After nine weeks of trial in the country Victorian town of Morwell, it took jurors seven days to return unanimous verdicts finding Erin Patterson guilty of three counts of murder and one count of attempted murder.
“Guilty,” the forewoman said after each charge was read.
Patterson appeared in court for the verdict dressed in a paisley top, and appeared nervous as the courtroom packed out ahead of the bombshell verdict.
She tried to meet the eyes of the jurors as they entered the room about 2.16pm, but not one met her gaze.
She remained expressionless as the forewoman softly said “guilty” in response to each charge.
There were soft gasps from some members of the public as the first verdict was read, and one supporter of Patterson was seen shallow breathing and staring at the ceiling.
The case had centred around a lunch Patterson hosted on July 29, 2023, at her Leongatha home about a 45-minute drive southwest of Morwell.
At the lunch were her estranged husband’s parents, Don and Gail Patterson, and his aunt and uncle, Heather and Ian Wilkinson.
At the meal, the five people present ate individually-portioned beef wellington parcels Patterson had modified from a RecipeTin Eats recipe.
During the trial, jurors were told by Patterson’s defence that it was not disputed that death caps were in the lunch, but the key question was whether she had deliberately poisoned her guests.
The trial was told Patterson invited her husband, Simon Patterson, to the lunch as well, however he pulled out the night before via text.
Each of the guests fell critically ill after the lunch, with Don, Gail and Heather dying of multiple organ failure caused by death cap mushroom poisoning in early August.
Ian Wilkinson, the pastor of the Korumburra Baptist Church, recovered after spending about a month and a half in hospital.
The jury heard the four family members began experiencing gastrointestinal symptoms about 12 hours after the lunch and were taken to hospital the following morning on July 30.
The two couples’ conditions rapidly declined and each were in induced comas by August 1.
Conversely, the jury heard, Patterson told others she began experiencing loose stools the afternoon following the lunch and suffered diarrhoea regularly through the night.
She attended the Leongatha Hospital the morning of July 31, two days after the lunch, was taken to Monash Medical Centre in Melbourne and released on August 1.
Doctors found no clinical or biochemical evidence of amanita (death cap) poisoning, although an intensive care specialist said her medical records were consistent with a diarrhoeal illness.
In her closing remarks, Crown prosecutor Nanette Rogers SC pointed to five “calculated deceptions” she said sat at the heart of the case against Patterson.
These allegedly were; a fake cancer diagnosis used as pretence for the lunch, that a lethal dose of death caps were “secreted” in the meal, Patterson faking the same illness as her guests, a “sustained cover up” and, untruthful evidence given from the witness box.
Rogers argued Patterson’s actions in the days after the lunch could only reasonably be explained by her knowing the guests were poisoned with death caps while she was not.
Jurors were told these included dumping a dehydrator on August 2 that was later found to contain death cap remnants and lying to police by claiming she had never foraged for mushrooms or owned a dehydrator.
It was also alleged she lied about feeding leftovers from the meal, with the mushrooms scraped off, to her children the night after the lunch as an effort to deflect suspicion.
Rogers said, on the evidence, the jury could “safely reject any reasonable possibility that this was a terrible accident” and allow them to find she committed each of the crimes.
“We say there is no reasonable alternative explanation for what happened to the lunch guests, other than the accused deliberately sourced death cap mushrooms and deliberately included them in the meal she served them, with an intention to kill them,” she said.
She pointed to evidence Patterson had previously used the website iNaturalist to look up death cap sightings in May 2022 and her phone records to suggest she deliberately sought out the poisonous mushroom in April and May 2023.
One iNaturalist post on April 18 identified them growing in Loch while a second post on May 21 located death caps in Outtrim.
“This evidence tends to show that the accused had the opportunity to source death cap mushrooms at a time approximate to the lunch,” Rogers said.
The prosecutor also pointed to an image found on a Samsung tablet of mushrooms on a dehydrator tray that an expert said was “consistent” with death caps.
Rogers also submitted lunch survivor Ian Wilkinson’s testimony of Patterson eating from a different plate to her guests as a “striking piece of evidence”.
“That choice to make individual portions allowed her complete control over the ingredients in each individual parcel,” she said.
“It is a control, the prosecution says, that she exercised with devastating effect.”
Turning to Patterson’s time in the witness box, including when she claimed to have been foraging for mushrooms for years, Rogers urged the jury to reject her account.
“You should simply disregard this new claim that this was a horrible foraging accident, as nothing more than an attempt by the accused to get her story to fit the evidence that the police compiled in this case,” she said.
“She has told too many lies and you should reject her evidence.”
He sought to paint the case against his client as “illogical” and “absurd”, highlighting that there was no identified motive for what Patterson had allegedly done.
Mandy said the evidence in this case showed Patterson loved her in-laws and had a mostly positive relationship with Simon Patterson since their separation in 2015.
“Why on earth would anyone want to kill these people?” he asked.
“There’s no possible prospect that Erin wanted in those circumstances to destroy her whole world, her whole life. Surely it’s more likely that her account is true.”
Mandy pointed to Patterson’s testimony from the witness box, where she said she was feeling isolated from her support network by Simon and the lunch was a proactive effort to keep the family in her and her children’s lives.
He argued her account was far more likely than the prosecution’s “convoluted” theory Patterson planned for these murders months out.
Patterson told the jury she’d always loved eating mushrooms and developed an interest in foraging wild mushrooms during the early Covid lockdowns of 2020.
She maintained what she told health authorities after the lunch was true, that she used fresh button mushrooms from Woolworths and added a packet of dried mushrooms purchased from an Asian grocer in Melbourne earlier that year.
But Patterson said she now believed she may have added dehydrated wild mushrooms to the same Tupperware container she stored the purchased mushrooms in her pantry.
Mandy told the court his client admitted she lied to police and tried to hide the dehydrator, explaining it as the actions of a woman who believed she would be wrongly blamed.
“You heard the accused say that she regrets telling lies, but that’s what she did,” he said.
“She’s not on trial for being a liar.”
The defence barrister argued the evidence his client had previously looked up death caps on iNaturalist had an innocent explanation – that a novice forager would want to see if the deadly mushroom grew in her area.
He pointed to Patterson’s account of binge eating cake and vomiting after the lunch as a possible explanation for why she did not get as sick as her guests.
Mandy also said the expert evidence in the case was that two people, eating the same meal containing death caps, could experience different severity of illness based on a range of personal factors.
Patterson will return to court at a later date.