The Victorian mother-of-two at the centre of a mushroom poisoning case had the opportunity to tell her own story this week as she took the stand at her triple-murder trial.
Erin Patterson, 50, is facing trial after pleading not guilty to the murders of her husband’s parents and aunt, and the attempted murder of his uncle.
Simon Patterson’s parents, Don and Gail Patterson, and Gail’s sister, Heather Wilkinson, died in the week after the lunch after falling ill from mushroom poisoning.
Prosecutors alleged she deliberately poisoned the beef Wellington lunch on July 29, 2023, with death cap mushrooms intending to kill or seriously injure her four guests.
Her defence, on the other hand, has argued the case is a “tragic accident” and Ms Patterson also consumed the death caps and fell sick, though not as sick as her guests.
Over five days this week Ms Patterson sat in the witness box about 7 m from the 14 jurors selected to hear her case, answering questions, firstly from her barrister Colin Mandy SC and then from Crown prosecutor Nanette Rogers SC.
Her opportunity to tell her own story came after the jury spent five weeks hearing from more than 50 witnesses for the prosecution as Ms Patterson sat in silence at the back of the Morwell courtroom.
Mushroom cook agrees death caps in lunch may have been foraged
In her testimony to the jury, Ms Patterson conceded death cap mushrooms “must” have ended up in the beef Wellington lunch she prepared and served for the four guests.
The morning of the lunch, she told the court, she started to prepare the duxelles, or mushroom paste, by cooking down two punnets of fresh sliced mushrooms she had purchased from Woolworths.
“So, as I was cooking it down, I tasted it a few times and it seemed a little bland to me, so I decided to put in the dried mushrooms that I’d bought from the grocer that I still had in the pantry,” she said.
Ms Patterson told the jury she had purchased a packet of dried mushrooms in April the same year from an Asian supermarket in Melbourne, initially intending to use them for a pasta dish but deciding against that because they had a strong flavour.
She said she now accepts it was possible she had stored wild mushrooms she foraged from her local area and dehydrated in the same Tupperware container.
“At that time, I believed it was just the mushrooms that I’d bought in Melbourne … Now I think that there was a possibility that there were foraged ones in there as well,” she said.
Ms Patterson told the jury she first became interested in foraging for wild mushrooms during Covid and educated herself online.
Over a period of months, she said she grew confident to identify “field mushrooms and horse mushrooms” growing on her property before deciding to eat some.
“When I got to a point I was confident what they were, I cut a bit off, fried it up with butter, ate it and saw what happened,” she said.
“They tasted good and I didn’t get sick.”
Ms Patterson said she had purchased a dehydrator on April 28, 2023, to begin experimenting with preserving mushrooms because they had a short shelf life.
Crown alleges photo shows Ms Patterson calculating ‘fatal dose’
Under questioning from Crown prosecutor Nanette Rogers SC, Ms Patterson was taken to a photograph of sliced mushrooms on a dehydrator tray being weighed.
The weight recorded was 280.0g and metadata from the photo showed it was last modified on May 4.
Ms Patterson agreed the photo was “likely” taken by her and contains her kitchen bench.
Previously, the jury heard from mycologist Dr Tom May that the mushrooms pictured were “consistent with amanita phalloides (death caps) at a high level of confidence”.
Questioned on if she accepted the mushrooms pictured were death caps, Ms Patterson said: “I don’t think they are”.
She also denied she had foraged these mushrooms in the nearby town of Loch on April 28 after seeing a death cap mushroom sighting post on citizen science website iNaturalist on April 18.
Dr Rogers suggested the image recorded Ms Patterson weighing the mushrooms to calculate the “weight required for the administration of a fatal dose”.
“Disagree,” Ms Patterson responded.
Mushroom cook tells jury she lied to health authorities because she was scared
Ms Patterson said she first learned her in-laws had fallen ill the day after the lunch on a phone call with her estranged husband on July 30.
The following day, she told the court, she attended the local Leongatha Hospital too seek treatment for gastro when the resident doctor, Dr Chris Webster, said “we’ve been expecting you”.
“I think I said to him, ‘Why? Why are you asking?’, and he said that there’s a concern or we’re concerned you’ve been exposed to death cap mushrooms,” she said.
“I was shocked but confused as well … I didn’t see how death cap mushrooms could be in the meal.”
Ms Patterson told the court she first began to suspect foraged mushrooms may have ended up in the lunch at Monash Medical Centre when Simon accused her of poisoning his parents.
In his own evidence, at the start of the trial, Simon Patterson told the jury he did not say this to his wife.
Ms Patterson told the jury on August 2, the day after her release from hospital, she disposed of her dehydrator at the Koonwarra Transfer Station.
“I was scared that they would blame me for it,” she said of the decision.
“Surely if you loved them (her in-laws) you would have notified health authorities about the possibility of the foraged mushrooms in the container?” Dr Rogers asked.
‘Well I didn’t,” Ms Patterson replied.
“I had been told people were getting treatment for possible death cap mushroom poisoning so that was already happening.”
Ms Patterson confirmed she did not notify anyone of her suspicions and lied to both police and health authorities in the following days by claiming she did not forage for mushrooms.
She was taken to a series of messages exchanged with public health officer Sally Anne Atkinson, where Ms Patterson insisted the only mushrooms in the meal were from Woolworths and an Asian grocer.
Asked what her state of mind was in relation to the Asian grocer, she said she “still thought it was a possibility, but I knew it wasn’t the only possibility.”
Ms Patterson told the court she first learned of Heather and Gail’s deaths as police searched her home on August 5 and continued to lie.
“It was this stupid knee-jerk reaction to just dig deeper and keep lying. I was just scared, but I shouldn’t have done it,” she said.
Ms Patterson claims she vomited after deadly lunch
Ms Patterson also told the jury she had long struggled with both her weight and relationships to food since childhood – describing it as a “rollercoaster”.
“Mum would weigh us every week to make sure we weren’t putting on too much weight … I went to the extreme of barely eating then to, through my adulthood, going the other way and bingeing,” she said.
She told the court she had engaged in binge eating until she was sick then “bringing it back up” since her 20s and no one knew.
In the lead up to the July 29, 2023, lunch, Ms Patterson said she had been engaging in this behaviour “two or three times a week”.
She told the court that at the lunch with Don, Gail, Heather and Ian, she only ate some of her serving, but consumed about two-thirds of an orange cake after her guests left.
“I had a piece of cake and then another piece of cake and then another,” Ms Patterson said.
“I felt sick. I felt overfull, so I went to the toilets and brought it back up again.”
Ms Patterson is expected to return to the witness box and continue giving evidence when the trial resumes on Tuesday.
