Hidden True Crime - MATTHEW COLEMAN: The week the unthinkable happened

Episode Date: March 12, 2024

For today's episode we are traveling back to August of 2021. Its an episode we've never shared publicly, until now. One week before we recorded this conversation at our kitchen table - on August 8th, 2021 - Matthew Coleman, a 40-year-old Santa Barbara California surf teacher, killed his two young children with a spear fishing gun in Mexico. His wife Abby reported that Matthew had taken their children from their California home and left suddenly. He was taken into custody and confessed to killing 2-year-old Kaleo and 10-month old Roxy . According to the probable cause--Coleman believed Abby had passed serpent DNA to their children. . Matthew said he knew what he did was wrong, but he was saving the world.   In the next episode we will delve deeper into this story, but here are our initial thoughts the week this tragic case unfolded.   JOHN MATTHIAS is a licensed clinical and forensic psychologist with 30 years’ experience. He serves as an expert witness for the federal government and consults on high-profile cases for District Attorney’s offices and defense attorneys in several states. In the forensic area, Dr. Matthias has developed expertise in personality assessments, hidden behavioral motivations, complex trauma and criminal psychology. In the clinical realm, he has worked with numerous victims. He received his Master’s degree in Marriage, Family and Child counseling, as well his doctorate degree, from the University of Southern California. Dr. Matthias graduated with honors in philosophy from Princeton University, and he won the prestigious McCosh Thesis prize while there. In high school he graduated valedictorian from a large public high school in Chicago where he was chosen to participate in a ground-breaking valedictory study that continues to this day. LAUREN MATTHIAS worked as an anchor in Idaho and Salt Lake City, Utah. She spent a decade reporting on a diverse range of topics from high profile crimes to Presidential visits. Most recently, she reported for Salt Lake City’s ABC affiliate News4Utah. In 2015 she received the Idaho State Broadcaster’s Association Best Reporter award and is a regular contributor on News Nation. She left the reporting world to produce the Hidden True Crime Podcast along with her husband Dr. John Matthias. HIDDEN: A TRUE CRIME PODCAST is: CRIMINAL PSYCHOLOGY REINVENTED. Join us on a journey into the darkest recesses of the human mind and the unconscious motivations that drive human behaviors in order to understand the world and ourselves. SUPPORT: https://www.patreon.com/hiddentruecrime  Our Sponsors:* Check out Acorns: https://acorns.com/HIDDENTRUECRIME* Check out Acorns: https://acorns.com/HIDDENTRUECRIME* Check out Armoire and use my code HIDDENTRUECRIME for a great deal: https://www.armoire.style* Check out Effecty and use my code HIDDENTRUECRIME for a great deal: https://www.effecty.com* Check out Happy Mammoth and use my code HIDDENTRUECRIME for a great deal: https://happymammoth.comSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/hidden-a-true-crime-podcast1836/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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school and contor. It is Happiness at Work from AI products. For today's

episode, we are traveling back to August of 2021. It's an episode we have never

shared publicly before. It's only ever been on Patreon, mainly because it was a casual

conversation we recorded on our phone. So forgive the audio. But we have now been following

this case for nearly three years and feel the need to start discussing it publicly in more detail. It's the heartbreaking case of Matthew Coleman. One week before we recorded this

conversation at our kitchen table on August 8, 2021, Matthew Coleman, a 40-year-old Santa Barbara California surf teacher and married family man killed his two young children. His wife Abby reported that Matthew had taken their children from their California home and left suddenly as they prepared for a family camping trip. He took his children to Mexico. And the next day, as Matthew crossed back into the United States, he was taken into custody and he confessed to killing two-year-old Colio and 10-month-old Roxy. He said it was necessary. According to the probable cause, Coleman had been following QAnon and Illuminati conspiracy theories

and had recently received visions and signs indicating that Abby had passed serpent DNA to their children. The serpent DNA was going to make Callio and Roxy grow up to become monsters. Matthew said he knew what he did was wrong, but he was saving the world. In the next couple of episodes, we delve deeper into this story. But here are our initial thoughts the week this tragic case unfolded, recorded again on our phone at our dinner table. Hidden, a true crime podcast, a forensic psychologist and a journalist

explore the hidden motives behind unthinkable crimes, while examining our deepest fears along the way. Hello, Patreon supporters. We're sitting at our kitchen table. And we want to talk tonight about a case that is not the day about case, a case that happened last week, Matthew Coleman. Many of you mentioned on our Facebook page that you would be interested in hearing about this case. For those of you that don't know, a little background last week,

