Erin Patterson trial: Nine weeks of testimony that gripped a courtroom

BBC News

a day ago

For two years, the mystery of exactly what happened at Erin Patterson's dining table has gripped the world.Five people sat down to eat lunch at her home in rural Australia on 29 July 2023. Within a week, three would be dead, a fourth would be fighting for his life, and the fifth would be under investigation for intentionally poisoning her guests with wild mushrooms.After a much-watched trial in the tiny town of Morwell, Erin has now been found guilty of murdering three relatives and attempting to kill another.Her eyes on the jury throughout, she remained silent and composed as they delivered verdicts which could see her spend the rest of her life in prison.The self-described mushroom lover and amateur forager had told the court it was all a tragic accident.But over nine weeks, the jury heard evidence suggesting she had hunted down death cap mushrooms sighted in nearby towns and lured her victims to the fatal meal under the false pretence she had cancer - before trying to conceal her crimes by lying to police and disposing of evidence.
The orange plate
Gail and Don Patterson had turned up on Erin's doorstep just after midday on that fateful Saturday, an orange cake in hand. With them were the Wilkinsons: Heather, Gail's sister, and her husband Ian, who weeks after the meal would emerge from a coma to find he was the only guest to have survived.Noticeably absent was Erin's estranged husband Simon Patterson. He'd pulled out the day before, saying he felt "uncomfortable" attending amid tension between the former couple.
Erin had spent the morning slaving over a recipe from one of the nation's favourite cooks, tweaking it to make individual serves of beef Wellington: expensive cuts of steak slathered with a mushroom paste, then encased in pastry.For the jury, Ian recounted watching the parcels go onto four grey plates – and an orange one for Erin – with mashed potatoes, green beans and gravy heaped on the side.A sixth serve, allegedly prepared for Simon in case he changed his mind and came over, went into the fridge. Erin was originally accused of attempting to murder him too – on several occasions – but those charges were dropped on the eve of the trial and the allegations were not put to the jury.The group said grace and then dug in, exchanging "banter" about how much they were eating."There was talk about husbands helping their wives out," Ian said.Stuffed, they nibbled on dessert before Erin stunned her guests with a declaration she had cancer, the trial heard.Even the defence concedes that was not true. But on that day, the two elderly couples gave Erin advice on how to tell her kids, before ending the meal the way it had begun – with a prayer.Ian told the court he didn't know the host well, but "things were friendly"."She just seemed like a normal person to me," he said.By that night, all of the guests were very ill, and the next day the four went to hospital with severe symptoms. Donald - who had eaten his portion of lunch and about half his wife's - told a doctor he had vomited 30 times in the space of a few hours.
Suspicion soon began to trickle in.The trial heard several of those asked to the lunch had been surprised by the invitation. Simon said it was rare for his estranged wife to host such an event, and Ian said he and his late wife had never even been to Erin's house before.In hindsight, one of the guests apparently wondered aloud why Erin had served herself on a different type of plate to the rest of the family."I've puzzled about it since lunch," Heather said, according to a witness. "Is Erin short of crockery?"Later, at hospital in Leongatha, Erin's ailing guests asked if their host was sick too. They'd all eaten the same meal, hadn't they?Detectives would pose similar questions days later, in a police station interview room with Erin."We're trying to understand what has made them so ill," the detectives were heard saying, in a tape played to the court. "Conversely, we're trying to understand why you're not that ill."
An orange cake
Detailing the lunch publicly for the first time, from the witness stand, Erin Patterson offered an explanation.She told the court that after waving off her relatives she had cleaned up the kitchen, before rewarding herself with a slice of the orange cake Gail had brought."[I ate] another piece of cake, and then another piece," she said. Before she knew it, the rest of the cake was gone and she felt overfull."So I went to the toilet and brought it back up again," Erin told the trial. "After I'd done that, I felt better."She outlined for the jury a secret struggle with bulimia, saying she had been regularly binge-eating and purging since her teens - something her defence team suggested accounted for her lack of symptoms.
Erin had taken herself to hospital two days after the lunch, reporting feeling ill. But she initially rebuffed the urgent pleas of staff who wanted her and her children – who she claimed had eaten leftovers – to be immediately admitted for treatment. One "surprised" doctor, who had seen the other sick lunch guests, was so concerned for their welfare that he called police to ask for help.But when medics finally got Erin in for checks, neither she nor her children demonstrated similar symptoms to the others who'd eaten at the house, and tests showed no traces of death cap mushroom poisoning.After a precautionary 24 hours, Erin was sent on her way.
Red flags
