The self-styled tracker who found a man wanted by police dehydrated and weak in the woods says the father immediately confessed to killing his three children.

"OK. I'm Allan and I did it," Kim Robinson testified Allan Schoenborn told him.

" 'I'm Allan and I killed my kids.' Those were his exact words."

Robinson, who was incredulous at the revelation, said Schoenborn went on to say he killed the children to "save them from a life of humility."

Robinson told Schoenborn's first-degree murder trial he was shocked.

"It was kind if hard to believe coming out of a guy that he had killed his own kids."

Robinson then asked Schoenborn how he killed them.

"He said 'With my bare hands."'

As Robinson testified, Schoenborn said from his seat in the prisoner's box: "Want to have that talk now?"

Two sheriffs quickly stood up and Schoenborn's lawyer came over to talk to him.

Robinson was widely quoted after Schoenborn was found 10 days following the April 2008 slayings. But he has never before revealed what Schoenborn said that day.

His explosive statements Wednesday followed the finish of the gut-wrenching testimony of the children's mother, Darce Clarke.

Clarke came home that day to find Kaitlynne, 10, Max, 8 and five-year-old Cordon dead in their Merritt, B.C., home.

She has testified her estranged husband had struggled with mental illness in the past, but she said he was a loving father and it never occurred to her he might harm their children.

She testified that even if he had shown signs of mental illness in the days leading up to the children's deaths, she may still have left her sons and daughter with their father.

Clarke reviewed statements she made to police just days after the killings.

She described Schoenborn as an active father who played often with the children.

She told police Schoenborn built a bed and attached desk for his daughter and a fireman-type pole for his sons' bunkbeds so they could slide down from the top bunk.

"You didn't think he was capable of violence towards the kids," defence lawyer Peter Wilson asked Clarke.

"Right," she replied.

"Allan never spanked the kids," said Wilson.

"True," she said.

"You didn't understand how he could have done it. It never entered your head that he could have hurt them," said Wilson, reviewing her police statement.

"Yes," she agreed.

Clarke testified earlier that Schoenborn had exhibited signs of mental illness for years before that and was most recently hearing what appeared to be snide voices in his head.

But in several phone calls between Clarke and Schoenborn that weekend, she said she heard no signs of him either drunk or mentally ill.

A phone call Friday night lasted until four in the morning. Clarke described the conversation as halting with long silences.

"If you had seen the symptoms (of mental illness) at all would you ever have left the children in his care," Crown lawyer Sheri Marks asked in rebuttal.

Clarke hesitated and said "I'm not sure."

The trial, by judge alone, has heard that Clarke and Schoenborn had an arrangement dictated by the provincial Children's Ministry that they not be together while looking after the children.

"If anything it was you that he had problems with. Right," said Wilson, referring to the couple's constant arguments.

"Right," Clarke replied.

However, the court heard she also told police that the first person she thought was responsible for the deaths was Schoenborn because of his mental instability.

When Schoenborn showed up at their trailer home on the Friday before the children were killed, he waited in the front yard while Clarke got ready to leave. Clarke spent the weekend at her mother's nearby home.

When she arrived home Sunday April 6, 2008, she found her boys dead on the living room couch and her daughter stabbed to death in a back bedroom.

Schoenborn vanished after the murders and was found 10 days later by a man walking his dog in the woods.

In the days after the murders Clarke did several interviews with police, but said she remembered little about the statements because she was heavily medicated at the time.

When RCMP were trying to find out where Schoenborn may have gone, she told them he could have taken the dog and gone into the woods to kill himself.

Police were trying to find out what was going through his mind, Wilson asked Clarke.

"I stopped trying to figure out what was going through his mind a long time ago," she replied.

Clarke's neighbour, Wendy Carson, later told the court that when the family moved to the neighbourhood in late 2006, Schoenborn told her that "they prefer to be left alone."

She said she saw Schoenborn standing in the kitchen window around dusk on the night before the children were killed, which was unusual because the shades were almost always drawn tight in the home.

Carson said one night she watched Schoenborn raking up leaves in the yard in the dark.

"My opinion? Odd ball," she replied when asked by defence lawyer Rishi Gill what she thought of Schoenborn.