Matthew Taylor Coleman has had a lot of time to think about where his life went wrong.
The surf school owner who admitted to murdering his two children with a spearfishing gun in Mexico — over fears they had "serpent DNA" — may now be realizing how very wrong he was about those very delusions.
Coleman has been in an undisclosed prison in California. From his cell, he wrote a two-page letter to a friend. In it, he revealed that he's starting to see the world differently.
He hand-wrote the letter on lined notebook paper. In the two-page note, he addressed his belief that his wife, Abby, had reptile DNA, and that she'd passed it to their children, Kaleo, 2, and Roxy, 10 months. "I was deceived," Coleman wrote in the letter. "I was deceiving myself. I know now that the [reptile] DNA thing was a delusion in my own mind. I made myself believe something that wasn't there."
He also revealed why he thinks his perspective might be shifting. In part, he seems to believe it's because he doesn't have access to the internet, where he was reading all sorts of conspiracy theories.
"I'm sorting through it all now," he wrote. "There's a lot to unpack, but I have to figure out what I really believe, but I don't have access to information anymore, so I'm having to use my mind to figure things out."
Coleman's wife addressed her husband's beliefs in an affidavit. In a later affidavit, she said that he "became significantly more paranoid that people around him were involved in a conspiracy." Authorities say Coleman was a huge believer of a certain QAnon conspiracy theory that says Donald Trump secretly battles Satan-worshipping pedophiles.
Coleman has been charged with two counts of foreign first-degree murder of United States nationals. He has pleaded not guilty.
Coleman's public defender could not be reached for comment.
