Latest news with #foraging
CTV News
19 hours ago
- Health
- CTV News
Woman who denies mushroom murders of her in-laws accepts that she served them death caps for lunch
Erin Patterson, the woman accused of serving her ex-husband's family poisonous mushrooms, is photographed in Melbourne, Australia, on April 15, 2025. (James Ross/AAP Image via AP) WELLINGTON, New Zealand — An Australian woman accused of murdering three of her estranged husband's relatives with poisonous mushrooms told a court on Tuesday she accepted that the fatal lunch she served contained death caps. But Erin Patterson said the 'vast majority' of the fungi came from local stores. She denies three counts of murder and one of attempted murder over the beef Wellington meal she served to her parents-in-law and her estranged husband's aunt and uncle at her home in July 2023. Don Patterson, Gail Patterson and Heather Wilkinson were hospitalized and died after the lunch in the rural town of Leongatha in the Australian state of Victoria. Heather's husband, Ian Wilkinson, was gravely ill but survived. Patterson's lawyer earlier told the Supreme Court trial that the poisoning was a tragic accident but prosecutors said it was deliberate. If convicted, she faces a sentence of life imprisonment on the murder charges and 25 years in jail for attempted murder. Long queues formed outside the Latrobe Valley Courthouse on Tuesday after Patterson took the stand late Monday, which was the first time she had spoken publicly since the deaths. Accused foraged mushrooms for years During several hours of evidence on Tuesday, Patterson, 50, told the court she began foraging fungi during the COVID-19 lockdown of March 2020, witnessed only by her children. 'I cut a bit of one of the mushrooms, fried it up with some butter and ate it,' she said. 'They tasted good and I didn't get sick.' Patterson said she also fed foraged mushrooms to her children, chopped up 'very, very small' so they couldn't pick them out of curries, pasta and soups. She developed a taste for exotic varieties, joined a 'mushroom lovers' Facebook group, and bought a dehydrator to preserve her finds, Patterson said. Her lawyer, Colin Mandy SC, asked if she accepted that the beef Wellington pastries she had served to her lunch guests in 2023 contained death caps. 'Yes, I do,' said Patterson. The accused told her lawyer most of the mushrooms she used that day came from local supermarkets. She agreed she might have put them in the same container as dehydrated wild mushrooms she had foraged weeks earlier and others from an Asian food store. Mandy in April told the court his client had lied when she initially told investigators that she had never foraged before. But he denied that she had deliberately sought out death cap mushrooms and said she disposed of her dehydrator in a panic about the accidental deaths. Regrets over 'venting' messages about in-laws Earlier Tuesday, Patterson became tearful when she was asked about expletive-filled messages she had sent about her in-laws in December 2022 in a Facebook group chat that she described as a 'safe venting space' for a group of women. 'I wish I'd never said it. I feel very ashamed for saying it and I wish that the family didn't have to hear that I said it,' said Patterson. 'They didn't deserve it.' Patterson, who said she had tried to have her parents-in-law mediate a dispute with her estranged husband, Simon, about school fees, said she was feeling hurt, frustrated and 'a little bit desperate.' The couple formally separated in 2015 after earlier temporary splits, the court has heard. Simon Patterson was invited to the July 2023 lunch but did not attend. Accused said she was still close with husband's family Tuesday's evidence also traversed Patterson's health after prosecutors' suggestions that her lunch invitation was unusual and that she'd organized it on a false pretense of receiving a cancer diagnosis. The mother of two admitted she never had cancer, but had been worried enough by symptoms to seek tests. Despite her separation from Simon, Patterson said she had hoped to reunite with her estranged husband and said she had remained close to her in-laws. 'It never changed. I was just their daughter in law,' said Patterson, through tears. 'They just continued to love me.' Evidence follows lengthy prosecution case The 14-member jury has heard five weeks of prosecution evidence, including what the lunch guests told relatives before they died. Heather Wilkinson said shortly before she died that Patterson ate her individual beef wellington pastry from a different colored plate to the other diners, said prosecutor Nanette Rogers. Opening her case in April, Rogers said the poisoning was deliberate but that her case would not suggest a motive for the alleged killings. The prosecution says Patterson lied when she told investigators she had eaten the same meal as her guests and fed her children the leftovers. Patterson is due to continue giving evidence on Wednesday. Her evidence Tuesday did not include her account of the day of the lunch, or cross-examination from prosecutors. Charlotte Graham-mclay, The Associated Press
