On the second day of the Anthony Todt murder trial, jurors were shown his interview with Osceola County Sheriff's detectives from Jan. 15, 2021.
Appearing lucid, Todt spoke of a pact between he and his wife Megan for the family to "cross to the other side together" ahead of an impending end-of-the-world apocalypse.
Todt faces four counts of first-degree murder and one count of animal cruelty.
After what he said was discussions with Megan starting in April 2019 and through online research done before Halloween of that year, Anthony said he found a way to put their children Aleksander, 13, Tyler, 11, and Zoe, 4, "to sleep and then have them bleed to death."
“I can’t piece together when the children died ... the kids were in bed before Christmas," Todt said in the interview, which would have been about three weeks before police finally made contact with him on Jan. 13, 2020.
In the video, Todt went into detail of how each child was killed — laying on top of Zoe and then putting a pillow over her head to suffocate her, stabbing and suffocating Alek, then using the knife on Tyler, who was a concern as "the strongest and quickest kid ... if something happened we wouldn't be able to catch him and then all go together," so Megan stood outside the door of the downstairs room as it happened. He then explained how he suffocated the family dog in the master bedroom.
The following night, Anthony recalled how Megan drank some wine and Tylenol PM, then stabbed herself multiple times. After 45 minutes she “didn’t feel anything happening” so she drank “a big bottle” of Benadryl, then asked Anthony to suffocate her with a pillow. "If you love me, you will do this," he recalled her telling him.
After she was gone, he detailed his efforts to kill himself — first with doses of Benadryl, then shooting himself with a BB gun, then hanging himself from the end of the bed. He said he went to local stores to buy more Benadryl; all to no avail.
“I had to get to them. I kept getting closer and closer," he said, noting one night he tried stabbing himself but he “chickened out," and another when he found himself in the garage after drinking more Benadryl and thought he was there for two days. In the meantime, he gathered all the bodies into the upstairs master bedroom, giving detectives intimate details of the movements. Me mentioned a note written by him and Megan on one of their phones to explain what they did that was supposed to be printed out.
He said he didn't remember anything from Jan. 13, the day law enforcement finally make contact, entered the Reserve Place home and found the bodies. At the end of the video, he's asked by Det. Cole Miller, "What are you most upset about?"
“That I’m here, not with them,” Todt replied.
(In jail statements from the summer of 2020, Todt recanted all of this, saying Megan was responsible for all the killings.)
Earlier in the day, Medical Examiner Jennifer Nara, who conducted the autopsies, explained that the bodies were in a state of decomposition, making those “a little more challenging.” She put the date of death, based on decomposition, “consistent with being dead for at least a couple of weeks," which would follow Todt's statement that the children were dead before Christmas. She noted body wounds more pronounced and more challenging to diagnose.
Nara said the manner of death in the three children was "homicide In association with diphenhydramine toxicity." Megan reportedly had two stab wounds that Nara said she received before she died and were not fatal. Nara could not ascertain if the stab wounds were self-inflicted due to decomposition, did not note the presence of trauma, and did not rule out smothering. She confirmed the presence of alcohol in Megan's system.
Crime Lab analyst Christopher Conklin said DNA and blood swabs taken from a knife handle found at the crime scene contained DNA from multiple members of the family, he said, noting it was 700 billions times more likely to occur from Tyler, Akel and Megan, 85 million times from Zoe and down to 5.2 million from Anthony.
Court will return to session Wednesday at 9 a.m. Judge Keith Carsten said he'll be on the bench at 8:30 a.m. to handle any issues that arise — court was recessed for about 20 minutes Tuesday to get a copy of the interview that had the proper parts redacted.
