Joe Yates
Warning: This article contains discussion of child abuse and murder which some readers may find distressing
A man who killed his entire family, including his four-year-old daughter, gave a hair-raising reason for why he committed the heinous act.
Anthony Todt was sentenced to life in prison without parole after he was found guilty of murdering his wife and children, as well as their dog, before living with their corpses for weeks.
The 48-year-old carried out the wicked crimes at their family home close to Disney World, in Orlando, Florida, back in 2019.
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It took more than six hours of deliberations before the jury came to a decision finding the cold-blooded killer guilty.
He was found to have suffocated his four-year-old daughter Zoe to death, as well as suffocating and stabbing his sons - 11-year-old son Tyler and 13-year-old brother Alek - as well as his 42-year-old wife Megan Todt.
He also killed Breezy - the family dog.
But the physical therapist went on to deny all the charges that were made against him, claiming he wasn't home on the night his entire family died before diabolically saying they were his 'first and foremost in life'.
Todt, originally from Connecticut, was arrested after cops showed up at his luxury home in Celebration, a town set up by the Walt Disney Company as it experimented in community planning.
Police showed up at his door on 13 January, 2020 initially to arrest him on charges relating to healthcare fraud - after an investigation was launched in the April the year before.
The evil father, who has been dubbed 'Disney Dad', was suspected of falsifying medical procedures and treatments and billing insurance companies for them.
It was then that they discovered the bodies of Zoe, Tyler, Alex and Megan all wrapped in blankets and were visibly decomposing.
An autopsy into their deaths revealed that they had been in that state for 'at least a couple of weeks'.
He would then go onto claim it was his wife's decision to murder the children and herself as part of a suicide-pact.
But it was what he said to detectives in a recorded interview in that same month that was really chilling, and would contribute to the jury convicting him.
He said: "I put my hands over her mouth and a pillow over top of her until she stopped."
In the same interview, he added: "Everybody needed to die in order to pass over to the other side together because the apocalypse was coming.”
During the interview, he also claimed that he and Megan came to the conclusion after watching videos about the afterlife.
But following their deaths, he then used their phones to text relatives as to not raise suspicion.
Todt would later deny that he confessed to the acts.
At the court sentencing, Judge Keith Carsten imposed four consecutive life sentences on the man he described as a 'destroyer of worlds', adding: “Not one of those lives was less valuable than the other.”