons because they were a similar age, making it easy to hide their whereabouts from the authorities. And they would've gotten away with it too, if it weren't for those meddling kids.)

However, after a video call from Loretta reveals that the pair aren't her parents, the children are forced to keep up appearances — but the unhinged duo start to taunt the siblings. Tyler in particular is forced to face his fear of germs as "Pop Pop" wipes dirty diapers in his face. The germophobia is something Shyamalan threads through Tyler's character throughout The Visit,  and the encounter with "Pop Pop" is a basic attempt of showing he's gone through some kind of trial-by-fire to get over his fears.

But the Jamison kids don't take things lying down: They fight back in vicious fashion — a subversion of yet another expectation that young teens might would wait for adults or law enforcement officers to arrive before doing away with their tormentors.

Its real message is about reconciliation

By the time Becca stabs "Nana" to death and Tyler has repeatedly slammed "Pop-Pop"'s head with the refrigerator door, their mother and the police do arrive to pick up the pieces. In a last-ditch attempt at adding an emotional undertone, Shyamalan reveals Loretta left home after a huge argument with her parents. She hit her mother, and her father hit her in return. But Loretta explains that reconciliation was always on the table if she had stopped being so stubborn and just reached out. One could take a domino-effect perspective and even say that Loretta's stubbornness about not reconnecting and her sustained distance from her parents put them in exactly the vulnerable position they needed to be for "Nana" and "Pop-Pop" to murder them. 

Loretta's confession actually mirrors something "Pop-Pop" told Tyler (before his run-in with the refrigerator door): that he and "Nana" wanted to spend one week as a normal family before dying. They should've thought about that before murdering a pair of innocent grandparents, but here we are. 

So, is The Visit  trying to say that if we don't keep our families together, they'll be replaced by imposters and terrify our children? Well, probably not. The Visit tries to deliver a message about breaking away from old habits, working through your fears, and stop being so stubborn over arguments that don't have any consequences in the long-run. Whether it actually sticks the landing on all of those points is still up for debate.

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The Visit (HBO)

: A teen and her little brother travel to meet their grandparents whose behavior soon takes a bizarre and scary turn.

Plans start at $9.99/month.

Drama, Horror, Thrillers

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Rating information, about this movie.

A teen and her little brother travel to meet their grandparents whose behavior soon takes a bizarre and scary turn. Olivia DeJonge, Ed Oxenbould, Deanna Dunagan, Peter McRobbie and Kathryn Hahn star.

Cast and Crew

Starring: Olivia DeJonge , Ed Oxenbould , Deanna Dunagan , Peter McRobbie , Kathryn Hahn , Celia Keenan-Bolger

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The Visit provides horror fans with a satisfying blend of thrills and laughs -- and also signals a welcome return to form for writer-director M. Night Shyamalan.

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M. Night Shyamalan

Olivia DeJonge

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Deanna Dunagan

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“phony”: kristen stewart decries hollywood’s self-satisfaction after making a few films like ‘barbie’, ‘the visit’ first trailer: m. night shyamalan’s latest.

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“Bedtime here is 9:30,” Grandpa announces before lights out. “It’s probably best you two shouldn’t come out of your room after that.” OK, Nanna and Grandpa are, well, grandparents. But if that doesn’t seem a tad odd, wait until you hear what Nanna comes up with much later in the kitchen. What you get when you team writer-director M. Night Shyamalan with “the producer of Paranormal Activity , The Purge , Insidious , Sinister ” is The Visit , which stars Deanna Dunagan and Peter McRobbie as the more than fairly odd grandparents. Kathryn Hahn is their daughter, whose children are Ed Oxenbould and Olivia DeJonge. Universal today posted this official trailer online, which has been in theaters for several days. It’s slated for Sept. 11. What do you think?

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Product Description

Writer/director/producer M. Night Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense, Signs, Unbreakable) and producer Jason Blum (Paranormal Activity, The Purge and Insidious series) welcome you to Universal Pictures’ The Visit. Shyamalan returns to his roots with the terrifying story of a brother and sister who are sent to their grandparents’ remote Pennsylvania farm for a weeklong trip. Once the children discover that the elderly couple is involved in something deeply disturbing, they see their chances of getting back home are growing smaller every day. Shyamalan produces The Visit through his Blinding Edge Pictures, while Blum produces through his Blumhouse Productions alongside Marc Bienstock (Quarantine 2: Terminal). Steven Schneider (Insidious) and Ashwin Rajan (Devil) executive produce the thriller.

