A very honest recap of Erin Patterson's mushroom murder trial.

Because I've spent months possessed.

A disclaimer:

Below, I’ve written a recap of the case that has captured the public’s interest in a distinctly modern, internet-ty way. I’ve listened to daily podcasts, read countless articles and have fallen into a deep rabbit hole, so wanted to pull out the most fascinating parts for those who, for example, are normal. And have been busy doing more important things.

But I want to start by acknowledging how weird it is to be part of a culture that indulges true-crime-as-entertainment. At the heart of the Erin Patterson trial are the deaths of three innocent people. By all accounts, these individuals - Donald Patterson, Gail Patterson, and Heather Wilkinson - were kind, valued members of their community. Then there’s Heather’s husband Ian, who came close to death and then made a miraculous recovery, but is left without his wife and his in-laws. Ian has been dragged through an exhaustive, confronting legal process that culminated in a murder trial, where a jury found that the woman who served him lunch two years ago had been trying to kill him.

There’s Erin’s husband, Simon, who has lost both his parents and his aunt, and is now responsible for parenting two children whose mother is behind bars. There’s those children, two grandparents gone, a mum whose face is plastered all over the news, their family irrevocably torn apart. Then there’s the ripples of grief through the Patterson and Wilkinson families, their friendship circles, their church, the people who knew them and loved them.

When a true crime story plays out in the media, dissected and editorialised, these flesh and blood humans are reduced to characters. It’s as though we’re watching a play, a Greek tragedy. And while I find that uncomfortable, I’m not here to admonish people for it. I’m part of it too. As Annabel Crabb wrote in a brilliant analysis for the ABC, the “proliferation of information with which we are pelted daily,” leads to a desperate “appetite for moral clarity”. We feel utterly helpless about war and devastation and climate catastrophe, but perhaps we can agree on whether a woman from Victoria intentionally poisoned her in-laws with death cap mushrooms. Perhaps we can agree that killing is wrong, that some people are capable of cold, callous acts, and that we are not.

I think that’s what we’re doing here. I think.

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If I were a lawyer (I’m not), or a detective (hmm too much work), it would be the beef Wellington recipe itself that I’d pin to the centre of my cork board.

It’s late April, and the Erin Patterson trial has just begun. She stands accused of three counts of murder, and one count of attempted murder. The prosecution case is that in July 2023, she deliberately poisoned her lunch guests with death cap mushrooms in a beef Wellington meal. Her defence is arguing it was all a tragic accident.

Early on, I hear on the Mushroom Case Daily podcast that Patterson had followed the recipe from iconic Australian cookbook, Dinner, by award-winning author and creator of RecipeTin Eats, Nagi Maehashi.

Oh, goodness, I realise.

I have that book at home.

I have a piece of evidence in my kitchen.

That night, I open it, remembering the exact page number referenced in the trial, because I am not a normal person with healthy hobbies and interests. I see exactly what was painstakingly discussed in court - a tiny detail that seems odd, suspicious, given what happened next.

The beef Wellington recipe in front of me is for one shared meal, made using a single log of meat. If Erin Patterson - according to her own story - followed this recipe, why did she end up serving individual beef Wellingtons, each separately wrapped?

Rather convenient, no? If you were going to poison your guests but not poison yourself?

In court, she says there was a lack of availability of eye fillet at her local Woolworths - she couldn’t find a big enough cut of meat. So she improvised.

If this were a reality TV show (let’s be honest, that’s probably where TV is heading), someone would run to Woolworths and ask the manager if this is a common occurrence. Or, they’d contact Nagi, because I just don’t think Australia’s favourite, accessible chef would publish a recipe where the core ingredients are hard to come by. There’s also receipts showing Patterson took multiple shopping trips leading up to the lunch, so, perhaps, had more than one opportunity to follow the standard recipe.

This is what the mushroom trial does to a person. One moment you’re listening to a podcast and the next you’re scouring the meat section at Woolworths to determine the probability that in July 2023 there was a limited selection of eye fillet.

By this stage, I’m hooked. I listen to my ‘mushies’ every day. And over the next nine weeks, these are the details I add to my cork board, while drinking 17 cups of coffee and staring into the distance:

An ominous-looking photo of mushrooms, surrounded by red question marks.

When Erin Patterson takes the stand, she has a remarkable memory. She is, in her own words, “pedantic”. But still, there are huge question marks over the provenance of the mushrooms in her beef Wellington.

In the days after the fatal lunch, Patterson told police, doctors, and health authorities, that they’d been purchased from an unspecified Asian grocer. As four people became increasingly ill from death cap poisoning, those connected to the case were clearly thinking um well we might have an unprecedented public health risk on our hands? Like we need to know where the mushrooms came from? If someone is selling them that’s literally life-threatening? This is rather urgent?

And Erin Patterson was like… idk. Maybe I bought them in this suburb. Or maybe this one. Who can say for sure.

On the stand, in court, for the very first time, Patterson admits to foraging for mushrooms. She never mentioned this in police interviews. Never mentioned it when she was arrested. Not even, it would appear, to her defence barrister, given that the story she tells the court is not what the defence presented at the beginning of the trial.

But yes, she concedes she had foraged for mushrooms, and put them in a tupperware container in her cupboard. She then used them in the beef Wellington, when the recipe didn’t taste quite right.

It’s undisputed that there were death caps in the meal. Patterson also dumped a dehydrator at the tip in the days following the lunch, and this dehydrator contained traces of death cap mushrooms.

Why did it take Patterson two years to tell the truth? Or was she retro-fitting her story to the evidence? It’s something I ponder as though I’m a cranky policeman in a British procedural. But neither my husband nor my 18-month-old daughter care about my theories.

