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Erin Patterson found guilty by jury of murdering three people with mushroom lunch in Leongatha

Erin Patterson found guilty by jury of murdering three people with mushroom lunch in Leongatha

7NEWS2 days ago
Erin Patterson has been found guilty of murdering three people with a toxic mushroom lunch following a marathon ten-week trial in Victoria.
Justice Christopher Beale sent the jury to deliberate last Monday, urging them to resist feelings of bias.
After seven days of deliberating, the 12 jurors returned with a unanimous verdict, finding Patterson guilty of three counts of murder and one count of attempted murder.
Patterson's former in-laws, Don and Gail Patterson, both 70, and Gail's sister, Heather Wilkinson, 66, died days after attending a lunch at her Leongatha home, in Victoria's Gippsland region, on 29 July 2023.
Heather's Baptist pastor husband, Ian, 68, spent months in hospital, but survived.
Patterson maintained her innocence throughout the trial, claiming the poisonings were accidental.
She will be sentenced at a later date.
When the jury were sent to deliberate, Justice Beale advised jurors that prosecutors did not have to specify a motive to prove their case beyond reasonable doubt.
But Justice Beale also said jurors could consider the lack of motive in Patterson's favour when assessing whether she had an intention to kill.
More than 50 witnesses gave evidence at the Supreme Court hearing in Morwell - including members of the Patterson and Wilkinson families, medical staff, Facebook friends, public health officials, scientists, digital experts, and police - as Patterson's horrific crimes were laid bare.
The court heard tension ignited between Patterson, her estranged husband Simon, and his parents over child support issues in late 2022, with the mother-of-two complaining about them in expletive-filled messages to her Facebook friends.
Although messages between Patterson, Simon, Don and Gail appeared to show the troubles quickly blew over, just months later she began plotting their murders.
In autumn 2023, she foraged for death cap mushrooms - the most toxic fungus in the world - before purchasing a food dehydrator to dry them out so she could later use them to kill.
Telephone data shown to the court suggests Patterson travelled to Loch and Outtrim in April and May, just days after death cap mushrooms sightings were reported on citizen website iNaturalist - a webpage that computer analysis showed she had used from as early as May 2022.
Just hours after her phone pinged in Loch on April 28 2023, Patterson went to a local store and bought a $229 Sunbeam food dehydrator, sending photos of her drying out mushrooms to friends.
A few weeks later, in June 2023, she began planting the seed for her heinous scheme by sending Gail and Don messages claiming she had medical appointments booked for a suspicious lump on her elbow.
With her trap laid, she invited Simon, Gail, Don, Heather, and Ian over to lunch, with her estranged husband recalling to the court how she told him she had medical issues she wanted to discuss in the absence of the kids.
While Simon pulled out the day before, his parents, aunt, and uncle still went to Patterson's Leongatha home, where she served up individual beef wellingtons laced with amatoxins to her guests on matching plates, while she ate from a different coloured dish.
After they finished their meal, Patterson told her in-laws she had ovarian cancer, leading the group- who had unknowingly just been poisoned at her hands - to pray for her and her health.
Over the next few hours and days, her guests' health rapidly deteriorated as they began to experience excruciating symptoms as their organs began to shut down, including vomiting blood, nausea, stomach pain, and diarrhoea.
Meanwhile, Patterson swiftly moved to try and cover her tracks - feigning symptoms, dumping the food dehydrator, lying to police and public health authorities, and tampering with her phone.
In court, Patterson claimed she, too, was a victim and was sick with nausea and diarrhoea after inadvertently picking deadly mushrooms and adding them to the beef wellingtons.
She said she did not begin to suspect her foraged mushrooms had made their way into the meal until after she and everyone became sick.
Patterson claimed she then 'panicked' and began destroying evidence and lying to authorities out of fear she would be blamed for the poisonings and would lose custody of her kids.
But jury panel - of seven men and five women - did not believe her.
In finding Patterson guilty, the jury ruled the prosecution had succeeded in proving the four elements of the charges of murder and attempted murder 'beyond a reasonable doubt'.
For murder, the elements include: the accused caused the death of the deceased by serving them a poisoned meal; that the alleged conduct was conscious, voluntary and deliberate; that at the time she intended to kill or cause really serious injury to them and that she did so without lawful justification or excuse.
The elements of attempted murder include: that the accused consciously, voluntarily and deliberately served Ian Wilkinson a poisoned meal; that her acts were more than merely preparatory; that she intended to kill him; and that her alleged conduct had no lawful justification or excuse.
The verdict brings to an end the almost two-month long trial, which captured international headlines as dozens of journalists descended on the small mining community of Morwell, a town of around 14,300 people a 50 minute drive northeast of Leongatha.
The trial also drew massive crowds as members of the public swarmed to the area from near and far, sometimes waiting outside in the cold for hours, to bag a spot inside the court room.
After giving his testimony, Ian Wilkinson sat in the public gallery every day listening to the proceedings, often accompanied by other members of the Patterson and Wilkinson families.
The woman who murdered his wife and almost took his life sat just metres away, at the back of the room, in the dock.
As Patterson awaits her fate, she will be remanded in at the Dame Phyllis Frost Centre, a maximum security prison for women in Melbourne's western suburbs.
The facility has housed some of Australia's most infamous female offenders, including teen killer Caroline Reed Robertson, gangland widow Roberta Williams and German drug smuggler Andrea Mohr.
Other high-profile inmates Patterson will be bunking with include pedophile rapist Malka Leifer, black widow Robyn Lindholm, Melbourne crime queen Judy Moran, and serial con artist Samantha Azzopardi.
While Justice Beale will have to weigh several factors when deciding Patterson's sentence, the nature of the crimes could see her jailed for the rest of her life.
In Victoria, the maximum penalty for murder is life imprisonment while attempted murder carries a sentence of up to 25 years behind bars.
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A trip to the tip, hospital visit and beef wellington leftovers: Photo exhibits from murderer Erin Patterson's trial released
A trip to the tip, hospital visit and beef wellington leftovers: Photo exhibits from murderer Erin Patterson's trial released

