Family annihilators: The psychology behind familicide

Experts in criminal behavior say so-called “family annihilators,” are often trying to spare their families from an indignity or tragedy, either real or imagined.

It’s a title that would describe Anthony Todt if he’s convicted of the crimes for which he’s been charged. Police in Florida say the Connecticut physical therapist confessed to killing his wife, three children and the family dog.

“I always want to ask, what was the problem and why did they decide that killing the family was the best solution,” said Dr. Stepahnie Leite, a psychologist in Hartford. “They’re trying to fix a problem and the really horrible solution they’ve come up with is to kill their family.”

Police in Osceola County, Fla. confirmed that 42-yearold Megan Todt, 13-year-old Alek Todt, 11-year-old Tyler Todt and 4-year-old Zoe Todt were killed sometime in late December 2019. Anthony Todt confessed to the killings, police said, who did not offer a motive.

N.G. Berrill said so-called family annihilators fall into one of three categories.

“In these cases there are several different reasons why poeople will committ a mass murder of their own family including spouse and children,” said Berrill, a forensic psychologist and director of New York Forensic, a private consulting group in New York City.

“One obvious reason is that the person is suffering from some sort of psychosis.”

In cases like that, Berrill said, there may be hallucinations.

“They become delusional and believe that this is a way of sparing their wife and children from some horrific event that they imagine might occur, “Berrill said. “They think there’s some satanic forces or there’s some message they’re receiving from God that says this is what needs to be done.”

Other so-called family annihilators are under a different kind of stress, often financial.

Todt has not been convicted in the deaths of his family, but records searches showed the family was being evicted from their Celebration, Fla. home, and that they were in a significant amount of debt.

Berrill said perpetrators of familicide often “believe that somehow this is the way to spare his family the humiliation, the stress,and himself the embarrassment of hitting rock bottom.”

Dr. Neil Websdale, director of the National Domestic Violence Fatality Review Initiative and author of “Familicidal Hearts” published in 2010, said that financial strain is a common theme among family annihilators.

“Roughly a quarter to a third of family annihilation cases appear to have financial problems at their root,” Websdale said. “Often what we see here is a deep sense of male shame.”

Perpetrators of familicide are often “highly repressed individuals,” Websdale said, facing potential eviction or bankruptcy. The family may be facing destitution, but “appear on the surface to be respectable.”

The goal, Berrill said, is to spare the family “all these assaults to their sense of well being and their sense of normalcy. It reflects very distorted thinking and very strained and depressive type thinking and desperation which culminates in this kind of terrible act.”

This act is called “anomic familicide,” according to Dr. Kevin Barnes-Ceeney, assistant professor of criminal justice at the University of New Haven. “It’s when you feel like you're going to lose everything and you have an attempt to immortalize the family.”

The third kind of family annihilator is attempting to “extricate themselves from a family life that they can’t tolerate,” Berrill said. Perhaps there’s an impending divorce, a threat to remove the children or an extramarital affair

“They decide that they’re going to take matters into their own hands,” Berrill said, “in order to presumably pursue a better existence without being shackled by the constraints of having a family to support and take care of.”

This is the most common sort of intimate partner homicide, Leite said: “It’s at the moment they feel that they are losing that control that they have the brilliant idea that the only thing to do is to kill them.”

Police say Todt killed his family in late December, and he was taken into custody at the family home this week.

That, for Berrill, would suggest that the first two possibilities are more likely. If true, it would point to “Delusional thinking that he’s brought peace to the family,” Berrill said. “It suggests there is some kind of genuine attachment to the family.”

“What’s most telling about the whole thing is that he didn’t leave,” he said.

Most so-called family annihilators are men, Berrill said — Websdale estimates that 95 percent of perpetrators are male — though they are so rare there has been no real studies on the subject.

“It’s fairly rare,” Berrill said. “It might come up every couple of years. It requires an awful lot of killing.”