The NINE questions that will decide the fate of the mum of two accused of murdering her in-laws with beef wellington laced with death cap mushrooms

Daily Mail​

16 hours ago

The last time Erin Patterson welcomed guests across the threshold of her home on the outskirts of Leongatha, a small cattle-farming town in the Australian state of Victoria, it was 12.30pm on Saturday, July 29, 2023.
Four elderly family members were joining her lunch. But within a week of this supposedly happy occasion, three of her guests were dead and the fourth in hospital, fighting for his life.
Erin, 50, had served beef wellington, a dinner party staple her mother used to cook on special occasions.
It soon became clear that highly poisonous death cap mushrooms had somehow found their way into the dish's filling.
Shortly afterwards, Patterson was interviewed by police. A month or so later she was arrested and, for the past six weeks, this middle-aged mother of two has been at Latrobe Valley Magistrates' Court, in the nearby town of Morwell, on trial for murder.
Erin's three alleged victims were her estranged husband Simon's parents Don and Gail, both 70, and Gail's sister Heather Wilkinson, 66.
She is also charged with the attempted murder of the fourth guest, Heather's husband Ian, 71, a pastor who gave evidence during the trial's opening days.
The gripping trial culminated, over the past fortnight, with Patterson taking to the witness box to give evidence in her defence. I was there for every moment. And as this blockbuster court battle enters its final stages, here are some of the questions the jury will consider…
The gripping trial culminated, over the past fortnight, with Patterson taking to the witness box to give evidence in her defence
DID ERIN SECRETLY HATE HER IN-LAWS?
Prosecutor Nanette Rogers hasn't identified any 'particular motive' for murder. But she's shared evidence of quite serious friction between Patterson and her husband's family.
Erin and Simon, who married in 2007, separated in 2015, a year after the birth of their second child. While they initially remained close, sharing custody of their son and daughter and taking family holidays together, things changed in late 2022 when Erin discovered Simon had described himself as 'single' on a tax return. The move seems to have affected her ability to claim tax breaks and the duo soon began to argue over money and school fees.
That December, Erin asked her in-laws Don and Gail to intervene in the row. But they were reluctant to get involved. This led Erin to post a series of angry messages to a group of women she used to chat with via Facebook.
'Nobody bloody listens to me,' read one. 'This family! I swear to f**king God,' read another.
In a third, Erin wrote: 'I'm sick of this s**t. I want nothing to do with them. I thought his parents would want him to do the right thing, but it seems their concern about… not wanting to get involved in their son's personal matters, are overriding that. So f**k them.'
Giving evidence, Patterson characterised that outburst as an aberration, saying she actually 'loved' her in-laws and now 'feels ashamed' that she was so rude about them.
Rogers takes a different view. She says the angry sentiments reflected Erin's true feelings: 'You had two faces,' she told Patterson this week. 'A public face of appearing to have a good relationship with Don and Gail… and I suggest your private face was the one you showed in your Facebook message group.
WHY DID SHE LIE ABOUT HAVING CANCER?
It was highly unusual for Erin to hold social gatherings. But her guests were under the impression that the lunch had a special purpose: to discuss a piece of bad medical news.
Several weeks earlier, Erin had told Gail that she'd found a lump on her elbow, so was going to hospital for a needle biopsy and MRI scan. And, in a subsequent text, she informed her mother-in-law that there was 'a bit to digest' from the test results and she'd share more when they met.
Meanwhile, on the eve of the meal, Erin messaged Simon, who had made a late decision not to attend, complaining that preparing for the party had 'been exhausting in light of the issues I'm facing' and asking him to reconsider.
Those 'issues' were duly discussed over pudding, when Erin suggested that she'd been diagnosed with ovarian cancer and would soon be undergoing gruelling treatment
However, medical records show that she had never actually received a cancer diagnosis and hadn't been given an MRI scan or a needle biopsy, either.
Indeed, Erin now accepts the cancer claim was a lie. According to the prosecution, Erin told this porkie to both ensure her guests showed up for the deadly meal and explain why her children – whom she hadn't told about the 'diagnosis' – couldn't be there.
Erin has offered a different explanation, however.
