The Australian woman accused of killing her estranged husband's elderly relatives with toxic mushrooms in a home-cooked meal is sharing her story — and dropping bombshells — during multiple days of testimony in court.
Erin Patterson, 50, is accused of intentionally putting death cap mushrooms — which are among the most poisonous in the world — in a beef Wellington dish she served at a July 2023 lunch at her home in the small town of Leongatha, some 85 miles from Melbourne.
All four of her guests — her husband's parents, aunt and uncle — were hospitalized with gastrointestinal symptoms the following day, and three of them died the following week from altered liver function and multiple organ failure due to Amanita mushroom poisoning.
Patterson was briefly hospitalized but did not have the same symptoms as her guests. She testified that she vomited later that day after eating two-thirds of a cake they had brought.
Patterson, a mother of two, denies that the poisoning was deliberate and has pleaded not guilty to three counts of murder and one count of attempted murder. She faces life imprisonment if convicted.
As Patterson's triple murder trial in the Victoria state Supreme Court unfolds, she has admitted to lying about certain details of her story — such as the cancer diagnosis she invited her guests over to tell them about, her previously undisclosed mushroom foraging hobby and the fact that she had owned a food dehydrator but quickly disposed of it during the investigation.
"Even after you were discharged from hospital you did not tell a single person that there may have been foraged mushroom used in the meal," prosecutor Nanette Rogers asked her Friday. "Instead you got up, you drove your children to school ... and drove home. And then you got rid of the dehydrator."
"Correct," Patterson replied.
The trial, which began in April, was initially expected to take around six weeks. Justice Christopher Beale said Thursday there are several more steps in the proceedings, potentially including hearing new evidence, before the jury is sequestered for deliberations.
"And then the boot is on the other foot, because none of you can tell me how long you will be in deliberations," Beale said. "How long is a piece of string? You will take all the time you need."
Here are some of the biggest takeaways from Patterson's week on the stand.
1. Patterson complained about her in-laws behind their backs
Erin and Simon Patterson got married in 2007 and, after splitting and reconciling multiple times over the years, separated permanently in 2015. They remained amicable and in close contact, sharing custody of their two children, seeing each other in church and even going on vacations together.
Simon was invited to the fateful lunch but declined the invitation the night before.
Patterson was also on good terms with her in-laws, Gail and Donald Patterson, both 70, saying in court that "they treated me like their own daughter."
But prosecutors — and Patterson herself — acknowledged that her relationship with Simon started deteriorating in 2022. Patterson said after noticing that he described himself as single on his tax return, she asked him to start paying child support, which he did. But they continued to fight over related issues, including which school their kids should attend and who should pay the fees.
On Thursday, Rogers asked Patterson to read from Signal messages she had sent to Donald and Gail about the disputed school fees. Patterson denied that she was asking her in-laws to make Simon pay for them.
"What I wanted from them, whether I communicated it well or not, was I wanted Don and Gail to help Simon and I communicate better about it," Patterson said. "I thought that … if Simon knew that Don and Gail knew how he was behaving, he might change his behaviour."
But Don and Gail took Simon's side, which prosecutors allege made Patterson angry.
On Friday, the prosecution asked Patterson about Facebook messages she sent to friends in late 2022 complaining about Simon's parents, including: "Don messaged to say he and Gail don't want to get involved in the financial things but just hope we will pray for the kids," alongside what she disputes was an eye-rolling emoji. Elsewhere, she wrote, "'This family I swear to f****** god."
"'I thought his parents would want him to do the right thing but it seems their concern about not wanting to feel uncomfortable and not wanting to get involved in their sons personal matters are overriding that so f*** em," read another message.
Under questioning, Patterson denied that the messages reflected her true feelings about Don and Gail, and said she was simply "venting." But Rogers accused her of having "two faces: a public face of appearing to have a good relationship with Don and Gail" and a private face reflected in her Facebook messages.
"Are you asking me to agree if I had two faces?" Patterson replied, before answering, "I had a good relationship with Don and Gail."
2. Patterson denies telling her guests she had cancer
Prosecutors say Patterson invited Don and Gail Patterson, as well as Gail's sister Heather Wilkinson, 66, and her husband Ian Wilkinson, 68, over for lunch to discuss some medical issues she was facing and how to break the news to her kids (whom she dropped off for lunch and a movie with a friend before her guests arrived).
Based on accounts from Ian Wilkinson, the sole survivor, Patterson told the group at lunch that she had been diagnosed with cancer after noticing a bump on her elbow, and asked for advice on whether to tell her kids.
In court on Thursday, Patterson acknowledged that she had misled Gail about the lump on her elbow in the weeks before the lunch, and didn't have medical issues to communicate either to her guests or her kids.
