Celebration's Dark Secret: The Todt Family Murders

Get ready for a chilling dive into the tragic story of the Todt Family, a seemingly perfect family whose shocking secrets and dark past led to a horrifying end. As the holiday season of 2019 wrapped up, concerned family members reported that they couldn't reach the Todts, and what law enforcement discovered was beyond imagination. From their beginnings as a loving couple in physical therapy school to the grim day in January 2020 when Tony Todt was found living among the decomposing bodies of his wife and children, this episode uncovers the twisted tale of lies, fraud, and murder. Join us as we unravel the Todt Family's descent from a fairy tale life in Celebration, Florida, to a true crime horror story.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:39):
I'm wondering if somebody can do a wellness check on
my brother in his family. They didn't really sick for
probably like the past week and a half, and I
can't seem to get a hold of them.

Speaker 2 (00:51):
That call came from one concerned sister to dispatchers around
the end of twenty nineteen. Christmas had come and gone.
New Year's was almost behind us, but no one, including
their families, had heard from the Totes, an unusual enough
situation on its own, especially around the holiday season, but
neighbors hadn't seen them coming or going either, and now

(01:14):
the FBI was after them as well. But it was
a long journey that took the Tots up to that
day in twenty twenty, when law enforcement arrived on their doorstep.
And it started in the most normal of places. Anthony
Tote met Megan Gula at Sacred Heart College, where they
both were studying to become physical therapists, and they couldn't

(01:36):
ignore the spark between them. Megan could light up any
room she walked into. It sounds cliche, but it's true.
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

(01:56):
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 Toats looked like they
had it all. Megan left the clinic to homeschool their children,
and Tony focused on growing their business so he could
support the family, and then they moved to Celebration, Florida,

(02:20):
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 throwaway, and it
was the perfect place to raise young children. But the
perfect location will only get you so far, and despite
their outwardly appearance and their posts on social media, there

(02:43):
were rumors that cracks had started to form along the
Tote's picturesque facade. Tony didn't exactly come from what would
be considered a normal familial background. Back in the day,
Robert Tote, Tony's father, had fallen in love with his mistress,
wanted to be with her instead of his wife Loretta.
But instead of handling things the legal way and filing

(03:05):
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

(03:27):
could understand why someone would 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 Tote ended up in prison and

(03:48):
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 assass lessons,
but he was on the investigator's radar for suspected fraud.
The Tots still had their original physical therapy clinic that
Tony and Megan had opened together, and even though the

(04:11):
family had moved from Connecticut to celebration, Tony still managed
the business. He would still 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.

(04:32):
He'd actually made over one hundred thirty thousand dollars from
filing fraudulent charges, and even then he was still over
one hundred thousand dollars in debt. The Tots were living
well above their means, and by November twenty nineteen, the
FBI was able to prove it. They stormed Tony's office
with a warrant and collected evidence of fraud that would

(04:54):
put Tony away for quite a while. During his interview
with the FEDS, Tony told them that he would lead
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 the charges were filed against him.
Hashtag white collar crime privilege. But only a month later,

(05:14):
Tony had cut off all communication with the investigators. At first,
it simply looked like the Feds had been duped, but
then call started coming in from other family members claiming
that they had not seen or heard from the Toats
in weeks. Law enforcements not by the Tote's family home
and celebration multiple times, but were unable to perform wellness

(05:35):
checks when no one opened the door. It was actually
only in mid January, when the Fed showed up to
serve toad Tis papers and with a warrant for his arrest,
that anyone was actually able to set eyes on the family.
The first thing that the authorities noticed that day in
January twenty twenty was the smell. It was an unmistakable smell,

(05:57):
and one that had them fearing for the word, although
they must have had no idea what truly awaited them
inside the house. The door was unlocked. The smell got
worse when the investigators stepped inside. Tony came down the
stairs to greet them. He'd lost a lot of weight
and looked incredibly weak, trembling. He told the investigators that

(06:20):
Megan was sleeping.

Speaker 3 (06:22):
Tell me coming downstairs, Tony, upstairs, Hey, come upstairs, right Okayigno,
it was all right, just stay called.

