Australian mother found guilty of murder over poisoned beef Wellington lunch

Telegraph

14 hours ago

An Australian mother has been convicted of murdering three of her estranged husband's elderly relatives by deliberately serving them a poisoned beef Wellington.
Erin Patterson, 50, laced the meal with powdered death cap mushrooms before serving it to her in-laws Don and Gail Patterson for lunch at her home in the small town of Leongatha, Victoria, in July 2023.
The mother-of-two also served the poisoned beef Wellingtons to Heather and Ian Wilkinson, the aunt and uncle of her husband, Simon Patterson.
Hours later, all four became violently ill and were admitted to hospital with acute liver damage. Gail, 70, and her younger sister Heather, 66, died on August 4 2023 – less than a week after the lunch. Don, 70, meanwhile, underwent a last-minute liver transplant but died of multiple organ failure the day after the operation.
Heather's husband, Ian, a local pastor, was the sole survivor after receiving an organ transplant and spending seven weeks in hospital. He became a critical witness in the 10-week long trial at the Supreme Court of Victoria in Morwell that has been dubbed Australia's trial of the century and gripped the nation – and the world.
On Monday, Patterson was found guilty by unanimous verdict of three counts of murder and one count of attempted murder.
Patterson, a former air traffic controller, and a true-crime fan, sat with a stoic expression as the verdict was read out in the Morwell court. She did not shed any tears. Patterson will be sentenced at a later date.
How the case unfolded
Now locked, cold and empty, Erin Patterson 's home stands at the end of a muddy track on the outskirts of town. It's a peaceful neighbourhood, nestled in the scenic foothills of the Strzelecki Range, with neat, wide houses set back from a narrow track and facing an expanse of open green fields. A place of immaculate lawns and enormous skies.
Overlooking rolling fields where beef cattle graze, a hint of a salt breeze often whips up from the Bass Strait 18 miles south.
Patterson, who only moved into the house a year before the infamous lunch, met Simon in 2002 while working as an RSPCA representative at Monash city council in Melbourne, where she was brought up by her father, a government worker, and her mother, an academic who specialised in children's literature.
Simon, who was a civil engineer working for the same council, told the court Patterson was very intelligent. She was also witty and could be funny. She held a degree in business and accounting, and had worked as an air traffic controller at Melbourne's Tullamarine Airport.
But the Pattersons' relationship was rocky. Within two years of marrying in 2007, they had temporarily separated. Patterson told the court that her son's birth in 2009 had been 'very traumatic'. She required a caesarean section after medical staff lost his heartbeat, he said.
When she and Simon split for good in 2015, they initially maintained friendly relations. She also maintained good relations with her in-laws, she claimed.
'It never changed. I was just their daughter-in-law,' she told jurors through tears during her eight days in the witness box. 'They just continued to love me.'
The dynamic between her and Simon seemed to change, however, when Simon listed himself as 'separated' on his tax return in 2022. Erin was 'upset' by this, Simon told the court. The 'chatty nature' of their relationship 'pretty much stopped', and their communication was reduced to managing the practicalities of family life.
That year, there was a disagreement over child support payments. Messages Erin sent to a Facebook group chat on December 6 2022 suggested her frustration was mounting. '[T]his family I swear to f------ God,' said one post by the user Erin ErinErin – one of three Facebook names she used. She wrote that she was 'sick of this s---' and 'f--- 'em' about Simon's parents.
Fast-forward four months and, on April 18 2023, Christine McKenzie, a retired poisons expert, posted on a site called iNaturalist that she had found deathcap mushrooms beneath an oak tree in Loch, a South Gippsland village less than 18 miles from Leongatha. On May 21 2023, fungi expert Thomas May likewise uploaded a post on the site, where users can share their nature observations, showing he too had found death caps on a street in Outtrim, 12 miles from Leongatha. He included photos and co-ordinates specifying where. (There is no suggestion either of the witnesses committed any wrongdoing.)
Did Patterson use the citizen science website to source the deadly mushrooms that ended up in the fatal lunch? The prosecution suggested so, alleging that phone data indicated that she had travelled to Loch on April 28, and to both Loch and Outtrim on May 22.
Patterson told a different story, initially at least. She had bought sliced button mushrooms from a Woolworths store in Leongatha and dried mushrooms from a Chinese grocer in the Oakleigh or Glen Waverley area (both suburbs of Melbourne), she told medical staff after the poisonings. She denied having ever seen the posts on iNaturalist.
Patterson admitted in court that she had gone foraging for mushrooms in the months preceding the lunch (despite telling police, at first, that she hadn't), but said she never deliberately sought out the lethal death caps.
