They spared no expense and had everything planned to a tee to pull off the perfect wedding, so the last thing Karen Whitehouse and Helen McLaughlin expected on their special day was a dramatic, podcast-worthy moment at the reception.
“Someone pooed on the floor!” says Karen, 37, recalling the rather surprising turn of events at her nupitals in Amsterdam in August 2018.
With only their closest family and friends around them and no way for strangers to enter the venue – a boat on one of the Dutch capital’s famous canals – the brides knew the culprit had to be one of their beloved wedding guests And although the rest of the night was “brilliant”, the poo on the floor of the women’s bathroom continued to prey on the brides’ minds. It was a classic poo-dunnit.
Love was in the air, but Helen and Karen smelt something was off.
Following the incident, Helen, 48, says she was at a friend’s house when the subject of the offending number two came up.
“It went on for three or four hours, and I remember watching everyone telling stories, laughing and joking, thinking, ‘There’s something really weird about this. People love talking about it.'”
It wasn’t until Karen’s job in film production ground to a halt during the 2020 lockdowns that she began looking for a fun project to fill her time.
“I had literally nothing to do,” Karen says. “Then I was like, ‘Maybe we should do something that involves the poo on the floor of the wedding?’ Helen and I just started talking about it, and hatched the idea for a podcast.”
The brides got to the bottom of the crime thanks to Lauren.
The British-born pair, who were living in Amsterdam at the time they tied the knot but have now returned to England, called upon their Kiwi friend Lauren Kilby for help.
Lauren, 37, a freelance producer, didn’t hesitate to take on the role as “lead detective” in the case of the deplorable deposit.
Says Wellington-born Lauren, “When they approached me and said, ‘Do you want to help solve this mystery?’ I’d obviously heard about the s**t on the floor. I mean, I didn’t hear about it during the wedding, but I heard about it a lot after. And so I was like, ‘Yep, that sounds like the right thing for me to do. That seems like a natural next step in my life.'”
The suspects.
Lauren’s deadpan humour and overly serious assumption of her detective role won the hearts of listeners all over the world, and their podcast, Who S**t On The Floor At My Wedding?, went viral.
“I was on holiday in Sweden and I suddenly saw all these messages start coming in, and I started getting all these screenshots from people – even people I hadn’t spoken to in a long time,” says Lauren, who has lived in Amsterdam for the past 13 years. “I was just like, ‘What is going on?’
“It just started going up and up, and then we had a million listeners and then it hit two million, and it just started exploding from there. I don’t know why that happened, but it’s good for us that it did – free publicity!”
The podcast sees Lauren “interrogate” many of Karen and Helen’s wedding guests about the unsavoury specimen on the floor, including the brides’ parents – going so far as to bring in actual police detectives and forensic psychologists, and carrying out polygraph tests with a lie detector that they purchased online.
Lauren explains one of the forensic experts “was working on a quadruple homicide at the time and I guess when you’re working on something that serious, you don’t expect to receive an email that says, ‘Who s**t on the floor at my wedding?’ in the subject line. But he obviously thought it was hilarious.”
Buying a lie detector was also much easier than they anticipated.
“We just googled ‘lie detector cheap’ and it was the first one that came up,” says Karen. “Our budget was zero for this, so we had to try to be economic with all of the tools that we employed. It was the best-rated one with the lowest cost and that was the sweet spot for us.”
And now the investigation has drawn to a close, the trio is working on a second season.
“We can say that season two is a new crime,” teases Lauren. “It’s relating to one of us and it’s also slightly classier. Don’t expect bodily fluids or faecal matter. We’re levelling up for this season and some very important new detective skills will be unravelled.”
