Death cap mushrooms: What are the symptoms of mushroom poisoning?
In July 2023, Erin Patterson invited four of her ex-husband's relatives to lunch at her home in Leongatha, a small town in Victoria. Within days, three of them had died.
Her estranged husband's uncle – a local pastor – was the only one to survive after spending weeks in a hospital.
The dish served to Ms Patterson's former in-laws, Don and Gail Patterson, and two other relatives, Heather and Ian Wilkinson, that day was a homemade beef wellington, which prosecutors say contained death cap mushrooms – one of the world's deadliest types. Doctors said the symptoms matched death cap mushroom poisoning, which forensic tests later confirmed.
The prosecution alleges that Ms Patterson, 50, deliberately poisoned the lunch guests after inviting them under the false claim that she had cancer and needed their advice on telling her children. Ms Patterson has pleaded not guilty, saying the poisoning was a tragic accident.
The trial, expected to last five to six weeks, is being covered by ABC through a daily podcast, while streaming platform Stan is producing a documentary on what it calls 'one of the highest profile criminal cases in recent history'.
Earlier, in a statement, Ms Patterson said that she did not know the mushrooms were possibly poisonous when she prepared the meal in Leongatha, South Gippsland. 'I am now devastated to think that these mushrooms may have contributed to the illness suffered by my loved ones,' the 48-year-old said at the time. 'I really want to repeat that I had absolutely no reason to hurt these people whom I loved.'
'I am now wanting to clear up the record because I have become extremely stressed and overwhelmed by the deaths of my loved ones,' she continued. 'I am hoping this statement might help in some way. I believe if people understood the background more, they would not be so quick to rush to judgment.'
Speaking about the loss in the community, South Gippsland Shire Mayor, Cr Nathan Hersey, said: 'The deaths of three well-respected members of our community – and the serious condition of another – have shocked and saddened local residents, many of whom knew them well.
'They were active in their hometown of Korumburra and had made significant contributions to education, religious and community support organisations. Their loss will be felt greatly and by many.'
The death cap, Amanita phalloides, contains the poison amanitin and is responsible for 90 per cent of deaths by fungus, with half a cap or even less enough to kill a person, according to the Woodland Trust.
Here is everything you need to know about the death cap and mushroom poisoning:
What does a death cap mushroom look like and where can it be found?
The death cap is a large fungus up to around 15cm across and 15cm tall with a domed or white cap and an off-white stem.
These mushrooms can be located in parks, gardens and nature strips, the Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria has said on its website.
It often resides under exotic trees, especially oak (Quercus). There have also been reports of Amanita phalloides growing under Eucalyptus in Algeria and Tanzania, but there have been no confirmed sightings of the death cap away from exotic trees in Australia, the website added.
In Victoria, the death cap is often found widely across Melbourne in suburbs including Ashburton, Burwood, Camberwell, Canterbury, Clayton, Deepdene, East Malvern, Emerald, Heathmont, Heidelberg, Kew, Sandringham, South Yarra, Surrey Hills and Wheelers Hill. In regional Victoria, Death Cap has also been reported from Bendigo, Bright, Castlemaine, Gisbourne and Wandiligong. They can be expected to grow anywhere in Victoria where oaks are planted.
It was first confirmed in Australia in the 1960s, according to Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria, but may have been undetected prior to that.
The death cap appears during the autumn and sometimes winter seasons.
Better Health, which provides health and medical information in Australia, has said there are three main effects of poisonous mushrooms, this includes hallucinations, gastrointestinal illness and liver failure, which can lead to death.
Other symptoms include:
• Confusion
• Muscle weakness
• Agitation
• Rapid heart rate
• Headache
The symptoms of gastrointestinal illness include:
• Nausea
• Vomiting
• Stomach cramps
• Diarrhoea
'About 9 out of 10 fungi-related deaths are attributable to the death cap mushroom (Amanita phalloides),' Better Health has said, and symptoms can occur six to 24 hours after consuming the poisonous mushroom.
Are there any treatments for mushroom poisoning?
If you suspect you or anyone else may have eaten a poisonous mushroom, do not wait for symptoms to occur to seek medical help, Better Health said.
You should try to seek medical attention from the nearest hospital or your local doctor, who will then be able to provide you with the treatment they think is best for you.
