Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - BONUS: Surf-Dad Killer Stabs Tots Dead With Spear Gun: Autopsy

Episode Date: August 28, 2021

Mom Abby Coleman reports her family missing after not being able to contact them for 24 hours. Using the “find my iPhone” app on her computer, she discovers her husband and children are in Mexico. The bodies of Coleman’s two children, Kaleo, 3, and Roxy, 10 months, are found on a Mexico farm, stabbed repeatedly. Joe Scott Morgan, Professor of Forensics at Jacksonville State University joins Executive Producer Jackie Howard to look at how the children died. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. This is Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. I'm executive producer Jackie Howard. The story of Matthew Coleman and his two children has horrified the country. Matthew Coleman, the founder of Love Water Surfing School, and his family were intending to go camping. But Coleman took his two children and left without his wife. He ignored texts and calls from her. She had to use the Find My Phone function on her laptop to find out where Matthew Coleman

had taken his children. They were in Rosarito, Mexico. That's a beach town about 16 miles south of the border city of Tijuana. The children's bodies were found by a farm worker at a ranch in Baja, California. They had been dumped in the brush. The little girl, 10-month-old Roxy, had been shot 12 times. The boy, 2-year-old Kalio, had been shot 17 times, and the weapon of choice was a spear-phishing gun. Matthew told agents that he had been receiving signs and visions that his wife was possessed by serpent DNA and had passed it on to his children.

They were going to grow up to be monsters, so he had to kill them. Joining me today is Joe Scott Morgan, professor of forensics at Jacksonville State University and author of Blood Beneath My Feet. Joe, first, let's talk about the weapon and what that weapon would do to a body. He used a spear phishing gun. What are we actually talking about? I don't know that I have ever, and I mean ever, encountered a case like this. The level of brutality. I think the only term I could really use is probably barbaric. Because here you have a father that has been around spearfishing for a while. He ran the surf school. And when they promote the surf school, it's not just surfing, they actually talk about spearfishing in the advertisement.

So that gives you an indication that he knows how this device is actually utilized and what it can actually do. Spearfishing is used to, I mean, people go out and hunt sharks underwater with these things, Jackie. And they operate on one of two ways. And it's kind of interesting, at least from a utility standpoint. You can either have them that operate off of a slingshot-based platform where you pull back the big rubber bands and they hook. And then they go into the bolt. The bolt is actually what you would think about as the arrow and it slides down a rail. You aim it and pull the trigger

and you aim it at what you're shooting at. And then the spear shoots out. It goes into the side of the target. And what is really barbaric about this is that it does have a point on it, but it's also got these little fins sometimes that will deploy on the side so that when you aim this thing and fire it into the target, if you try to pull it out, it hangs up on these fins that are deployed. So they're kind of spring loaded. The fact that he utilized this particular weapon is absolutely gruesome. Now, there is another kind that works on compressed air, but it takes a long time to pump this thing up. My suspicion is this is probably rubber band operated. But, you know, when you think about the number of times that he shot these kids and And it takes a long period of time to reload this thing because you have to pull back the rubber band, reinsert the bolt, then aim it and fire it.

He shot them over and over and over and over again. And when you look at this, this would not have happened quickly. This would have taken, I would say, at least going through the loading process, it would have taken him probably roughly about, probably about 12 to 15 minutes just to shoot one of these kids over and over again because it cycles so slowly. Well, now that's if he indeed used the gun every time. Wouldn't it seem more likely that he did this manually if he did it once? I mean, we're still waiting to find out some of this information.

But if let's say he did it the first time expecting the child to die immediately and the child didn't, wouldn't you think it would be more likely that at that point that he started manually stabbing the child to have been able to stab them that many times? You know, this thought has crossed my mind as well, and it is possible. It's certainly possible. One of the problems that you encounter with this, if you're stabbing someone with one of these spears or bolts, to take this bolt and drive it into the body of these children over and over and over again, would give you an indication that potentially the bolt would have become deformed over a period of time because the shaft is not quite resilient enough to take that kind of pressure. So, you know, it does give us

pause, doesn't it? And it raises to a whole new level, the level of horror. If we begin to think about that he would slowly reload this thing every single time and then fire it into the body as opposed to standing over the body and drive the bolt over and over again. One of the things they're going to be looking for in this particular case, or these cases, since we have two children, is how closely concentrated these injuries are. Remember, a spearfishing gun is not like shooting a rifle, where you can put the round actually in target very, very tightly. It doesn't have rifling.

