By Editor Guy Adams
In the end, Erin Trudi Patterson’s fate was sealed by her lies.
She lied about deliberately picking death cap mushrooms. She lied about buying and using a Sunbeam food dehydrator to preserve them.
She lied about having cancer, to ensure four relatives accepted an invitation to visit her home for a ‘special’ lunch.
And she lied about using multi-coloured plates to prevent herself accidentally eating the poisonous beef wellington she then served.
She lied about deliberately picking death cap mushrooms. She lied about buying and using a Sunbeam food dehydrator to preserve them.
She lied about having cancer, to ensure four relatives accepted an invitation to visit her home for a ‘special’ lunch.
And she lied about using multi-coloured plates to prevent herself accidentally eating the poisonous beef wellington she then served.
Patterson proceeded to falsely claim she’d also been made sick by the toxic meal, when she was in fact perfectly well. Finally, after the lives of her guests had ebbed away, she fabricated an elaborate cock and bull story suggesting that the reason she’d survived the meal was because she suffered from bulimia so had vomited it up.
The jury which saw through this cruel web of deceit, delivering a verdict of guilty of three counts of murder and one attempted murder at 2.15pm today, certainly knew a pathological liar when it saw one.
Yet the grisly events that were raked over at the Latrobe Valley Magistrates Court during the past ten weeks represent only a small part of the Erin Patterson story. And it wasn’t the most unsettling part, either.
For behind the scenes of this great Australian soap opera, a gripping sub-plot has been bubbling away, in circumstances that were kept entirely secret from both the public who followed the ‘mushroom murder’ trial, and the seven men and five woman who ultimately decided its leading lady’s fate.
It revolves around Erin’s estranged husband, Simon Patterson, a mild-mannered civil engineer she’d married 18 years ago but separated from in 2015.
Simon, 50, lost three close family members to the poisonous meal she chose to serve at her home in rural Victoria on Saturday July 29, 2023. They were his elderly parents, Don and Gail, along with Gail’s sister, Heather Wilkinson. A fourth relative, Heather’s husband Ian Wilkinson, spent weeks in hospital but escaped with his life.
Yet he can also count himself lucky to have avoided serious harm, since he also happened to be on Erin’s guest list that fateful day.
We found this out when Simon spoke from the witness box during the opening week of this epic trial, telling how he pulled out via text message the night before, saying he was ‘too uncomfortable’ to attend.
What the jury was never told, however, is what exactly had made this outwardly unremarkable father-of-two feel so very ‘uncomfortable’ about the prospect of being fed by his wife in the first place. And therein lies a drama, or perhaps tragedy, of Shakesperean proportions.
I can today reveal that the silence, on this front, was for one simple reason: a draconian court order meant that Simon was officially banned from explaining himself.
To understand why it was in place, we must wind the clock back to October, when Simon gave evidence at a pre-trial hearing at the Supreme Court of Victoria in central Melbourne, roughly two hours’ drive from the rural mining town of Morwell where Erin’s case would eventually be heard.
Under Australian law, such hearings are used by both the prosecution and defence to cross-examine potential witnesses behind closed doors. The judge will then decide which parts of their evidence, if any, can be shared with the jury at a subsequent criminal trial.
It was during this process that Simon made a quite remarkable claim.
Namely: that in the two years prior to the fateful ‘mushroom lunch,’ Erin had made no fewer than four, and possibly five other attempts to deliberately poison him.
Her attempts on his life involved sabotaging a series of dishes including curry, pasta bolognese and beef stew, he alleged, along with such snacks as chocolate cookies and a chicken wrap.
On four occasions after eating Erin’s food, Simon said he’d ended up in hospital. Twice, he’d nearly died.
When Simon began to suspect what was going on, he compiled a spreadsheet detailing the times and dates of suspicious meals.
Eventually, he confided in a doctor, saying he feared Erin was lacing his food with ‘anti-freeze’ or some similar toxin. Later he told family members, appearing to conclude that his symptoms could also be consistent with ingesting either rat poison, or hemlock, the deadly plant.
