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BAD RECEPTION
Our wedding day was shattered by stomach-churning discovery… we had to hire lie detector & detective to investigate
YOUR wedding should be one of the best days of your life.
And for Helen McLaughlin, 48, and Karen Whitehouse, 37, of Chipping Norton, their big day, held on a boat on the canals of Amsterdam, was “glorious” - until it took a very dark (and smelly) turn.
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“It started out as a very classy affair,” says Helen, who works in cybersecurity.
“The weather was really sunny, there was champagne, a jazz band. It was perfect.”
But, at just after 9pm on August 11th, 2018, as guests had finished their “delicious” lasagne main course followed by chocolate mousse - with hindsight, an unfortunate choice - Karen made a horrifying discovery on the toilet floor.
“As soon as I opened the door to the ladies’, I saw a silhouette of this perfect, poo emoji-looking turd, really far away from the toilet cubicle," she recalls. “I stopped in my tracks.
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“The first thing that struck me, was that it was early on in the evening, and people weren't drunk enough to really excuse that.
"But also, it was really far away from the toilet bowl and - sorry for the detail - was really firm.
"That struck me as not an accident. That was on purpose."
Karen, who had just delivered her speech, said she felt a wave of conflicting emotions, because while she was elated and having the best time, she was suddenly confronted by a "matrimonial turd".
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“I saw it and walked straight back out as quickly as I could," she went on.
“I didn't even tell Helen until the wedding finished and we got back to the hotel, just because it wasn't really appropriate to interrupt her lovely day.”
As if it wasn't bad enough discovering a poo on the floor at their wedding, what made things worse for the couple was that the culprit had to be someone they'd invited, due to the event being on a boat.
Karen told Helen what had happened when they got back to the hotel later on, and an Agatha Christie-esque 'poodunnit' ensued.
As soon as I opened the door to the ladies’, I saw a silhouette of this perfect, poo emoji-looking turd, really far away from the toilet cubicle
Karen Whitehouse
They studied their guestlist, trying to work out who the phantom pooper could be.
“We stayed up until about 3am going through that list,” says Helen. “It was terrible... it had to be somebody we know.
“It’s a horrible thing to have to question which of your friends and family you expect it might be.
“We had to consider whether it was Karen’s side or mine - and I think, everyone thought, unanimously, it was Karen's side.”
Karen adds: “By 2am we had lists of medical issues versus motives, and we'd already got basic groups of suspects.”
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Inspired by true crime podcasts, the married couple, together with their amateur detective pal Lauren Kilby, 37, decided to create their own podcast, entitled Who S**t on the Floor At My Wedding? in a bid to find the culprit.
The three women bought a cheap lie detector off the internet and began questioning their guests.
Every interview ends with Karen and Helen asking the suspects, “Did you, or did you not s**t on the floor at our wedding?”
They even received advice from a criminal psychologist, a lawyer and a forensic analyst - who usually covers homicides - in an attempt to track down the 'poo-petrator'.
“The forensic psychologist is quite famous,” Karen says. “He's investigated some of the IRA crimes where they left faeces on the wall.
"His mantra is, ‘If it's a firm faeces, it suggests that someone did it out of anger, but if it's a loose faeces, that was stress,' so there's apparently an emotional link between the consistency of the poop as well.”
Meanwhile, the criminal psychologist wondered if it may have been a homophobic attack, or Karen’s “scorned” ex-boyfriend, possibly annoyed she’d “become a lesbian after meeting him”.
The list even included Karen’s mum - who insisted it couldn’t be her, because she’s “very regular” and it was “the wrong time of day”.
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Helen says having to ask her mother-in-law if she was the culprit was "excruciating".
"Everyone was a suspect,"; Lauren, an advertising producer who lives in Amsterdam, explains.
“We went in hard with the families because there's definitely some unresolved issues there."
Fellow advertising producer Karen also interrogated her old boss - the managing director of a top ad agency, who remained anonymous for the podcast.
She says: “I sent her in a cab on a two-hour round trip to go and be hooked up to a professional lie detector, and she was like, ‘Fine, sure, no problem. I’ve got nothing to hide.’
“She was a good sport - but I started trying to come up with a motive for her like, ‘God, could I have done something to p**s her off? Was I not a good enough employee? Did I try to steal her thunder?’
“You go into this weird tailspin of reactions and question everything you've done in past relationships.”
One guest questioned several times throughout the podcast was Henk - who bravely stepped in to clean the poo when it was discovered.
Helen says: “He was an absolute hero. Who wants to get down on their hands and knees and start scraping that off the floor?
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“You can't really expect staff to do that either. If one of your guests has done that on the floor, you have to deal with it. He was an absolute legend.”
However, his heroic antics only fuelled Lauren's suspicion.
“What was he doing in the ladies’ toilets? He was in there for five or six hours," she says. “It's too suspicious for my liking - It's like those murderers that kill and go back to the crime scene to wrap it up.”
Unfortunately, 13 episodes later the three women are yet to nail down the culprit, but they have narrowed it down to a handful of suspects.
They also learned about other unexpected, strange events that they never knew happened on the day - including the fact many guests had complaints about one of the wedding entertainers.
“We left the wedding with our own experience of the day, the people that we spoke to, the memories that we had," says Karen.
"Then when you take a step back and dissect the whole event from everyone else's different perspective, the things that happened that we had no idea about, it was mind-blowing.
“There were some weird and strange sightings in the canals of Amsterdam.”
The podcast was first released at the end of 2020, but Who S**t on The Floor went viral earlier this month and has had over 1.1 million views. It's currently number one on Apple Podcasts.
And it’s not the end for fans of Karen, Helen and Lauren.
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"We've now realised our expertise in the non-crime comedy podcast category, so we're currently working on season two and we've got a brand new case that we're taking on," Karen reveals.
"It’s a slightly different tone to the first season but it's still a comedy non-crime crime, which is a new genre.”
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