a father who happens to also own a surfing school in California. He is a big surfer, took his two-year-old and ten-month-old without telling his wife in his car, without any car seats, drove off, drove to Mexico. The wife, Abby, didn't know where he had gone, called police concerned for their welfare. She didn't seem to imply that she knew that he would harm the children, but she was concerned for their well-being and didn't know what was going on. The next day, police discovered that he was in Mexico, and when they found him, they discovered that he had murdered his two children, that he had stabbed them with a spearfishing gun multiple times. And the reason he gave to police is that he believed the children would grow up

to be monsters that his wife. had demon, demon DNA. They referenced Q&ON in the probable cause as a conspiracy theory that he believed in. It was really shocking. It, of course, reminded me of the Davelle case, very upsetting. And so here I am looking at my husband, hoping that he can shed some light on this. So, Dr. John, what is going on here? I think there's a lot going on. Since we don't know all the details at this point, we're just, I want to talk about the Coleman case in broad terms. So what we do know is that he believed that the children had serpent DNA, that they were going to grow up to be monsters.

We know that he had a lot of involvement in Q&ONON. We're not exactly sure the connection between those two things. we also know that he was fairly religious. I don't know if he was extreme in his religious beliefs, but certainly more on that side. Christian.

A very strong Christian. He had a lot of Christian posts on his Facebook. We've already delved into social media with multiple family members. So the way I want to dive into this case would be to talk about paternal philocyte. So we've talked about maternal

filicide a lot with Lori Daybilt. To clarify for instance, maternal filicide is a mother killing their children. Philicide is killing their children. So paternal is the father, killing children. Yeah, so let me clarify that, actually. So philicide is when a parent kills a child.

It can be the mother or the father. Believe it or not, it's more common for, it is not more common for mothers to kill their kids. That fathers do it fairly often. Seems like we don't hear about that as much. But they're not exactly equal. Mothers kill their children more, but fathers do kill their kids. There's different, there's also something called infanticide, which is just killing children in general.

There's something else called famililicide, which is similar to family annihilation. Familicide is usually when a parent, usually a father, kills the children and the wife and sometimes himself. So familicide is essentially killing the whole family, often a murder-suicide type situation. And that's more a man doing that if that happens. Yeah, it's usually, you know, in fact, there was a case in Las Vegas last year where a firefighter took the lives of his kids and his wife. and then he killed himself. So about half the time in famililicide, if it is the husband or the male partner,

about half the times it'll be a murder-suicide. And then the other half of the times, it'll be simply murders that the children and the mother will be killed. So another case of famililicide is the famous case, from Cold podcast.

Oh, right. Josh Powell, Susan Powell, and his children, although that was really drawn out. He killed her and attempted to keep the children alive

that I guess decided at the end when he came. Well, he killed the wife, he killed his kids, and then he killed himself. so that was a malecide. So, and then there's another,

there's another type of family type homicide called neonatocytes. which is killing children under 24 months. Or sometimes, depending, it's usually defined as 24 months and under, but sometimes 12 months and under. So in other words, very young infants. Almost like that. Right.

So this is, this is a case of that as well. I mean, I think we would call it philocyte because there's two kids, but the youngest was 10 months old, right? Or 12, 10 months old? The youngest was 10 months old, a little girl. And the oldest was two. I don't know how many months, but two years old. So you have different versions of, you know, unfortunately killing children here and different categories of that, I guess.

But looking at some of the research on fathers or paternal suicide, fathers who kill their kids, there's essentially, the research suggests there's essentially two types of paternal philocyte. The first type involves fathers who are psychopathic. or have some history of violence usually. And clearly, we would say that Nathan Coleman, who has no criminal past at all, no criminal record.

I did do a background check. Nothing I could find. He seems to have a clean record. He doesn't seem to fit the category of a psychopath. So that leads us to the second category, which is called the emotionally overloaded type. And so I assume that he fits this category my guess is that would suggest that this is someone who doesn't cope well with stress.

Since we don't know what the stressors are at this point, I don't want to speculate on that, but I think it's fair to say that there was a lot of stress somehow in his life. I don't know if that could have been related to his work in the surfing school or maybe his marriage. I'm not sure, but perhaps it was related to his involvement in some conspiracy groups. I don't know. But for whatever reasons he was feeling very emotionally overloaded,

and he was stressed and anxious. And he saw this, I think, is a way to kind of alleviate that anxiety. I know that sounds crazy. But because he was so inundated with stress, he saw one solution, obviously a crazy solution, or certainly not a rational solution, the solution being to take his children to Mexico and to murder them. So I think that's a good place to start.

You know, I think you'd have to start with somebody who's overwhelmed, somebody who doesn't have the resources or the resiliency to cope with that stress, somebody who is probably creating a lot of that stress on his own, right? A lot of it is internally generated because he's involved, and all these conspiracies, and apparently he was jumping on all types of internet groups. And, I mean, we'll learn more over time, of course. But I think some of this stress was clearly internal, internally generated from these groups. Could he have turned to the conspiracy theories to not deal with real life too, though?

