Erin Patterson tells her murder trial she regrets saying she wanted 'nothing to do with' in-laws

Australia Broadcast Center

2 days ago

Erin Patterson has become emotional on the witness stand at her murder trial as she expressed regret about messages she wrote about her in-laws.
Ms Patterson resumed giving evidence in her own defence on Tuesday, as she fights charges of murdering her parents-in-law Don and Gail and Gail's sister Heather Wilkinson by serving them a beef Wellington meal containing death cap mushrooms.
She is also charged with the attempted murder of Heather's husband Ian Wilkinson at the lunch, held in July 2023.
The trial of Erin Patterson, who stands accused of using a poisoned meal to murder three relatives, continues.
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On Tuesday, Ms Patterson was asked about her multiple separations from her husband, Simon.
She outlined to the Supreme Court, sitting in the regional Victorian town of Morwell, 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 Erin, 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."
Ms Patterson also told the court about her love of mushrooms, saying she enjoyed eating them because they tasted good and were "very healthy".
She said she developed an interest in wild mushrooms in early 2020 when she and her children would go for walks at the Korumburra Botanic Gardens 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.
She told the court it was difficult to identify the species.
Ms Patterson said she found field and horse mushrooms in the paddock near her home and "eventually" consumed them.
"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.
"They tasted good and I didn't get sick."
She told the jury she regularly bought dried mushrooms at Asian grocery stores and used them in dinners because they had a more interesting flavour.
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.
"I don't want to lose her."
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.