OGDEN — Brenda Emile insisted Tuesday that she got a phone call threatening the lives of her children.

“If you don’t take the deal you’re going to bury another kid,” she said her mother told her in August, before she agreed to a plea bargain in the 2017 death of her 3-year-old daughter, Angelina Costello. The alleged threat supposedly originated from Miller Costello, Emile’s husband and Angelina’s father, who also is charged in the toddler’s death.

Emile’s comments came during an extended back-and-forth with 2nd District Judge Michael DiReda and the Ogden woman’s attorneys, Martin Gravis and Jason Widdison. The occasion was a hearing on the defense’s motion to withdraw the guilty plea. In return for the Weber County Attorney’s Office taking the death penalty off the table, Emile in August pleaded guilty to first-degree felony aggravated murder.

County prosecutor Letitia Toombs provided the judge with recordings of all of Emile’s conversations with relatives and friends during August. All inmate phone calls are recorded at the Weber County Jail.

Toombs said prosecutors heard nothing in the calls to substantiate Emile’s report of a threat. Widdison and Gravis said they also reviewed the recordings, which were provided to them by the prosecutors, and they also found no evidence of a threat. They had filed the plea withdrawal motion two weeks ago on Emile’s say-so regarding a threat.

“As far as I can tell there is no evidence to support this motion,” DiReda said. He recounted his interview of Emile at her change-of-plea hearing, in which she said no one had coerced her to plead guilty and that she was pleading guilty because she committed the crime.

“My son was being threatened,” Emile said. “I want closure too.”

Asked why she did not report the threat before she agreed to the plea bargain, she said she decided to do so only after Costello later took his own plea bargain. Until then, she was worried that Costello might be found innocent and get out of jail, where he could carry out the alleged threat. “Before, I didn’t know if he was getting out,” she said.

DiReda said that even so, Emile still has not met her burden to provide evidence to substantiate the supposed threat. Widdison then said the only remaining question regarding the jail phone calls was that Emile and her relatives sometimes spoke in Romanian. None of the attorneys speak Romanian, and nothing has been translated.

Toombs said prosecutors doubted anything substantive would be revealed with translations. The passages in Romanian “are very brief, a couple of seconds,” with nothing in the surrounding English language conversations indicating talk about any threats, she said.

The attorneys talked about finding a Romanian translator. DiReda asked further questions of Emile and told her the burden is on her to provide evidence. At one point, Emile seemed to become frustrated and said, “I’ll just take the plea.”

DiReda told Emile to take a few minutes to talk things over privately with her attorneys. After that, they continued to seek the change of plea. DiReda set another hearing in December to give time for the defense to have translations done.

DiReda said he wanted to make sure not to leave anything unaddressed, especially because Emile wrote him a letter in October asking to fire Widdison and Gravis. But Emile said Tuesday she had ironed things out with them and no longer wanted to fire them.

Emile and Costello were arrested on July 6, 2017. Charging documents alleged the couple beat, burned and starved the girl over a yearlong period. A police detective testified in 2018 that the girl’s body resembled that of a Holocaust victim.

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