BBC News
21 hours ago
- General
- BBC News
Erin Patterson tells murder trial wild mushrooms have 'more flavour'
An Australian woman who cooked a toxic mushroom meal has told her murder trial she has long been a mushroom lover, but more recently developed a taste for wild fungi varieties that have "more flavour".Erin Patterson has pleaded not guilty to the murder of three relatives, and the attempted murder of another, after serving them death cap mushrooms at her home in Victoria in July 2023. Prosecutors say she deliberately put the poisonous mushrooms in the meal but her defence team says it was a "terrible accident".Ms Patterson - during her second day on the witness stand - told the jury she began foraging for wild mushrooms during the Covid pandemic, years before the fatal meal. Ms Patterson's in-laws, Don and Gail Patterson, both 70, and Gail's sister Heather Wilkinson, 66, were all hospitalised after eating beef wellington at the lunch and died several days Wilkinson, the uncle of Ms Patterson's estranged husband, also fell seriously ill but survived after weeks of telling the court she accepted that death cap mushrooms were in the beef wellington she had served, Ms Patterson described foraging for mushrooms at various locations - botanic gardens, a rail trail near her house, and on her own property. "I mainly picked field mushrooms," she told the court, explaining she sometimes foraged with her two children. She recounted the first time she tried wild mushrooms, cutting off a small part before cooking it in butter. "[It] tasted good and I didn't get sick," she told the court also heard she had bought a food dehydrator in April 2023, in part because wild mushrooms had such a "small season" and she wanted to preserve them for later where the mushrooms for the lunch at the centre of the case came from, Ms Patterson said "the vast majority" were purchased from a supermarket in Leongatha while some had been bought a few months earlier from an Asian grocery store in Melbourne. She couldn't remember "the specific purchase", but had previously bought a variety of mushrooms - shitake, porcini, enoki - from similar stores, she said. Other times, she'd purchased "wild mushroom mix" or "forest mushrooms" which didn't specify exact Ms Patterson had stepped through changes in her dynamic with Simon Patterson and her in-laws following the couple's separation in 2015."In the immediate aftermath it was difficult... but that only lasted a couple of weeks... we went back to being really good friends."Her relationship with her in-laws "never changed", she said."I was just their daughter-in-law - they just continued to love me."However, she told the court her relationship with Simon turned tense amid conflict over finances from October 2022 onwards, and she had tried to get her in-laws to mediate.
ABC News
21 hours ago
- Health
- ABC News
Erin Patterson tells murder trial she began foraging wild mushrooms during Victoria's COVID lockdowns
Erin Patterson has told her triple-murder trial she first began foraging wild mushrooms during Victoria's COVID lockdowns, years before hosting her in-laws for a fatal meal. Ms Patterson spent Tuesday on the witness stand as her trial continues over the deaths of her parents-in-law Don and Gail Patterson and Gail's sister Heather Wilkinson after she served them beef Wellingtons containing death cap mushrooms in July 2023. The trial of Erin Patterson, who stands accused of using a poisoned meal to murder three relatives, continues. Look back at how Tuesday's hearing unfolded in our live blog. To stay up to date with this story, subscribe to ABC News. She has also pleaded not guilty to the attempted murder of Heather's husband Ian Wilkinson, who was the sole surviving guest of the lunch at Ms Patterson's Leongatha home. Ms Patterson told the court she had developed an interest in wild mushrooms in early 2020 when she and her children would go for walks at the Korumburra Botanic Gardens and surrounding areas 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. The 50-year-old said she eventually became confident in her ability to identify different species of wild mushrooms. "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. The court heard that after buying a dehydrator, Ms Patterson used the machine to dry some of the wild mushrooms she had foraged as well as store-bought mushrooms. The court heard not every attempt was successful, with Ms Patterson detailing one occasion she had tried to dehydrate the mushrooms whole rather than sliced. "They were still a bit mushy inside … they just didn't dry properly," she said. Ms Patterson said with experience, she became "very confident" she could accurately identify honey and slippery jack mushroom varieties growing in the Gippsland region. She said they were "very nice" for eating, having