In Australia, people are advised to contact the Victorian Poisons Information Centre as soon as possible.
Better Health has said: 'It helps to have a sample of the mushroom. VPIC staff may ask you to send them a photo of the wild mushroom to help in the species identification and risk assessment.
'If the person has collapsed, stopped breathing, is having a fit or is suffering an anaphylactic reaction, immediately ring triple zero (000) for an ambulance.'
In the UK, the NHS has advised people showing signs of being poisoned to call 999 to request an ambulance or take the person to their local A&E department.
'In serious cases, it may be necessary for the person to stay in hospital for treatment. Most people admitted to hospital because of poisoning will survive,' the NHS website has said.
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For five weeks, the fate of Erin Patterson has hinged on a single, contested question: how did she survive the toxic meal that left three of her guests dead and the fourth in a near-fatal coma? On Wednesday, we finally got the answer. Or rather, we got Erin's version of the answer, via a blow-by-blow account of the fateful day that she made beef wellington, using poisonous death cap mushrooms, then served it to members of her estranged husband Simon's family for lunch. It was the 50-year-old housewife's third day in the witness box of a tiny court in Morwell, a mining town roughly two hours' drive south-east of Australia's second city, Melbourne, and half an hour from her home in Leongatha, where these tragic events played out. Erin is standing trial for the murder of three of her guests: Simon's elderly parents Don and Gail, along with Gail's sister Heather Wilkinson, in a case that has drawn global attention to this corner of rural Victoria. 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Erin Trudi Patterson, who had thus far spent this marathon trial sitting silently in the dock, occasionally dabbing her eyes with a tissue, has since spent five days, and more than 20 hours, giving evidence under oath. At times, she's seemed intelligent, composed and commanding. On others, frantic, evasive and downright dishonest. I've been there for almost every second, sometimes watching in person, from a few yards away, and sometimes from an overflow room across the first-floor landing of Latrobe Valley Magistrates Court where the small army of reporters and TV crews who are unable to fit into the half dozen Press seats are permitted to scrutinise the soap-opera proceedings via video link. It was here that, to gasps audible both inside and outside the courtroom, Erin sought on Wednesday afternoon to explain how, exactly, she managed to avoid falling ill. Twisting in her chair, and at times blinking as quickly as she spoke, the mother-of-two alleged that she'd been 'fighting a never-ending battle of low self-esteem most of my adult life', which revolved largely around 'issues with body image' and weight gain. What's more, she claimed that since her 20s she had been secretly suffering from bulimia, an eating disorder characterised by binge eating and subsequent vomiting. A compulsion to gorge herself on food had, she added, struck shortly after her guests had departed from the fatal meal, on Saturday July 29, 2023. Describing how she had cleared away leftovers, including roughly two-thirds of an orange cake that Gail, 70, had brought for dessert, Erin told the jury: 'I kept cleaning up the kitchen and putting everything away and, um, I had a piece of cake.' There followed a short pause. 'And then,' she added, 'I had another piece of cake. And then another.' 'How many pieces of cake did you have?' asked Mandy. 'All of it,' came her reply. 'And what happened after you ate the cake?' 'I felt sick. I felt over-full. So I went to the toilets and brought it up again.' A few hours later, Patterson claims to have fallen ill with explosive diarrhoea. However, the fact she'd vomited up much of the beef wellington meant her symptoms were far less severe than the other guests. The four ended up in hospital the following day and swiftly fell into comas. Three would be dead by the end of the week from organ failure. Erin escaped unscathed, aside from an incident in which she was caught short the day after the meal, while driving along a local freeway with her son. 'I went off into the bush and went to the toilet,' she recounted. 'Then I cleaned myself up a little bit with tissues and put them in a dog poo bag.' The court heard they stopped at a service station where she dropped the bag into a bin. 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At both locations, sightings of death caps had been logged a few days earlier on an internet site named iNaturalist. Analysis of a computer seized from Patterson's home suggests she had used iNaturalist and had used it to search for local locations of death caps a year before. In a gripping exchange yesterday, Rogers directly asked a strikingly evasive Patterson if she'd been responsible for those web searches. 