When facts and theory collide

Yesterday we made a mistake.

Following last week’s post about the vile Dearman Does Hampstead blog, which had published an even worse than usual post featuring RD’s sister, mother, and grandmother, we were eager to find and expose the writer of that blog.

All we know is that she gives her name as Kris Da Costa, she claims to be from La Jolla, California, and she has the moral fibre of a hyena. She often uses an advert for cheap wigs from China as her Facebook avatar, but for a short time earlier this year she used a blurry, dated picture of a young man and woman.

With this as our only real clue, and making use of tips sent us by some of our readers, we pieced together what we thought was the correct profile for Kris Da Costa.

Everything seemed to fit: our suspect had the ‘right’ friends, she shared the standard Hoaxtead posts on Facebook, and most tellingly, when we dropped a strong hint that we knew who she was, she panicked and began tightening her Facebook security.

We were so certain we were right…and yet it turned out we were completely, undeniably wrong.

A kind commenter who shall remain nameless sent us evidence that blew our sure thing out of the water.

We’ll be honest: our first reaction was disbelief. How could we have been so far off-base? Maybe this new info was wrong? Maybe someone was trying to mess with us?

And we were angry: with ourselves for getting it so wrong, and (irrationally) with our commenter for pointing out our error. There had to be something wrong with this new information. Right?

Wrong.

The new evidence was incontrovertible. The post that we’d thought would help put Kris Da Costa behind bars had to be removed from the blog, and we had to start our search again.

The good news: not only did our commenter point out our error, but they gave us some excellent starting points on which to base our new research.

Our team is once again hot on the trail of Da Costa, digging up family links, old usernames, biographical data, addresses…slowly but surely, a picture of Kris Costa  (not a typo) is emerging. We’re not ready to make our findings public just yet, but we can say that we’ve made some fascinating new inroads.

Meanwhile, we can’t help but reflect on yesterday’s erroneous post, and the nature of what is real, versus what we think we know.

One of the things that used to amuse us when Kris’s DDH blog first began to ‘expose the truth’ about RD was her use of flimsy and highly questionable data to draw completely erroneous and unwarranted conclusions. Each time she posted some new revelation that claimed to ‘prove’ that RD was pretty much everyone on the internet including the Easter Bunny, we’d read it aloud to one another, hooting at her hilarious allegations.

She’s always been wrong; so far we haven’t seen her guess correctly once.

But now we’ve discovered to our chagrin that it’s not so funny when we’re the ones making leaps of logic that lead us in very wrong directions.

Yes, it’s humiliating. It’s infuriating. It’s disappointing to find out just how mistaken we can be. It’s sad, too, to have to toss hours and hours of hard work into the bin and start anew.

But when the facts collide with our theories, it’s the theories, not the facts, that must go.

That’s the big difference between us and the Hoaxtead mob: instead of ignoring or downplaying new evidence, or trying to cram it into our theory willy-nilly, or even trying to twist our narrative to make it fit the new facts, we did the grown-up thing. We threw out the theory, and kept the evidence.

Perhaps the Hoaxteaders could try that sometime.