Who Shat On The Floor At My Wedding? And Other Crimes - S3 E15 Phantom Cleaner - Part One

Episode Date: December 31, 2025

What kind of criminal breaks into your home… and cleans it? When a man from Massachusetts leaves the house with his son, he returns to a scene of domestic disturbance. Floors scrubbed. Surfaces polished. Toys in his son’s room neatly rearranged, and intricate toilet paper roses left in the bathrooms. Nothing stolen. Nothing damaged. Just a mysteriously cleaned house, with no explanation why.At first, this appears to be a hopeless case with no leads, no motive and zero suspects. But things take a sharp turn when an unlikely witness emerges. There's only one tiny problem... this witness isn’t human.Undeterred, we attempt to make contact with the creature, embarking on a journey that is as bizarre as it is revealing. And if you thought we’d hit peak unhinged already… you have no idea what’s coming. Part Two drops 15th Jan.Support us on Patreon http://patreon.com/whoshatontheflooratmyweddingFollow us on Instagram @whoshatontheflooratmywedding for case evidence and behind-the-scenes.Sound design by @juanthummler Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

911, what's your emergency? I'm the victim of a crime. Someone broke into my house and cleaned it. Oh, you've got the wrong department, sir. This is the police. We deal with real crimes. Hang on, I'll transfer you to someone who can help. Karen.

Okay, I've got it. Keep the phone. Karen, pick up the phone. Now. Give me one second. I'm just finishing my biscuit. Honestly, Karen. Hi there.

It's assistant to the detective Karen Whitehouse here. How can I help? Someone's broken into my home and cleaned it from top to bottom. Oh, okay. I'm going to have to patch you through to the lead detective for this kind of case. Hold the line. All right, here we go. This is Detective Lauren Kilby speaking.

How may I help you? No, if we weren't in the virtual unqualified detective agency slash interrogation chamber, how would you greet us in person? Would you be a high five guy, a hug guy, knuckle pump, handshake? kiss on the lips. Yeah, how would you go? Probably a cautious handshake. I hope it's not a limp handshake.

No, not at all. I'm in sales. My handshake is excellent. So it's firm but cautious. How does that work? A lot of arm extension. Keep some distance. I think that could come across as quite aggressive

because I'd have to step back in order to receive your hand. Yeah, it looks like a sleet. It looks like you'd turn into a sleet at any moment. Let's just assume you've just slept us. You probably deserve it, to be honest. Nate? Yes.

You phoned into our hotline this morning, our detective hotline, saying that someone has broken into your home and cleaned it. That's right. Can you tell me what happened? I was living in Marlborough, Massachusetts at the time. I had left for the day.

I was out with my son, who was five at the time. I was normally very, very particular about making sure I kept my doors locked. I actually had an alarm that I would normally arm. And just that day, I happened to neglect both of those things. I left my back door unlocked and I did not arm my alarm. It's an unusual coincidence that I would not do both of those things. So after being out for a while, I came home and when I walked in,

I immediately felt that something was really wrong. Imagine walking into your home and something smelling incorrect. The feeling that you get when you walk through your door that you recognize as your own space, but all of a sudden, like, something's off. And I could smell like cleaning chemicals. And I thought maybe something had spilled. It just struck me as very odd. So I started looking around.

And then I noticed that things looked different. Things were clean. I went in my bathroom and my whole. whole bathroom had been cleaned and sitting on the toilet paper was this neatly folded rows made out of toilet paper. And so I continued to look around the house and I found my son's room had been completely cleaned from top to bottom. All of his stuffed animals lined up in a row. It was so odd and so unnerving just to see that someone had been in my home and like touched all my things and my kids things and like been in my bedroom and like made my bed. My first instinct was to

call the police. And when I called and said, I think someone's been in my home, everything's been cleaned. They said, are you in your house right now? And I said, well, yeah. And they say, well, get out of their idiot. We'll be right there. So I go out and I wait in the driveway and they go in and they do their whole house clearing thing. And then they start asking me questions, like, is anything missing? And I wasn't quite sure. You know, I had to look around, and there was part of me that was expecting to find, like, something creepy,

like a severed animal head under my sink or something like that. They started asking if there were any suspects. I thought my wife was my girlfriend at the time. Had maybe surprised me, and she had no idea what was going on. Nobody I knew seemed to know anything about it. Since there was nothing missing, nothing destroyed, there really wasn't much of a crime committed. So there wasn't a whole lot the police were really prepared to do.