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A trip to the tip, hospital visit and beef wellington leftovers: Photo exhibits from murderer Erin Patterson's trial released

Photos shown to the jurors who determined Erin Patterson's fate as a triple murderer have been released by the court. Patterson on Monday was found guilty of murdering her former in-laws Don and Gail Patterson, and Gail's sister Heather Wilkinson by serving a toxic beef wellington lunch in July 2023. Patterson was also convicted of the attempted murder of Heather's husband and local church pastor Ian Wilkinson, who survived the meal after a lengthy stint in hospital. A tranche of exhibits, released by the Victorian Supreme Court following the verdict, have given a glimpse into Patterson's home during a police search in the aftermath of the toxic meal. Further footage shows Patterson's hospital visit in the days after the lunch, as well as her trip to the tip to dump a food dehydrator. Inside Patterson's home after toxic lunch An annotated photograph shows where each lunch guest sat at the table during Patterson's beef wellington lunch. The image depicts Ian at the head of the table with his wife Heather to his left and Gail to his right, while Don sat opposite Erin. On August 5, 2023, Patterson's home was searched by police and a number of items were seized, including a computer. Detective Leading Senior Constable Stephen Eppingstall told the trial he was the main officer tasked with staying by Patterson's side during the search. Patterson was allowed to move around her home but an officer was with her at all times, he said. Mr Wilkinson gave evidence during the trial that the beef wellingtons were dished out as individual serves on different coloured plates. The church pastor said there were five plates in total, four grey ones and another which was an orangey-tan colour. Patterson served herself a portion of food on the odd plate and then carried it to the table, he said. The defence argued Patterson did not own a full set of matching plates in her home. The beef wellington leftovers The court heard the beef wellington recipe was sourced from a RecipeTin Eats cookbook. During her testimony, Patterson claimed she bought the fresh mushrooms used in the meal from Woolworths, as well as dried ones from an Asian grocer in Melbourne's south-east. She had stored the dried mushrooms in a Tupperware container. Patterson told the court she had dehydrated and foraged for mushrooms in the past, and feared some may have mistakenly been mixed into her beef wellington meal. She denied the poisonings were deliberate. Leftovers of the meal were later retrieved from a red bin at her property by police and provided to pathology and toxicology for testing. The testing came after Patterson's four lunch guests were admitted to hospital due to being critically unwell in the days after the lunch. CCTV released of Patterson's trip to the tip During the trial, the court was played CCTV footage of Patterson dumping a food dehydrator at the Koonwarra Transfer Station and Landfill on August 2, four days after the lunch. Stills of the footage, which have now been released, show Patterson carrying a large item from her red SUV as she walks towards a large green shed. The trial heard the operations manager of the group which runs Koonwarra Transfer Station was contacted by police on August 4 in relation to the CCTV footage. The manager asked one of his employees to look for the item depicted in the footage, which was dumped in an e-waste bin. The worker then found what he described as a microwave-type dehydrator. Police went to the tip to pick up the appliance the following day. The hospital saga Patterson presented to Leongatha Hospital about 8am on July 31, but discharged herself against medical advice only about five minutes after she arrived. Dr Chris Webster told the jury he tried to call Patterson three times after she left the hospital amid fears for her health. He left her three voice messages, and later called police as he was concerned for the mother-of-two's welfare. At this stage, Don and Gail had been transferred to Dandenong hospital, while Ian and Heather were at Leongatha. Patterson returned to the hospital a few hours later and was transferred to Monash Medical Centre with her children after doctors were told the kids had eaten leftovers of the meal. The jury delivered their guilty verdict on Monday after seven days of deliberations, bringing to a close what has been 10 weeks of proceedings in the regional Victorian town of Morwell. The prosecution argued Patterson's lunch was intentionally laced with death cap mushrooms, but the mother-of-two denied the poisonings were intentional. Prosecutors further argued that Patterson faked a cancer diagnosis to lure her guests over for lunch as she needed advice on how to break the medical news to her children. Her estranged husband Simon Patterson was invited to the lunch, but pulled out of the gathering the day before by text message. It is not yet known when the mother-of-two will be sentenced.

