Erin Patterson's week on the stand in her mushroom murder trial

Australia Broadcast Center

21 hours ago

For weeks, the trial of Erin Patterson has moved carefully through vast expanses of at-times highly technical evidence.
It's included contested data from mobile phone towers, reports of digital analysis carried out on seized electronic devices and tables tracking the movement of SIM cards between phones.
It's even included a run-through from a fungi expert on how to distinguish the deadly Amanita phalloides (or death cap) mushroom variety from its more benign relatives.
But it was in the sixth week of the Supreme Court trial that a packed courtroom in Morwell heard hours of evidence directly from the person who organised the 2023 beef Wellington meal that led to three deaths.
The trial of Erin Patterson, who stands accused of using a poisoned meal to murder three relatives, continues.
Look back at how Friday's hearing unfolded in our live blog.
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In her evidence, Erin Patterson told the jury she never intended to harm the four relatives she invited to Saturday lunch at her Leongatha home.
She said she now believed foraged mushrooms had accidentally made their way into the meal in a mix-up that had seen them blended with other dried mushrooms purchased from an Asian grocer in Melbourne's south-east.
The 50-year-old, who has pleaded not guilty to three charges of murder and one of attempted murder, admitted several times she had used lies and exaggeration in the past.
But she maintained she was telling the truth when she rejected one of the prosecution's central claims: that her lie to her lunch guests about possibly requiring cancer treatment in the future was part of a carefully laid plot to murder them.
"I suggest that you never thought you would have to account for this lie of having cancer, because you thought that the lunch guests would die and your lie would never be found out," Dr Rogers said to Ms Patterson.
"That's not true," she replied. She also said while she may have indicated cancer treatment lay ahead, she never told them a diagnosis had been made.
This week, Ms Patterson gave deeply personal evidence as she discussed the context in which the lunch had taken place.
The evidence went as far back as her childhood, when Ms Patterson told the court her mother would weigh her "weekly".
She said she had grown up with significant body image issues, engaged in binge eating and by the time of the lunch, she was planning to undergo gastric-band surgery as a way to control her weight.
Ms Patterson said she was too embarrassed to tell her relatives about this, so instead she fed her parents-in-law Gail and Don Patterson a lie.
The court heard Ms Patterson told them in several messages sent before the lunch that she was undergoing a biopsy and MRI for a lump on her elbow.
"I remember thinking I didn't want to tell anybody what I was going to have done, I was really embarrassed about it, so I thought perhaps letting them believe I had some serious issue that needed treatment might mean they would be able to help me with the logistics around the kids and I wouldn't have to tell them the real reason," Ms Patterson said.
It was a lie she expanded on at the lunch, although Ms Patterson told the court while she had indicated she may need ovarian cancer treatment, she did not believe she had told them a diagnosis was made.
Her history with illnesses and the medical system was also explored in evidence.
The court heard several traumatic experiences with her children's health and hospital staff had built a sense of distrust.
"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'm going to have to solve that problem myself," she said.
Earlier in the trial, the court heard from medical staff who said Ms Patterson needed to be persuaded to bring her children (who had eaten leftover meat from the meal) in to be tested for death cap mushroom poisoning.
Ms Patterson said any perceived reluctance wasn't because she did not want her children to be treated, but because she was wary of the "drastic step" of hospital admission.
"I wanted to understand that that was really necessary, because of their anxieties about being in hospital," Ms Patterson said.
But she said ultimately, she understood "the logic" of that course of action.
Ms Patterson also gave detailed evidence on the family dynamics at the time of the lunch.
Tensions over financial matters had flared between her and her estranged husband in late 2022 and she had feared it was damaging her relationship with the Patterson family.
In a bid to bring them closer, Ms Patterson had organised a lunch in June, 2023, with Gail and Don Patterson and the children, where she served up shepherd's pie.
"The kids and I had such a good time seeing nanna and papa," she said.
Ms Patterson said the positive engagement with her in-laws had inspired her to organise another lunch, this time with Gail's sister Heather Wilkinson and her husband Ian.
"Her and Ian have been really good to me over the years, I wanted to have some more connection with them," she said.