earlier told the court that she was a fan of mushrooms as a food in general. "They taste good and they're very healthy," she said. Earlier, Ms Patterson's barrister, Colin Mandy SC, asked her about the beef Wellington lunch she had cooked for her relatives on July 29, 2023. "Do you accept that there must have been death cap mushrooms in it?" Mr Mandy asked. "Yes, I do," Ms Patterson replied. She told the court she had bought most of the ingredients for the meal at Woolworths in Leongatha and some mushrooms were purchased from an Asian grocer in Melbourne. However, Ms Patterson said the specific purchase of the mushrooms was not clear in her mind, beyond it being in the April school holidays. She told the court she had purchased mushrooms from those kind of shops before, including shiitake, porcini and enoki varieties. "Sometimes the bags might say something like 'wild mushroom mix' or 'forest mushroom'," she said. Ms Patterson told the court the mushrooms she bought from the Asian grocer in April smelt "very pungent", so she put them in a tupperware container and took them back to her Leongatha home where she stored them. Earlier, she told the court she generally stored mushrooms she had dried in her dehydrator in a tupperware container in the pantry. Earlier in the day, Ms Patterson became emotional as she expressed regret about messages she wrote about her in-laws. Ms Patterson was asked about her multiple separations from her husband, Simon. She outlined 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 Ms Patterson, 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." 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. 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.
The Guardian
a day ago
- Business
- The Guardian
Erin Patterson tells court she foraged mushrooms; minimum wage boost; and viral mousse taste tested
Good afternoon. Erin Patterson has told a court she foraged wild mushrooms and had eaten them with her children in the past, becoming interested in them while walking near her home during Covid lockdowns. In her second day in the witness box, Patterson also told the jury in her triple murder trial that she was never diagnosed with ovarian cancer and had a history of 'consulting Dr Google'. The court heard she hoped to bring her family back together despite a formal separation with her estranged husband. The 50-year-old has pleaded not guilty to three charges of murder and one charge of attempted murder relating to poisoning four of her husband's relatives with a beef wellington served at her house in Leongatha on 29 July 2023. Mehreen Faruqi accuses University of Melbourne of 'witch hunt' for expelling students over pro-Palestine protest Victorian man sentenced for attacks on men he met on Grindr says TikTok vigilante videos inspired him RBA ready to use rapid-fire rate cuts if Trump policies rattle Australia's economy, minutes reveal Winter brings Australia's 'humpback highway' to life and peak hour is about to begin Vanuatu criticises Australia for extending gas project while making Cop31 bid US man charged for framing immigrant in fake plot to kill Trump Boiled eggs? Tofu? Avocado? Are these high-protein, low-sugar alternative mousse recipes the new way to make the chocolate dessert? TikTok seems to think so. Guardian Australia staff put them through a taste test so you can decide if you should try making these at home – or give them a miss and keep scrolling instead. 'It's disappointing for us to lose a Greens senator. But Dorinda has said her values lie there, and you need to be true to yourself, don't you?' The Greens leader, Larissa Waters, said the Western Australia senator Dorinda Cox gave her just 90 minutes' notice of her shock defection to the Labor party yesterday. Waters said she had 'no animosity' towards Cox and wished her well, but also noted Labor's approval of the North West Shelf project, which Cox herself had criticised just days earlier. But Anthony Albanese shrugged off the remarks, saying the Greens had 'lost their way' and were 'not capable of achieving the change that [Cox] wants to see in public life'. The Fair Work Commission says a 3.5% above-inflation increase to the minimum wage is necessary to avoid 'entrenched' lower living standards among the millions of Australia's lowest-paid workers. The annual determination delivered on Tuesday morning was quickly welcomed by the peak unions body, but was criticised by business groups which had argued for an increase of 2.0-2.5%. Sign up to Afternoon Update Our Australian afternoon update breaks down the key stories of the day, telling you what's happening and why it matters after newsletter promotion It's the end of an era: Marc Maron has announced that he's ending his popular and influential podcast WTF with Marc Maron after nearly 16 years and more than 1,600 episodes. Maron says he and his producer, Brendan McDonald, are 'tired' and 'burnt out' but 'utterly satisfied with the work we've done'. We've rounded up five of the podcast's best interviews. Today's starter word is: SAIL. You have five goes to get the longest word including the starter word. Play Wordiply. Enjoying the Afternoon Update? Then you'll love our Morning Mail newsletter. Sign up here to start the day with a curated breakdown of the key stories you need to know, and complete your daily news roundup. And follow the latest in US politics by signing up for This Week in Trumpland. If you have a story tip or technical issue viewing this newsletter, please reply to this email. If you are a Guardian supporter and need assistance with regards to contributions and/or digital subscriptions, please email
