Celebration’s Dark Secret: The Todt Family Murders

“I’m wondering if somebody can do a wellness check on my brother and his family.” Came the call from one concerned sister to dispatchers around the end of 2019. “They’ve been really sick for probably like the past week and a half, and I can’t seem to get a hold of them.” 

You can listen to this episode here: https://www.10minutemurder.com/celebrations-dark-secret-the-todt-family-murders/

Christmas had come and gone. New Years was almost behind us, but no one, including their families, had heard from the Todts. An unusual enough situation on its own, especially around the holiday season, but neighbors hadn’t seen them coming and going either, and now the FBI was after them too.

But it was a long journey that took the Todts up to that day in 2020 when law enforcement arrived at their doorstep, and it started in the most normal of places.

Anthony Todt met Megan Gula at Sacred Heart College, where they were both studying to become physical therapists, and they couldn’t ignore the spark between them. Megan could light up any room she walked into. She was kind and caring. She loved music and cooking and was focused on living a healthy lifestyle.

Anthony, or Tony as he liked to go by, fell head over heels and asked Megan to marry him almost as soon as they were done with their education. 

Together, they opened up a physical therapy clinic, where they both worked until their family started growing. With two sons; Alexander and Tyler, and a daughter named Zoe, the Todts looked like they had it all. Megan left the clinic to homeschool the children, and Tony focused on growing their business so he could support his family.

And then they moved to Celebration, Florida, a community built by the Walt Disney Company to be the most magical place on Earth to live. Shops, entertainment and Disneyland itself were only a stone-throw away, and it was the perfect place to raise young children.

But the perfect location will only get you so far and, despite their outward appearance and their posts on social media, there were rumors that cracks had started to form along the Todt's picturesque facade.

Tony didn’t exactly come from what would be considered a normal familial background. Back in the day, Robert Todt, Tony’s father, had fallen in love with his mistress and wanted to be with her instead of with his wife Loretta, but instead of handling things the legal way and filing for divorce, he did something almost unimaginable.

When Tony was only four years old, he witnessed a young man attacking Loretta. The man shot her in the head before fleeing the scene, leaving the young Tony to watch as his mother bled out in front of him. 

It was only through sheer luck that Loretta survived the attack.

At first, no one could understand why someone would want to attack Loretta, but then the would-be assassin’s identity came to light and all was revealed.

It turned out that Robert had hired a former, mentally challenged student of his to kill his wife and free him up to marry his mistress. Instead of getting what he wanted, however, Robert Todt ended up in prison, and it was Loretta who remarried and moved on.

To fast forward to the future, it looked like Robert’s criminal genes hadn’t entirely skipped his son. 

Tony wasn’t hiring any assassins, but he was on investigators’ radars for suspected fraud. 

The Todts still had their original physical therapy clinic that Tony and Megan had opened together and even though the family had moved from Connecticut to Celebration, Tony still managed the business. He would make frequent trips to make sure that everything was in order, but the authorities were starting to think that it was Tony’s books that weren’t exactly as they should be.

For years, Tony had been charging insurance companies for treatments that he never actually provided. He’d actually made over 130,000 US dollars from filing fraudulent charges, and even then he was still over 100,000 dollars in debt.

The Todts were living well over their means and by November 2019, the FBI was able to prove it. They stormed Tony’s office with a warrant and collected evidence of fraud that would put Tony away for a while.

During his interview with the feds, Tony told them that he would plead guilty as soon as he found a lawyer to represent him. The authorities believed him and released Tony so he could wrap things up before they filed the charges against him.

But only a month later, Tony had cut off all communication with the investigators. At first, it simply looked like the Feds had been duped, but then calls started coming in from other family members claiming that they hadn’t heard or seen from the Todts in weeks.

Local law enforcement stopped by the Todt’s family home in Celebration multiple times, but were unable to perform wellness checks when no one opened the door. It was actually only in mid-January when the Feds showed up to serve Todt his papers and with a warrant for his arrest that anyone was actually able to set eyes on the family.

The first thing the authorities noticed that day in January 2020 was the smell. It was an unmistakable smell and one that had them fearing for the worst, although they must have had no idea what truly waited for them inside the house.

The door was unlocked. The smell got worse when the investigators stepped inside.

Tony came to the stairs to greet them. He’d lost a lot of weight and looked incredibly weak. Trembling, he told the investigators that Megan was sleeping.

“Megan?” he called, seemingly trying to get her to wake up.

The investigators followed through to the master bedroom, where they quickly realized that Megan was far more than just sleeping.

“The bodies were discolored,” responding officer Michael Phelps later said. “Black and blue.”

Megan, Alek, Tyler and even four-year-old Zoe were all lying in bed, wrapped in blankets and in various stages of decay. Even the family dog Breezy had been killed along with them, and it looked like Tony had been living with their remains for weeks. All of them, including Tony for that matter, had toxic levels of Benadryl in their systems, and Megan and the boys had also been stabbed. But their remains were so badly decomposed by the time that the investigators discovered them that the coroner couldn’t determine the exact cause of death.

The investigators were forced to rely on Tony’s version of events in order to paint a picture of what had happened.

He claimed that it had all started a while ago when Megan had contracted Lyme’s disease from a tick bite. After that, the usually happy and outgoing mother of three had turned inwards and frequently suffered from bouts of depression.

It was during this time that she’d allegedly become obsessed with the concept of salvation. She’d apparently found videos describing the end of the world and had realized that they needed a way to save their family. Together, she and Tony came up with the idea to kill their children and then themselves.

According to Tony, when he and Megan approached the children to explain what they intended to do, the children said that they wanted to join their parents. 

That was it then. The only thing left to do was to follow through.

Tony said he started with Zoe.

“I needed to save her soul,” he told the investigators. “I wanted her to be with us.”

He claimed that he went into her room while she was sleeping one night and sat on the bed with her for a while. He then said that he rolled over on top of her and suffocated the four-year-old in her sleep.

Then he approached his eldest, Alek. Tony first suffocated and then stabbed the teenager in his sleep before moving onto Tyler and doing the same thing to him.

Megan, Tony claimed, had stabbed herself. She’d aimed for her liver but had missed and lost the courage to follow through with the plan that had supposedly been her idea in the first place. Tony stepped in and suffocated her with a pillow. He then wrapped all the bodies up in blankets and laid them out in the master bedroom while he worked up the courage to kill himself. He had taken the Benadryl, but found he was too scared to turn the knife on himself.

It was weeks later that the authorities found them all and by then Tony had given up on the idea of killing himself entirely.

And it was in court that, despite his earlier taped confession to detectives, Tony changed his story entirely.

“My testimony today is the fact that Megan killed her kids and killed herself,” he told the jury.

The prosecution argued that Tony had killed his family and then tried to cover up his tracks by using their phones to message relatives to tell them that everyone was sick.

“I think he blamed his family for a lifestyle that he couldn’t maintain,” they told the court. “I wish he had gone to them and told them that they would need to live within their means… His solution was, instead, to end everything.”

The jury agreed and found Tony guilty of first-degree murder. He was sentenced to four consecutive life sentences, with an extra year for animal cruelty.