Her victims, though, continued to suffer in hospital. And as their relentless diarrhoea and vomiting was escalating to organ failure, Erin was covering her tracks, prosecutors alleged.The day after she was discharged from hospital, CCTV captured Erin travelling to a local dump and disposing of a food dehydrator later found to contain traces of poisonous mushrooms.She was also using three phones around the time of the lunch, two of which disappeared shortly afterwards. The one she did hand over to police had been repeatedly wiped – including while detectives were searching her house.For investigators, the red flags began mounting quickly.Questions about the source of the mushrooms elicited odd answers. Patterson claimed some of them had been bought dried from an Asian grocery in Melbourne, but she couldn't remember which suburb. When asked about the brand, or for transaction records, she said they were in plain packaging and she must've paid cash.
Meanwhile detectives found out death cap mushrooms had been spotted in two nearby towns in the weeks before the meal, with concerned locals posting pictures and locations to online plant database iNaturalist. Erin's internet history showed she'd used the website to view death cap mushroom sightings at least once before. Her mobile phone location data appeared to show her travelling to both areas – and purchasing the infamous food dehydrator on her way home from one of those trips.But Erin told police she'd never owned such an appliance, despite an instruction manual in her kitchen drawer and posts in a true crime Facebook group where she boasted about using it."I've been hiding powdered mushrooms in everything. Mixed into chocolate brownies yesterday, the kids had no idea," she wrote in one.When digital forensics experts managed to recover some of the material on her devices, they found photos showing what looked like death cap mushrooms being weighed on a set of kitchen scales.During the trial, Erin said she realised in the days after the lunch that the beef Wellington may have accidentally included dried mushrooms that she had foraged and mistakenly put in a container with store-bought ones. But she was too "scared" to tell a soul."It was this stupid knee-jerk reaction to dig deeper and keep lying," Erin told the court.
No clear motive
What baffled police, though, was the question of motive.Simon told the trial he and Erin had initially remained chatty and amicable after their split in 2015. That changed in 2022, he said, when the couple started having disagreements over finances, child support, schools and properties.He said there was no inkling of ill will towards his family, though.
"She especially got on with dad. They shared a love of knowledge and learning."With his voice faltering, Simon added: "I think she loved his gentle nature."But Erin herself told the court she was feeling increasingly isolated from the Patterson family – and there was evidence presented which indicated she had grown frustrated with them."You had two faces," the prosecutor Nanette Rogers said, after making Erin read aloud expletive-laden Facebook messages in which she had called Simon a "deadbeat" and his parents "a lost cause".The prosecution opted not to present a specific motive, however, saying the jury may still be wondering what drove Erin to kill long after the trial wrapped.
The lack of a clear motive was key to Erin's defence: why would she want to kill her family, people she said she loved like her own parents?"My parents are both gone. My grandparents are all gone. They're the only family that I've got… I love them a lot," she told police in her interrogation.Everything else could be explained away, Erin's barrister argued.The messages critical of her in-laws were just harmless venting, they said; the cancer claim a cover for weight-loss surgery she was planning to have but was too embarrassed to disclose.Cell phone tracking data isn't very precise, so there's no real evidence she actually visited the towns where death cap mushrooms were sighted, they argued.They also suggested that Erin was sick after the meal, just not as sick as the others because she'd thrown it all up. She strongly disliked hospitals, which was why she had discharged herself against medical advice.And her lies and attempts to dispose of evidence were the actions of a woman worried she'd be blamed for the accidental deaths of her guests."She's not on trial for lying," Colin Mandy said. "This is not a court of moral judgment."He accused the prosecution of trying to force a jigsaw puzzle of evidence together, "stretching interpretations, ignoring alternative explanations because they don't align perfectly with the narrative".But the prosecution argued Erin had told so many lies it was hard to keep track of them."Perhaps the starkest," Dr Rogers said, were her attempts to explain the cancer fib. To prove that she actually had plans to undergo gastric-band surgery, Erin claimed to have booked an appointment at a Melbourne clinic – one that did not offer the treatment."She has told lies upon lies because she knew the truth would implicate her," Dr Rogers said. "When she knew her lies had been uncovered, she came up with a carefully constructed narrative to fit with the evidence – almost."Dr Rogers said the jury should have "no difficulty" in rejecting the argument "this was all a horrible foraging accident".Ultimately, after a week of deliberations, the jury did just that.She will return to court for a sentencing hearing at a later date.