Because I did learn a little bit about his real life. Let me just throw this out here. He was 40, his wife was 35. They had not been married that long. They're both very Christian. So my guess, this is me guessing with some evidence in front of me, that they got married quickly and started a family very quickly. I saw where they did get engaged not too long ago.

They were not married long before they had children. And they had a two-year-old and a 10-month-old. They were renting their house. I know that they didn't own. And they had started this surfing school, which seemed to be doing really one. while it had already been recognized as a great school. But I just want to share that. His life clearly changed drastically within five years.

Right. So that's something. Yeah. So again, I mean, any of those would be major stressors. You know, getting married, believe it or not, is considered one of the top five highest stressors. Right. What?

Just kidding. No. Certainly not getting married to me. No, marriage. Marriage was wonderful. It was the child. That was the major stressor. Right.

And having a child, yeah, having a child, yeah, having a child is another one of the top five stressors too. We got married thinking we were having three. And now we're done. Right. Now one feels like five. Especially, you know, especially trying. to do our podcast and work independently from home, it can be really overwhelming at times. So in that sense, I can relate to Matthew Coleman.

Of course, I would never consider what he considered. But let's go down the path of how we got there. So let's start with this idea of being emotionally overloaded. He's overwhelmed. He's struggling to cope with the stress. And yeah, you know, the business was fairly young, right? Maybe there were some issues there. Right.

Maybe the business was struggling. You know, we went on their website. We looked at the business. Of course, if you look at this couple in this family on Instagram or social media, they look like the absolutely perfect family, right? And that's part of the, I think that's part of the fascination of this crime is that this is, right? This is a couple in a family that looks picture perfect, right? And how could something possibly go so wrong?

With a lot of friends, too. This was a social couple. They had a lot of friends. They did a gender reveal with a many people, surrounded by many people who seemed to really love them when they learned that they were having a second child, their daughter. Yeah, from everything that you can see online, it seemed picture perfect. So let's assume that there's a lot of stress, that there's kind of a lack of resiliency in dealing with that. And by the way, some of his beliefs and his religiosity and his involvement in conspiracies would certainly suggest some rigidity that this is someone who isn't really open, right? He's not really open-minded, which again, another fascination with his case is you've got this surfer dude, right? When you think of a surfer dude, you think of total freedom and, you know, hang five or whatever, just like, Put it out there, man. The world is my playground.

Right. You know, go with the surf, you know, whatever. And like, and that's not, I don't, I think you've got something here. Most people don't realize how much their personal information is being bought and sold every day. Data brokers are making billions, pulling details about you from public records and the internet. And then packaging and selling it, usually without your consent. That's how your information lands in the hands of scammers, spammers, even stalkers. It's why you get endless robocalls and why ad seem to.

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Protect yourself now atora.com slash remove. It's actually quite contradictory with that. You have a surfer dude who is probably very rigid and probably not that open-minded. And so you've got another one of these huge contradictions. And one of the things I told Lauren early on in this case is I think there's a lot of conflict. What's one financial lesson you learned the hard way? I'll go first. It's not too late to start saving. Today's episode is sponsored by Acorns. Acorns is a financial wellness app that makes it easy to start saving and investing for your future. You don't need to be an expert.

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I showed John the news. I had known about it for a while and had already posted on Facebook about it, but you were working. And the moment I showed him, the news article, it took less than about three minutes for him to say this. This is exactly what he said. Yes. And do you want me to share?

I don't remember exactly what I said. Well, no, I want to share what I discovered. Well, what you shared is there's conflict. There's a lot of conflict in him. And I bet there's a lot of conflict in his family. I bet he has different types of parents. And I was like, okay. And then I did, again, do the research for us.

And I found his mother and I found his father. They are divorced. I don't know when. I don't know that history. But their worldviews couldn't be. be more different. His mother and his father and their ideology and who they are is vastly different. Right. And so that's an interesting clue. Of course, we don't know specifically how those belief systems affected him or those worldviews affected him. But I think their divorce is kind of a

metaphor for his psyche, right? That the splits in his psyche are reflected in the differences in his parents in some ways. So you've got a lot of stress, you've got a lack of resiliency, you have some rigidity, and you've got this internal conflict probably from these parents that were quite different and probably at war a lot during this childhood. One was very religious and conservative. The other was very liberal. One was an artist.