The legal eagles behind the mushroom trial that captured the world's attention
The legal eagles behind the mushroom trial that captured the world's attention

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Genteel in his interactions from the bench during Erin Patterson's trial, Beale was thorough when instructing the jury. The lead prosecutor Dr Nanette Rogers, SC, was appointed a Crown prosecutor by the Victorian Office of Public Prosecutions in 2012 and is now one of the state's most senior prosecutors. She was previously made a queen's counsel in the Northern Territory, where she also compiled a landmark report that alleged child sexual abuse and neglect were widespread and under-reported in Indigenous communities in the territory. That report prompted a government inquiry and ultimately the Howard government's emergency response legislation. In Victoria, Rogers has prosecuted offenders in sex crime cases and also led the Crown case against Adrian Basham, who was found guilty of murdering his estranged wife, Samantha Fraser, at her Phillip Island home in 2018. In that trial, Rogers argued against the defence position that Fraser took her own life after Basham assaulted her. A Supreme Court judge jailed Basham for life, to serve 30 years before he is eligible for parole. Known for her colourful turn of phrase when addressing the jury in Patterson's trial, Rogers also went head-to-head with the accused woman over five days of cross-examination. 'Are you making this up as you go along, Ms Patterson?' she asked the mushroom cook at one point. However, she wasn't there when the verdict was delivered on Monday. The lead defence counsel Colin Mandy, SC, swept into court alongside his junior barrister Sophie Stafford for each day of the mushroom trial. It was not the first high-profile trial he has taken on. In his first week after being admitted to the Bar 25 years ago, Mandy worked with esteemed human rights barrister Julian Burnside, QC, at the High Court of the Solomon Islands. He became a senior counsel, or 'silk', in 2018. The position recognises barristers with high professional standing, skill and integrity. One of Mandy's prominent cases was defending Ari Sherani from terrorism allegations in Victoria's Supreme Court. Sherani, alongside his brother Aran, was accused of attempting to commit a terrorist act by dousing bushland near Humevale, north of Melbourne, in petrol before setting it alight in the summer of 2021. The brothers were acquitted, and Mandy described his client, the elder brother, as a 'weed-smoking, fun-loving guy'. The lawyer also represented Kandasamy Kannan, one half of a couple jailed for enslaving a woman in their home for eight years, at an appeal hearing. The junior prosecutors While Rogers led the Crown's case against Patterson, she had a team of lawyers working with her to share the load during the 10-week trial and in hearings and preparatory work beforehand. Among those lawyers were Jane Warren and Sarah Lenthall, both Crown prosecutors and the junior barristers behind the lead prosecutor. Loading In the trial, Warren questioned some of the key witnesses in front of the jury and read into evidence transcripts of messages between Patterson and her family members. Warren, a former Office of Public Prosecutions solicitor and then an independent barrister before she became a Crown prosecutor, was in court on Monday for the jury's verdicts, as Rogers was absent from court. Lenthall has been a Crown prosecutor for about 18 months and was previously an OPP solicitor. She was involved in addressing Justice Beale in pre-trial hearings, before the jury was selected. The junior defence counsel Mandy's junior barrister was Sophie Stafford, a criminal law specialist whose work has included inquests and inquiries. Before joining Mandy to defend Patterson, Stafford took part in another case that gripped the country. She was part of the defence of Terence Kelly, who abducted West Australian girl Cleo Smith, then aged four, as she slept in her tent as her family camped in Carnarvon in 2021. Police found Chloe at Kelly's home 18 days after he snatched her. He was sentenced to 13½ years behind bars. Stafford was also part of the team that defended Jacob Elliott, the son of slain crime boss Nabil Maghnie, over a fatal shooting outside Melbourne nightclub Love Machine in 2019.

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