Product details

• Aspect Ratio ‏ : ‎ 1.85:1
• Is Discontinued By Manufacturer ‏ : ‎ No
• MPAA rating ‏ : ‎ PG-13 (Parents Strongly Cautioned)
• Product Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7.25 x 5.75 x 0.5 inches; 3.03 ounces
• Item model number ‏ : ‎ 35222485
• Director ‏ : ‎ M. Night Shyamalan
• Media Format ‏ : ‎ Color, Widescreen, Digital_copy
• Run time ‏ : ‎ 1 hour and 34 minutes
• Release date ‏ : ‎ January 5, 2016
• Actors ‏ : ‎ Olivia DeJonge, Ed Oxenbould, Deanna dunagan, Peter McRobbie, Kathryn Hahn
• Subtitles: ‏ : ‎ French, Spanish
• Language ‏ : ‎ English (Dolby Digital 5.1), French (Dolby Digital 5.1), French Canadian (Dolby Digital 5.1), English (DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1), Spanish (Dolby Digital 5.1)
• Studio ‏ : ‎ Universal
• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0152AVXUI
• Number of discs ‏ : ‎ 2
• #1,886 in Mystery & Thrillers (Movies & TV)
• #3,503 in Horror (Movies & TV)

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Her family thought her death was a tragic accident. It was years before the truth came out.

Theresa Neubauer was at work five years ago at a Georgia university when she got a phone call that stunned her.

Her son-in-law — a prominent fertility doctor who’d authored or edited several medical books — had just been arrested on suspicion of murder in the mysterious death of her daughter, Susann Sills, 45.

Susann’s body had been found at the bottom of a staircase in the couple's suburban Southern California home in 2016.

Up until that April 2019 phone call, Neubauer said, her family hadn’t even known that authorities were investigating the death as suspicious. She’d viewed her daughter’s husband, Scott Sills, 59, as a man who’d lost his wife in a tragic accident, she said, and she viewed herself as his ally as he raised the couple’s twins on his own.

“I thought the police were satisfied with the investigation — that he had nothing to do with it and he was this poor single father,” Neubauer told “Dateline” in her family’s first interview. 

“I hadn’t thought of him as a threat in any way,” she said. “It did not enter my mind.”

During Sills' murder trial last year, the prosecutor said there had been a violent struggle that ended with him strangling his wife and staging her body on the staircase. His lawyer attributed the 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 dialed 911 and said that he’d found his wife’s body at the bottom of the stairs in their home in San Clemente, roughly 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 that he’d heard a noise overnight but didn’t bother checking since the couple had two dogs and 12-year-old twins.

“There’s always noise in the house at night — somebody’s always doing something — so it didn’t concern him,” she recalled Sills saying. “But then in the morning, he found her downstairs.”

Sills told investigators from the Orange County Sheriff’s Department that he thought his wife’s death was a tragic result of migraine medication that may have caused her to lose her balance and tumble down the stairs, investigator Eric Hatch told “Dateline.”

Neubauer believed her daughter must’ve suffered a sudden and unexpected ailment — an aneurysm, perhaps — because she had always been especially agile and graceful. She’d done ballet and gymnastics as a child, Neubauer said, and as a teenager, she’d been a cheerleader and ran hurdles. 

As an adult, Susann — who helped her husband run their 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 child.”

Neubauer said she wanted the detectives to know how “physically capable” her daughter was. When she related that information, she said, one of the investigators responded: “Yes, well, but accidents do happen.”

“Which, of course, is true,” Neubauer said. “I had no reason to think they would not have done a thorough investigation. So I thought it was done and it was over.”

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Another investigator looking into the death, Dave Holloway, described their communication with the family as typical for a law enforcement investigation: sympathetic but limited. 

“We wouldn’t come right out and tell the family that it was definitely an accident,” he said. “We wouldn’t come out and 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 wouldn’t want to prejudice their answers.”

A fight, injuries and a topless photo 

That meant Susann's relatives were unaware that investigators found possible evidence early on indicating that there could be more to her death than her husband’s theory suggested. 

In the bedroom where she had slept the night of her death, the detectives found hair and bloodstains on a curtain and baseboard, Hatch said. A preliminary autopsy showed that she suffered a considerable number of injuries, including what appeared to be defensive wounds on her arms and a ligature mark across her neck, he said.

Her husband also had an injury that the detectives found suspicious — a fresh-looking laceration on his head that he’d covered with a beanie, Hatch said. When detectives questioned Sills about it, Hatch recalled, he said it had happened while fixing his car a few days earlier. He denied knowing anything about the blood in the bedroom, Hatch said.

The investigators also found evidence that there may have been problems in the couple’s relationship. One of their children recalled his 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, the detectives found a cryptic note — a message they later learned was linked to a bet Susann had made 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 site. The message, which had been printed out and was sitting on Sills’ printer, was in response to her photo. 

“All I’ve got to say is you must have a super cool husband,” the message said.

“That told me that this posting had been on someone’s mind,” Holloway said. “That wasn’t something that just happened to be up there that day.”

When investigators asked Sills about the note, he denied printing it and said his wife had probably put it there. The argument was about his wife needing to get rest when she wasn’t feeling well, Hatch recalled Sills saying, and the texts were about finances in their business, according to his lawyer.