Right, an artist. The other is a, he only was a. He's a carpet cleaning business. So he's a businessman and very, you know, probably somewhat rigid. So the rigidity is interesting to me in the sense that he's going to lack a certain amount of resiliency, right? But it also suggests, if I'm right about that, it suggests that he doesn't deal well with uncertainty. And the reason that's important is because the two elements, elements that predict whether people will follow conspiracies and the degree to which they will follow

conspiracies. The two elements are fear and uncertainty. And those two often go together. So the best way we know of predicting that someone will become involved in a conspiracy are the way they cope with negative emotions and specifically with fear and uncertainty. Uncertainty is an interesting thing here, an interesting component of this, because if indeed Matthew Coleman has a certain amount of rigidity, which I think he does from looking at his history, then he's not going to deal with uncertainty well. And when you're talking about owning your own business, right, especially a surf business, and they had employees, by the way. They have multiple employees, so they have a payroll. There's definitely got to be some stress there. But, you know, the,

And I can tell you as someone who relies on referrals from attorneys in the courts and DAs that there's a lot of uncertainty about when the next call is going to come with a referral, right? And his business must be much worse because at least I've developed some networks that are fairly reliable, right? But his has to be uncertain in the sense that it's seasonal, right? He's dealing with tourists. He's dealing with tourists. you know, we're coming to the end of the summer. You know, I have to imagine that the uncertainty of dealing with his business is probably a major

stressor. Throw in the pandemic. The pandemic, right. And so you have those elements and the fear, you know, the fear of the future. The fear in some ways he said or the probable cause. statement said that he was concerned about his children to, he was concerned his children would grow up to be monsters, right? That's, that's an immense fear of the future. He's already, right, he's already thinking many years ahead. And you have to wonder how that type of fear,

that's being overly sensitive to fear, by the way. Like, you have to imagine, how does that fear come into play with his business? Is he thinking the same thing with his business? Is he thinking my business is certainly going to fail? I'm not going to make this. work? Is he thinking, right? Like he's... Or his marriage. His wife has serpent DNA. Right. This is someone with a lot of... This is someone who's very fear-based. Right. And I mean, you know, you certainly don't get that from looking at his Instagram, but I think there's a lot of fear here. And so we see that definitely come into play,

though, with the conspiracy theories and this real immense fear of his children growing up the monsters, which is a really peculiar thing. The probable cause actually stated that he knew they were going to become monsters, and it was the only way he could save the world. Save the world. So that's grandiose. I don't know. Maybe there's, maybe there's, I didn't see that part.

So, so thanks for enlightening me on that. But there's that kind of grandiosity, by the way, would suggest some potential narcissism, which is maybe something we should keep an eye out for on this case. Yeah, I've been speculating. that with my fellow true crime friends online was the narcissism bit. You know, that was, that was speculated without you. Oh, okay. Yeah.

But, yeah. Heaven forbid you go there without me. You know, the other interesting thing about conspiracies is that people who kind of have these extreme beliefs. And again, we don't really know if his religious beliefs. beliefs were extreme or if they were moderate. We don't really know where he falls on that spectrum. But people with, you know, moderate to more extreme religious beliefs, when they become involved in conspiracy theories, there's some really interesting research showing that conspiracy theories

become what's called a radicalization multiplier. So, in other words, if somebody is already kind of out there a little bit with their beliefs, when they become involved in conspiracies, they get radicalized much more. quickly, that they become much more extreme, much faster. And I think you have some of that here potentially, right? You have this guy who's dealing with all these stressors and... Conflict. He's...

Uncertainty. Uncertainty, right. Fear. And you throw... He's got probably some, you know, reasonably extreme religious beliefs. You throw in a conspiracy theory and all of a sudden things just accelerate and you know and and that's how you kind of get to that point okay um so those are some of my initial thoughts you know there's one other reflection i would have about this situation

and i think this is relevant to conspiracy theories too and especially to this case but more specifically to mental health in general and that is that there's a lot of research showing that the least mentally healthy people. Most people don't realize how much their personal information is being bought and sold every day. Data brokers are making billions, pulling details about you from public records and the internet, and then packaging and selling it, usually without your consent. That's how your information lands in the hands of scammers, spammers, even stalkers. It's why you get endless robocalls and why ads seem to follow you everywhere.

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Start your free trial today at ORA.com slash remove. Protect yourself now atora.com slash remove. Tend to be really paranoid. They tend to be really out there on the spectrum of mental illness, right? That paranoia, extreme paranoia, which is a type of fear, too, right? It's a fear. It's a mistrust of other people, essentially. So it's an overreact.

sensitive perception of the world, that everyone's out to get you, that you can't trust anyone. A persecution complex? I mean, paranoia is a little different. I mean, a little bit. Yeah, I think there's some overlap. But, but, I mean, so mental health broadly defined, you know, on the, on the, on the, on the, on the two ends with poor mental health being on one end, you'd see a lot of paranoia. And on the other end, you would see something like openness, like acceptance, the ability to stay open to new ideas, the ability to trust people. And that doesn't mean you trust everyone.

