Kristie Sue Costa: Hoist with her own petard

You might recall that a few weeks ago we asked Kristie Sue Costa the Awkward Question: you know, the one about why the children claimed that everyone in the cult (except themselves, conveniently enough) had devil and/or monster tattoos…but somehow Ella had managed to live and have a total of three children with two of the alleged “bosses” of the cult, without noticing their tattooed genitalia.

It was a simple question, we thought, but for some reason it seemed to make Kristie Sue profoundly uncomfortable:

…and so it went, with EC/Snake asking the Awkward Question, and Kristie Sue ducking, dodging, and trying to evade the inevitable: Ella never noticed the tattoos because they didn’t exist. Because the cult didn’t exist, never has done, and the whole thing was a poorly constructed hoax designed by two drug-addled nitwits in a boneheaded attempt to wreak vengeance on Ella’s ex-husband as well as anyone in the neighbourhood who had ever looked at either of them sideways.

We should have known that it would take Kristie Sue a few weeks, but eventually she’d come up with her own attempt at an Awkward Question:

The forced retractions of the two Hampstead children differ in their answers, much unlike their initial testimonies and police interviews. Whenever we’ve asked our opposition, the trolls at Hoaxtead Research, we’ve never received an answer, why can’t they answer this one, very simple question? Who told the truth about Dearman’s relationship with one of the teachers? One child says the father didn’t know him, the other says he did. Which is it Dearman?

And just to show how helpful she could be, Kristie Sue included this handy extract from the children’s interviews.

A few problems

There are a few problems with Kristie Sue’s version of the Awkward Question:

1. Contrary to her assertion, this is the first time she’s asked us, so we haven’t been evading the question.
2. She makes the erroneous assumption that we are all RD…and that we would therefore know which child was correct. We aren’t, and we don’t, though we have our suspicions.
3. In raising this question, she once again shoots the hoax squarely in the foot.

Like her fellow Hoaxtead mobsters, Kristie Sue has constantly maintained that everything Abe forced the children to say was 100% pure-D true: her evidence for this is that the children’s stories were utterly consistent. Despite the police having pointed out that there were multiple inconsistencies, this has always been the Hoaxtead mantra.

The biggest problem with Kristie Sue’s clumsy, disingenuous attempt at an Awkward Question is this: it demonstrates that despite a full month of brutal beatings, sleep deprivation, and threats that he would bury the children in the desert and leave them there if they didn’t go along with his lies, Christie was not able to fully enforce absolute consistency between the two children’s versions of the story.

The retractions took place after the children had been removed from Ella’s custody. They were feeling more relaxed, knowing that they wouldn’t have to face either Abe or Ella when they left the ABE interviews with the police. Both children had already expressed the wish that they not be returned to Ella so long as Abe was still in the picture.

The fact that the children gave different answers to the same question means nothing more nor less than this: they were not reporting on anything they had personally experienced. And by the time they had decided to retract their earlier allegations, one of the children felt brave enough to tell the truth.

Their differing stories don’t bolster the hoax; they blast it to smithereens.

And if Kristie Sue weren’t quite so thick-headed, she might grasp that in asking this question she has outsmarted herself. She is, as the Bard would say, hoist with her own petard, and it looks good on her.