Yeah, that's why we exist. I was left to just go back inside and just be in this house that had been cleaned by a stranger. That afternoon, I went to the hardware store and I bought all new locks for the house. I replaced all the locks and really tried to make myself feel secure. I was still just caught up in this anticipation of finding some weird surprise left by the serial killer that had like cleaned my house in preparation for the next part of the ritual or something.

You know, it was just, it was so unnerving. That evening, I made a post on Facebook about what it happened because it was so strange. I wanted to share it. And a friend of mine who worked at the Boston Globe asked if she could just write a fun little article about it. That morning, with the morning edition of the paper, that story ran and my phone just started blowing up. A home in Massachusetts

has been mysteriously cleaned while the owner was at work. Origami roses made of toilet paper left behind after intruder breaks into home and cleans it. Massachusetts' shoe no house in Massachusetts was encountered completely

limpiam... A house in Massachusetts was during the abasenity of the besitterin fullstendich careinished forgoon. I had, I think, seven news crews in my house that day. I mean, it was just turned into this huge

And now the police were involved because now the police are being interviewed about it. And they didn't quite know what to say. Nobody really knew it to make of it. The story caught on. I got comments about it from all over the world. You know, I was contacted from news days, which is from outside the U.S., Japan, BBC even. It was a wild, wild time. And then it was probably a week when things had finally started to settle down.

This woman shows up at my door. She doesn't speak much English. She's Brazilian, only speaks Portuguese. She's got her phone out trying to use Google Translate to communicate with me, and she's trying to tell me that she and her daughter were the ones who came to clean the house. And I said, okay, so you were here, and she was just being a little aloof about the whole thing. The whole interaction just felt a little off. I just, at no point was I ever convinced that she was the one who did it.

I can't prove that she wasn't. I don't have any evidence one way or the other. Just talking to her and just trying to communicate her was difficult, but at the same time, it just didn't feel real. What about did she not request a fee? Because they obviously cleaned without money. So they claimed for free. So you owe them a payment.

So was she not requesting that payment? Oh, no. Not at all. Can you imagine if that was your business model as a cleaning company? We're like, just going to crash through to someone's house. I'm going to clean and then, you know, make them that afterwards. Give me the cash, but I know you didn't ask for this, but I did it anyway, so here's the built. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It really wasn't clear, and I was like, can I, you know, have your contact info? And she didn't want to share it with me. She just gave me this business card for some general cleaning service. It wasn't hers or anything like that. It was either later that same day or the next day, another woman comes by a younger woman. Same kind of situation doesn't speak any English. She's got her phone out using Google Translate to try to communicate with me, and she's telling me that she did it.

And I was like, oh, you must be the daughter. Your mother was just here. And she was like, no, my mother's in Brazil. Now, the stories aren't lining up. And I never got her contact info. And I was like, I don't even know what the purpose of this visit was. To this day, I have no idea. Who did it or what's going on.

No one else ever came forward. The police never found anybody. Even with all the attention that the story got, I never got any kind of resolution for it. Wow. It's so much to unpack. It is the biggest head. scratcher that we've come across so far.

Did you just describe as visually as possible what the access points were to your house, where this cleaner would have got into your house? The way the house was laid out, there was a big main door right on the street, fairly busy road out front. And then there was a back door, which is where they came in and left. That's where I would normally enter and leave my house as well next to the driveway. One of the weirdest things about it is after all that and all that they did, The first room that you go into when you go through that door is there's a little small entryway and then you'd be in the kitchen.

