Details of a car ride mushroom killer Erin Patterson took in the hour after lunch guests left her home can now be made public.
At trial, Patterson told the jury she spent the afternoon cleaning and binge-eating an orange cake her mother-in-law brought, while her son gave evidence she had gone upstairs to play Lego.
But what the jury didn’t hear was that police had tracked Patterson jumping in the car and travelling to a recycling centre and landfill about 13km away.
The four lunch guests, Don and Gail Patterson and Heather and Ian Wilkinson, departed Patterson’s Leongatha home together about 2.45pm on July 29, 2023.
Giving evidence, Ian Wilkinson said Don dropped him and his wife home shortly after 3pm for a scheduled meeting with other members of the Korumburra Baptist Church where he serves as pastor.
Meanwhile, Patterson during her time in the witness box claimed she began the clean-up after the quartet left her home.
“I kept cleaning up the kitchen and putting everything away, um, and I had a piece of cake and then another piece of cake and then another,” she said.
Patterson said she felt sick and “brought it back up” – which her lawyers later argued may well explain why she wasn’t as sick as the others.
Her teenage son gave evidence he helped his mum clean up, before playing the computer game Valorant with a friend.
He said later that evening he found his mother upstairs building Lego and asked her to drive the friend home about 7pm.
During the trial, jurors were shown CCTV footage of Patterson dumping her dehydrator, later found to contain remnants of death cap mushrooms, at the Koonwarra Transfer Station and Landfill on August 4 – a day after she was released from hospital.
But they didn’t learn this wasn’t Patterson’s first visit to the tip.
In pre-trial hearings earlier this year, Crown prosecutor Sarah Lenthall told the court investigators had discovered Patterson visited the landfill within an hour of the lunch.
At 3.29pm on July 29, Patterson arrived at the Koonwarra Transfer Station and Landfill, dropping off an unknown item or items and a small amount of cardboard.
Records from the facility indicate she paid $9.50 at 3.51pm for the disposal of items that fell into the categories of “120L” bin and “0.5m pap/card”.
The items were not recovered, but it was alleged CCTV captured her disposing cardboard and “something else”.
Prosecutors sought to use this, and the element of secrecy by not telling her son, as a basis for the jury to infer the items were connected to the fatal meal and incriminating.
Lenthall argued the evidence pointed to Patterson leaving less than 30 minutes after her guests did and that there was plenty of space left in her home bins.
“We say the jury could, acting on the evidence as a whole, accept that the only purpose of making that trip was to dispose of items related to the lunch,” she said.
“It must be due to the nature of the material, rather than the volume of material, as to why she’s making that trip.”
In response, defence barrister Colin Mandy SC argued the prosecution was seeking to invite “speculation” when a jury could not draw the logical inference Patterson’s visit was incriminating.
“What’s been disposed of at the Koonwarra tip could be entirely innocent and nothing to do with any event,” he said.
This conduct was ultimately ruled out of the case by trial judge Justice Christopher Beale and business records from the facility were altered before they were shown to the jury to remove mention of the July 29 trip.
Justice Beale’s reasons for ruling this was inadmissible were released this week along with a series of his pre-trial rulings.
He wrote that when a suspect conceals or destroys something, such as a body, a jury could reasonably infer the act amounted to an implied admission of their guilt.
But the judge found when the thing in question is itself unknown, it invites the jury to speculate.
“I accept the accused’s submission that since Item (a) invites speculation, it fails the test of relevance,” he said.
Patterson was found guilty of murdering Don, Gail and Heather and the attempted murder of Ian Wilkinson following 11 weeks of trial on July 7.
She will return to court later this month for a pre-sentence hearing.