THE DAD WHO BECAME A KILLER

Matthew Coleman is behind bars charged with stabbing his two little children to death with a fishing spear

- MAXINE PETERS

THE kids in the picture are grinning from ear to ear, kitted out in wetsuits and holding up their “surfs up” hand signs with instructors from the Love water Surf School. With them is the school’s founder, who looks like a stereotypical happy-go-lucky surfer dude.

But the cheerful guy beaming out from the photograph turned out to be anything but laid-back and chilled. The surf community in Santa Barbara, California, was shocked after Matthew Taylor Coleman’s recent arrest.

Matthew’s students and fellow surfers knew him as a pleasant guy who’d happily chat about surfing, his kids and how his toddler son’s surf lessons were going.

That’s why they’re horrified at news that the 40-year-old was arrested for murdering his two-year-old son, Kaleo, and 10-month-old daughter, Roxy, with a fishing spear during a trip to Baja California, Mexico.

Matthew’s wife, Abby, reported him and the children missing after they’d disappeared ahead of a camping trip they’d planned for the weekend of 7 August. He hadn’t said a word to Abby about going anywhere with the kids but she wasn’t worried that he’d hurt them.

The police tracked his iPhone to Rosarito, in Baja, and CCTV footage showed him checking into a hotel with their children and checking out a few days later without them.

Then came the shocking discovery: two tiny bodies found by a farmhand on a ranch near Rosarito, less than 20km from the US-Mexico border. Roxy had been stabbed 17 times and Kaleo 12 times.

Local authorities alerted border police and Matthew was taken into custody by US customs agents two days later when he returned to the US.