And that's the one room, the one room in the entire house that didn't get cleaned. I don't know why. The kitchen didn't get claimed. They must have left it for last and I don't know. Maybe they figured out they were in the wrong place or I don't know. The house was cleaned very well, very, very thoroughly, except for the kitchen. There was a dirty coffee mug in the sink still. There's a small kitchen too, just this one small room, everything else, not a speck of dust, everything, every pillow, every blanket, every object, dusted, cleaned, organized.

That's what was threw me off, is it was so, there was so much attention put into how thoroughly this was all done. That was the most upsetting thing. Like, someone spent a lot of time and effort to do all of that. Could you give us the timings of when you left the house? and when you came back and discovered this? Sure. I left that morning. I think it was late morning. If I'm remembering correctly, I was picking my son up from his grandfather's house

in a couple of towns over. And then we had just gone out and just spent the day together. Maybe it took him to a park or an arcade. It was a nice day. Yeah, we came back late afternoon. It was still daylight. So I know it's a long time ago, but if you had to guess, like, the exact time,

like what would you say for the late morning? Oh, 10, 11 o'clock? 10 or 11 o'clock? then arriving back at... Probably around four. I mean, this would have taken hours. The window of time was, you know, certainly enough to do that. But they must have arrived not long after I left.

Yeah, it's such a perfect sort of storm, isn't it? Right. It's so odd. Do you know what day this happened? It would have either been a Tuesday or a Thursday, I think. You messaged me and you said it was May the 15th, 2018. Let's just have a moment. that toilet paper rose. Oh my gosh, Nate. Just explain the emotions that went through you when he clapped eyes on that origami rose. If you've ever been struck by something where you're

presented with it and you just have to take a moment to consider what the hell is going on in front of you, you're stuck in a moment of contemplation where you're trying to figure out, like, what the hell am I looking at? What is that? It was so nice. It was so well done and it's such an extra kind of thing. How many bathrooms does this house have? Two. There's one upstairs and one downstairs. And did the origami rose feature in both bathrooms?

Yes, it did. Holy shit. So they did that in both toilets. If you had to choose right now to have gone through this creepy, inexplicable phantom cleaning situation or to have a very normal dirtier. theft, someone broke into your house and just nicked a laptop. Which would you actually have preferred?

At the time, I would have rather someone just stole something. Because it's like it was clear why they were there. If they accomplished what they set out to accomplish and, you know, I could have had a proper crime that I could report to the police. It would have been a much tidier sequence of events. Looking back now, I'm glad they didn't take anything. And I'm glad, you know, knowing that nothing else ever really happened after that. But, I mean, of course, the first thing that goes through my mind is that a serial killer has targeting me.

That's what this is about. This is some type of sinister step in a larger plan. That was very, very scary. And the funny thing was I wasn't the only one to kind of reach that conclusion. After, you know, I posted this online, all of a sudden people from all over the world are reading the story and commenting on it. People are commenting, get out of your house right now, run, flee. And there are people saying, you've got to search the room for hidden cameras and microphones and all that, especially your son's room. Look out, he's in danger.

Oh, no. If you were really focused or like, I have to completely clean this house top to bottom, how long would have it taken you to clean those rooms that were clean to perfection? All day. Maybe I could have done it in that four or five hour period of time. So that's the weirdest thing about this. So if it was one person, you had a window, a maximum window of like six hours that you had left. And so as soon as you left pretty much someone arrived, which is wild or it was two people. And so it would have taken like two hours to get to that stage. Perhaps. Yeah. So it seems like probability wise, like it's having a two person team would have been a bit more likely. Otherwise, you know, it's just one of those perfect coincidences.

