Karen Whitehouse, host of the Who Shat On The Floor At My Wedding podcast spoke to PodcastingToday about how it came about and what’s next.
As the podcast reaches its 5th year, the latest investigation When The Cops Say No, We Say Yes has been nominated for Best Comedy – Individual Episode in the Webby Awards for one of the Season 3 investigations, “Who shat in my dishwasher?”
We asked a few questions to investigate more about Karen and her Assistant Detective, Lauren Kilby to go behind the scenes, so read on to find out what we discovered!
Who Shat On The Floor At My Wedding is celebrating its 5th anniversary – how did the poop incident on your wedding day turn into a podcast and how did it develop to become so successful?
My wife, Helen McLaughlin and I got married in Amsterdam in August, 2018. It was a spectacular wedding, in many ways.
We hired a big boat (also known as an enclosed crime scene) for 100 of our nearest and dearest friends and family.
Glorious sunny, warm summer’s day. Open air ceremony on the top deck, champagne reception with a jazz band sailing past windmills, followed by a 3 course sit down dinner and DJ kicking off with the after party until the early hours. It was, you could say, a classy affair. Or at least it started off that way.
After dinner, I went downstairs to the ladies bathroom at around 9.45pm. As I walked through the doors, I saw a scene that will be etched in my memory forever. A large human turd was in the middle of the bathroom floor.
The turd in question was too far away from any toilet (it was outside the cubicles IN FRONT of the wash basins), too firm to have been an accident and it was far too early in the evening for this to have been a drunken accident. So my immediate thought was ‘this must have been done on purpose’.
I put it out of my mind at that moment, until later that night when my wife and I got back to our hotel room and I told her, ‘you’ll never guess what happened’.
When I told her, we couldn’t let it go. Because we KNOW it had to be one of our closest friends and family.
Amidst the amusing burning questions – namely WHY did someone do this to us?- we were genuinely a bit upset and annoyed.
Darker motives even crossed our minds – was someone out to get us? Brazenly shitting on the floor at a close friend or family’s wedding and then walking away without even attempting to clean it up is a pretty shocking thing to do in any case.
So it was a mystery that genuinely plagued Helen and I since it happened, and it started to make us question some of our closest friends and family.
At the time, I was working as a producer making TV commercials. Then COVID hit and I lost my job. Suddenly, with time on my hands, I asked myself “if I could produce anything in the world with my production skillset, what would I want to make?”
The answer was that I wanted to make content that spread joy to the world. We certainly needed it at that time. So I had the idea to turn our wedding mystery into a highly crafted yet ridiculous investigative podcast – a spoof of all the depressing true crimes out there.
We just needed a detective, so I called my friend Lauren Kilby (who was also at the wedding and who is the funniest woman alive and who once did a stellar performance as a Detective in a murder mystery event) and she said yes.
And as to why it was a success, I think it was a rare combination of high production values mixed with a completely low-brow, ridiculous subject.
It also offered an insight into a lesbian couple’s dynamic and friendship circle, bringing in top-class forensic specialists to advise us which offered a fascinating insight into real case-solving approaches. And listeners were able to follow the real ups and downs of our investigative journey.
Tell us about some of the other “crimes” you’ve investigated.
The most recent one was ‘The Case of the Boob Bandit’. Matt Wright is one of the cast of the reality TV show Naked And Afraid.
The idea of the show is a group of survivalists are pin dropped in an extreme environment and have to survive for 40 or 60 days completely naked with only a pot, a fire starter and a knife as tools.
Matt brought a crime to us that happened while filming once of these challenges in the middle of the Amazon rainforest. It was day 39, and only 6 survivalists remained and they were starving.
Matt shot down a large turkey like bird just after sunset – a massive win. They slow cooked it overnight in a pot, excited to finally eat in the morning. But when they opened the lid, they realised the breasts of the bird were missing. Someone grabbed and ate the boobs in the night.
We interrogated all 6 of the survivalists and managed to confront the perpetrator of the crime and get closure for everyone.
Some more of our cases are referenced in question 4.
How do you go about your investigations, and do you find people are willing to talk to you?
We kick off our investigations in the way real police would – by gathering witness statements and information.
Once we have done that, all standard procedure goes out the window and we come up with unique theories and strategies that only Unqualified Detectives could about how to solve the case.
We then always get one or multiple top experts to advise or guide us on our approach. And the episode usually ends with a final confrontation or interrogation with our lead suspects.
We recently cracked one case by realising the perpetrator had to have long enough femur bones in order to commit the faecal crime, so we got a forensic osteologist to calculate their femur bone length, and the results ruled out one of our two suspects.
