6 days ago
The stuff of nightmares
Warnings about picking and eating unknown fungi are handed down by many parents to children at an early age, along with other important life lessons of crossing a road safely and not plugging in electrical appliances with wet hands.
Mushrooms and their poisonous relatives toadstools, both the fruiting bodies of the group Basidiomycota, have always had a somewhat fearsome reputation, not always thoroughly deserved.
We all know how delicious some mushrooms are and how good they are for you. Most of us recognise the toxic toadstools to steer clear of, including the pretty, bright red-and-white fly agaric and the far more deadly death cap, with its pale greeny-yellow top and white stalk.
We place a great deal of trust in those who prepare food for us, and have to hope that if they are using fungi, and have been out foraging, they know exactly what they are doing.
How horrific then that three Australians who died after eating a beef wellington containing death cap have now been found to have been murdered by mother Erin Patterson, a true-crime stories buff.
After a week of deliberations in the Supreme Court in Victoria's Morwell, the jury on Monday also found Patterson guilty of attempting to murder a fourth guest at her July 2023 lunch.
The case has caught the public's imagination in the way trials do which feature bizarre crimes or high-profile defendants. It's one of the most ghoulish aspects of human nature that people are fascinated by unusual offences, celebrities in court or seemingly "normal" people caught up in extraordinary circumstances.
Many people wanted to see justice done in what became known glibly as the "mushroom murders". They were impatient for the verdict to be handed down.
The jury of 12 determined Patterson, 50, murdered the parents of her estranged husband and also her maternal aunt, whose husband somehow survived.
Pieces of death cap were added to the individual beef wellingtons which were served on four grey plates for the guests while Patterson had hers on an orange plate.
Within hours, the deadly amatoxins were starting to eat into and destroy the organs of the three, who died an awful death over the course of about a week.
While Patterson was caught lying during the court case, the judge warned the jury that was not necessarily a sign she was guilty.
But in the end, they believed the lies about her health, about owning a food dehydrator which she dumped and was later found to contain traces of the toadstools, and evidence she had been looking online for local patches of death caps were too compelling to ignore. Open letter season
It sure does feel like open season on open letters, thanks to former prime minister Dame Jacinda Ardern, Dunedin business leader Sir Ian Taylor, and a cast of, well, several.
Is an open letter a "thing", you say, and not just a frequently used arrow in Sir Ian's quiver? It certainly is.
Viewed through a pen-is-mightier-than-the-sword lens, this particular weapon is something written to an individual, though not really for their eyes only but for the delectation of a much wider group.
Sir Ian's letter to Dame Jacinda last week about her government's Covid-19 lockdown failures and repercussions, her book A Different Kind of Power and her glamorous appearances in fashion magazines, relitigates a good deal of what he has previously said in columns in The New Zealand Herald and in a 2022 article in the NZ Listener .
Last week's open letter was quickly followed by a Steve Braunias parody in Newsroom and the Otago Daily Times at the weekend, which in turn sparked another open letter from Sir Ian back to Mr Braunias, before The Spinoff joined in the party yesterday with an open letter to Dame Jacinda about open letters to her.
Wonderful stuff. This increasingly ludicrous and Monty Pythonesque spectacle is something to brighten us all up at this dark and cold time of year.
But where will it end? Remember that infinity mirror effect, where you look at mirrors through other angled mirrors and the image goes on down the corridors of forever?
There must be a way our ailing NZ Post can capitalise on all these open letters.