I know you said you don't, it's not usual thing, but did you ever hire a cleaner to clean that house? Not that house, no. So your son, you're with your son all day? Yeah. Oh yeah. So it wasn't your son who just had a random skill in origami who just kind of cleaned the house and lined up his toys. Definitely not. He was also five. Yeah, still suspicious, but yeah. What about the business card for the general cleaning service?

have there? I don't. I kept it for a while, and I'm not quite sure, not quite sure whatever happened to it, but I remember reaching out and trying to connect with somebody there, and I never got through to anybody. I recall leaving a message at one point saying, hey, you know, someone came by saying they cleaned my house, can you please give me a call? And I never heard from anybody. The reason why this is such a head scratching case, because I was like, oh, you know, no worries, we'll sort this up, we'll tie this up for old Nate. And then sort of I asked you a few questions on email. And I was like, well, you know, obviously the previous owners of your house must have already registered for a cleaning company. And they just accidentally, when they moved to house, they'd ordered it and they hadn't updated their address or something.

But you're like, you have an answer for everything. You've literally been the best detective on this job. You're like, oh, no, I checked that. I got in touch with the old, you know, owners. And they absolutely have no knowledge of this. They didn't do that. You know, you check so many possible routes that I feel like I don't know where to even go from here. And the Dirty Coffee in the Sank, was it yours or was it the cleaners?

No, that was mine. Okay. Oh my gosh, I'm just reading The Daily Mail Askle now, and you have a pet that was at home. A few pets, actually. No cats or dogs. My son had a lizard in his room, a bearded dragon, and I had a couple of snakes as well. And you know, it's funny, a lot of people are afraid of snakes. They cleaned the room with the snakes. Are any of the pet witnesses still alive?

Yeah, the lizard is not. I do still have one of the geckos that I had at the time. We know an animal psychic, Nate, and this is, to be honest, we're pretty desperate right now, and I feel like that's... We're going to have to do something weird like that. So do you think you can send me some pictures of your... ...animal that possibly saw this person clean your house against your will? I do have a gecko that was there, and her name's Persephone, and I'd gladly send you some pictures.

And also, it would be good if we... understood the placement of where these pets were in relation to the house. Sure. Because if they were in the kitchen... That's a bad place to keep pets. Sends the wrong message. Oh, no, you keep goldfish in kitchens, don't you? I think it's...

I'm not... I've never really been allowed a pet, so I actually don't know. I'm not qualified to answer to it. I had an exercise room. One of the offices I converted into an exercise room and all the reptiles were in there. Okay, we need a floor plan of that house with particular reptiles and various other creatures placed on that floor plan. And also ideally, kind of like the exact placement of their cage or whatever they lived in.

There's an exercise room, there's a trampoline that my son used in the exercise room. Oh, okay. And to the left of that frame is where the reptile cages were. This exercise room was completely tidied, was it all? Oh, yeah. No, it was all clean. They wiped down the exercise machine, everything. Oh, my God.

For me, the most unnerving part about this case is that I just, if I was in your position as a dad, I think it's someone having gone into my child's bedroom and having touched and rearranged all of their toys. That was really the worst part of it. I think that night I actually slept on the floor of his room. Oh, Nate. So just to recap, the only idea that we feel that we've got to move this case forward is to find an animal. psychic to try and connect with the still alive pet snake that would have witnessed this person going into the gym room. If the only thing we can do is speak to an animal psychic, best case

scenario, they tune into the snake and the snake's like, yeah, hey bro, I saw a person with long black hair. Then what? The snake's going to be like, oh, I did my own investigation. They actually work it here, and this is their home address, and this is their number. You know, we can't even crack it if the snake tells us. with the business. This is the kind of thing we tend to do. We go to so many lengths, extreme lengths, to do something that doesn't really help us. It does not pay off in any way. But it's about

the journey, not the destination, Lauren. Animals are quite instinctive and they feel beyond just, you know, names are just they can feel if the intention was good or sinister. Like, I think they would pick up on that. So it snakes are going to be like, yeah, it was a sinister type of claim. Yeah, she was cleaning with extreme anger. There was like an angry, If it was a fast scrub, it means that the person was angry. If it was a slow scrub, it means... It was a slow polish. Maybe that person had nice intentions.