Mostly suspects are willing to talk to us as they know the tone and humour of our show and know we’re not in the business of finger pointing and they’re always silly mysteries.
It’s the most important thing to us to make sure anyone featured in our show enjoys the process and feels comfortable. So we always offer to change people’s names to hide their identity and always share episode edits prior to publishing to make sure they’re happy.
Sometimes, some suspects don’t play ball. Which is fine too. As we are open about being Unqualified Detectives, so we don’t always solve our cases. It’s more about the journey than the destination, and the antics we get up to try and solve the crime.
Any standout incidents or revelations during your investigations?
- ‘Rural Rectal Rampage’ There is a prank that has been going viral online for several years where people go around placing these small stickers that say ‘For Rectal Use Only’ on phallic shaped objects. Cucumbers at supermarkets, mops, tools, you name it. These videos are everywhere on TikTok. We took on a local case where this happened around Chipping Norton and through our investigation, we actually managed to track down the real global mastermind of this operation. A man who runs a global online joke shop that sends a roll of these stickers with instructions where to put them with EVERY ORDER. So he was the originator of the idea, and we managed to trace it all back to him. An IT guy from England.
- ‘The Case of the Phantom Cleaner’ – a real mystery where someone broke into a house in Massachussets… and cleaned it from top to bottom. Tidying the toys on the victim’s child’s bed and leaving ornamental roses made out of toilet paper in the bathrooms… super creepy. Our challenge in this case was that we only had one witness who saw this ‘phantom cleaner’ in action, and that witness happened to be the house owner’s pet gecko called Persephone. So we did what all comedy investigators would do in this situation – hired an animal communicator to get the gecko’s witness statement. Whether you believe it or not, this exercise provided us with key information that actually led us to our lead suspect, who later confessed (even though the confession was obtained through slightly dodgy means but that’s another story entirely). In any case, we were amazed that a gecko solved one of our cases.
- ‘The Case of the Fecal Fugitive’ – was a lesson in compassion for us as the poopetrator turned out to be the sweetest man and had the purest motive for shitting on a wall at our victim’s wedding. He was just so nervous about officiating the wedding that he drank too much to compensate, combined with eating a massive portion of the mother’s famous spicy wedding beans and wearing braces which inhibited quick trouser removal was a recipe for faecal disaster but one we all forgave full heartedly.
Why are you starting the new podcast When The Cops Say No, We Say Yes?
Quite simply, because the world needs a bit of brightening up at the moment, and we think there is no better use of our time and energy than to try and make people laugh.
We decided to make Who Shat in the first place as Helen’s mother passed away in tragic circumstances and during that time we listened to My Dad Wrote A Porno.
It was at that time that we realised the power of a comedy podcast and that’s a big reason why we decided we wanted to try and make one too. Because, if we could offer people around the world with some light relief during tough times, we think that is a very worthwhile use of our time.
We have also been inundated with people requesting us to solve their real comedy mysteries. Some people genuinely want closure about weird or shocking things that have happened to them, and we are happy to try and bring them that.
We love meeting different people around the world and shining a light on the weird and wonderful mysteries that happen every day.
Can you give me a rundown on the idea behind it, what it will be about, and does it run alongside the other podcast or are they separate?
When The Cops Say No, We Say Yes is a continuation of our comedy crime investigations. Season 1 was a limited series investigating who shat on the floor at Helen and Karen’s wedding.
Season 2 “The Case Of The Tiny Suit/ Case’ was also a limited series investigating another comedy/Scandi Noir crime set in Sweden.
Season 3 is “When The Cops Say No, We Say Yes” and it is a move away from the limited series to a new ‘always on’ format.
The idea is we investigate real listeners submitted crimes and attempt to ‘speed solve’ them in 48 hours. Each investigation is split over a different number of episodes, usually two episodes, but they can be as much as five episodes, so each case is a bit like a mini-series.
Can you give a little insight into some of the cases you’re featuring and how do you find them – do people come to you?
It’s a mixture. Most come to us, because at the end of Season 1 and Season 2 we put a shout out to listeners to submit their non-crime crimes to us and since going viral we get a lot of submissions that way.
We always want to have comedy mysteries submitted from listeners, but we also are beginning to take on more high-profile comedy mysteries that we actively seek out.
We approach people who have public profiles, a sense of humour and who work in very interesting settings. For example, we are working with one of the cast members of another reality TV show to investigate a comedy mystery set in the world of super yachting.
We are also working on a meditation centre mystery, and an arctic themed comedy mystery. Part of the joy of these comedy mysteries is to transport listeners to, and offer them an insight into, completely different worlds and places.
