WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — Before Erin Patterson’s in-laws and their relatives arrived at her home for lunch, she bought pricey ingredients, consulted friends about recipes and sent her children out to a movie.
Then, the Australian woman served them a dish containing poisonous death cap mushrooms — a meal that was fatal for three of her four guests.
Whether that was Patterson’s plan is at the heart of a triple murder trial that has gripped Australia for nearly six weeks.
Prosecutors in the Supreme Court case in the state of Victoria say the accused lured her guests to lunch with a lie about having cancer, before deliberately feeding them toxic fungi.
But her lawyers say the tainted beef Wellington she served was a tragic accident caused by a mushroom storage mishap. She denies murdering her estranged husband’s parents, Don and Gail Patterson, and their relative, Heather Wilkinson.
The mother of two also denies attempting to murder Heather’s husband Ian Wilkinson, who survived the meal. In a rare step for a defendant charged with murder, Patterson chose to speak in her own defense at her trial this week.
On Wednesday, she spoke publicly for the first time about the fateful lunch in July 2023 and offered her explanations on how she planned the meal and didn’t become sick herself.
Adding more mushrooms to a ‘bland’ meal
No one disputes that Patterson, 50, served death cap mushrooms to her guests for lunch in the rural town of Leongatha, but she says she did it unknowingly.
Patterson said Wednesday she splurged on expensive ingredients and researched ideas to find “something special” to serve. She deviated from her chosen recipe to improve the “bland” flavor, she said.
She believed she was adding dried fungi bought from an Asian supermarket from a container in her pantry, she told the court.
“Now I think that there was a possibility that there were foraged ones in there as well,” she told her lawyer, Colin Mandy. Patterson had foraged wild mushrooms for years, she told the court Tuesday, and had put some in her pantry weeks before the deaths.
The accused says she ‘shouldn’t have lied’ about cancer
Patterson, who formally separated from her husband Simon Patterson in 2015, said she felt “hurt” when Simon told her the night before the lunch that he “wasn’t comfortable” attending.
She earlier told his relatives that she’d arranged the meal to discuss her health. Patterson admitted this week that she never had cancer — but after a health scare, she told her in-laws she did.
In reality, Patterson said she intended to have weight loss surgery. But she was too embarrassed to tell anybody and planned to pretend to her in-laws that she was undergoing cancer treatment instead, she said.
“I was ashamed of the fact that I didn’t have control over my body or what I ate,” a tearful Patterson said Wednesday. “I didn’t want to tell anybody, but I shouldn’t have lied to them.”
Patterson says she threw up her mushroom meal
The accused said she believes she was spared the worst effects of the poisoned meal because she self-induced vomiting shortly after her lunch guests left. She had binged on most of a cake and then made herself throw up — a problem she said she had struggled with for decades.
Patterson also said she believes she had eaten enough of the meal to cause her subsequent diarrhea. She then sought hospital treatment but unlike her lunch guests, she quickly recovered.
At the hospital where her guests’ health was deteriorating, her estranged husband asked her about the dehydrator she used to dry her foraged mushrooms, she said.
“Is that how you poisoned my parents?” she said Simon Patterson asked her.
Growing afraid she would be blamed for the poisoning and that her children would be taken from her, Patterson said she later disposed of her dehydrator. She told investigators she’d never owned one and hadn’t foraged for mushrooms before.
While still at the hospital, she insisted she’d bought all the mushrooms at stores even though she said she knew it was possible that foraged mushrooms had accidentally found their way into the meal.
She was too frightened to tell anyone, Patterson said.
Also later, Patterson said she remotely wiped her cell phone while it sat in an evidence locker to remove pictures of mushrooms she’d foraged.
Prosecutors argued in opening their case in April that she poisoned her husband’s family on purpose, although they didn’t suggest a motive. She carefully avoided poisoning herself and faked being ill, they said.
The trial continues on Thursday with Patterson’s cross-examination by the prosecutors. If convicted, she faces life in prison for murder and 25 years for attempted murder.