I don't mean like naive trusting people. I don't trust everyone. I mean a healthy dose of trust. Like trusting people that show you they're trustworthy. I don't mean, you know, just openly trusting everyone. So I'm not talking about extreme openness. I'm talking about openness in the sense of being curious and generally trust or trusting the world, giving people the benefit of the doubt.

People that have more mental health tend to be on that side of the spectrum. People with less mental health tend to be more paranoid. So I think you've got, you definitely have some mental health issues here in terms of the paranoia. I'm trying to process the trusting people thing. Would it almost be humanizing people in the sense that, let me see if I can figure this out, groups of people, maybe like in general terms, you're not going to... I think that would be part of it. But no, this goes back to our earliest years.

Okay. This goes back to childhood attachment. This goes back to the first months of being on this planet and how our caregivers take care of us, whether we develop a secure attachment to them or an insecure attachment to them. There's essentially two types of attachments. There's secure attachment and there's insecure attachment. Secure attachment generally is going to lead to trust.

Insecure attachment is much more likely to lead to mistrust of others as a child and potentially paranoia as an adult if the insecure attachment is extreme. Yeah, which is similar to Chad Daybell. What else are the similarities with this in the Debel case? Because I think one thing that most people recognized with this. case that are also following the Davell case was how familiar it seemed. Children being zombies, children being monsters, conspiracy theories. You know, I know that in our first podcast episode on, you know, our main podcast, Chad Debo, you said had those insecure attachments most likely.

what else is similar with this and the daybell case? Because are we going to keep seeing more of this too? It's just crazy. You know, the day bill case was crazy. This is crazy and they're happening not too far apart. Yeah, I think there's a lot of overlap. You know, the rigidity, right? Chad's extreme religious beliefs, he was very rigid, very close-minded.

the fear. The way Chad dealt with or deals with uncertainty is to create this fictional universe that doesn't exist and then to say that he's going to go live in it. Yeah, there's a lot of overlap. Chad also wasn't very resilient.

Chad was generally seen as someone who was fairly unassuming and humble and Matt Coleman is seen as someone who is somewhat happy go lucky and, you know, also somewhat humble that he, I think he worked for some mom prophets for a while and he was a teacher and you've got that element too, right? Like these aren't people that on the face of it would seem to be capable of killing children. And yet that's exactly what they did.

So, and that's another lesson here, by the way. You know, one of the great enduring lessons of true crime is sometimes what you see is not what you get, that when we make assumptions about people based on how they look and kind of their public personas and how they interact with others, even if they're super friendly and kind, that doesn't necessarily mean that that's going to represent their internal worlds. We'll never learn that lesson every time that there's an unsolved crime case and it's clear who the suspect is, you're always going to have 10 friends saying there's no way who believes them to the very end, you know, whether it was Chad, Daybell's neighbors, or Lori's,

you know, primary presidency or this guy's friends who have already spoken out and said they could have never seen this coming. Yeah, I remember when, uh, when I was a kid and the Dahmer case broke and, you know, I lived in the Chicago area. Uh, and I don't remember why I was watching the news, uh, but I remember, um, I don't know why. I'll never forget this, but I think my mom had the news on and we were kids. And, you know, they were talking about what Dahmer did, that he killed people and ate him and all this crazy stuff. I don't think I understood what that meant. But I remember that the news station, which was up in Milwaukee, which was obviously close to Chicago, the reporter knocked on the neighbor's door and you had the classic.

well he seemed like such a nice guy he was so kind and he kept to himself and he was such a good neighbor right like and I remember thinking even as a kid I remember thinking but wait he ate people mom this doesn't make any sense like well how could he be such a nice guy I know Ted Bundy so he he converted to Mormonism and a lot of his murders were committed in Utah and my friend who I went to high school with, his dad was as bishop, his word bishop, when he was arrested. And they were so concerned about him. They had the entire primary, which is the kids, all the children write him letters while in prison, letting them know that he'd be out soon.

Sorry, random, now that we're talking about this. Nice sentiment. Okay, so this is a tangent, but kind of a tangent. How do you... Well, there's a moral here. There's a moral here. Now that we're talking about trust. That's where I'm going.

Now we're saying, now we're saying, now we're... Don't trust in people. That's where we're going is how do you have trust in people when you can so clearly see, for example, when Chad Daybell's neighbors were all coming out saying there's no way, there's no way. I wanted to be like, oh my gosh, like you are going to be so disappointed when, not disappointed, shocked. That was a bad choice where it's shocked and upset. and shaken when you realize he really did this. Well, I'm not talking about blind trust. You know, the issue here is that Dahmer and Ted Bundy and Chad Daybell and Matthew Coleman are showing you their public persona, right?

