Erin Patterson tells murder trial she began foraging wild mushrooms during Victoria's COVID lockdowns

Australia Broadcast Center

2 days ago

Erin Patterson has told her triple-murder trial she first began foraging wild mushrooms during Victoria's COVID lockdowns, years before hosting her in-laws for a fatal meal.
Ms Patterson spent Tuesday on the witness stand as her trial continues over the deaths of her parents-in-law Don and Gail Patterson and Gail's sister Heather Wilkinson after she served them beef Wellingtons containing death cap mushrooms in July 2023.
The trial of Erin Patterson, who stands accused of using a poisoned meal to murder three relatives, continues.
Look back at how Tuesday's hearing unfolded in our live blog.
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She has also pleaded not guilty to the attempted murder of Heather's husband Ian Wilkinson, who was the sole surviving guest of the lunch at Ms Patterson's Leongatha home.
Ms Patterson told the court she had developed an interest in wild mushrooms in early 2020 when she and her children would go for walks at the Korumburra Botanic Gardens and surrounding areas during lockdown.
"The first time I noticed them I remember because the dog was eating some and I picked all the mushrooms that I could see because I wanted to try to figure out what they were to see if that might be a problem for him," she said.
The 50-year-old said she eventually became confident in her ability to identify different species of wild mushrooms.
"It was a process over several months in the lead-up to it, but when I got to a point where I was confident about what I thought they were … I cut a bit off one of the mushrooms, fried it up with some butter, ate it, and then saw what happened," she said.
The court heard that after buying a dehydrator, Ms Patterson used the machine to dry some of the wild mushrooms she had foraged as well as store-bought mushrooms.
The court heard not every attempt was successful, with Ms Patterson detailing one occasion she had tried to dehydrate the mushrooms whole rather than sliced.
"They were still a bit mushy inside … they just didn't dry properly," she said.
Ms Patterson said with experience, she became "very confident" she could accurately identify honey and slippery jack mushroom varieties growing in the Gippsland region.
She said they were "very nice" for eating, having earlier told the court that she was a fan of mushrooms as a food in general.
"They taste good and they're very healthy," she said.
Earlier, Ms Patterson's barrister, Colin Mandy SC, asked her about the beef Wellington lunch she had cooked for her relatives on July 29, 2023.
"Do you accept that there must have been death cap mushrooms in it?" Mr Mandy asked.
"Yes, I do," Ms Patterson replied.
She told the court she had bought most of the ingredients for the meal at Woolworths in Leongatha and some mushrooms were purchased from an Asian grocer in Melbourne.
However, Ms Patterson said the specific purchase of the mushrooms was not clear in her mind, beyond it being in the April school holidays.
She told the court she had purchased mushrooms from those kind of shops before, including shiitake, porcini and enoki varieties.
"Sometimes the bags might say something like 'wild mushroom mix' or 'forest mushroom'," she said.
Ms Patterson told the court the mushrooms she bought from the Asian grocer in April smelt "very pungent", so she put them in a tupperware container and took them back to her Leongatha home where she stored them.
Earlier, she told the court she generally stored mushrooms she had dried in her dehydrator in a tupperware container in the pantry.
Earlier in the day, Ms Patterson became emotional as she expressed regret about messages she wrote about her in-laws.
Ms Patterson was asked about her multiple separations from her husband, Simon.
She outlined how they formally separated at the end of 2015 and divided their assets up equally, without lawyers.
Ms Patterson told the jury she continued to attend Patterson family events after the formal separation, and that Heather Wilkinson would always make a point of talking to her at church.
She said her relationship with Don and Gail also did not change after the separation.
"I was just their daughter-in-law … they just continued to love me," she said, her voice breaking.
But by late 2022, Ms Patterson told the court there were tensions between her and Simon over finances, including school fees, a child support application by Ms Patterson, and Simon declining to pay an anaesthetist's fee for their son.
"I was hurt," Ms Patterson told the court.
"We'd never had any conflict over money that I could remember before this."
Mr Mandy took Ms Patterson through Facebook group messages in which she expressed frustration with her parents-in-law about their reluctance to get involved in their dispute about finances and said: "This family I swear to f***ing god."
Ms Patterson told the court she was feeling hurt, frustrated and "a little bit desperate".
She became emotional as she said she regretted saying it, and some other similar messages which were read to court.
"They didn't deserve it."
Earlier on Tuesday morning, Ms Patterson told the court about multiple experiences that she said caused her to lose faith in the health system, including incidents with her children.
She told the jury how her daughter cried for long durations as a newborn and she believed she was in pain, but was told she was just being an over-anxious mother and dismissed her concerns.
"I didn't like hospitals before it, like who does, but I didn't trust that these people knew what they were doing, and I was just in a heightened state of anxiety ever after about my daughter's health.
Ms Patterson also answered questions about whether or not she had been diagnosed with cancer.
Throughout the trial, the court has heard a cancer diagnosis was the reason Ms Patterson invited her parents-in-law and Ian and Heather Wilkinson to the beef Wellington lunch that ended in the ingestion of poisonous cap mushrooms.
On Tuesday Ms Patterson told the court she never had ovarian cancer, but that she had been experiencing chronic headaches, fatigue, abdominal pain, sudden weight gain and fluid retention.
She told the court she often googled her symptoms and went to GPs concerned about what the results suggested, including times when she thought she had a brain tumour, multiple sclerosis and auto-immune conditions.
"I think I wasted a lot of time, not just my time, but medical people's time, through all my 'doctor Googling'," she told the court.
"It's hard to justify it but with the benefit of hindsight I can see that … I just lost so much faith in the medical system that I decided that anything to do with my health and the children's health [I'll sort myself]."
Mr Mandy also took Ms Patterson back to evidence she gave on Monday about suffering from low self-esteem, particularly around her weight.
Ms Patterson said she had had body image issues since she was a teenager.
"When I was a kid, Mum would weigh us every week to make sure we weren't putting on too much weight and so I went to the extreme of barely eating then, to through my adulthood going the other way and bingeing, I suppose, for want of a better word.
She became visibly emotional as she said she was was bulimic, binge eating two-to-three times a week through her 20s.