O’Fallon man who killed his wife by setting her on fire avoids trial with plea deal

Five days before his trial was to begin in the gruesome murder of his wife, Andrew McKissick entered into a plea agreement with St. Clair County prosecutors.

McKissick was accused of dousing his wife, Sherry Billups, with a diesel fuel supplement and setting her on fire, just blocks from their O’Fallon home on April 22, 2019. He confessed to his mother, she told the Belleville News-Democrat the day after the crime.

McKissick 40, agreed Wednesday — nearly four years after the crime — to plead guilty to first-degree murder in exchange for a 20- to 60-year sentence with 100% time stipulation attached to it under the Truth in Sentencing law. If he lives to the end of his term, he’ll serve an additional three years of supervised release.

Sentencing is set for March 29 in St. Clair County Circuit Judge Bob Haida’s courtroom.

The case was extraordinary in its violence, for the couple’s romantic history as childhood sweethearts, and for the bond forged between the mothers of the victim and the perpetrator.

According to police, officers arrived at the scene near the O’Fallon Family Sports Park at 7:23 a.m. to find Billups outside the 2015 Kia Optima and covered in flames. She died just blocks away from her home in the 600 block of Madison Street.

The couple had been married for less than a month and were returning from a trip to Corpus Christi, Texas to visit an uncle. Billups, 35 at the time of her death and known to friends and family as “Lil’ Sherry,” was scheduled for work later that morning at the Collinsville Post Office.

She never made it.

Later that morning, McKissick made a panicked phone call to his mother, Linda McKissick, to tell her what he had done.

“He called me and said ‘Mom! Mom! I messed up. I set her own fire Mom!’” she recalled.

Andrew McKissick was captured in Memphis, Tennessee two days later and charged with first-degree murder and aggravated arson. Even after making the stunning admission to his mother, he pleaded not guilty, then rifled through court-appointed public defenders, delaying the case with continuances.

Linda McKissick said her son called her from the jail on Tuesday. She asked him “what on earth are doing?”

“I asked him if he thought I was going up there and lie for him,” she said. “I have to stand before God. Holding on to something like that is not right.

“You can’t uphold your child when he’s wrong. He told me what he did. How would I not tell her mother what he told me? … I told him everyone would have to relive this whole situation. ‘Right is right, wrong is wrong. You know what you did.’”

That’s when Andrew McKissick told his mother he was going to accept the plea deal.

After her son confessed to her, Linda McKissick called “Big Sherry” Matthews, Billups mother.

“I called big Sherry and asked her if she heard from her daughter. I was the one who told her what my son told me,” Linda McKissick said. “ I don’t feel I did wrong.”

Sherry Matthews said she was relieved Wednesday when Andrew McKissick accepted the plea deal from prosecutors, but was horrified by his admissions to the court and his claim that her daughter’s violent death was an accident.

“He said in the courtroom he was trying to leave her and he accidentally set her on fire,” Matthews said. “I heard what chemicals he used to set my child on fire. I will never be able to unhear that.

“To see him standing there telling lies about it being an accident and then hearing again how heinous the crime was really got to me. What do you mean you accidentally set her on fire? I could have gone up there and choked him. It took everything in my soul for me not to scream out.”

Billups and McKissick had been sweethearts in an Alorton elementary school, but each moved onto other relationships. They reunited in 2018 and were married in March of 2019.

McKissick brought a criminal past to their relationship, according to St. Clair County Circuit Court records. He’d been charged with unlawful restraint in 2010, aggravated battery causing harm to a police officer in 2007 and aggravated battery with a firearm in 2002.

He had just recently been paroled when he reunited with Billups.

O’Fallon police said they were frequently called to the Madison Street home on reports of domestic abuse. Billups’ friends and family described McKissick as being “insecure” and “jealous-hearted.”

Billups is remembered for her physical beauty and laughter, her kindness and work ethic, and her dedication to her two boys.

“She was in love with (McKissick). She loved this boy. She bought that truck he had,” Matthews said. “... How dare you say (it was an accident). It still hurts.”

This story was originally published February 2, 2023 at 11:21 AM.