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

7NEWS

2 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.