They're not, we don't really know their private personas, though we don't know who they are behind closed doors, obviously. And, you know, so trust has its limits. I think if they're going to ask you for a big favor, you're probably going to have to know them better than simply seeing them coming and going from their house. Okay, well, here's a question, though. His wife didn't seem to know his private persona because when she called the police, her first concern was their well-being. Did something happen?

Because he wasn't between texts, but according to the probable cause, his wife, that first night in talking to the police, did not believe that the children were in harm because of him. There was no concern that he would harm the children. And then we learned that he stabbed them multiple times. The girl, I think was 12 times and the boy 17. Right. So, you know, in extreme cases, the spouse doesn't know the person either.

Like, this is someone who, again, let's get back to this idea of conflict. This is someone who had a lot of inner turmoil and he probably hit it from his wife. He had a lot of secrets. He was probably hiding a lot of stuff. I mean, again, you're assuming that most marriages are reciprocal and that people that spouses share stuff. I mean, just because we do it

doesn't mean that everyone does it. I'm sure there's plenty of marriages where one spouse has many, many secrets. So I think his wife probably didn't know him that well. And like you said, they weren't married that long. Before they started having children. Right. So, I mean, in fact, it reminds me of, I don't remember the name of this show. I'm sure some of our listeners would remember.

But there was a show on, like, IDTV about, you know, these spouses, people getting married and not knowing their spouse at all who turned out to be like somebody completely different. And I think it was like, I can't believe I married something. I don't remember anyway. It reminds me of that. There's actually an entire show devoted to the idea that sometimes people marry people with aliases that are completely different. They just don't know them at all. This does lead me down the rabbit hole of trust, though. It does have me thinking because at what point can you trust someone and at what point can you trust the world?

Because another example is this couple. in going down their social media history. You and I, John, we didn't even have a honeymoon. We eloped and I think we were like sleeping in, you know, your parents' house the next day, taking care of some family business. But they did have a honeymoon and they went for like three weeks to New Zealand. So they traveled overseas together.

and it seemed very spontaneous and they see it in Airbnb's. And then there's another picture. I'm going to interrupt you quickly and say, look, we didn't need a honeymoon because we started our honeymoon in the minute we met, right? So. Well said. Yes, yes. So in that sense, in that sense.

And it's been a honeymoon ever since, right? Just laughing. Yeah. It's awesome being married to the delicate Venus fly trap. Another story is. There's a picture on their social media that looks like they're sleeping in a back of a van at Zion National Park. It seems that they're a very spontaneous couple who's spending a lot of time together.

You get to know, they say if you want to get to know someone, go travel with them, right? I know. I mean, spending time together doesn't mean getting to know someone though, right? Like, I mean, in some ways I could argue that maybe that's preventing them from becoming closer. I think maybe the hardest thing to do with someone is to spend time alone and without going to do, you know, without doing all this stuff, but just to be in a room with someone and to talk and to get to know them and to really listen to them. You know, I think. Without the exciting adventures. Yeah, right.

You know, in other words, like hiking and running around Zion National Park, in some ways would be, would contradict. that ability to develop intimacy or to really sit directly in front of someone and get to know them. So it's a distraction. It's a distraction. Yeah, it's the notion of staying busy or active to really avoid feeling something or to avoid really connecting to someone. That makes sense. So back to the bigger question, which is one thing you asked earlier on. And then we can conclude and go to bed.

But when you follow true crime and when you learn that people aren't who they seem, how do you trust people? What does it look like to be a trusting person and not get into this place of paranoia and fear and rigidity? You know, it's such a contradiction. It's, yeah. You know, and I mean, I'm someone who works with the most, you know, you know, the most dishonest and the least trustworthy people on the planet. So I think it's a really interesting question.

You know, it still goes back to our early years. Like that fundamental ability to trust or not trust is going to occur in the first couple of years of life. And I think for me, you know, I think I was fortunate that I did develop a secure attachment. hopefully. And it my natural tendency is just to trust people. And, but of course, you know, I'm always assessing. Like, does somebody, you know, what are they doing? What's my, how do I feel about that person in the room? Is there something peculiar? You know, I remember five or six years ago I was doing an assessment at Clark County Detention Center in Las Vegas. And, um,

There was a guy who had committed a, it was fairly low-level crimes. But I got in the room and like it just, I just had this really awful feeling. Like I knew this was someone I couldn't trust. And, you know, that's not like a rational thing, but, you know, like the kind of the hairs on your neck stand-up type thing. Like this guy was just really creepy. And even though his crime wasn't that bad, like the creep factor. was off the charts and there was just something really insidious about this guy. And so, you know, to answer your question, some of it's going to be based on evidence and

information and things that people do. So their behaviors and their actions, we're going to look at those and assess them. But some of it is going to be unconscious. Some of it's going to be based on our experiences with people and our relationships and intuition, which is intuition is basically, you know, developing certain patterns of the way people are, and it's based more on emotion. And in this particular instance I'm talking about, you know, clearly I knew there was something off that this guy wasn't like the typical criminal. And I knew that he was deceiving me.