I've watched a lot of animal whispering videos in my time, and they're very good about, like, their own experience and communicating that. There was a jaguar that was caught in a cage, and it was called Diablo, this black jaguar, and the animal whisperer went over, and it was like, what do you want to, like, communicate to me? He was like, I hate being called Diablo. It's like it really upsetting to me. So they changed the name.

because they went through it and then he became as a really aggressive cat because he was just not respected. They changed the name and then he came out of his cage and was really lovely. Would you be open to us sending

an animal psychic to speak to your snake? That's not really wrong. That came out wrong. I've lost it. I'm losing it now. There's a meeting between Nate's snake and our psychic

that we send you away. Just leave your begged or unlocked. Don't know. Just when you go to work, we'll send them over. No worries. Well, they'll know, won't they? Yeah, they should know exactly what you do.

Yeah, they'll know where you keep your key, everything. Sorry, remind me of the name of the snake that's going to solve this? It was a lizard. Oh, sorry. No, no, but a live snake is the only one that we can chat to. That's the name we need. Oh, it's the, no, it is the gecko, not the snake. I had snakes as well.

But her name is Persephone. She's a leopard gecko, yeah. And why can we not rely on the snakes? Well, I don't know where the snakes are because there was a sort of a, not quite a zoo, but like an animal sanctuary that like did things with the public. They were happy to adopt them. Yeah, okay, so Persephone.

It all lies with... On that note, Nate, thank you so much for speaking with us. It's been very fun. And we'll definitely be mulling this one over, I think, for the next 10 years or the rest of our lives. I appreciate that. In a way, like I just wonder if I left my door open more often, what good things could come my way. Plainers are quite expensive in Amsterdam.

Maybe I'll just leave my front door wide open tomorrow. Do you know, I've got a line that I usually say when we finish calls and it says something along the lines of leave it with us. Your case is in safe hands and then it's like goodbye and hangs up. And I can't say that. Your case is in dangerous hands. This case is officially open. Time is ticking. The 24-hour speed-solving countdown to crack this case starts now.

Countdown initiated. 24 hours left on the clock. 24 hours. Also known as one day. Case-solving room now. Testing evidence files. Initiating lie detector machine. Suspect profile complete.

Activating expert database. Professional experts at the ready. Contacting experts. The case of the Phantom Cleaner is one of the most difficult we've encountered. The problem isn't a lack of clues. It's that our victim, Nate, has already chased them all. Before we ever stepped in, Nate did everything in his power to find answers. He called the police. He involved the media.

He rang all the local cleaning companies. He dialed the number on the cryptic. business card left behind by the first Brazilian woman. He interrogated everyone he could think of. Friends, family, neighbours. Every lead dissolved into nothing. This morning, Karen tried a different approach. Her mission. To tap into the local Brazilian community and ask if we can put up some posters in key Brazilian hotspots requesting information. With basically offering a reward to actually pay for the cleaning services because that's the only, like, injustice from the perpetrators' side. Let's say they've made a mistake and they've, you know, spent four hours of their life cleaning and not getting paid for it.

We're offering to pay for the service in exchange for proof that it was you. And then I thought, well, let me reach out to some of the Brazilian restaurants in the area, just to see if they would speak to me. Oh, hi there. Is this the Prula restaurant in Marlborough, Massachusetts? Oh, hi, is that Emporia in Brazil? How can I help you? Hello, how may I help you? Or is it possible to speak to the manager? I'm the manager.

How may I help? This is the weirdest question you'll be asked today. We were wondering, for example, if we could put a poster up in your restaurant to see if anyone has any information and we can offer a reward. She should call the police and don't you think? Um, yeah, just leave one second. Just hung up. She just hung up on me.