Speaker 1 (06:41):
Any children you I can't remember down to the last Na,
keep coming downtown. She like some sun?

Speaker 3 (06:54):
Where your where did you got any weapon? What's your
wife's name? Meghan as amurders megas her Megie? All right,
come on body.

Speaker 2 (07:13):
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. Meghan, Alec Tyler, and even four year
old Zoe were all lying in bed, wrapped in blankets

(07:35):
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 benadrill in their systems, and Meghan and the
boys had also been stabbed, but their remains were so

(07:57):
badly decomposed by the time the investigators discovered them that
the coroner couldn't determine the exact cause of death. The
investigators were forced to rely on Tony's versions of events
in order to paint a picture of what happened. He
claimed that it all started a while back when Megod
contracted lyme disease from a tick bite. After that, the

(08:18):
usually happy and outgoing mother of three had turned inwards
and frequently suffered 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

(08:40):
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.

Speaker 3 (08:53):
That was it.

Speaker 2 (08:53):
Then the only thing left to do was followed through.
Tony said he started with Zoe. I needed to save
her soul, he told 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

(09:14):
four year old in her sleep. Then he approached his
oldest Alec Tony first suffocated and then stabbed the teenager
in his sleep, before moving on to Tyler and doing
the same thing to him. Megan, Tony claimed, had stabbed herself.
She'd aimed for her own liver, but had missed and
lost the courage to follow through with the plan that

(09:36):
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 benadrill, but
he'd found that he was too scared to turn the
knife on himself. It was weeks later that the authorities

(09:58):
found them all and by the 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. Quote my testimony today is
the fact that Megan killed her kids and killed herself,

(10:19):
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. Quote. I think he blamed
his family for a lifestyle that he couldn't maintain. I
wish he had gone to them and told him that
they would need to live within their means. His solution

(10:41):
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.

(11:03):
That is ten Minute Murder for today brief and binge
able true crime. My name is Joe. I'm the host,
and thank you for taking the time to listen to
the podcast. If you're a new listener, make sure you
hit subscribe wherever you're listening. If you're an og listener,
make sure you're following on all of the social media
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(11:26):
all those places. Just type ten minute murder into the
search bar and it's going to pop right up. Or
you can go to ten minute Murder dot com links
for all that are there. And let's get to an email. Hi, Joe,
I should probably start by saying how much I love
your podcast. I've been a listener for almost two years
and it's the only podcast I ever keep up on,
so thanks for keeping it interesting. I live in Billings, Montana,

(11:49):
and missing and murdered Indigenous women is very prevalent here,
which made me think of a case that you could cover,
a local case, the death of Selena. Not afraid the
entire case is it never seemed to add up and
what really happened is still often debated. I would absolutely
love to hear your take on it. I think it
would really interest you as well. Thanks again, Larissa and Larissa.

(12:11):
Let me start by saying thank you for the kind words.
That is not always necessary. You don't have to start
out with nice things to get me to read your email.
Now it helps. It helps to let me know at
the beginning you're not about to try to trash me.
So the compliments are welcome but not expected. And I've
never done this on the podcast ever. In the history
of this podcast, I've never committed to doing an episode

(12:35):
on a certain case on the podcast because it's super
public and now that means I have to do it right.
So I will do this case. Absolutely one percent will
do this. And the main reason is I've been looking
into the missing and murdered Indigenous women. It's it's an
epidemic that I don't think most people know about. I
didn't know about it before I started reading about it.

(12:57):
It's been going on for decades and decades decades, and
no one talks about it. I'm sure the indigenous communities
talk about it, but as far as like the mainstream,
it's not really a thing that's discussed as often as
it should be. There's so much injustice going on as
it relates to that, and so yes, I will do
that case. It may take me a little bit of
time to obviously research it and get it on the podcast,

(13:20):
but you can, you can go ahead and count on it.
I'm doing that. So again, thank you for the email,
and thank you for listening. Larissa, and that's going to
do it. That's your episode for today. Thank you for
listening to ten Minute Murder.