Alleged Family Killer Anthony Todt Said He Made Death Pact With Wife 'Because The Apocalypse Was Coming,’ Prosecutor Alleges

As alleged family annihilator Anthony Todt’s trial begins, jurors were told he admitted to investigators that he killed his family because he thought the apocalypse was coming and he'd made a pact with his wife.

Todt, 46, is accused of killing his wife and their three children in the Disney-developed community of Celebration, Florida in 2019. He has been charged with four counts of first-degree murder for the deaths of his wife Megan, 42, and their children Alek, 13, Tyler, 11, and Zoe, 4. He also faces an animal cruelty charge for the death of the family dog, Breezy.

“The defendant, in his interview, says that Megan Todt and himself had an agreement that everybody needed to die in order to pass over to the other side together because the apocalypse was coming,” Assistant State Attorney Danielle Pinnell told the jury on Monday morning at the Osceola County Courthouse in her opening statements, WESH reports. 

Pinnell described to jurors how the father and physical therapist allegedly killed his entire family.

“The defendant ... went into Zoe Todt’s room while she was asleep,” Pinnell said, according to the Orlando Sentinel. “He took the time to sit with her and then he rolled over on top of her until she suffocated.”

Pinnell explained that in an alleged confession, Todt said he then went to his son’s bedroom to kill Alex and then to a playroom to kill Tyler.

Anthony Todt Photo: Osceola County Correctional Facility

“The defendant was more concerned about Tyler Todt because Tyler was the fastest,” the prosecutor told jurors. “He was afraid that if something didn’t go the way that he wanted, Tyler would escape.”

Pinnell stated that Todt told investigators he'd made a murder-suicide pact with his wife Megan because they thought the world was ending. He claimed she stabbed herself, unsuccessfully, in the abdomen.

“The defendant told law enforcement that Megan did that to herself, and as best as she tried, that didn’t work,” Pinnell said. “And so the defendant took a pillow and suffocated Megan Todt as well.”

Before the trial began, Todt’s defense had asked presiding Judge Keith Carsten to exclude several alleged confessions — three in all — he made about his family’s deaths to law enforcement, the Orlando Sentinel reported. Only one of the three will be kept out of the courtroom.

The decomposing bodies of his wife and his children were found inside their home in January. The bodies were found when federal agents and deputies went to the house to serve an arrest warrant to Todt, who was already under investigation by the FBI and agents with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for health care fraud.

Todt, who ran his own physical therapy practice with Megan, allegedly billed insurance companies for physical therapy services he never performed, Click Orlando reported. Their practice, Family Physical Therapy in Colchester, Connecticut, was raided a month before the murders and Todt allegedly admitted to falsely billing Medicaid, saying neither his wife nor his employees were aware of the fraud, CNN reported. An eviction notice had also recently been filed in a Florida court for the home where the bodies were found, according to NBC Connecticut.

Todt, who has pleaded not guilty to the slayings, had claimed in a letter to his father that his wife killed their kids before killing herself, the Sentinel reported last year. Notorious family annihilator Chris Watts, who murdered his wife and two daughters in Colorado in 2019, also infamously tried to blame the murders of their children on his wife, but later admitted to killing them all.