This is going to be a very, very strange request. Oh. And hung up again. What's going on? It's a hard segue when you call someone up going, you know, explain who you are, that you're a comedy sort of crack investigation squad taking on a, it's not even a crime,

but sort of a non-crime crime that happened about almost eight years ago. And we're trying loosely to sort of see if someone, we don't have a picture of the person that, you know, confessed, but if we could get any leads about someone, we don't know what they look like. It was a really, it was a tough call. So I feel like the Brazilian community outreach has kind of hit the end of the road now on this one.

Another lead, dead. This is a case with no answers and no clear suspects. A puzzle that refuses to be solved. And our only witness is a tiny lizard. Which is why, at this point, we're bringing in the big guns. Introducing a very special expert. someone we've all grown very fond of since he advised us on our very first case. Hi Mike, are you there?

Our criminal forensic psychologist, the one and only, Professor Mike Berry. Yes, hi Karen, I'm here in sunny Sydney, Sydney, in Australia. It's so good to speak to you again. Earlier when we had lost, we had dropped the recording, it wasn't working, and you came on to the call and I'd forgotten to click record. I wrote down here, might confirm that we are friends, but the recording was off, but at 100% happens. So just now that we're actually recording, could you please just confirm that we are friends? Well, the question was, how would you describe us if you had to choose between are we friends or are we colleagues?

You started off as colleagues, but then having spent a really good time in Sweden, that moved into friendship. You're the first clinical forensic psychologist that we've ever become friends with, and we feel really, really happy with that. You are the weirdest bunch of women I know, you really are. That says a lot given the people that you have criminals that you've crossed paths with. That's really concerning, actually. We're the weirdest women out of all of the messed up murderers. We're the weirdest. Yeah.

We're worse than some murderers. Oh, no, no, not saying moralistically wrong. What I'm saying is it's just weird. We've got another case which is what we're calling a real head scratcher and I just want to know your thoughts on it because it's a really bizarre one and this case has been covered by the media. It happened in 2018 and it's a real classic non-crime crime. And so he walks me to the next room and then he sees that someone has entered his house

and has cleaned it top to bottom to perfection. Except for the kitchen. Except for the kitchen. It's a bit weird. I don't think I've ever come across somebody doing that. Unless somebody's made a mistake, because you're saying the house is open, somebody might have actually got the wrong address

and done a job and cleaned. You know, these professional cleaners that come in and do a house. And they might have just generally turned up Rochstale Road instead of Rochstead Street or something and gone into the house and just by chance it happened to be open and they've seen it in the right place.

Or it could be somebody who is really weird to want to tidy up everything. Somebody's OCD at a very high level. They've got to actually clean up somebody else's house suggests that they are very, very OCD. How does someone with OECD, how does it help them when they sort of tidy things?

If they're obsessed with having everything in order, they get distressed when things aren't in order so they want to put everything back, put the toys in the right place, put the shoes in the box and everything else. That relieves their attention. Yeah, an OCD person would do that. Again, it would be somebody that knows him

and wants to do it to try and show them how they should live rather than how they do live. A woman in her sort of 50s turns up outside the house and has already on her phone on Google Translate, she doesn't speak very good English, speaks Portuguese, goes up to this victim, Nate,

and says, it was me who cleaned your house with my daughter. And he was like, right, why and what happened? How did it come across and couldn't communicate at all? He said it was a very strong feeling that it just wasn't her. It didn't feel right to him. It didn't feel right. A whole interaction. Then the same day,

A younger woman turns up in the afternoon, and he opens door and says the same thing. She goes, oh, your mum was here, thinking it was the daughter that the mum talked about. And this girl said, what, no, my mum's in Brazil. And he was like, what on earth? Someone's turning up and confessing to this crime or this, you know, trespassing, and weird cleaning obsession they've got. And, yeah, there's a fake confession as well. false confessions are quite common in crimes

younger people tend to make false confessions and also people who are mentally ill they think they've done it and they convince themselves quite thoroughly that they've done it I come across over the years many cases where people have made false confessions even to murder

I guess animal psychics or animal communicators have never been used in any actual proper criminal case before if there was a, the only witness of something was an animal. A gecko. You've never, you've never seen anyone, an animal be brought to court before as to provide a witness. A witness through an animal communicator.