And, although she didn't deny they were in the meal she served, she said this was unintentional and afterwards, she 'panicked'.
She had long been a mushroom lover, she told the court. Her interest in wild varieties had started in 2020, when she noticed them while walking around the nearby town of Korumburra during lockdown, she said.
Three months before the deadly lunch, she had bought an electronic dehydrator and shared photos of her dehydrating mushrooms to a Facebook group chat. After her victims had fallen ill, two samples taken from the dehydrator tested positive for deathcap mushrooms.
But when her guests turned up on that fateful summer day just under two years ago, they had no cause for suspicion. It was 'very rare' for Patterson to host social gatherings at home, Simon told the court; but she ostensibly had a good reason on this occasion. She had some 'important medical news' to discuss, or so she claimed.
When Simon pulled out at short notice, she told him it was 'really disappointing' as she had 'spent many hours this week preparing lunch'. It was important, she stressed, that everyone was there and that she could have the necessary conversations.
The lunch went ahead all the same. To make the beef Wellingtons, Patterson adapted a recipe from the food blog RecipeTin Eats, serving mashed potato and green beans on the side. She told the court she had added to the main dish what she believed were dried fungi purchased from an Asian supermarket and stored in a container in her pantry. But, she acknowledged, 'Now I think that there was a possibility that there were foraged ones in there as well.'
Her son, 14, and daughter, nine, were not present at the lunch, but the reason for this seemed clear when Erin delivered her news: that she was suffering from 'life-threatening' ovarian cancer.
It later transpired that she had never received any such diagnosis. What she had done, she said in court, was consult 'Dr Google' because she was worried about her health. She meanwhile planned to have weight-loss surgery but was too embarrassed to admit this, she said, and so intended to pretend to her in-laws that she would instead be having cancer treatment.
'I was ashamed of the fact that I didn't have control over my body or what I ate,' she said. 'I didn't want to tell anybody, but I shouldn't have lied to them.'
Her guests weren't to know she was lying, of course, and prayed for her that day. (Patterson said she was a 'fundamental atheist' but that Simon was a Christian who had converted her.) They also advised their hostess on how to break the news of her supposed illness to her children.
That night, the true nature of the meal became horrifyingly clear. The Wilkinsons were admitted to Leongatha Hospital with severe gastric symptoms. Don and Gail Patterson, similarly afflicted, also went to hospital on July 30. All received intensive treatment, but Erin Patterson's parents-in-law and Mrs Wilkinson died within days, of 'altered liver function and multiple organ failure'. Mr Wilkinson was placed in a coma, remained in hospital for almost two months and survived.
Erin Patterson, too, went to hospital with stomach symptoms. By this point, her four guests had been diagnosed with death cap mushroom poisoning while Erin, for her part, 'didn't look unwell', a nurse told the court. Instead she was angry and tearful, repeatedly insisting, 'I don't want any of this,' in relation to her hospital treatment. She was discharged on August 1.
Was she faking illness? The defence case was that no, she was genuinely unwell, since she too had eaten the meal. She simply wasn't as unwell as her guests. Erin also explained her very different reaction to the meal by claiming she made herself vomit not long after her guests had left, and after bingeing on most of a cake. It was a problem she had battled for decades, she said.
She told the court she had fed her children leftovers of the beef Wellington the day after her guests had come over, but had scraped off the mushrooms and pastry because they were fussy. The prosecution cast doubt over her account.
Erin Patterson had eaten off a different-coloured plate from those her guests had eaten off, the court heard. Mrs Wilkinson thought this odd, telling Simon while she was in hospital: 'Her plate had colours on it. I wondered why that was. I've puzzled about it since the lunch.'
Mr Wilkinson confirmed in his evidence that Patterson had served her guests' food on four large grey plates while she herself had eaten from an orange/tan-coloured one.
The prosecution also suggested that Patterson had lied about feeding her children beef Wellington leftovers, and questioned why she would give a meal to her children when she 'knew or suspected' that it had made her guests ill.
'I didn't know or suspect that,' she replied.
She didn't think, at first, that they needed to be brought to hospital either, since she didn't think they had eaten any of the mushrooms, she explained.
'I suggest that you would have wanted them to have immediate medical attention, notwithstanding your claim that they hadn't eaten the mushrooms,' prosecutor Nanette Rogers said.
Four days after the lunch, on August 2, Patterson jettisoned the dehydrator at a tip just outside town. She later claimed she had panicked after her guests had fallen ill. She also wiped her phone in the days after the lunch, which she said was due to her fear that she would be blamed for her guests' deaths as Simon had accused her of poisoning them.
