Mushroom cook a multi-millionaire
The unassuming Victorian woman drew the world's attention after three of her husband's family died from a poisoned meal and a fourth fought his way back from death's door.
Details about Patterson's life were revealed by those who knew her best as the Supreme Court trial played out in the regional town of Morwell over the last four months.
She had pleaded not guilty to three counts of murder and one count of attempted murder, with her defence arguing the poisoning was a tragic accident. Erin Patterson maintained she did not intentionally harm anyone. Brooke Grebert-Craig. Credit: Supplied
At trial, prosecutors argued Patterson intentionally sourced death cap mushrooms, the most poisonous known fungi, and included them in the beef wellington lunch intending to kill or at least seriously injure her four guests.
Don and Gail Patterson, her husband Simon Patterson's parents, and Gail's sister Heather Wilkinson died in the week after the lunch on July 29, 2023.
Gail's husband Ian Wilkinson recovered after a lengthy stay in hospital.
On X, jurors returned to the Latrobe Valley law court and returned unanimous guilty verdicts on all four charges following X days of deliberations. Erin Patterson's parents in law Don and Gail Patterson. Supplied. Credit: Supplied
During the trial, jurors heard Patterson first met her husband in the early 2000s when they were both working at the Monash city council.
She was an administrative assistant engaged by animal welfare charity the RSPCA while Simon was a civil engineer at the council.
Giving evidence, Simon said they got to know each other as part of a 'fairly eclectic' group of friends from the council before developing a romantic relationship.
'Erin is very intelligent. I guess some of the things that attracted me to her in the first place was definitely her intelligence. She is quite witty and can be quite funny,' he said. She remains married to Simon Patterson. NewsWire / David Geraghty Credit: News Corp Australia
The jury heard Patterson had worked as an accountant and as an air traffic controller at Melbourne's Tullamarine airport prior to meeting Simon.
Patterson told the court she met Simon in 2004 and they began dating in July the following year.
She said she first met his parents, Don and Gail Patterson, in about March or April 2005 while on a camping trip with Simon and a few friends and they stopped in at his parents.
Patterson described herself as a 'fundamentalist atheist' and initially sought to convert Simon, a devout Christian, but ' things happened in reverse and I became a Christian'.
She pointed to a 'spiritual experience' while on that camping trip when they attended a service at Korumburra Baptist Church where Simon's uncle, Ian Wilkinson, was pastor.
I'd been approaching religion as an intellectual exercise up until that point,' Patterson said.
'But I had what I would call a religious experience there and it quite overwhelmed me.' Ian Wilkinson survived the lunch. NewsWire / Diego Fedele Credit: News Corp Australia The Korumburra Baptist Church where Mr Wilkinson has been pastor for two decades. NewsWire / Josie Hayden Credit: News Corp Australia
Simon told the court a month after their wedding on June 2, 2007, the pair set off on a cross-country trip.
'We planned, before we married, to pack up everything, get a four-wheel drive and drive across Australia and camp in tents, which we did,' he said.
Their wedding was held under a marquee at Don and Gail's Korumburra home, with Simon's cousin, David Wilkinson, walking her down the aisle.
Patterson told the jury her parents did not attend as they were on a holiday crossing Russia by train.
By late 2007, Simon said, they settled down in Perth where he found work at a local council.
The jury heard their first child, a son, was born in January 2009, with Patterson describing the birth as 'very traumatic'.
On the stand, she said she developed a mistrust of doctors and questioned if they knew what they were doing. The couple also took a number of international holidays, including to New Zealand and Africa. Supplied. Credit: Supplied
Patterson said Don and Gail came to stay with them after the birth, saying Gail was 'really supportive, and gentle and patient with me'.
'I remember being really relieved that Gail was there because I felt really out of my depth,' she said.
A few months later the family packed up again heading north and covering the top end of Australia.
After months of travel, Patterson said she'd had a 'gutful' and elected to fly back to Perth from Townsville leaving Simon and their son to drive back.
'It had been a good holiday but I'd had enough. I wanted to sleep in a real bed,' she said.
The jury heard this led to the couple's first separation, in late 2009, for 'about six months' with Patterson and their son living in a rental while Simon lived nearby in a caravan.
'What I understood from Erin was that she was struggling inside herself,' Simon said.
The couple underwent marriage counselling and the family reunited after Simon moved to the wheatbelt town of York for work as a council civil engineer.