She claims to have been suffering from 'self-esteem' issues due to her ballooning weight, so was going to have gastric band surgery.
She told the jury that she needed help with childcare related to her hospital visit but was too embarrassed to tell family members of its exact purpose.
Erin and Simon Patterson (pictured), married in 2007, and separated in 2015, a year after the birth of their second child
WHERE WERE THE MUSHROOMS FROM?
Both sides accept that highly toxic death caps found their way into the lunch. The big question is: how? During initial police interviews, Erin denied being a forager. And both of her children told the authorities that they had never seen her pick wild mushrooms. But in the witness box, Erin claimed that was untrue, saying that she had been in the habit of picking wild mushrooms since the early months of the 2020 Covid lockdown.
The defence case is that this hobby led her to accidentally pick death caps, which were then inadvertently served to lunch guests in what her barrister Colin Mandy has dubbed 'a tragedy and a terrible accident'.
Prosecutors say she picked them deliberately, however. In support of this thesis, they have shared digital evidence suggesting that Erin was a user of iNaturalist, a website where enthusiasts share mushroom sightings.
They say her mobile phone records indicate that, in April 2023, she travelled to areas near rural towns named Loch and Outtrim where sightings of death caps had been recently logged.
HOW DID THEY GET IN TO THE MEAL?
On the day of her alleged visit to Loch, Erin also visited a hardware store to buy a food dehydrator.
She told the jury that the device was at least partly acquired so she could preserve foraged mushrooms, which have a short growing season and go off quickly.
They were then stored in a Tupperware pot in one of her kitchen cupboards, alongside a supply of more exotic dried mushrooms obtained from a Chinese supermarket.
Fast forward to the morning of the lunch. She recalls initially using fresh supermarket mushrooms to make duxelles, a mushroom pate that goes between the beef fillet and pastry in the wellington dish.
But because the mixture tasted 'a little bland' she decided to add to it with the contents of the Tupperware container. Erin's defence is that this container must have held dried death caps, which she'd accidentally foraged.
The prosecution of course takes a different view. Although Patterson carried out a 'factory reset' on various phones seized by police, images recovered from one device show her using electronic scales to weigh what appears to be a large quantity of death caps on the dehydrator tray in her kitchen sometime in early May.
They told the jury that this shows Erin attempting to measure out a 'fatal dose' of death caps which were then dehydrated and turned to powder that could be deliberately sprinkled into the dish. In support of this argument, they have shown the jury Facebook messages from around this time in which Patterson told friends she had been 'hiding powdered mushrooms in everything' including chocolate muffins given to her children.
Regarding the message, Rogers said to Patterson: 'I suggest you were testing to see how you could hide mushrooms in food without someone noticing.'
WERE GUESTS SERVED ON COLOUR-CODED PLATES?
A traditional beef wellington involves an entire beef fillet, encased in pastry, which is then sliced into portions served to individual guests.
Erin, who served the dish with mashed potato, beans and gravy from a packet, says she was unable to source an entire fillet of beef from her local Woolworth's supermarket, so instead bought half a dozen individual steaks wrapped in plastic.
This, in turn, forced her to adapt the dish so that each portion consisted of a single wellington, similar to a pasty.
Ian Wilkinson told the court that Erin served all four of her guests their meals on a grey plate but she used an orange one. Simon Patterson has recalled that, the following day, Heather told him she had 'noticed Erin used a different coloured plate to us'.
Prosecutor Rogers has claimed that Patterson could easily have purchased a whole beef fillet from the region's butcher shops, but instead deliberately created individual ones, adding death caps to the ones her guests would eat, while making sure her own wasn't poisonous.
Then 'to avoid any error, in case you accidentallyate one of the poisoned beef wellingtons, you took the extra precaution of using a different and smaller plate for your non-poisoned serve'.
Erin denies the claim, saying she doesn't own any grey plates and served the lunch on a mixture of white and black crockery.
However video footage of a police search of her home on August 5 appears to show at least two beige or grey plates adjacent to the dishwasher.
The defence case is that her hobby of foraging led her to accidentally pick death caps
DID ERIN REALLY VOMIT HER MEAL?
