23-05-2025
Mushrooms are at the center of a major Australian murder case
A woman is on trial in Australia for hosting a lunch in 2023 that left three people dead.
Erin Patterson has been charged with three counts of murder and is accused of purposely serving a beef Wellington made with poisonous death cap mushrooms, according to The Washington Post.
Patterson has pleaded not guilty and her legal team has described the deadly meal as 'a terrible accident,' per The Washington Post.
Death cap mushrooms are another name for poisonous Amanita phalloides mushrooms.
The toxins of death cap mushrooms target the liver and kidneys, according to the BC Centre for Disease Control. If you ingest the mushrooms, initial symptoms such as nausea and vomiting appear six to twelve hours after ingestion.
Your health deceptively appears to improve after those symptoms, but that's when your vital organs are actually being targeted by the toxins, the article said.
You'll become 'very ill, experiencing jaundice and seizures, followed by coma, and sometimes culminating in death' several days later, per the BCCDC.
The mortality rate following consumption and 'prompt hospital treatment' is 10% to 30%.
Cooking does not destroy the mushroom's toxins.
On July 29, 2023, Patterson prepared beef Wellington for a lunch. Her guests were all relatives of her estranged husband, Simon Patterson, The Washington Post reported.
In the days after the lunch, Simon Patterson's parents, Don and Gail Patterson, died, as did Gail Patterson's sister, Heather Wilkinson.
Wilkinson's husband, Ian Wilkinson, who was also a guest, spent weeks recovering in the hospital and ultimately survived, according to the Post.
Erin Patterson also invited her estranged husband to the meal, but he declined to attend.
Don and Gail Patterson and Heather Wilkinson all died of 'altered liver function and multiple organ failure due to Amanita mushroom poisoning,' NPR reported.
In August 2023, Erin Patterson said she was 'devastated' that the mushrooms caused the deaths of her 'loved ones,' per a statement shared with Australia's ABC.
'I am now devastated to think that these mushrooms may have contributed to the illness suffered by my loved ones. I really want to repeat that I had absolutely no reason to hurt these people whom I loved,' she said.
In addition to alleging that she intentionally poisoned her guests, prosecutors have accused Erin Patterson of making up a cancer diagnosis, which she used as the pretense for the lunch, of visiting locations known to have death cap mushrooms beforehand and of getting rid of the food processor she used, according to The Washington Post.
She is also accused of not eating the same beef Wellington as her guests and covering up the poisoning by 'pretending to suffer similar symptoms' as her guests, per NPR.
Patterson's legal team has said her questioned actions stemmed from panic.
'She was overwhelmed by the fact that these four people had become so ill because of the food she'd served to them,' defense barrister Colin Mandy said during opening arguments, per The Washington Post.
The trial in Australia has wrapped up its fourth week and is expected to conclude in June.
This is not the first time someone has died after consuming death cap mushrooms.
In 2013, a 57-year-old woman in England died after using the mushrooms in a soup she had prepared, as the BBC reported.
The woman's husband also ate the soup and was hospitalized but survived.
In December 2016, 14 people, including an 18-month-old child, across five California counties were hospitalized as a result of consuming death caps, according to The Weather Channel.
Three of the 14 died, and the child 'developed cerebral edema and suffered permanent neurologic sequelae.' At least three of the individuals needed a liver transplant.
A more recent case in California happened on December 31 in the town of Salinas.
Three individuals were hospitalized after eating the mushrooms that they had purchased from a vendor on the side of the road, KSBW Action News reported.
