Australia’s Melbourne Erin Patterson, an Australian, was convicted on Monday of killing three relatives of her divorced husband by purposefully giving them deadly mushrooms for lunch.
After a nine-week trial that captivated Australia, the jury in Victoria State’s Supreme Court trial returned a decision after six days of deliberations. Although a hearing date has not yet been set, Patterson faces a life sentence and will be sentenced later.
As the judgments were read, Patterson, who was seated in the dock between two jail guards, blinked quickly but remained emotionless.
Following the 2023 lunch in her Leongatha home, where she served individual beef Wellington pastries with death cap mushrooms, Patterson’s parents-in-law Don and Gail Patterson, together with Gail’s sister Heather Wilkinson, all away in the hospital.
In addition, she was convicted of trying to kill Heather’s husband, Ian Wilkinson, who lived through the lunch.
The fact that Patterson served the mushrooms and that her guests were killed by the pastry was undeniable. She had to tell the jury if she knew the lunch contained death caps and whether she meant for them to perish.
The jury rejected Patterson’s defense that the toxic fungi were a dreadful accident that resulted from her mistakenly including foraged mushrooms that she didn’t realize were death caps, according to the guilty verdicts, which had to be unanimous.
Although they did not provide a motive for the murders, the prosecution did point out throughout the trial that Patterson and her divorced husband had a tense relationship and that she had previously been frustrated with his parents.
The case hinged on whether Patterson killed three people she loved—including the only remaining grandparents of her children—accidentally or through a well-planned triple homicide. She had recently moved into a lovely new home, was financially secure, had exclusive custody of her children, and was about to start her studies for a degree in nursing and midwifery, according to her lawyers, therefore she had no need to do so.
But according to the prosecution, Patterson had two personalities. On the outside, she seemed to get along well with her parents-in-law, but her innermost thoughts about them were kept a secret. According to the prosecution, throughout the year prior to the deaths, her relationship with her estranged husband, Simon Patterson, who was invited to the fatal lunch but chose not to attend, worsened.
Because the recipe Patterson used called for a single, family-sized amount, the individual beef Wellington pastries she presented her guests caused conflict throughout the trial. Patterson claimed that she couldn’t find the right ingredients to make the recipe as instructed, but prosecutors claimed that she went back to individual servings in order to lace the other diners’ portions—but not her own—with the deadly fungus.
The reasons Patterson sent her kids to a movie before her guests arrived, why she added more dried mushrooms from her pantry to the recipe, why she didn’t get sick when the other diners did, and why she threw away a food dehydrator after the deaths and claimed she didn’t own one were all among the nearly every other detail of that fateful day that was closely examined.