And that turned out to be true, by the way. I learned a lot more about this guy later that I didn't know when I walked in that room. You know, it's a tough question. I think it becomes problematic, though, when we start with the assumption that everyone is out to get us, that everyone is not trustworthy, that, you know, it becomes a problem when we start with paranoia and we don't extend trust or the ability to trust because then we have no capacity to form relationships. That makes sense. The whole everyone is out to get me.

As I, yeah, that makes sense to me. And I think as a reporter in interviewing people, you have to give everyone your interviewing trust. It's just to be able to tell their truth and share things without critiquing them. Or, you know, maybe that's a bit of it too is just believing people are who they are and to trust. Yeah. That they'll let you know that. You know, oftentimes I'll walk in a room with some of the most hardened criminals. And I'll start with that assumption of trust.

You know, in one of our podcasts, I talk about the story of being with a guy in death row who actually had assaulted previous evaluators. In fact, he almost killed one of them. And I was the guy next up to do his evaluation. And I talked about sitting on the other end of the table from the panic button to show him that I trusted him. Right. And so, you know, I don't know. He walked in the room and I felt comfortable. he knew what was going on.

He knew that I was sitting away from the panic button, and it worked out well. I think sending that initial signal of trust really, really helped that interview. Even though you knew what he had done. Yeah. I knew what he had done, and I knew it was horrendous, and I knew that he had attacked the previous person that tried to evaluate him. Of course, I also learned that that evaluator had no trust when he entered the room. That evaluator was actually quite defensive in a...

angry. So having trust in someone isn't necessarily a denial of who they are or what they did. You weren't, in order to trust him, you weren't pretending that he didn't do the horrible things he did. Right. No, I knew those things. The trust was that it was built upon the idea that I could sit with him and listen to him and get to know him as a human being and get to listen to his story and really not try to judge him, right? You know, that I wanted to really understand him. And I think he knew that. So, I mean, part of this is, part of trust is building it, is earning it.

Right? To not be so paranoid or believing that the world is out to get you that you can't go. Yeah, exactly. If I walk in that room with paranoia, I have no chance of building trust. Right. You know, if I lead with, let me pull out your criminal record and repeat what you did, right? I mean, some people do that. Yeah.

You know, that's not going to help my relationship with this guy. So I think, for the most part, you know, with the exception of the creepy guy I talked about. And it was a hard interview. You know, I don't, with him, by the way, I wouldn't suggest that I was paranoid, paranoid about, what was going on in the room, but there was just, there was something there that was, like his mannerisms were a little off too, and it was just a really unusual situation. Yeah. Thanks for sharing that.

Thanks for exploring trust with me a little bit. I think there's still more to delve into, but I appreciate that. And exploring the basis or the basics of this Matthew Coleman case, it also got our attention. And we decided that we do want to talk about it because of how the parallels to the case we're delving into. Because of the parallels with the Dave L case, John and I always say, we don't want something like this to ever happen again. That's part of our goal with our podcast.

And here something is that's happened that's eerily similar. So let's talk about it and try to figure this out. Right. You know, there are many parallels with Daybell except for, I think the Daybell obviously wasn't. Chad Daybell wasn't, as far as I know, he wasn't caught up in as many conspiracy theories. So with Matthew Coleman, I think you have that radicalization multiplier that comes into play. And with Chad, you know, there may have been a little of that. No, he was definitely down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole, I'd say. What do we know about that? On the AVow website, AVow, AVow, everyone pronounces it differently, there was comments he made about

needing to shoot zombies as they came from liberal Idaho Falls and wondering how they were going to do it. To me, that shows that A, that's sort of like the demonic, you know, the DNA or whatever, and that people outside of Rexburg, it implies a fear of them. Idaho Falls is not very far from Rexburg, Idaho, for those that are wondering, and he's already labeled them as completely different than people in Rexburg. I thought that was interesting.

You know, it wasn't like those liberal New Yorkers. It was the liberal Idaho fallers. It's like, you know, it's all east Idaho. So I wonder what he would have done with liberal New Yorkers. Yeah, there was definitely a lot of fear and paranoia. I've heard this from multiple people on that Avow website. And I do think that there were conspiracy theories. And then Julie Roe shares conspiracy theories on many of her podcasts.

