
Erin Patterson mushroom murder trial LIVE updates: World waits on verdict as jury enters seventh day of deliberations
Victoria Supreme Court Justice Christopher Beale concluded his address to the jury - or 'charge' - last Monday afternoon before the jury retired to deliberate on the verdict.
Two jurors were balloted out, leaving 12 to decide Patterson's fate.
The five women and seven men will resume their deliberations at 10.30am, meaning there is a possibility today of a verdict in the murder trial which has garnered worldwide attention.
Patterson, 50, is accused of murdering her in-laws, Don and Gail Patterson, and Gail's sister, Heather Wilkinson, after allegedly serving them a beef Wellington lunch made with death cap mushrooms.
Patterson is also accused of attempting to murder Heather's husband, pastor Ian Wilkinson, who survived the lunch after spending several weeks in an intensive care unit.
The court heard Patterson's estranged husband, Simon (pictured), was also invited to the gathering at her home in Leongatha, in Victoria's Gippsland region, but didn't attend.
Witnesses told the jury that Patterson ate her serving from a smaller, differently-coloured plate to those of her guests, who ate the meal on four grey plates.
Patterson told authorities she bought dried mushrooms from an unnamed Asian store in the Monash area of Melbourne, but health inspectors could find no evidence of this.
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


Daily Mail
13 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
Competitor at Aussie fitness event is blasted for 'dog act' with his distressed girlfriend
A male competitor at an exercise competition has been accused of a 'dog act' for ditching his girlfriend after she fainted so he could continue the event. The incident occurred at the HYROX competition in Sydney last weekend, with footage from a witness going viral on social media. HYROX is a fitness phenomenon similar to Crossfit, with competitors competing solo or in teams in events that mix endurance and functional strength. Aaron Boundy, who posted the video, accused the male competitor of abandoning his partner - who was competing in a two-person team with him - even though she was 'twitching on the floor' when she passed out. 'That guy's missus just fainted and like full hit the deck,' Boundy said over footage of a male competitor running while a woman was being attended to by medics as she lay on the floor. 'She's unresponsive and he just kept doing the wall ball [the final exercise] and then crossed the line by himself, he's left her there. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Aaron Boundy Blue Tick (@aaronboundy_) 'What a piece of s**t.' Boundy continued to rail against the man after leaving the event. 'I think I've just witnessed one of the worst things in my life. 'Some guy's missus started like falling and fainting at the wall balls and I was like, told one of the judges, can you help her? And they were like what, no, she's OK, she's OK. 'She was full, like, twitching on the floor. And then her boyfriend kept on doing wall balls, didn't go over and see her.' Boundy said the medical teams 'put barricades' around the woman as they treated her. 'The boyfriend walks over, taps her on the leg, and then looks at the judge and goes, "Do I need her to finish the race?"' According to Boundy, when the judges told him that technically he didn't need to finish the event with his partner, the man 'ran off' and 'didn't even go back and check on her'. Daily Mail Australia has contacted HYROX Australia for comment. The video - which also featured on Instagram - drew strong reactions from viewers. 'If you sign up to do team sports you agree to compete as one ... you start together and finish together. I've seen friends pull up early in a race and tell their partner to crack on and do a solo. But fainting and fitting on the floor, that's a no from me. More important things in life than seeing your time pop up on a screen,' one wrote. 'This is absolute grounds for breaking up,' added another, with more commenters labelling the incident a 'dog act'. 'Even if I told my husband in this situation to keep toing, if I became unresponsive suddenly I can confidently say he would never leave my side ... Girls pick your standards up,' a third commented. However, a commenter who claimed to be the woman who fainted gave another version of events. 'That girl in the video is me, and my first two questions to my partner when I came to was 'did you finish it for us, and what time did we get?' And for context if you bothered to show it, he came back straight away,' they wrote.


