Disney dad Anthony Todt told cops his kids were at sleepover before they found rotting bodies in room upstairs
CELEBRATION, FLORIDA: The 44-year-old Florida dad, who killed his family inside their Disney townhome and lived with their mummified bodies for days, told authorities that his wife and three children were away on a sleepover when police arrived at his home and later found the decomposed bodies which were "black as leather."
Anthony Todt is currently facing the death penalty after being charged with the murders of wife Megan, 42, and their three children Alex, 13, Tyler, 11, and Zoe, 4. He waved his right to a preliminary hearing after he was apprehended on January 14, days after he allegedly brutally slaughtered his family at their home in Celebration, Florida, a community developed by Disney. He is suspected of carrying out the killings shortly after New Year's Day and reportedly lived with their bodies for at least two weeks before the news came to light.
According to Osceola County Sheriff Russ Gibson, Todt is a former physical therapist who confessed to the murders immediately after his arrest but following his arraignment entered a plea of not guilty. Recently the Sun has obtained the interviews of the three agents from the Department of Health and Human Services who arrested the accused after discovering the horrific scene inside the family’s Florida home.
Melissa O’Neal, the lead agent on the case, said that their initial plan was to conduct basic surveillance to aid in the investigation of their Boston field office after the accused's family members were reported missing on January 6. “The plan was, we were going to do some surveillance, take our photos and rally with the two guys who were coming down from Connecticut,” O’Neal explained.
As they were staking out the house, one of the agents, Jim Nguyen, saw Todt walk out on his porch. While the third agent, Michael Phelps, moved in to keep watch over Todt, Nguyen radioed to the team saying that the suspect had been spotted. The group's supervisor made a plan, which did not work out. “If he was on front porch we were going to grab him,” said O’Neal. "I called [back-up police] units when he went back in [the house]. We wanted to get some marked units because we didn’t know if the kids would be alone and we would have a DCS problem.”
Phelps recounted that he noticed that Todt could barely stand or walk, and was convulsing with every step he took. Phelps was also the one who approached the house first. “We knocked and no one came to the door. Mike tried the door, the door was unlocked and mike popped it open,” recalled O’Neal. “And we could hear mumbling from inside the house. It sounded like it was from the top of the stairs. He was still mumbling and needing a lot of assistance to get down, but saying don’t touch him because he would fall. It took him a long time to get down the stairs."
According to Phelps' testimony, when they first laid their eyes on Todt inside the house he was wearing just a shirt and underwear. The agents wasted no time in confronting Todt about the whereabouts of his wife and children who were nowhere to be found inside the house.
“He said Megan was upstairs sleeping and he also called for her like she was alive,” said O’Neal. “We asked where are the children, and he said: ‘I don’t know, I can’t remember if they went to a sleepover last night.'"
Phelps then opted to sit and keep a watchful eye on Todt while others searched the accused's place. He said that he had little choice since they had brought only one pair of handcuffs and Todt needed two to be restrained due to his size. “We went upstairs to check for Megan and the children because we had called for her too and obviously there was no answer," O'Neal said. "The door of the master bedroom was open."
This was followed by the harrowing discovery of the multiple decomposing bodies. “I could see feet, and you could tell it was somebody who was deceased,” said O’Neal. “You could see the buttocks of another person."
It took the agents two visits to the master bedroom to find the accused's youngest child. After they failed to locate Zoe during the first search of the room, they asked Todt where she was. Zoe's body was eventually found in the same room as the rest of the corpses. “We went back in the master bedroom, and she’s so little. She’s only like three or four,” said O’Neal. “There's another little blanket at the foot of the bed … Zoe’s there, at the foot of the bed, underneath blankets.”
All the bodies were in such a badly decomposed state that their preliminary cause of death could not be determined. “So, the bodies are black, like, as black as this [points to leather],” explained O’Neal. “It looked like there was deformation but he didn’t know if it was overdose cause there was vomit or stabbing because the bodies are so far gone. The boys’ bodies are black as leather.”
Crime scene investigators were called upon the scene to examine the bodies. “We saw a knife on the windowsill. One of your deputies said they saw vomit,” recalled O’Neal of the scene. When Todt was taken outside of his house and placed on arrest, he confessed that he had tried to kill himself by overdosing on Benadryl.