How Erin Patterson became the mushroom murderer
She lived in a large, white house down a long dirt track on the outskirts of Leongatha, Victoria, and hailed from middle-class Melbourne. Her family was educated and relatively prosperous, with a government worker for a father and a mother who studied 19th-century literature at university.
Erin, 50, was also prosperous through inheritances — she'd lent relatives hundreds of thousands of dollars — yet she had little love for the life she left behind. 'It was like being brought up in a Russian orphanage where they don't touch the babies,' she told a friend about her upbringing.
After the collapse of her marriage to Simon Patterson, 50, with whom she had two teenage children, Patterson, also 50, lived a lonely life beneath the bruised skies and biting winds of Australia's far south — a region where religion runs deep, like the coal seams that once brought power and privilege. In the twin towns of Leongatha, population 5,900, and Korumburra, population 3,600, everyone knew everyone, yet no one could ever say they truly knew Patterson.
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