A photographer made a bizarre contraption to catch Erin Patterson. The gamble paid off

Sydney Morning Herald

15 hours ago

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.