For want of a calculator: Hoaxtead by the numbers

When Abraham Christie and Ella Draper were concocting the Hampstead SRA hoax and teaching RD’s children to recite their childish version of how a “paedophile Satanic cult” operates, they failed to pay attention to a few telling and important details. As if they hadn’t already given away the show by filling the kids’ heads with bizarre, incorrect rubbish which the children then obediently reeled off under fear of another beating, Abe and Ella forgot something very important: their calculator.

The baby skull problem

For many people, the image of tattooed cult members, naked and bedecked with the skulls of dead infants—20 skulls per adult—was understandably very unsettling. According to Abraham in the Jean-Clement Yaohirou recording, there were 400 adults in the cult. He excitedly informed Jean-Clement that this meant that 800 infant skulls would be required. Of course, this was incorrect: 20 multiplied by 400 is 8,000 skulls.

Nowhere is the age of the alleged babies specified, but it seemed reasonable to assume an average age of six months. It’s pretty easy to find charts online that specify the circumference of infants’ heads. We found that at age 6.5 months, going by the 50th percentile, a male baby’s skull is 44.04 cm circumference, while a female baby’s skull is 42.7 circumference. This puts the average 6.5-month-old baby’s skull at 43.37 cm.

Using ancient skills we thought we’d long ago misplaced (involving things like the value of pi and such-like), our resident mathematician worked out that this would mean the average diameter of a 6.5-month-old baby’s skull would be 13.8 cm (5.4 inches).

The children claimed that these skulls, all 8,000 of them, were stored in the vestment drawers in the church.

For anyone unfamiliar with vestment drawers, they are much like the drawers used to hold maps or blueprints: they’re quite shallow, and are meant to hold the chasubles, stoles, dalmatics, and so forth, worn by (in this case) Anglican priests. We don’t know the vintage of the vestment drawers at Christ Church Hampstead, but most of the chests of drawers of this sort that we found on line looked roughly like this: It seems that vestment drawers come in a standard height: about 87cm high. This particular one is listed at 118cm W x 87cm H x 89cm D. Most of these chests have six drawers, plus space between the drawers. We estimated (by putting a ruler against the screen of the computer) that each drawer in such a chest would therefore measure approximately 10cm high x 110cm wide x 89cm deep.

The crucial measurement, of course, is the 10cm drawer height: remember that the baby skulls (all 8,000 of them) that are meant to fit into the vestment drawers are 13.8cm in diameter. To be sure, a skull is not perfectly round, but a more or less roundish thing that is 13.8cm at its widest point simply will not fit into a 10cm-high drawer.

And even assuming that the drawers in the chest at Christ Church were high enough to accommodate a 13.8cm diameter skull, a chest of this size could only hold 48 such skulls per drawer. The entire chest shown above would hold only 288 skulls. To hold all 8,000 skulls, the church would require 28 chests of this size (only higher). Whoops.

Sure enough, recall that when the police searched Christ Church in Hampstead, they concluded that there were no drawers sufficiently deep to contain baby skulls as described by the children. The police were correct.

Sorry, Abe and Ella: another stupid claim debunked.

The swimming pool change room

Another issue where a calculator might have come in handy was the allegations regarding the mass “sex parties” at the East Finchley lido. This is mentioned in the IPCC report issued a year ago: The mathematical problem here: fit “20 parents, a number of teachers, and several children (for argument’s sake, let’s call this 30+ people) into a space that is 3.5m long by 2.5m wide”. We asked one of our team who happens to be a CAD whiz to throw together a schematic of that space, with only 30 average-sized people (whose shoulders seem to overlap, and who are apparently dancing the Macarena):

As you can see, even with 30 people, things would be just a tad crowded in the change room. Good luck squeezing a few more people in there, and then trying to hold an orgy.

And of course, as the report points out, the walls of the disabled change room do not meet the ceiling, so anything taking place in that room would be fully audible from the pool deck.

The IPCC report states that the other change rooms are even smaller: 2m x 2m; 1.5m x 1.5m; an L-shaped room that’s 2m along its longest walls. Nothing that would fit even 20 people, let alone 30+.

Again: another stupid claim debunked.

We suggest that next time Abe and Ella plan a hoax, they consider bringing along their calculator.