After countless hours helping coordinate her friend’s wedding, Kait Dorrough never imagined the special night ending with a strange, cake-eating wedding “guest” robbing her at the reception.
Little did Dorrough know, she had just become the latest victim of a serial wedding-crasher bandit who has gained infamy among brides and grooms across Alabama, Tennessee and Mississippi.
“I was speechless,” Dorrough, 34, told The Messenger of the incident at the Guntown, Miss., wedding party on Sept. 30.
“I mean, like, are you kidding me?”
The wedding pest turned out to be Sandra Lynn Henson, a 57-year-old woman from Mississippi, who’s become infamous over the last several years for her alleged habit of sneaking into weddings to which she was not invited across the tristate region.
While the crashing might seem harmless enough, police say after sneaking her way into the events, Henson has made off with thousands of dollars in gifts and other items when guests are distracted with festivities, NBC News reported.
In this case, she allegedly stuffed the pilfered cash into her bra.
“We were all just so shocked,” Dorrough says of the moment she and other guests wedding confronted Henson near a side bridal room at the wedding venue.
Dorrough says the bride’s sister, Bethany Clark, was the first to become suspicious of Henson, who was alone in the room eating a piece of wedding cake with her fingers.
“Bethany thought maybe she had dementia or something like she didn’t know where she was,” Dorrough says, explaining that Clark’s radar went off when Henson couldn’t specify who accompanied her to the wedding.
Shortly after, Dorrough says she checked her Tory Burch bag, near where Henson had been standing, and noticed that the $200 she had in one of the pockets was missing.
“So Beth walks back over to her, and she’s just like, ‘I’m done,'” says Dorrough. “She tells Sandra that she had 30 seconds to give me back whatever she took or the cops could start when they got here.
“Then, Sandra reaches into her bra and pulls the money out right in the middle of the floor,” she says.
Dorrough shared a video, allegedly of Henson apologizing after being caught.
“It came over me,” the woman says in the footage. “I just thought, I wonder if she has $20, and that’s what I thought, and I’m sorry.
“I have been doing so well, so well, I had myself in church, I’ve been staying home and just Doordashing … I’m sorry, I have no excuse.”
Efforts to reach Henson for comment on Thursday were unsuccessful.
After police arrived and arrested Henson, Dorrough says they searched her name online and were surprised to see that she had already been charged with stealing from weddings many times before.
How, they wondered, did she end up at their event?
“The first time she got caught was five or six years ago, but nobody is punishing her,” Dorrough says.
Henson pleaded guilty this week to petit larceny, trespassing and disturbing the peace following the incident and was ordered to pay a fine of $650.
Though she will have to reappear in court next year for the case, she has since been released.
“I mean, I got my money back, which is great, but there’s tons of people who probably haven’t,” Dorrough says of her reaction to Henson’s release. “And I’m sure she is immediately going back to [stealing] because they basically said if you pay this amount of money for the fine, you can walk free.
“I get there are probably bigger problems that police have to deal with, but it’s just crazy to me.”
Dorrough notes that the bride and groom, Lexi and Brady Butler, did not have a gift table, which is likely why Henson had to “go digging” through the bridal room, which eventually led to her getting caught.
Henson is expected to appear in court on Nov. 23 in connection with a February 2020 indictment in Lauderdale County, Ala.