For a time, the couple also lived in Quinninup, in Western Australia's southwest, and Patterson started a second hand book shop in Pemberton which she operated in 2011 and 2012.
Giving evidence, Simon said there were a few other periods of short separation while the pair lived in Western Australia before they returned to Victoria in 2013.
Patterson's second child, a girl, was born in 2014, and the couple purchased a home in Korumburra to be close to Simon's family the same year.
Simon's sister, Anna Terrington, said she developed a strong bond with Patterson because they were both pregnant at the same time.
She gave evidence their children, born three days apart, were known in the family as 'the twins'. Anna and Josh Terrington, with sibling Matthew Patterson (right). NewsWire/Ian Currie Credit: News Corp Australia
Many of Simon's family members called in the trial described Patterson as a devoted mother to her two children.
The couple separated for a final time in late 2015, the jury heard.
Asked about the separation, Patterson said she believed the key issue in their relationship was communication but that Simon and her remained close and co-operative in the following years.
'Primarily what we struggled with over the entire course of our relationship … we just couldn't communicate well when we disagreed about something,' she said.
'We could never communicate in a way that made each of us feel heard or understood, so we would just feel hurt and not know how to resolve it.'
Patterson told the court after their separation, she remained close to Simon's parents and continued to attend family events.
'It never changed. I was just their daughter-in-law and they just continued to love me,' she said. A court sketch of Erin Patterson during the trial. NewsWire / Paul Tyquin Credit: News Corp Australia
The jury heard Patterson received a large inheritance after her grandmother's death in 2006, with disbursements paid out twice annually until 2015.
Simon agreed Patterson was 'very generous' with the money, with the couple lending hundreds of thousands of dollars to each of his three siblings and their partners interest free.
'We wouldn't have been able to do it without those inheritances,' he said.
'Money has not been the most important motivation to either Erin or me in our decisions.'
He said he believed it totalled roughly $2 million.
Patterson also received another large inheritance in 2019 after her mother's death split her estate between her two daughters.
The jury heard Patterson used part of this money to buy a block of land at Gibson St, Leongatha, where she built her family home and the location of the deadly lunch.
Living on the 3 acre block in the small dairy town, Patterson said she kept animals including sheep and goats. Erin Patterson's home in Leongatha. NewsWire / Diego Fedele. Credit: News Corp Australia
Despite their separation four years earlier, Patterson titled both the Gibson St property and a home in the Melbourne suburb of Glen Waverley as shared ownership with her husband.
Simon told the court he viewed this at the time as a sign Patterson remained committed to the family unit and was hopeful they would reconcile.
He said he believed Patterson had struggled with her self-image for many years although she never explicitly said this to him.
On the stand, Patterson said she had body-image issues since childhood and struggled with her weight.
'I tried every diet under the sun,' she said.
'When I was a kid, mum would weigh us every week to make sure we weren't putting on too much weight.'
Patterson told the court she had engaged in binge eating and purging since her 20s but no one knew.
The jury heard from three witnesses who came to know Patterson in 2020 through an online true crime Facebook group that splintered off into a social chat during the Covid pandemic and continued into 2023.
Non-profit manager Christine Hunt said Patterson had made a name for herself in the group as a 'super-sleuth', able to dig up details about true crime cases they discussed.
Stay at home mum Daniela Barkley said she believed Patterson to be a wonderful mother, but recalled she vented about problems with Simon and his family. Daniela Barkley said she formed the view Simon was not a nice man from Patterson's posts. NewsWire / Diego Fedele Credit: News Corp Australia
A series of messages Patterson sent to the group between December 6 and 9 in 2022, captured her complaining about her husband and his family.
'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 em,' one message read.
Patterson told the jury she regrets the messages, but her defence noted they needed to be viewed in the proper context of a woman venting to her support network.
Giving evidence, Simon told the jury they remained friendly and committed to co-parenting their two children but he first noticed a change in their relationship in late 2022.
He said he believed this was after Patterson noticed he'd been listed as separated for the first time in his tax return and he understood the change to have financial implications. Simon Patterson was the first witness called in the trial. NewsWire / Luis Enrique Ascui Credit: News Corp Australia
Patterson disagreed, saying while there was a change in the relationship, it occurred weeks later after Simon began to refuse to contribute to their children's schooling and medical costs.