I personally haven't, no. I mean, there is a famous case, oh, I think about 16th century, where a pig was actually charged with murder. I know the case, but I can't remember the details, other than some religious nutter in the 16th century, decided that this pig had killed, I think it killed a child or something. I can't remember the details.

And the pig was found going to murder and actually was sat in the dot. So Mike, what I'm hearing here is that it is acceptable and there is clear precedent for us to bring a gecko to the stand. It's clear to do what? The gecko that was in the house... In the gem. when this weird cleaner broke in and cleaned the house.

The only animal that saw that was Percophany the Gekko. No, unless this cleaner did something rather intimate with it. It's unlikely there would be any DNA on the animal. And I don't see how else you can make the animal... Cough. Yeah, cough, yeah. We would be using an animal psychic, an animal whisperer, to tune in to Persephone the Gekoe and ask the Gekko,

can you please confirm the physical profile of the person who claimed this house in 2018 on May 15th? The first mistake you made was your language. Can you confirm? This implies that it's already that person. And you're saying, can you confirm it's that person? What you should have been saying is can you describe the person? You shouldn't ask them to confirm because that's putting words into their mouth. That's being suggestible. Mike, I'm not the one that's directly communicating with the gecko. I'm not the animal whisperer. So there will be a professional animal whisperer who will actually know how to form those sentences. We will absolutely brief this person to say, can you describe this person?

If you're trying to get information, I've actually hypnotised, suspected killer. And I had to be incredibly careful about the language I used simply because it was just a disability. You have to be very, very neutral in the language. Even more bizarrely, I was asked to organise hypnotes on Maria Henley. Were you? Yeah. I spent six months on that. And I had to explain to the police and some very senior home office people.

It was absolutely fascinating because they just thought, oh, you can go along, wave a clock or something. And hypnotise and you'll tell you where the bodies are. That was quite hard also to build up a relationship so that somebody trusts you enough to tell you something. and then you'd have to try and find where the bodies was, 25 years previously. I spent months and months arguing with the police, arguing with the home office, and then she went and died. I'm probably the only person in the country that was annoyed when she died. I think that's the thing that you're most annoyed about in your career because you were so

close to getting some answers. Yeah. Are you saying that we need to hypnotise the GICO? No. Okay It's very late where you are, Mike So we will let you go and enjoy the rest of your evening Thank you so much for talking with us

It's always so fun Okay Thanks Mike Thanks very much today Take good Bye Okay we're recording We've only got one next step

It's tenuous Let's own it that it's tenuous But we've got one witness Persephone the Gecko Yes Persephone the Gecko She may be the key to everything the only living creature that witnessed this crime.

For our victim Nate's sake, we cannot just let this case go cold. I'm worried that this is turning into the zoo episode from season one. Look, we've got nothing else to do, so this is the only chance we've got. I understand that and I'm willing to move forward with this, but this is going to be polarising, to say the least. No, I know.

Maybe we should run it past Helen. Helen will definitely not agree with this. As extreme as this is, we have to explore this lead. I think we actually just need to not tell Helen about it and hope she never listens to this episode. Hello, I'm Melissa. I am an animal communicator, a shaman, a medium, a psychic. It sounds like a lot of stuff. And I am communicating with Perciphany, the gecko today. I want to understand how you are going to communicate with the gecko and how you're going to receive information back and how I can also be adding some questions.