Daily Mail
20 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
Mummy blogger Constance Hall gets slammed for doubting Erin Patterson was guilty of triple murder in bizarre post after trial
Mummy blogger Constance Hall has been called out for doubting that Erin Patterson was guilty of mass murder. Patterson, 50, was found guilty on three counts of murder and one count of attempted murder on Monday after serving her in-laws beef Wellingtons poisoned with death cap mushrooms at her Leongatha home on July 29, 2023. Following the verdict, Constance said she didn't think the mother-of-three looked 'like the mushroom poisoning super villain'. 'I mean, she just doesn't look like the mushroom poisoning super villain that she ended up being... You really never can tell, can you,' she wrote on Facebook. She went on to say she didn't think that uncovered message sent by Patterson which suggested she had very personal issues with Simon's parents was hat bad. From A-list scandals and red carpet mishaps to exclusive pictures and viral moments, subscribe to the DailyMail's new showbiz newsletter to stay in the loop. 'I think my doubts stemmed from her messages... like if that was the worst they could get on her messages... well, I'd hate to see what they'd pin on me after reading mine,' Constance wrote. 'I mean, those messages revealed that she wasn't a fan of the ex and his family, but that's so common that it just doesn't feel like a motive. Ugh, my heart goes out to those kids.' Constance's followers flocked to the comments to slam the social media influencer. 'Do you honestly think they took two years to organise the case, sat for 10 weeks in court and took seven days to deliberate because all they were going off was a text message about her ex father and mother in law!? Seriously,' one person wrote. 'It was more than just text messages. The disposal of the phone and dehydrator, pretending she gave the leftovers to the kids, searching where to locate death cap mushrooms,' another said. 'What did you think a mushroom poisoning super villain would look like?' a person questioned. 'I never thought you would be one that would judge a book by the cover. Evil and goodness come in many shapes and forms,' another commented. One person wrote: 'Scary how we can forget that monsters don't look like monsters. The most dangerous people, perhaps, are the ones we don't see.' 'What do you mean doesn't look [like a villain]? How can anyone know anything by how someone looks?' another questioned. Patterson previously pleaded not guilty to the murders of Don and Gail Patterson, and Gail's sister, Heather Wilkinson. They died after consuming death caps in the beef Wellingtons during lunch at Patterson's Leongatha home in southeast Victoria on July 29, 2023. Patterson faces a sentence of life in prison for the three murders and one attempted murder. The families of the murder victims, who died in hospital days after eating lunch at Patterson's home, were absent for the verdicts, as was sole lunch survivor Ian Wilkinson. During the trial, Victoria Police forensic data analyst Shamen Fox-Henry found a series of messages sent by Patterson that suggested she had very personal issues with Simon's parents. In the messages, Patterson described her in-laws as a 'lost cause' and exclaimed 'f**k them'. 'I mean clearly the fact that Simon refuses to talk about personal issues in part stems from the behaviour of his parents and how they operate,' she wrote around December 6, 2022. 'According to them, they've never asked him what's going on with us, why I keep kicking him out, why his son hates him, etc. It's too awkward or uncomfortable or something. So that's his learned behaviour. Just don't talk about this s**t.' Patterson claimed her father-in-law's solution to her relationship problems with his son was to 'pray'. 'Don rang me last night to say that he thought there was a solution to all this. If Simon and I get together and try to talk and pray together,' she wrote. 'And then he also said, Simon had indicated there was a solution to the financial issues if I withdraw this child support claim?!' Patterson claimed she told her in-laws she wanted them to be accountable for the decisions their son made concerning their grandchildren. 'I would hope they care about their grandchildren enough to care about what Simon is doing,' she wrote. 'Don said they tried to talk to him, but he refused to talk about it, so they're staying out of it, but want us to pray together. '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 feel uncomfortable, and not wanting to get involved in their son's personal matters, are overriding that. So f**k them.'


The Guardian
29 minutes ago
- The Guardian
We all became detectives in Erin Patterson's trial. But as a crime writer I can't help wonder, at what cost?