"I didn't have a legitimate medical reason, no, that's true," Patterson said.
When asked directly, Patterson repeatedly denied telling her lunch guests that she had cancer — contradicting Wilkinson's version of events. But she admitted that at the end of the lunch, "I'm not proud of this, but I led them to believe that I might be needing some treatment," following up on a previous ovarian cancer scare.
"I can't remember the precise words, but I do know what I was trying to communicate was that I was undergoing investigations around ovarian cancer and might need treatment in that regard in the future," she said. "I can't say that that was the specific words I used, but that's what I remember wanting to communicate."
Patterson said she had long struggled with low self-esteem because of her weight and had made an appointment for that September to look into gastric bypass surgery.
"I was really embarrassed about it, so I thought perhaps letting them believe I had some serious issue that needed treatment might mean they'd be able to help me with the logistics around the kids and I wouldn't have to tell them the real reason," she said.
Rogers suggested that Patterson never planned to account for her cancer lie "because you thought that the lunch guests would die," to which Patterson replied, "That's not true."
3. Patterson accepts there were death cap mushrooms in the food
Patterson said Tuesday that she accepts there must have been death cap mushrooms in the meal she made, an admission she had long withheld.
In the immediate aftermath of the incident, Patterson told doctors and investigators that she used two kinds of mushrooms for her dish: fresh from the grocery store and dried from a Chinese grocer in the area, though she couldn't remember which one. In interviews with police, she denied owning a dehydrator and foraging for mushrooms.
On the opening day of the trial, however, her lawyer, Colin Mandy, confirmed those had been lies, but said Patterson "denies that she ever deliberately sought out death cap mushrooms."
Patterson said on the stand that she started foraging for mushrooms at trails and botanical gardens in her area in early 2020, and joined Facebook groups to identify and learn about the different kinds.
The Victorian government issued a warning in early 2023 that death cap mushrooms were growing in the region. Patterson repeatedly said she couldn't remember using the naturalist website that marked where the toxic mushrooms had been found.
Patterson acknowledged buying a food dehydrator in April 2023, but denied prosecutors' allegation that she traveled to a nearby town to collect death cap mushrooms that same month. She admitted to disposing of the device after the lunch, but said she didn't know death cap mushrooms had been in it.
She said while she was preparing the beef Wellington — which is typically coated in mushroom paste and wrapped in pastry — "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."
"I didn't deliberately put death cap mushrooms in the meal," Patterson said, but acknowledged she now thinks there was a chance that some of her foraged mushrooms were also in that Tupperware.
She said the possibility only occurred to her days later, as her relatives' conditions deteriorated and toxicology tests confirmed death cap mushroom poisoning. She said she was talking to Simon in the hospital when the topic of her dehydrator came up, and he asked: "Is that how you poisoned my parents?"
She said his comment got her thinking about how she had dried foraged mushrooms in it weeks earlier.
"I was starting to think, 'What if they'd gone in the container with the Chinese mushrooms? Maybe that had happened,' " Patterson said, adding it made her feel "really worried because Child Protection were involved and Simon seemed to be of the mind that maybe this was intentional. I just got really scared."
4. Patterson says she lied to authorities out of fear
Prosecutors said that even as doctors confirmed the patients were suffering from "serious toxin syndrome caused by ingestion of amanita phalloides mushrooms," they did not immediately receive the antidote because there was a lack of evidence to confirm they had ingested such mushrooms.
On Friday, Patterson confirmed she did not tell anyone about the possibility of the contaminated mushrooms. Rogers asked why she didn't alert medical authorities as soon as it occurred to her, on Aug. 1.
"I had been told that people were getting treatment for possible death cap mushroom poisoning," Patterson answered. "So that was already happening."
Instead, she confirmed that the next day she drove her kids to school, came home and got rid of the dehydrator, taking it to what's called a tip — a second-hand store at a waste facility.
Heather Wilkinson and Gail Patterson died on Aug. 4, and Donald Patterson died the following day. Ian Wilkison was extubated on Aug. 14 and discharged to rehab on Sept. 11.
She said she disposed of the dehydrator "in the context of thinking that maybe mushrooms that I'd foraged, or the meal I prepared was responsible for making people sick," and that after she learned of the deaths, "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 added.
Patterson also said she did a factory reset of her cell phone during the police investigation because "I knew that there were photos in there of mushrooms and the dehydrator and I just panicked and didn't want [detectives] to see them."
That didn't stop prosecutors from showing photos taken on her phone in April 2023, depicting wild mushrooms being weighed on a scale. They suggested Patterson had done so to calculate a lethal dose, which she denied.
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