A long-awaited cause of death

Despite the detectives’ suspicions about Sills, the coroner was yet to determine the cause or manner of his wife's death. That process took a 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’s far easier for prosecutors to file charges in those cases.

But with Susann, Hatcher said, the case couldn’t move forward until the coroner completed extensive testing looking at the ligature marks and her neck structure. 

“They’re very methodical,” Hatcher said. “In this case, it took a very long time.”

By November 2017, that testing was finally complete: Susann's death was a homicide, Hatch said. She’d been strangled with a ligature. 

Forensic testing showed that the blood in the bedroom belonged to both the dead woman and her husband, Holloway said. Stains on a shirt that Sills wore in the aftermath of his wife’s death that he attributed to chocolate milk were actually her blood, Holloway said, and his blood was found under her fingernails. 

While a toxicology analysis found pain medication in Susann's system, there didn’t appear to be enough to affect her balance, according to the report.

As the investigators worked 

Susann’s relatives had no idea about the coroner’s findings. Nor was her mother aware of any problems in the couple’s relationship. Neubauer said she spoke with her daughter weekly, and the only issues Susann's related to her about her husband were minor.

“If there was a problem there, she never brought it up,” Neubauer said. “And she was not the meek kind of person.”

After Susann's death, Neubauer said, she’d remained in touch with Sills about the twins and found they worked well together. For a vacation to the Caribbean with his wife’s family, Sills updated the twins’ passports, filled out all the paperwork for diving classes and “seemed very happy about it,” she said.

“He did nothing to prevent them from coming out and being with us,” she said. 

For Sills, life continued as though he were not the subject of a homicide investigation.

Sympathetic neighbors said they organized prayers and meal drop-offs while Sills continued to raise their twins at the home where his wife died. He appeared on a Las Vegas radio show to discuss the dangers of a now-discontinued birth control device, and he worked on a new book, “Ovarian Reboot: A Personal Journey to Hormone & Fertility Renewal.”

The detectives, meanwhile, had returned to Sills and interviewed him again about the results from the coroner and the forensics testing. 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 she fell down the stairs.”

Although the investigation hadn’t uncovered a clear motive, investigators believed Sills was responsible in the murder of his wife and forwarded their findings to the Orange County District Attorney’s Office. Hatcher, the prosecutor assigned to the case, said that by the time she reviewed the two boxes of evidence, it had been roughly two years since Susann’s death.

“I felt very disturbed for the family and for Susann that it took so long to get to the bottom of it,” Hatcher said. “But by the time I reviewed it, there was enough there.”

Hatcher said she came to believe there had been a violent struggle in the bedroom where the blood was found. That struggle ended with Sills strangling his wife and staging her body on the stairs, she said. 

His lawyer, Jack Earley, maintained that Susann's death was from an accidental fall and said the ligature marks may have come from her dogs tightly pulling a scarf that had been found around her neck. 

On April 25, 2019, as Sills drove to work, undercover deputies pulled him over 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’s a moment of relief,” she said, recalling what it was like to hear the guilty verdict. “And then after that — but there’s no Susann. And there never will be.”

Tim Stelloh is a breaking news reporter for NBC News Digital.

Michelle Madigan is a producer for "Dateline." 

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On The Red Carpet

'kingdom of the planet of the apes' actor says character is 'metaphor for evolution'.

LOS ANGELES -- It all started with a movie back in 1968, when Charlton Heston led the cast of "Planet of the Apes." More movies followed. Then came TV series, TV movies, and even a Saturday morning animated series. Now, 56 years later, the franchise continues with a new story to tell in "Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes."

Freya Allan plays one of the few humans in the new film and shares that her character's journey "is like a metaphor for evolution."

VIDEO: Apes ride into Hollywood for premiere of new film 'Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes

This film is set years after the last film and times have changed drastically. These days, apes rule the world with humans living a more challenging existence.

"She goes to places she didn't even know she would go to, you know? Or that she could," Allan said. "And that's survival kicking in and trying to complete something in honor of, you know, her loved ones, essentially. And, you know, humanity is on her shoulders."

Peter Macon plays a wise orangutan known as Raka.

"And it is my job to teach and to help grow, you know, the collective consciousness of our species," he said.

Owen Teague plays the film's young hero, Noa, whose journey is key to the future of both apes and of humans. He's fascinated by the technology that turned him into an ape.

VIDEO: New look into the world of 'Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes'

" [ It ] literally captured bits," he said. "Things that I do as a person, just like little ways that my face moves and put them on an ape and it's mind-blowing every single time I see it because it is me!"

"So you're seeing apes, but it's our exact expressions," said Kevin Durand. "It's our exact performances. It's just a little hairier"

Of course, there would be no kingdom here without a king. And that's Durand.

"It's so fun," he said. "It's so fun to be bad."

Watch "Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes" in theaters nationwide starting May 10.

Disney is the parent company of 20th Century Studios and this ABC station.

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