'It's possible. I don't know,' came her response. Did she have an interest in death cap mushrooms? 'Depends what you mean by interest,' came her reply. As to whether she'd been to Loch on April 28, Patterson stated: 'I don't know.' Asked if she'd gone there to look for death cap mushrooms, she replied simply: 'Disagree.' Another sub-plot involves a food dehydrator, which Patterson had purchased on April 28, the day she allegedly visited Loch. The machine was used to preserve field mushrooms, including specimens Patterson bought at supermarkets and then ground into powder to add to muffins and other food she prepared for her children. But laboratory tests of the machine found traces of death caps on it too. The prosecution argues that the dehydrator was deliberately used to preserve the deadly fungi, so Patterson could use them to poison her relatives months later. But Erin insists that the death caps were foraged by mistake and, after being dried, transferred into a Tupperware container filled with dehydrated mushrooms from a Chinese supermarket. She claims to have then used products from that container when preparing her 'duxelles', after taste tests of the initial mixture revealed it to be 'a little bland'. In other words, it was all a terrible accident. Of particular interest, given this debate, are photographs found on a Samsung tablet seized from Erin's home. Taken in early May, they show trays of mushrooms being weighed on scales adjacent to the device. An expert witness, Dr Tom May, has testified with 'a high degree of confidence' that they were death caps. During cross-examination, Rogers suggested to Erin that these images depicted her 'weighing these mushrooms, these death cap mushrooms, so that you could calculate the weight required for the administration of a fatal dose for one person'. She added: 'Agree or disagree?' Erin, seemingly distressed at the question, responded: 'Disagree.' 'And the weight required for five fatal doses, for five people, agree or disagree?' Again, she responded: 'Disagree.' Whatever those images actually show, both sides accept that Erin then ended up disposing of the dehydrator at a local tip on the Wednesday after the fatal lunch. The prosecution says this was part of an effort to hide evidence. But Erin claims instead that she dumped the device following a conversation with her estranged husband Simon 48 hours earlier in which he accused her of having poisoned his parents. 'Simon seemed to be of the mind that maybe this was intentional and I just got really scared,' she told the court. 'Child Protection were coming to my house that afternoon and... I was scared they'd remove the children.' Despite her four lunch guests by this stage being seriously ill, Erin admitted that she repeatedly lied to doctors and public health investigators over the ensuing days by telling them that her beef wellingtons had not contained foraged mushrooms. 'I lied because I was afraid I would be held responsible,' was how she put it, wiping away a tear. She further claimed to have decided to conduct a series of 'factory resets' to wipe information from her various mobile telephones and other devices because: 'I knew there were photos on there of mushrooms in the dehydrator so I just panicked and didn't want them to see them.' Erin's relationship with Simon, a civil engineer she married in 2007, increasingly appears to be of central importance to the case. The couple, who had separated in 2015, appear to have enjoyed a largely cordial relationship until late 2022, when they began to argue over money and the question of who ought to pay their two children's school fees. That December, Erin had asked Don and Gail, her parents-in-law, to intervene in the dispute. However they had declined to get involved, a decision that left her deeply upset, judging by messages she posted in Facebook chat groups in which she'd portrayed her husband as sinister and manipulative. 'This family I swear to f****** God' read one such post.' 'I'm sick of this sh**, I want nothing to do with them... So f*** 'em,' went another. These and other hostile messages were presented to Erin in court this week as evidence that she'd fallen out with her in-laws prior to the fatal lunch, to which Simon was also invited but pulled out at the last moment. Perhaps the oddest of all this week's courtroom arguments involved the circumstances in which Erin invited her guests to the lunch in the first place. Ian Wilkinson, the survivor who gave evidence for the prosecution, says that Erin had told her guests she wanted to discuss a 'medical issue'. And over pudding, he recalled her telling them she'd been diagnosed with a 'very serious' and 'life-threatening' cancer. 'I didn't quite catch what she said but I thought it was... ovarian or cervical cancer,' he said. 