'I wasn't upset, because him listing himself as single on his tax return meant I now have the opportunity to claim family tax benefit that I had been denied before,' she said.
Simon said after the tax return, Patterson had filed a child support claim and he'd been instructed by authorities not to pay for things until a financial agreement was reached.
Both agreed tensions had cooled down by the end of 2022 but their relationship became 'functional' after this point.
She will return to court at a later date.
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Sydney Morning Herald
an hour ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
A photographer made a bizarre contraption to catch Erin Patterson. The gamble paid off
In news photography, getting 'the shot' is partly down to planning and good luck. On Monday, May 12 – two weeks into Erin Patterson's trial in the usually quiet Victorian country town of Morwell – most of the photographers and journalists covering the murder trial were taking the opportunity of a jury-free day to get some well-earned rest. Martin Keep, though, ventured out into the bitter cold, a custom rig mounted to his body with studio flashes twisted around his camera. It was something that Keep, who was photographing the trial for Agence France-Presse, his colleagues, and Age photographer Jason South had never seen before – a bizarre creation, born out of a chance find at former Jetstar pilot Greg Lynn's trial almost a year before. For years in Melbourne, photographers haven't bothered chasing police vans, thinking they couldn't capture the scene inside. 'But the Greg Lynn case changed all that,' South said. '[ Age colleague] Joe Armao got a picture inside [Lynn's] van without anybody in it, and he showed me. He said: 'You can see in there.' I spent days and days, and got Greg Lynn in that van. 'Martin was on the [Patterson] job with me, and he was asking how, and what, and where. On the first day, he did actually get a really dark, soft and grainy photo of [Patterson] in the van. 'He went home and thought on how he could make it better, and he built this whole rig to go around the camera … then he had the most amazing luck.' Patterson also wasn't expecting any media to bother showing up at Morwell Police Station on May 12; she thought they'd spare themselves the boring legal argument, South suggested. Photographers had two chances a week to capture her in the van – when she was en route to and from the Dame Phyllis Frost Centre in Melbourne's west. On May 12, Keep thought he'd test out his rig for the first time, and caught her staring dead-eyed through the window of the police van. In his images, her shock at being photographed is visceral. Her face falls before she turns away from the camera, covering her face with her hands, in a now-iconic set of photographs. 'After that series of flashes through the window, [photographers] never saw her again,' South said. 'She would dive underneath the window, or … [sit with] the back of her head on the window, so there's no chance of seeing her. She'd ride like that all the way to Melbourne – 165 kilometres back.' A stakeout and Erin Patterson's only interview About nine months before Keep captured Patterson in the police van, the news first broke that three people died after a family lunch in Leongatha, about 60 kilometres south-west of Morwell. The Age crime reporter Marta Pascual Juanola, based in Melbourne, grabbed her camera gear and raced down to South Gippsland to begin what then became an eight-day reporting trip to cover the biggest crime story of the year. On August 7, she'd spent most of the morning trying to figure out who the victims were, and who had cooked the fateful meal, before she landed the tip that gave her their names. She managed to track down Patterson's address, where she knew the lunch was held, and parked outside her house for hours, waiting for the mother of two to emerge and engage with the waiting media pack. When Patterson finally came outside, Pascual Juanola was there, waiting with her DSL camera to capture the moment. Holding her phone with one hand to record her comments and using the other to shoot her portrait, the reporter captured an emotional Patterson as she told journalists she loved the people who had attended the lunch. Looking up into the sky as if searching for answers, Patterson dabbed at her eyes with a tissue – but did not appear to have any tears. The result was a Quill Award-nominated series of compelling portraits, which captured Patterson's emotional appeal for sympathy in what would become her only interview with the media. A 'lesson in patience' For Jason South, covering Patterson's triple-murder case was one of the most difficult jobs of his decades-long career, for one reason alone. 'There's so little variety to shoot,' South said. 'You're shooting the same people, at the same place, for 10 weeks straight. Trying to make interesting pictures in the ninth and tenth week was a real lesson in patience. 'Then you add having to get there in the early morning to get people queuing up, and trying to grab a frame of the prosecutor, who would always try and sneak in before the media. 'You'd have early mornings in the sometimes sub-zero temperatures, and then be there at 4.30pm in the afternoon, when they come out.' South and other media initially thought the trial would go for about a month. He ended up having to tell his family, repeatedly, 'just one more week'. His 18-year-old and 22-year-old children caught onto the delay, and it became a running joke. 'When I came home, they quipped, 'are you my daddy?',' South says with a laugh.