It was against this backdrop that Ms Patterson said she approached Gail and Heather after a church service in Korumburra one Sunday.
"Would you like to come to lunch at my house?" Erin said she asked them.
"They said 'we'd love to'."
Ms Patterson told the court she decided a "special" dish was required for the event, and so decided to attempt beef Wellington for the first time.
A few "deviations" were made to the RecipeTin Eats cookbook method, she said.
Due to meat availability, Ms Patterson said she made individual pastry parcels rather than the one log called for in the recipe.
A prosciutto layer was dropped because Don Patterson didn't eat pork, the mustard was left out and a crepe layer was swapped for the simpler option of filo pastry.
Crucially, Ms Patterson told the court she believed the deadly addition to the meal likely came during the preparation of the mushroom paste, or duxelle, that coats the meat.
She said on the morning of the lunch, she had cooked down Woolworths-bought mushrooms when she tasted the duxelle.
"It seemed a little bland, to me," she said.
"So I decided to put in the dried mushrooms that I'd bought from the grocer that I still had in the pantry.
"So I put them in, like a little … strainer with a handle … and just roughly poured water over them to get the crispness out of them.
"I chopped them up and I, like, sprinkled them over the duxelle and pushed them in with an egg flip."
She said at the time, she had believed the dried mushrooms were the ones she'd bought from an Asian grocer in Melbourne's south-east.
"Now I think that there was a possibility that there were foraged ones in there as well," she said, closing her eyes and blinking as her voice cracked.
After guests arrived, Ms Patterson said the individual Wellingtons were plated up and put on the table with no great thought as to who ended up with which portion.
"I said, you know, 'grab a plate guys, I'm just going to finish off the gravy.' I turned around," she said.
Ms Patterson told the court she only had part of her meal and shortly after the guests had left, she binged on two-thirds of an orange cake her mother-in-law had brought, before vomiting it all up.
The events after the guests left the dining table have been raked over in hours of court evidence and detailed in briefs running into tens of thousands of pages.
On Friday, lead prosecutor Nanette Rogers SC questioned the "love" Ms Patterson has maintained she held for her in-laws:
Rogers: You agree that you told police in your record of interview that you loved Don and Gail?
Patterson: Correct.
Rogers: Surely if you had loved them .. You would have immediately notified the medical authorities that there was a possibility that the foraged mushrooms had ended up in the meal.
Patterson: Well I didn't. I had been told that … people were getting treatment for possible death cap mushroom poisoning. So that was already happening.
The prosecution noted that these questions related to Ms Patterson's mindset on the Tuesday after the lunch, days before anyone had died.
But, Dr Rogers told the court, Erin didn't tell "a single person" that foraged mushrooms may have been in the meal.
"Correct," Ms Patterson replied.
Further, Dr Rogers put to Ms Patterson that she had "two faces" when it came to her relationship with her in-laws. A public face of loving them, and a private face shared with her Facebook friends, where she shared anger and mocked her relatives' religious views.
Ms Patterson denied it, telling the court she had "a good relationship with Don and Gail" and sobbed as she recounted how she had invited Heather Wilkinson to the lunch to thank her for the kindness she had shown her over the years.
This week in court the prosecution also alleged that in the lead-up to the lunch, Ms Patterson had seen iNaturalist listings of death cap mushrooms at nearby Loch and Outtrim, and knowingly foraged the poisonous fungi.
They alleged that photos taken from devices seized at her home showed she had been weighing dehydrated death cap mushrooms in the lead-up to the lunch, to determine what the lethal dosage would be for her guests.
The prosecution said that her elaborate cancer lie was carefully constructed to create a pretence for a lunch without her children, and that had her estranged husband Simon attended the lunch, she would have knowingly fed him a sixth beef Wellington laced with death cap mushrooms.
And they alleged her decision to dump the dehydrator and lie to police about it was done because she knew admitting to the dehydrator would have revealed her murderous plot.
Ms Patterson denies it all. And the trial's not over yet.
This week, Justice Christopher Beale told jurors the hearings could stretch towards the end of June, before they would be asked to deliberate and return a verdict.
How long the jury will need to weigh the mountain of evidence and arrive at a verdict is impossible to know.
"None of you can tell me how long you will be in deliberations … how long is a piece of string?" Justice Beale said.