When initially quizzed by police asking why she'd survived the lunch, while her guests were either dead or in hospital, Erin didn't offer any explanation beyond a cryptic 'hmmmm'.
In court, she has elaborated considerably, revealing to the jury 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 manifests itself via bulimia, an eating disorder characterised by binge eating and subsequent vomiting.
This condition struck that very afternoon, when she clapped eyes on roughly two-thirds of an orange cake that Gail, 70, had brought for dessert.
'I kept cleaning up the kitchen and putting everything away and, um, I had a piece of cake,' she told the jury. 'And then,' she added, 'I had another piece of cake. And then another.'
'How many pieces of cake did you have?' asked her barrister, Colin 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.'
WAS SHE PRETENDING TO BE SICK?
Erin claims she then experienced a spectacular bout of diarrhoea, which kicked off on the night of the meal and continued into the following week.
This has involved much courtroom discussion of her bowel movements, including a graphic account of a disputed incident in which she allegedly became 'worried I would poo my pants' while driving her teenage son to a flying lesson the following day, so stopped her car by the side of the dual carriageway and scampered off into the bush to defecate.
Patterson then presented at Leongatha hospital the following day, complaining of 'gastro'.
But medical professionals, who were by then treating her lunch guests, did not believe her symptoms were anything like as serious as the others. Nurse Cindy Munro told the court Patterson 'didn't look unwell' compared with her in-laws, while an expert toxicologist called Laura Muldoon recalled that she'd 'noted [Erin] looked clinically well, she had some chapped lips but otherwise very well. She had normal vital signs'.
A third doctor, Varuna Ruggoo, said Patterson's liver function tests returned normal results. According to prosecutors, Erin was feigning illness 'to cover your tracks'. The defence case is that, perhaps thanks to the aforementioned vomiting incident: 'She was sick too, just not as sick.'
WHY DID ERIN DUMP THE FOOD DEHYDRATOR?
Amid growing concerns over the fate of her lunch guests, Erin told a series of lies to police and public health officials. She denied having foraged for mushrooms, claiming instead that the beef wellington contained fresh ones and some dried specimens from an unnamed Chinese supermarket, and repeatedly insisted that she didn't own a food dehydrator.
The day after she was discharged from hospital, she drove to the local rubbish tip, whose CCTV cameras caught her disposing of the Sunbeam dehydrator she had purchased that April. Police forensic tests then discovered both Erin's fingerprints and traces of death cap mushroom toxins on the device.
Asked to explain what looks suspiciously like a bungled effort to destroy evidence, Erin claimed that she had decided to get rid of it because she had 'panicked' after a confrontational conversation with Simon earlier in the week. Specifically, she claimed that her estranged husband had mentioned the device and asked: 'Is that what you used to poison my parents?' This question had left her 'frantic' and 'scared', she said, because 'child protection were now involved' in the investigation into the meal.
She therefore took the decision to dump the dehydrator because, 'I was scared of the conversation that might flow about the meal and the dehydrator and I was scared that they [child protection] would blame me for it'.
Simon remembers things differently, however, and denies making any such remark to her.
Prosecutor Rogers has claimed that Patterson could easily have purchased a whole beef fillet from the region's butcher shops, but instead deliberately created individual ones, adding death caps to the ones her guests would eat, while making sure her own wasn't poisonous
SO WHO WILL THE JURY DECIDE IS TELLING LIES?
During her eight days giving evidence, Erin has claimed that virtually everyone else involved in the Mushroom Murder trial is somehow mistaken. Family members whose accounts she has contradicted range from her husband Simon to his surviving uncle, Pastor Ian Wilkinson, to Ian's late wife Heather. And on at least one occasion, she has also disagreed with remarks made by her own children during recorded interviews.
In cross-examination, she has claimed various Facebook friends are mistaken about the contents of their various conversations, while alleging that a host of professional witnesses – from mushroom experts to public health officials, doctors and nurses, to the analysts who examined her phones and computers, to the police who searched her property – have got various important pieces of their testimony quite seriously wrong.
At one point this week, Rogers accused her of 'making this up as you go along' to which Erin responded with a vigorous: 'No!'
But if she's telling the truth, some of the witnesses must have been lying. The jury will shortly have to decide who, exactly, they want to believe.