Anthony Todt, charged with killing his family, to face trial in September
Anthony Todt, the Colchester physical therapist accused of killing his wife, three children and family dog in Florida, is set to face jury trial in September.
The trial, set by Judge Keith Carsten of the Osceola County 9th District Court, will begin on Sept. 27. Lawyers for both the prosecution and defense notified the court they would be unavailable until that date. Todt appeared before the court virtually Wednesday morning from the Osceola County Jail. He also had a pretrial hearing set for Sept. 15.
In December 2020, an order was signed transferring Todt’s case from Judge Wayne Wooten and Felony Division 201 to Carsten and Felony Division 301. Divisions 201 and 301 are both in Osceola County, Fla. Todt’s attorney, Public Defender Robert Wesley, filed a motion for continuance of the pretrial conference because “additional time is needed in order to prepare this case for trial,” and, “The accused previously waived speedy trial,” which led to Wednesday’s appearance.
Todt had his initial appearance in January 2020, a hearing in June and then the December pretrial conference. He has had the majority of his court proceedings rescheduled, waived or canceled since he was arrested.
In January 2020, Todt was found inside his family's home in Celebration, Fla., with the decomposing bodies of his wife and three children after the FBI arrived to arrest him on a warrant stemming from a federal health care fraud investigation in Connecticut.
Shortly after his arrest, he allegedly confessed to killing his wife, Megan, 42, their children, Alek, 13, Tyler, 11, and Zoe, 4, and the family dog, Breezy, according to the Osceola County Sheriff's Office. That confession has been kept from the public and redacted from official documents to this point.
The bodies of Megan and the children were found wrapped in blankets, decomposing in a second-floor bedroom of their large family home in a quiet neighborhood, days after family members in Connecticut called police requesting welfare checks on Megan and the children, whom they said hadn't been heard from in weeks.
An independent death penalty review board had voted unanimously in February 2020 to seek the death penalty for Todt, who is charged with four counts of first-degree homicide and one count of animal cruelty.
However, Aramis Ayala, the former state's attorney of the 9th Judicial District in Osceola County, Fla., announced in January 2021 that her office would no longer seek the death penalty against Todt, as it was "not in the best interest" of the state as a potential sentence, according to court records. She said the decision was the result of the "consideration of the facts and law applicable to this case" and "serious concerns regarding the mental health of the defendant." Ayala has made headlines in the past for her opposition to the death penalty.
State Attorney Monique Worrell, who was elected in November, issued a statement in January that said her administration did not coordinate with Ayala's on the decision and would be re-evaluating Todt's case and others. "We will establish our own review panel to examine the individual circumstances of every capital case before rendering any final determinations on the matter," Worrell said in her statement.
In January 2020, Todt pleaded not guilty to the murders. He has since blamed the murders on his wife, Megan.
In July, he wrote a 27-page letter to his once estranged father, Robert Todt, in which he said Megan fed their children a pie laced with Benadryl before stabbing them and then herself. Autopsy reports found that Megan and the children had traces of Benadryl in their systems when they died and that Megan, Alek and Tyler were stabbed in their abdomens.
In a March phone call from jail, Anthony Todt told his sister that he couldn’t stop his family from being murdered. “I couldn’t stop this because I wasn’t there,” he told Chrissy Caplet, who lives in Connecticut but was in Florida at the time of the call after assuming power of attorney over her older brother.
In two calls between Todt and Caplet in March and April, Todt suggested that his wife, Megan, may have tried to kill her family before. “There were multiple attempts,” he told his sister in one of the calls, recordings of which were obtained by The Day from the State Attorney’s Office.
In the phone calls and letter, Todt has denied being at the home the family rented at 202 Reserve Place the night that his wife and children were killed. Todt claims in the letter that he was at the condo that the family owned at 211 Longview Ave. that night and fell asleep. When he returned home, he said, his children were dead and his wife stabbed herself.
The date of the murders is still unknown, but Medical Examiner Joshua Stephany said that the family had likely been dead for at least two weeks when they were found on Jan. 13, 2020.
For more information on this case, listen to "Looking for the Todt Family," a new podcast from The Day.
Comment threads are monitored for 48 hours after publication and then closed.