It doesn't even have like little feathers like you see with an arrow on the back end of it. It has nothing like that to kind of guide it. So when you fire the spearfishing gun at something at a target, it actually spreads out over a large area. You won't consistently hit the same area every time if you're firing at a great distance or even at an intermediate distance. So if you have this highly concentrated area of these defects in the body, there's a higher likelihood that he probably stood directly over the bodies as they're laying on the ground, driving this bolt in and out of the bodies. Following up on that, Joe, knowing the difficulties and being that precise, what is the likelihood that the child died with the first shot?

I would say if he was able to kill either one of these children with the first shot, it would be a miracle shot. It's not something that is going to happen immediately. It's not going to have the same ballistic effect as a bullet on target that's so highly destructive. And a lot of that destruction that you get with a bullet has to do with the displacement of energy or the force that's behind the bullet, it can disrupt all sorts of things. But there is very little kinetic force with an arrow as it penetrates the body. So you're not going to get as much tissue disruption, but it's very, very painful. So that goes to the mode here.

If he sensed that the child was not dying immediately, I'm sure he would fly into rage and then continue to stab the body over and over until the child was rendered deceased. But then he did it, but he did it to the lack of lethality, if you will, of the weapon itself, that you would need to do this more exacting. So why do you continue to use this weapon that you're not actually killing them with in the immediate? Why would this happen? Why are there so many injuries to the body? So I think that it goes beyond just the utilization of the spear phishing weapon as an actual tool of homicide. It goes to something deeper. It goes to something darker.

Remember, this guy actually believed that his children were inhabited or that they were infused with, of all things, serpent DNA. If this guy is thinking like this, maybe he sees himself as killing a beast of some kind. Maybe he's going head to head with Satan, for all we know. Who knows what's going on inside this guy's mind? But I can tell you this, he absolutely destroyed, I mean, destroyed these little babies' lives and their bodies. Joe, if they were not killed by the first blow that was struck to them by their father, is there a way to tell which of those blows

actually killed them? Well, yeah. You know, thinking about which one of these shots or strikes or penetrative events was actually the lethal blow, it can be kind of hard to determine that. Obviously, if you have a penetrating wound that goes directly into the heart, that's going to be what we might refer to as a kill shot. But, you know, the thing about it, Jackie, is that some people actually survive, actually survive for a time, even after being struck in the heart with a bullet, there is some level of survivability. And that's with a tremendous amount of kinetic energy. When you have a bolt like this, it's just being driven in there. There's a chance that they could have

survived for a few minutes. The trick is trying to determine how much hemorrhage is existing around some of these wounds. And that's one of the things that we do in forensic pathology and death investigation, is that if we have a specific amount of hemorrhage that's involving one particular wound, we can get an idea as to what position or in what sequence these wounds may have occurred in. And I'll give you, for instance, if you've got a tremendous amount of bleeding that is connected with a particular wound, that gives you an indication that the person survived that wound for a while because they bled and hemorrhaged into that specific area. Now, when you get into post-mortem injuries, which are injuries that occur after death, you'll literally have a hole, or as we refer to it as a defect, that goes into the body and there won't be any associated

hemorrhage. That means that you're striking dead tissue at that point in time. There's no longer blood flow in that area. So when the forensic pathologist does the exam on these bodies, that's one of the things they're going to be keen in on, you know, how many of these injuries occurred in life and how many of them occurred in death. Joe, because the bodies were found so quickly, very little decomposition would have happened yet. You know, Jackie, I think that one of the things that we need to focus on here is how long, what type of time frame are we talking about? Because remember, the wife has been tracking this guy by the movement of his cellular device. And how much time had kind of elapsed since he took the kids, he went to Mexico, he committed this horrific act,

and then the children were found by this worker out in this orchard of all places. From what we understand, there's not a lot of what we refer to as decompositional artifact. And that's kind of fancy words for saying how long they had been dead. And we gauge that by, you know, what changes have taken place in the body after death. The fact that the bodies appear to be, for lack of a better term, fresh dead, that's actually good from an investigative standpoint because it means we're not losing evidence. And that means that they got to this in very short order. So you're not talking about like a body that's found in an arid region where we might have skeletal remains or, oh God forbid, that a wild animal would come by and begin to disrupt the bodies. None of that apparently happened. These kids had died a very short period of time prior

to their bodies being found. And that is good for the investigation. Following up on one thing that you mentioned a minute ago, we do know that Matthew Coleman is being held at an undisclosed federal prison and he is undergoing a psychological evaluation where a psychiatrist is working to determine whether or not Coleman is fit to stand trial. I'm executive producer Jackie Howard, and this is Crime Stories. This is an iHeart Podcast.