'She was anxious about telling the kids. She was asking our advice about that.' In fact, Erin was not suffering from cancer. The prosecution claims that she faked the diagnosis in order to 'ensure and explain why her children would not be present at the lunch' and to lure the remaining guests to the event. During a deeply awkward period of cross-examination, Erin variously denied and then admitted that she'd lied to her lunch guests about the condition. She then sought to explain the behaviour by claiming she had been planning to have gastric bypass surgery, but was 'ashamed' about her weight, so did not tell anyone. 'I was really embarrassed about it, so I thought perhaps letting them believe I had some serious issue that needed treatment might mean they'd be able to help me with the logistics around the kids, and I wouldn't have to tell them the real reason,' she said. Pressed for details, she claimed to have 'an appointment [booked] in early September at the Enrich Clinic in Melbourne' for a 'pre-surgery' assessment, though couldn't remember 'the exact date' it was due to happen. 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Daily Mail
2 days ago
- Daily Mail
Erin Patterson is accused of luring her guests to fatal lunch as tears flow under intense cross examination
Erin Patterson has been reduced to tears under intense cross examination where she was branded 'two-faced' by a senior prosecutor. The 50-year old has been put under the spotlight now for three days after she was called as the defence's one and only witness. Patterson has pleaded not guilty to the murders of Don and Gail Patterson, and Gail's sister, Heather Wilkinson. They died after consuming death cap mushrooms served in beef Wellingtons during lunch at her Leongatha home on July 29, 2023. On Friday, Crown prosecutor Dr Nanette Rogers bombarded Patterson with accusations that she deliberately murdered her lunch guests by coating the beef Wellingtons she served with death cap mushrooms. The trial has been going on now since April 28 at the Supreme Court of Victoria sitting at the Latrobe Valley Law Courts in Morwell, east of Melbourne. While the jury heard at the beginning of the trial the prosecution would offer no motive as to why Patterson allegedly murdered her guests, Dr Rogers suggested the mother of two had actually hoped her estranged husband Simon would attend. The jury has heard Simon Patterson pulled out of the lunch the night before, leaving his parents, uncle and auntie to face the meal without him. Patterson has maintained to anyone who has asked that she loved Don and Gail Patterson. 'I suggest that you didn't love them; correct or incorrect?' Dr Rogers asked Patterson. 'That's not true,' the alleged killer responded. 'I suggest that you were angry that they took Simon's side in your argument with him in 2022 about the child allowance?' Dr Rogers continued. 'That's not true,' Patterson insisted. The jury has heard Patterson's relationship with her estranged husband had become frosty at the end of 2022 over issues with child support and unpaid school fees. 'And that feeling towards them continued; correct or incorrect?' Dr Rogers said. 'Incorrect,' came the response. Dr Rogers accused Patterson of pretending to love her in-laws while secretly loathing them. 'You had two faces: a public face of appearing to have a good relationship with Don and Gail, as shown to people ... and police in your record of interview; agree or disagree?' Dr Rogers said. 'Are you asking me to agree if I had two faces?' Patterson asked. 'I had a good relationship with Don and Gail.' But Dr Rogers continued her onslaught against Patterson, who grabbed for tissues throughout a gruelling day in the witness box. 'I suggest that your private face was the one you showed in your Facebook Messenger use; correct or incorrect?' Dr Rogers said. 'Incorrect,' Patterson said. The jury has heard Patterson expressed frustration with both her in-laws and Simon to those Facebook mates in a series of chat messages. 'That is how you really felt about Simon Patterson as expressed to your Facebook friends; correct or incorrect?' Dr Rogers continued. 'Incorrect.' 'And that you did not regard him as being a decent human being at his core; correct or incorrect?' Dr Rogers alleged. 'Actually, I still believe that,' Patterson said. Dr Rogers suggested Patterson only invited the Wilkinsons because she thought it would make it more likely that Don and Gail would accept the invitation. 'Did you invite Ian and Heather to lunch to ensure that Don and Gail would also attend?' Dr Rogers asked. 'I didn't need to do anything. I just needed to invite Don and Gail and they'd come because they loved me,' Patterson said. 'Did you ask Ian and Heather in an attempt by you to get Simon to attend as well?' Dr Rogers asked. 'No,' Patterson replied. 'I suggest to you that you thought Simon would be more likely to accept the invitation if he knew that his parents and Ian and Heather were also attending,' Dr Rogers said. 'I suggest you told him you had a medical issue to encourage him to attend.' Patterson denied all of the allegations, maintaining what happened at the lunch was a tragic accident. 'They did love me and I did love them,' she said of Simon's parents. 'I do love them.' The trial continues. .