The Guardian
24-05-2025
- Lifestyle
- The Guardian
I'm feasting on the contents of hedgerows like a horse in plimsolls – and I've never felt so healthy
I had a daughter during one of the bone-cold early months of this year, which means that my full-time job is now to produce a yield. Between the hours of dawn and midnight, with a few lactic minutes in between, I am a feeding machine for a new person. And it is this, perhaps, that has led to my somewhat strange new eating habits. Pregnancy may traditionally be the time associated with cravings and aversions – the old cliches of sardines and jam, coal and creosote, bread and crackers. But here, in my postnatal feeding frenzy, I'm eating nettles by the handful. I am chomping on sticky weed. I have been biting the heads off dandelions (bitter – like really serious dark chocolate) and sucking the nectar from inside honeysuckle. This recent chlorophyll gala has, of course, coincided with England's greatest month: May. Some of us love the look of May, some of us enjoy the smells. But for me, this year, the greatest heady, verdant, leaf-rich pleasure of my life is to eat May by the bushel. The sheer amount of dilute dog pee I'm ingesting must be through the roof, I suppose, but I don't really care. The number of edible plants and flowers in Britain right now is dazzling. My latest love is a plant called hedge garlic. Or, if you're in the Midlands like me, Jack by the hedge (he sounds like the villain from a Grimms' fairytale, or the kind of singer-songwriter we all regrettably slept with in our twenties). Alliaria petiolata, to give it its Latin name, is a wild member of the brassica family and has a thin, whitish taproot scented like horseradish, triangular-to-heart-shaped leaves and small white flowers. Friends, once you see it, it's everywhere. You can eat it from towpaths and bike lanes and public parks if, like me, you're not embarrassed to be seen bending down beside a lamp-post and pulling up your lunch. If you don't live in the sort of lush, woodland world where wild garlic covers the ground like concrete then hedge garlic is a fantastic alternative; the taste is oniony, garlicky and even a little mustardy. Of course, like absolutely everything that grows wild, it has a toxic lookalike in the form of lily of the valley. In fact, once you start Googling, pretty much everything edible seems to have a potentially dangerous twin, from mushrooms to flowers to roots. Buttercups are extremely poisonous, as are daffodils. So please make sure you are referring either to an expert or a very well illustrated book before you start to chow down on your local undergrowth, and it's a good idea to wash anything you pick in salt water to get rid of insects, as well as dog wee. But to be extra safe you could stick to these few, extremely identifiable friends: nettles (both the leaves and the seeds), dandelions, clover, sticky weed (that plant that people squished against your school jumper when you were little and is sometimes known as cleavers) and daisies. A friend of mine serves up slices of bread and butter topped with daisies to her small children as a mind-bending treat. She is yet to be burned as a witch. Of course, I am in the incredibly privileged position of living somewhere in which food is, to a greater or lesser degree, widely available. I am able to boil rice and buy eggs and stock up on strawberries because I am a relatively wealthy woman living in a country that has not quite, as yet, cut itself off entirely from global food markets. I am not eating undergrowth out of necessity, and for this I am grateful every day. Am I worried about the sewage in our rivers and the microplastics in our soil and the pesticides leaking into our ponds? Of course I am. But it is also true that Britain right now is a lush and emerald salad bar that I cannot hold back from. Pesto, bhajis, soups, salads, pizzas, pakoras, fritters, sauces – I'm putting these plants in everything. I'm literally mowing down the greenery around my house, munching through the stalks and leaves like a small, pink horse in a pair of plimsolls and I don't care who sees. Because my iron levels are up, my skin is good and it's all gloriously free. Just imagine what I'll be like when the apples and blackberries arrive. Nell Frizzell is a journalist and author