When news of the poisonings broke and began to attract media attention, Patterson tearfully insisted she was 'devastated to think that these mushrooms may have contributed to the illness suffered by my loved ones'.
She had, she said, 'no reason to hurt these people, whom I loved'.
Reason or not, on November 2 that year, she was formally charged by police.
By the time her sensational trial opened at the end of April this year, the reason remained elusive, and the prosecution offered no possible motive to the jury.
'You might be wondering, now, 'Why would the accused do this, what is the motive?'' she said. 'You might still be wondering this at the end of the trial.'
Indeed they might, along with the many others who have followed the ins and outs of these strange and shocking proceedings.
It was an oddity – and potentially a weakness in the case – that Patterson's barrister attempted to use to bolster the defence. In his closing address to the court, senior counsel Colin Mandy said the prosecution had relied on 'ridiculous' and 'convoluted' propositions, including the idea that it didn't matter that Erin had no motive, and that she thought it 'would all be passed off as some strange case of gastro, where everyone died except her'.
But, said Rogers in her own closing address, there was 'no reasonable alternative explanation' for the deaths other than Patterson seeking out death caps and adding them to the meal she served 'with an intention to kill'.
Justice Christopher Beale, in his summing up, pointed out to the jury 'inconsistencies' in evidence given by some of the trial witnesses, but also in evidence given by Ms Patterson. How much she ate of her beef Wellington, whether she had a habit of picking and eating wild mushrooms, the source of the the mushrooms used in the meal – apparent question marks hung over these and other matters.
In convicting the triple murderer, jurors evidently agreed. A trial that transfixed the world is over. Justice done for the four innocent victims. Yet the question of why Patterson killed will undoubtedly prove a puzzle for years to come.
Residents in this normally quiet corner of Gippsland are now bracing themselves: they know another wave of intense media attention in the form of news crews messing up their grass verges is on the way.
When The Telegraph visited the area, Justice Christopher Beale was coming to the conclusion of his jury directions at LaTrobe Valley Magistrates' Court, in Morwell, 35 miles north-east of Leongatha.
'It's been very tense during the trial, everyone is on tenterhooks,' said local resident Steven Lodge.
Lodge, 52, an IT specialist for a local water company, lives in a single-level property just a few houses away from Patterson, and would often see her when he was out walking his two dogs daily. 'I'd only lived here for a short time before it happened, but I remember she would wave and give me a nod; she just seemed like a friendly, normal mum,' he said.
'She'd be in the car with her two kids ferrying them around at all times, just like a lot of parents with busy lives.'
Like many locals, Lodge is quite the expert on the trial and what's been reported in the media.
'I've been following the trial closely and it still seems surreal the lunch happened here on this street.'
Many people wanted to believe Patterson's testimony that the whole incident was an accident, he says.
'This is a small community where people help each other out and care for each other; intentionally poisoning people has never been heard of… but then… there are so just so many odd things that are hard to explain, like switching sim cards on the phones after it happened and dumping the dehydrator at our local tip.
'At the same time, if you think you are going to be wrongly blamed for something you didn't do and people are dying, maybe anyone would panic.'
On the metal gates at the top of Patterson's 60ft driveway, there is a laminated note to media written on her behalf. Independently wealthy, Erin funded and helped design this property herself, only a few years ago. The note is sharp and to the point.
'Please be advised that the owner of this property hereby gives notice to all members of the media or any person employed or contracted to an organisation, that you are not permitted to enter any part of this property as marked by the boundary fence. If you do enter then you are committing the offence of trespass and will be reported to the police.'
In the small hamlet of Loch, shop keepers and locals are bemused to find themselves wrapped up in this sprawling, complicated story. It's a tiny historical pit-stop, off the main road, popular with Melburnians heading to coastal holiday homes and campsites.
There is an antiques shop, a pretty red-brick brewery and distillery which once used to be an old bank, a general food store and a couple of wine bars which serve expensive menus to match the expensive car brands that park up at the weekends and in holiday season.
It is here that Patterson foraged for death cap mushrooms under oak trees, after a photo was posted on a nature website in April 2023, a few months before the deadly lunch. Police allege her mobile phone pinged from a nearby tower.
One shopkeeper, who did not want to be named, sighs. 'It's been very hard to read for a lot of us.'
With the trial over, 'Everyone can then focus on what matters – that we've lost three locals who, by all accounts, were very much loved.'
In Korumburra Baptist Church, where survivor Ian Wilkinson still takes the weekly Sunday service at 10.30am, a different message awaits visiting media or curious passersby.
' Matthew 7:15 – Be on your guard against false prophets; they come to you looking like sheep from the inside but on the outside they are really like wild wolves. '