I've been going down the Julie Roe podcast rabbit hole recently for a lot of reasons in my upcoming interview. and there are definitely conspiracy theories shared some of them similar to this she talks about reptilian or DNA as well so I would actually say that and I'm going to assume Chad held many of those beliefs

since according to Julie they talked every day while writing her books so there's a little bit right so that would have been another similarity with Matthew Coleman then yes yes And of course, Lori believed in these conspiracy theories, too. We're talking about Chad because he's a male.

We haven't been mentioning Lori as much because we're referring to paternal philocyte, even though Chad wasn't the father of the kid, so we're, you know, but Lori was the parent, you know. So there's not a perfect parallel here. This is a dad of his biological children. Chad was a soon-to-be stepfather of the children and never became the stepfather, but was, you know, would have been. And Lori was the mother.

So it's not perfect, but the reasons and the motive are eerily similar. And so would the intervention, by the way, like, if the question is, how could this be avoided or how can you, how could you prevent this? And the answer is you'd have to address the paranoia and the fear and the rigidity. And you'd have to try to build some resiliency. I don't know if that's possible, but I think that would be the goal. So I don't, you know, it would be interesting and we'll try to figure this out over time. Yeah, we don't know his medical history. Yeah.

We don't know, you know, this is just the basics. This is just the start. Yeah, that, you know, I'd like to know what, like, for example, did Matthew Coleman's friends see him as paranoid? Like, was there, you know, was there some paranoia going back to like his childhood or his adolescent years, right? Like, that would be really interesting to me. Like, when does the paranoia start? clearly there's extreme paranoia by the time he gets to the point where he's killing his kids, right? And maybe even, you know, there could be some schizophrenia, there could be some even more severe mental health issues going on.

Visions and I think visions might have been mentioned in the probable cause that he had had visions. Let me confirm that, but I feel like I read that in one of the articles. I also want to say to someone, we do plan to do more on the Matthews, Coleman case. So if there's anyone listening that knows somebody who knows him or somebody listening that does know him and you want to reach out whether on record or off record to share more information, please do at hidden truecrime at gmail.com. So I think it would be it's an interesting question to to analyze this in terms of mental illness, which is obviously our, you know, what we do. And then to try to figure out when did this,

when did the middle illness begin? You know, when did the paranoia start? If there's schizophrenic features, when do those start? If there's narcissism, when does that start? Right. So the key to prevention is always to begin to notice when some of these things start to take shape and then to try to get the person help, right?

Or to try to intervene in some way or to at least take whatever those issues are and address them so they're less severe. These children were absolutely adorable. They were beautiful. They were full of life. I saw a lot of home videos. And it is heartbreaking.

It's a tragedy. It's horrendous. And, you know, and again, like, you know, could it have been prevented? I've been praying for the mother, you know. I can't imagine. So anyway, we'll continue discussing this case. And we're both feeling better. I gave whatever I had to John.

Yeah. Yeah, and now you can tell that I'm a little congested. So I'm trying to get over it. But I think we're on the up. And then our son's had it, you know. But we're all hanging in there and doing better. So thank you, everyone, for your support. and we'll be talking more soon.

And I have a YouTube interview coming up that I'm editing. And then, babe, when is our next podcast podcast? Not our YouTube video interviews, but podcast. Yeah. So I have the outline done for our next podcast. It's going to be about Chad Daybell. I am working on a really big murder case right now that won't conclude, or at least my portion of it won't conclude until September 2nd.

So unfortunately, I think we're looking at September to get it out, but we are working on it. I'm just absolutely consumed by a particular case right now, and I'll be very happy to get that report done and to have the ability to focus more on our work. Yes, we'll all be happy to have you back. And thanks to your support, we will have him back because he is going to be able to be taking fewer cases. He's kind of finishing up some last ones and some here and there.

But it's exciting. We now can officially cut back a bit. So thank you. And we have some big things planned, which I don't think we can talk. about yet? Not yet. Okay. So I think can I say that I was the, yeah, you can say the, yeah.

Yeah. So I guess I can say that I will be in an upcoming documentary on the daybell case. That's really all I can say at the moment. But we're really excited about that. But we have some really interesting plans or big plans. Lauren and I do for something we're going to be doing together, and we're going to be announcing that fairly shortly. So thank you guys.

You guys are really, our Patreon supporters are really the basis or the foundation for giving us some freedom to take on some better projects or to focus more on some projects we want to. So thank you very much. Thanks. Have a good night. Hello, Hidden Jems. For exclusive content, thinks Dr. John and I

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