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"I didn't want to kill him." The true story behind Netflix's I Just Killed My Dad.

"I just uh... killed my dad. What do I need to tell you?" 

This is the question 17-year-old Anthony Templet asked a 911 operator in the early hours of June 3, 2019. He was calm throughout the phone call. He stated the facts. He admitted to shooting his own father. And then he waited outside their Baton Rouge, Louisiana home for the responding officers to arrest him. 

His complex story is explored in Netflix's new three-part true crime documentary series, I Just Killed My Dad, from director Skye Borgman, the woman behind Girl In The Picture and Abducted In Plain Sight.

 Watch the trailer for Netflix's I Just Killed My Dad. Post continues below.

"He just attacked me," Anthony continued on the 911 call. "Then, we got into a fistfight. Then, I ran into his room, closed the door, and got a gun. As I unlocked the door, he tried to {inaudible} and then I shot him."

Within minutes, Anthony was arrested. When his father Burt died three days later from his injuries, he was charged with second degree murder. The media began covering the case, telling the shocking story of a teenage son who killed his own dad in cold blood. 

Then investigators received a phone call out of the blue. On the other end of the phone was a woman named Natasha. She said she was Anthony's half-sister, and he had been missing since 2008. 

Anthony spent the first five years of his life living in Houston, Texas, with his mother Teresa Thompson, his father Burt and his half-sister Natasha. 

According to Natasha, Burt was abusive towards Teresa throughout their relationship. 

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"Burt and my mum were together for about 10 years and it was extremely violent. I can only imagine what Anthony’s been through. When he was a baby, Burt would hold him in his arms while abusing my mother," she said. 

After the couple separated, Burt was granted temporary sole custody of Anthony in his home state of Louisiana. When Teresa filed a protective order against Burt, he took Anthony and moved to Baton Rouge. 

He didn't tell anyone where they were going and Anthony was not allowed to contact his mother or half-sister. In the documentary Teresa's sister, Elena, describes how Anthony was tricked by his father into believing his mother was "just a junkie, had no use for him, didn't care for him and there was no reason to go looking for her."  

Anthony and his mother Teresa. Image: Netflix.  Knowing that Burt's parents lived in Baton Rouge, Anthony's relatives posted missing persons posters around the city but received no leads on the pair's whereabouts. They spent the next decade not knowing whether he was alive or dead. By the time Anthony was 14 or 15, they realised they had no idea what he looked like. They could pass him in the street and not recognise him. 

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Meanwhile, in Baton Rouge, Burt refused to enrol Anthony in school. He controlled his every move and was both physically and verbally abusive towards him. 

In the docu-series, Anthony talks about how he was "punched and thrown and kicked" by his father during fits of rage and that "sometimes it wouldn't stop for hours".

"He always wanted to know everything," he said. "I was always being tracked by something, whether it be a camera or mobile app.

"He wanted to be in control of everything, of me and the rest of the family in that house. I knew he was trying to control me."

Burt eventually married a woman named Susan, who was also abused and controlled by him. 

"Burt had an app on his phone; with every movement on a camera he’d get a text of what was going on," Susan told the docuseries. 

"Every time I turned my car engine off, he’d get an alert that it was off. If I parked here, he could know when I’d got home from the grocery store and how many bags I was carrying."

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Susan left Burt not long before the shooting. 

On the night of the shooting, Anthony and Burt allegedly got into an argument about privacy.  

The argument turned violent and Anthony grabbed two of Burt's guns and shot him in the head three times. 

"I didn't want to kill him, I didn't want him to kill me," Anthony explains in the documentary. "It was kind of 'do or die'."

When Natasha saw his mug shot on the news, she realised it was her long-lost little brother and he had killed the man who had taken him away from them years earlier. 

Anthony now. Image: Netflix.  

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"After 11 years of waiting to hear if my brother was still alive, he is found. He has been secluded and abused all these years by his own father. My brave brother had to defend himself for the last time against that evil man," she told WAFB at time. 

Teresa said she "jumped for joy" when they finally found her boy. 

"I was just so happy, I was jumping up and down and screaming, 'They found him,'" she says in I Just Killed My Dad

After hearing his backstory, prosecutors dropped Anthony's charges to manslaughter and then negligible homicide. 

In 2021, Anthony pleaded no contest to negligible homicide and will serve five years of supervised probation with credit for time served.

Since his release, Anthony has been trying to rebuild his relationship with his mother and grandmother. But it's been harder than anyone anticipated. 

"This is harder than losing him," Teresa said in the documentary. 

"I want to be his friend, because I know it'll never be a mother/son relationship. That was the past."

I Just Killed My Dad is streaming on Netflix now.  

Feature Image: Netflix.