Death cap mushrooms, foraging and a dehydrator: Erin Patterson takes the stand
After nearly a month of hearing experts, witnesses and police officers testify, this week Erin Patterson herself took to the stand. Patterson is facing three charges of murder and one of attempted murder – after she served a beef wellington lunch laced with death cap mushrooms – at her house in regional Victoria in 2023. She's pleaded not guilty to those charges. Justice and courts reporter Nino Bucci takes Reged Ahmad through some of the key moments of her evidence, as she tells her side of the story
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I could hear gasps in the courtroom as the ‘mushroom poisoner' finally took the stand and revealed why she survived – when three others died: GUY ADAMS lays bare a lie by Erin Patterson even the prosecution hasn't mentioned
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. She is also charged with the attempted murder of the fourth: Gail's husband Ian, a local Baptist pastor. The Crown's case is simple. It says she used the internet to locate and pick death cap mushrooms during the growing season, in April 2023, before preserving them in a food dehydrator. Three months later, she allegedly added them to a 'duxelles', or mushroom paté, used to make the four individual beef wellingtons she served to the alleged victims. Erin's own dish was, prosecutors claim, free from any poisonous fungi. She, however, insists otherwise, and has pleaded 'not guilty' to all charges. But prior to Monday's shock announcement that, in the words of her barrister Colin Mandy, 'the defence will call Erin Patterson', her case had been light on details of that deadly lunch. That has now changed. 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. Erin's condition subsequently improved, and she appears to have been more or less back to normal by Tuesday. That's what she told her counsel Colin Mandy, at least. His defence will now be built around the ingenious proposition that the 'Mushroom Cook' was, effectively, saved by bulimia. Importantly, Erin will also contest claims that she used a different coloured plate to her four lunch guests, in what the prosecution suggested was an attempt to ensure she didn't accidentally eat a poisonous beef wellington. Ian Wilkinson, the sole surviving guest, has told the court that they ate off grey plates while Erin used an orange one. Police photographs of her home taken a few days later appear to show two grey plates adjacent to the dishwasher. Erin insists, however, that she doesn't own any grey plates and instead used 'a couple of black, a couple of white, and one that's red on top and black underneath'. Whether the jury agrees is, of course, another matter. And that brings us to the two-and-a-half days Erin has since spent being subjected to hostile cross-examination by prosecutor Nanette Rogers, an austere character who approaches her task with the severity of a schoolmistress on the wrong end of a vulgar classroom prank. Yet this has been an altogether more gruelling – and more combative – experience. Erin is occasionally prone to tearfulness, and both sides accept that she has, at times, been a prodigious liar. With this perhaps in mind, Rogers has yet to address her alleged bulimia, but has instead focused on a number of intriguing sub-plots that form part of the prosecution case. One involves the provenance of the death cap mushrooms, which are relatively rare in this region of Australia, but sometimes grow under oak trees in the rainy months of April and May. According to mobile phone data analysed by police experts, Patterson visited two nearby small towns, Outtrim on April 22, and Loch on 28. 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. That is, perhaps, not surprising, since this reporter has established that the Enrich Clinic in Melbourne turns out to be a cosmetic dermatology facility which doesn't offer gastric bypass or any other major medical procedures. Ms Rogers may or may not be aware of this pressing fact, but she has yet to raise it with the jury. So they for now remain blissfully unaware that the defendant has told yet another porkie. Perhaps the whole thing will be chewed over next week, when the cross-examination is set to continue. Perhaps the Mushroom Murder trial's focus will pivot on to other matters. Either way, we are surely due more fireworks as this case simmers to a climax.
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