Two photos of phones, also surrounded by question marks.

If police asked for my phone, the interaction would be quite simple: ‘Here it is, glued to my hand. Please excuse the fact I was just in the middle of watching a woman fight with her wedding dress designer on TikTok.’

I have 1 x active phone. I have old phones that are dusty and in a drawer somewhere, because I’m definitely signed up to an appalling contract that somehow requires me to pay an absurd monthly fee for the privilege of retaining my broken, unusable phone at the end of it.

In court, the prosecution argues that Erin Patterson was using two phones with two separate SIM cards in the weeks leading up to the lunch.

One of those phones - believed to be Patterson’s primary phone - was never recovered by police. On the phone that was taken into evidence, it was found:

• The handset had connected to two locations where death cap mushrooms had been spotted

• The handset was factory reset three times after the lunch.

On the stand, Patterson says she factory reset (i.e. wiped) the phone during the police search, because she knew it had photos of mushrooms and dehydrators and that would make her look guilty. She also factory reset the phone remotely while it was in police custody.

Did she panic? Where is the other phone? Who takes photos of mushrooms?

I’m like Claire Danes trying to solve sh*t in Homeland after she got fired. Except I was never employed in the first place.

A photo of leftover beef Wellington.

The day after the lunch, all four lunch guests - Don, Gail, Heather, and Ian - were taken to hospital complaining of serious illness. Patterson’s estranged husband Simon called Erin that morning to tell her his parents were in hospital, and she told him she was having diarrhea. She also told her children she wasn’t feeling well.

So. She’s made lunch on Saturday, and by Sunday, everyone who ate that lunch is sick.

What does Patterson feed her kids, later that day? With five people suffering from what appears to be food poisoning?

The. Leftovers.

Of.

The.

Beef. WELLINGTON.

But later, once doctors have figured out they’re dealing with death cap mushroom poisoning, Patterson isn’t worried about her kids being affected. Why? Because she scraped off the mushrooms, and only fed them the meat.

If you made a meal. And people got sick. Would you not. Be most concerned. About the meat. And maybe not. Feed that. To your children.

A photo of white pants, with a piece of string attaching it to a photo of the Bristol Stool Chart. With diarrhea circled.

Patterson has always claimed that on the Sunday after the lunch, she had diarrhea. She needed to use the toilet roughly every 20 minutes.

That day, she spent over an hour in the car with her son, driving a 180km round trip. She did not stop to use a toilet. In court, however, she says she pulled over on the side of the road and emptied her bowels in the bush.

She also, and I believe this is important, wore white pants. The choice of white pants on a day where you have diarrhea is an interesting one. Is all. I’ll say. About that.

A complex web of strings joining the words ‘cancer diagnosis,’ ‘weight loss surgery,’ ‘liposuction,’ ‘orange cake,’ and ‘vomiting.’

During the fatal lunch, Erin Patterson told her guests that she had cancer.

In court, she acknowledges that was a lie.

But she was telling the lie, she says, to cover for the real reason she was about to undergo a medical procedure. She had plans for weight-loss treatment, and would need Don and Gail’s help with the kids. She was too embarrassed to open up about her gastric-bypass surgery, telling the court about her unhealthy relationship with food, her bingeing.

Of course, if she was lying about having cancer as a cover for an upcoming surgery, there’d be evidence of that surgery. A date. A doctor.

Patterson provides the name of a clinic, the one she had an appointment at. But later in the trial, once the prosecution has had the opportunity to contact the clinic, there’s something that doesn’t add up: that clinic doesn’t do gastric-bypass surgery. The prosecution puts this to Patterson, who is “puzzled,” and says it must’ve been for another kind of weight-loss procedure. Liposuction, maybe.

But Patterson’s struggles with body image, her stories of a childhood where her mother weighed her “weekly”, come up in another line of questioning. After the lunch, she says she binged on the leftovers of an orange cake Gail had brought over. She ate two thirds of it, and vomited it up. Again, she shares this in court for the very first time, having not provided this information to police or, it would seem, to her defence team. Her defence argue during closing that this might explain why Patterson didn’t get as sick as her guests.

At this point, my cork board is overflowing and chaotic and precisely no one is interested in it, because there are entire legal teams and a judge and a jury with their own far more sophisticated cork boards.

On Monday July 7, that jury found Erin Patterson guilty of three counts of murder and one count of attempted murder.

Since then, I’ve gobbled up every detail I can about what the public weren’t told during the trial, and what the people who were actually there really thought. The hosts of Mushroom Case Daily released an episode sharing their impressions of the case - what they expected the verdict to be, how Erin Patterson came across in court, who was there to support her.

As Annabel Crabb put it, there really is something to be said about our appetite for moral clarity. For some sense of certainty. For the relief of knowing when a person is bad, and the hope that we will always be able to tell. This is one of the most bizarre criminal cases in Australian history, and there’s a strange sense of community in the knowledge that a jury unanimously found Erin Patterson guilty.

But perhaps what’s most bizarre is that we’re no closer to understanding her motive. The prosecution said from the outset that they weren’t going to propose one, and they didn’t have to - it is not ‘motive’ but ‘intent’ that’s required to return a guilty verdict.

We might never know, but I’d imagine all the books and films and TV shows inspired by the case will put forward some theories. And if the rogue doctor who met Erin Patterson when she presented to hospital, then was a witness in her trial, then went on to call her hectic names in the aftermath is anything to go by (no he legit called her a “disturbed sociopathic nut bag” which feels unprofessional), there are still several chapters of this story to unfold.