The Age
an hour ago
- The Age
A photographer made a bizarre contraption to catch Erin Patterson. The gamble paid off
In news photography, getting 'the shot' is partly down to planning and good luck. On Monday, May 12 – two weeks into Erin Patterson's trial in the usually quiet Victorian country town of Morwell – most of the photographers and journalists covering the murder trial were taking the opportunity of a jury-free day to get some well-earned rest. Martin Keep, though, ventured out into the bitter cold, a custom rig mounted to his body with studio flashes twisted around his camera. It was something that Keep, who was photographing the trial for Agence France-Presse, his colleagues, and Age photographer Jason South had never seen before – a bizarre creation, born out of a chance find at former Jetstar pilot Greg Lynn's trial almost a year before. For years in Melbourne, photographers haven't bothered chasing police vans, thinking they couldn't capture the scene inside. 'But the Greg Lynn case changed all that,' South said. '[ Age colleague] Joe Armao got a picture inside [Lynn's] van without anybody in it, and he showed me. He said: 'You can see in there.' I spent days and days, and got Greg Lynn in that van. 'Martin was on the [Patterson] job with me, and he was asking how, and what, and where. On the first day, he did actually get a really dark, soft and grainy photo of [Patterson] in the van. 'He went home and thought on how he could make it better, and he built this whole rig to go around the camera … then he had the most amazing luck.' Patterson also wasn't expecting any media to bother showing up at Morwell Police Station on May 12; she thought they'd spare themselves the boring legal argument, South suggested. Photographers had two chances a week to capture her in the van – when she was en route to and from the Dame Phyllis Frost Centre in Melbourne's west. On May 12, Keep thought he'd test out his rig for the first time, and caught her staring dead-eyed through the window of the police van. In his images, her shock at being photographed is visceral. Her face falls before she turns away from the camera, covering her face with her hands, in a now-iconic set of photographs. 'After that series of flashes through the window, [photographers] never saw her again,' South said. 'She would dive underneath the window, or … [sit with] the back of her head on the window, so there's no chance of seeing her. She'd ride like that all the way to Melbourne – 165 kilometres back.' A stakeout and Erin Patterson's only interview About nine months before Keep captured Patterson in the police van, the news first broke that three people died after a family lunch in Leongatha, about 60 kilometres south-west of Morwell. The Age crime reporter Marta Pascual Juanola, based in Melbourne, grabbed her camera gear and raced down to South Gippsland to begin what then became an eight-day reporting trip to cover the biggest crime story of the year. On August 7, she'd spent most of the morning trying to figure out who the victims were, and who had cooked the fateful meal, before she landed the tip that gave her their names. She managed to track down Patterson's address, where she knew the lunch was held, and parked outside her house for hours, waiting for the mother of two to emerge and engage with the waiting media pack. When Patterson finally came outside, Pascual Juanola was there, waiting with her DSL camera to capture the moment. Holding her phone with one hand to record her comments and using the other to shoot her portrait, the reporter captured an emotional Patterson as she told journalists she loved the people who had attended the lunch. Looking up into the sky as if searching for answers, Patterson dabbed at her eyes with a tissue – but did not appear to have any tears. The result was a Quill Award-nominated series of compelling portraits, which captured Patterson's emotional appeal for sympathy in what would become her only interview with the media. A 'lesson in patience' For Jason South, covering Patterson's triple-murder case was one of the most difficult jobs of his decades-long career, for one reason alone. 'There's so little variety to shoot,' South said. 'You're shooting the same people, at the same place, for 10 weeks straight. Trying to make interesting pictures in the ninth and tenth week was a real lesson in patience. 'Then you add having to get there in the early morning to get people queuing up, and trying to grab a frame of the prosecutor, who would always try and sneak in before the media. 'You'd have early mornings in the sometimes sub-zero temperatures, and then be there at 4.30pm in the afternoon, when they come out.' South and other media initially thought the trial would go for about a month. He ended up having to tell his family, repeatedly, 'just one more week'. His 18-year-old and 22-year-old children caught onto the delay, and it became a running joke. 'When I came home, they quipped, 'are you my daddy?',' South says with a laugh.
Perth Now
3 hours ago
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