I don't know anything about animal discussions. What's going to happen? It's great for all of us to be involved and chat with her and ask questions. So we verbally say the questions, I don't like think it in my head and then wait for you to say she's responding or something. I actually say what I want to know out loud.

As a podcast as well, we probably should do that. It's a lot of work for me to go into another dimension, so it makes it much harder if I've defined. figure out what your question is. I don't want you in my head anyway. I don't think it's a safe place for anyone to be, so no problem with that. Don't worry. I won't be and don't want to be.

Also, we were thinking to maybe just have a little bit of trust-building exercise at the start, just so Persephone feels like she's in, you know, like a warm environment. And I don't know how to do that. Maybe we ask Nate to give her a cricker and we just say, Persephone, we're your friend. Maybe we could sing to her. I'm not singing. I'm not singing.

What do you think? What should we do to make Persefif? Stephanie feel relaxed. I think the feeding of a live cricket to Stephanie is probably enough. I think the bigger question is asking the cricket if it minds being a sacrifice for your podcast. Oh my God.

Oh my God. We're sacrificing a cricket for the podcast. This has gone so dark. This is really crossed another. This is not where I thought we would be and I don't feel very comfortable with it. Should we just check with the cricket if it's okay that we are sacrificing it?

And if the first one says no, then we'll move on to the second one and go, what about you? Do you mind being a sacrifice for when the cops say no, we say yes, because it's a great podcast and it's a great thing to be sacrificed for. And then we'll just move through all the crickets

until one says yes. Sure. We don't want to get distracted by talking to crickets. Like the crickets didn't see anything. They're not witnesses. Just one thing for you to know, Alyssa, is when you're asking Persephone or when you're talking to Persephone,

it's important to not ask leading questions, keeping the questions quite generic and open. That's why our clinical friends psychologist told us. So you can't be like, was it a woman and a daughter? Was it blah, blah, blah. You have to be like, describe the person. Very essential because if this goes to trial,

we need to show that we were not leading the witness in any particular way. Let's not forget the key mission is to find out if a stranger or someone that she knew came in on May the 15th, 2018 to clean the gym equipment. and if we can get a description of what that person looked like, that's kind of, that's what we want. I do think we need to ask whether Nate is the perpetrator or the mastermind behind this clean. I'm not saying he's the one who cleaned it.

He was with his son all day. But what if he arranged for this to happen so that he would get media attention? He's in sales. Maybe he wanted a bit of attention. Just something we should ask Persephone about. On the sly, Alyssa, just tune in to Nate and just get a vibe of if he's,

making this off or not. The overall feeling I get is when you said does Periphani, no, the person was a very strong, yes? And then when you said, did he do this himself? I heard, no, he's a doofist. He wouldn't. She's sassy. I like Pacephany. Pasefony thinks her owner is a doofist.

Alyssa has already made contact with Pacephony, the gecko at the centre of this case. The message she brought back was confronting. Aside from describing her owner, Nate, is a came a revelation we cannot afford to ignore. Persephone claims to know the Phantom Cleaner. The smallest witness in this case might deliver the biggest twist yet. And if Persephone cracks it, we may have to accept the humiliating truth.

We have been out detectived by a gecko. Coming up next on Phantom Cleaner. Maybe we can tell her that that could only happen if she cracks the case. for us? Are you trying to bribe a gecko? Is that what's happening right now? She's not trying to be unhelpful? Well, it's coming across that way, to be honest. The only living creature who knows the truth unfortunately can't share his secrets is what they say. But it's like, well, actually, I think she can. I never really had her as a suspect.

She might have set it up. Come on, Pysiphany. Come on, mate. I think she's somehow connected to it. It's not inconceivable. She could have done something. Talk to someone, hired someone. We've got some information from a witness to this crime, and that witness is Persephone the Deco. There's two things here from that call, which does sadly point quite strongly in your direction. So we just want to know what you have to say to defend your honour.