From the moment we saw Erin Patterson sobbing and wiping her eyes in her driveway in Leongatha, we started to judge her. The tone of her voice. The mournful tilting back of her head as she tried to control her emotion. The strange examining of her own fingers for tears. Was the performance real, or was she faking it? We had to decide. We had to participate. The public's natural hunger for participation in solving crimes has fuelled a billion-dollar podcast industry rooted in true crime. It's elevated crime fiction to the leading genre in the book world. Overwhelmingly, true crime podcasts that deal with unsolved mysteries dominate the hit lists, and the industry celebrates crime novels with unexpected twists and unreliable narrators. That's because the public wants to get involved. To join in. The human brain is made for solving puzzles and we hate to be fed answers. The media is riddled with advertising for opportunities to be a crime-fighting hero, from subscriptions to mail-out mystery solving games to in-person crime nights. Sydney-siders can now experience a simulated courtroom environment and be seated on a mock jury with The Jury Experience. The website boasts that 'the power to deliver justice is entirely in your hands!' Just $39 a ticket. Sign up for Guardian Australia's breaking news email The problem is that armchair detectives and their untrained analysis of apparent shock and grief has been historically (and, for the victims, very painfully) wrong. The plight of Joanne Lees, whose boyfriend Peter Falconio disappeared during a terrifying abduction attempt by Bradley John Murdoch in the Australian outback, is an example of the savagery of mob crime-solving. Deep-breathing and tearless, her seemingly calm walk down a corridor to front the press, and her choice of a singlet top emblazoned with the words 'cheeky monkey', turned the tide of opinions against her. Her account of crouching in bushland, evading her would-be attacker and his dog, was shredded at watercooler conversations nationwide. The whole time, Joanne was telling the truth. She was traumatised and grieving and being called a liar. The wrongful public-opinion (and legal) convictions of Kathleen Folbigg and Lindy Chamberlain should have made us cautious about believing we can spot a killer by how they appear and behave. They didn't. Erin's driveway performance was viewed with suspicion. So it was time to examine the evidence. What didn't make sense in the mushroom saga is the apparent weight of the premeditation against Erin's utter lack of after-crime planning. We were told by the prosecution of the coldness and calculation with which she researched, accessed and concealed the deadly mushrooms, going so far as to dehydrate and blitz them in a blender. There was, they argued, a conceited lie constructed to make the victims come to the lunch. Stringent physical measures taken to ensure only her victims, and not herself or her children, fell ill. It seemed that Erin risked her own life, and those of her kids, to make this murder plot come to fruition. She apparently wanted her in-laws dead that badly. What then did we make of Erin's lack of any real plan to explain why three people had suddenly died after attending the lunch? Erin's accounting for her actions in court seemed half-hearted and ham-fisted. I lied. I panicked. I was mistaken. I don't remember. TikTok-trained psychoanalysis of Erin's explanations was bandied around WhatsApp group chats and office lunch rooms. She's a narcissist. She's a sociopath. She's an idiot. What makes the public's insatiable hunger to play detective, jury member, behavioural analyst and forensic scientist so worrying is that, when we do it, we lose sight of the victims entirely. The Pattersons, the Wilkinsons and their community will never recover from Erin's senseless act. Erin herself will likely spend her life behind bars and her children will have to somehow get through the loss of their grandparents, a great-aunt and their own mother. Right now, that family is trying to learn how to function again, having been hit with unfathomable pain. And they'll have to do it while mushroom murder memes are shared around and influencers break down the case into 60-second soundbites over trending audio. The line between real life and fiction is blurring, helped along by AI, the fake news movement and the pursuit of likes. But it comes at the expense of truth. 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 I'm guilty of wandering that line myself, as a crime fiction author who keeps a close eye on court cases as a means of research. I've wondered many times during the mushroom trial how I'd fictionalise something like this, where I'd set it, whose perspective I would write it from. I worry that the true crime and crime fiction industry, of which I am a maker and a consumer, is making a professional crime-solver of all of us. Candice Fox is a bestselling Australian crime novelist based in Sydney