This dark story begins during the mid-2000s when Erin met Simon while they both worked at Monash Council in the suburbs of Melbourne.
Friendship, then romance ensued and in 2007 they married before moving to Western Australia. Their first child, a boy whose name is now protected via a court order, came along two years later. The second, a daughter, was born in 2014.
Crucially, in the context of subsequent events, Erin was by this stage a wealthy woman.
Hailing from a privileged metropolitan family – her mother, Dr Heather Scutter, was a prominent literary critic – she inherited around £1million from her grandmother around the time of her 30th birthday.
Much of this cash was then invested in residential properties in and around Simon’s home-town of Korumburra, not far from Morwell, where they moved in the 2010s. Some of the money was also distributed to his siblings, via interest-free loans.
Yet by 2015, the couple had decided to separate.
Explaining the events that led to their split, Simon said that Erin had struggled with her mental health, especially after the birth of their children. This had left her unable to hold down employment or complete university studies and, he claimed, made her tricky to live with.
‘It was strained, there was tension in it’ he said, of their relationship, saying that Erin found communication tricky.
At one point, during the pre-trial hearing, he went so far as to suggest that she’s on the autistic spectrum, describing her empathetic behaviour in public as different to the trickier personality she adopted in private.
‘I think Erin is very good at relating to people,’ was how he put it. ‘She’s learnt how to do that the way a high functioning Asperger’s does, so the way she presents is high functioning… She knows how to appear to be enjoying interaction.’
Whatever its cause, the couple nonetheless put a harmonious face on their relationship after Simon moved out, agreeing to share custody of the children and divide their assets, without needing to involve lawyers.
They continued to holiday as a family, enjoying trips to such exotic destinations as South Africa, Botswana and Namibia, and would attend family events in Korumburra, where his relatives are prominent figures in the local Baptist church.
Simon’s Christian faith almost certainly contributed to multiple efforts to reconcile with Erin over this period, fuelled by his religious belief in the sanctity of marriage.
Yet they all failed. And behind the scenes, it seems that Erin had over time began to feel hostile towards her husband and his family, perhaps resenting the fact that a significant portion of her inheritance had ended up in their hands.
She started sharing pointed criticisms of Simon in private Facebook chatrooms during the Covid pandemic, pouring scorn on his personal habits and parenting techniques, and calling him a ‘deadbeat’ whose home was dirty.
Eventually, Simon believes, it was Erin’s bitterness that made her decide to get rid of him. The first attempted poisoning came in November 2021, when they were due to go on a family trip to Wilson’s Promontory, a beauty spot in south-east Victoria.
On the eve of departure, Erin fed him ‘penne pasta Bolognese,’ from a Tupperware container in the fridge.
He began vomiting the following morning, continued being sick during the car journey, and was eventually admitted to hospital where doctors became concerned that soaring creatine levels in his blood indicated impending kidney failure. After five days on a drip, his condition stabilised and he was discharged.
The following May, the couple embarked on another trip, this time camping in Victoria’s Lake Eildon national park. In the run-up, Erin asked Simon to conduct a taste test on spice levels in a curry she was planning to take. Sauces ranged from mild to hot, and Simon recalled ‘my preference was for somewhere in the middle.’
She gave Simon a portion of his chosen dish on the second night, and he began to feel ill within hours.
‘At first I felt hot, especially in my head and that led to feeling nauseous and that led to me quite suddenly needing to vomit and then after vomiting I started to have diarrhoea,’ he told the pre-trial hearing, which was shown a dash-cam video of him being driven to a hospital in the nearby town of Mansfield.
Simon was discharged, but then collapsed after returning home, and was rushed back to hospital where surgeons performed three life-saving operation that saw a large portion of his bowel removed.
During this period, he was in a coma for 16 days and stayed in intensive care for three weeks. On two occasions, his family were called in to say farewell, because doctors believed he could not be saved.
Fast forward to July 2022, and after three weeks’ largely successful recuperation at her home, Erin decided to again serve another big meal. This time, it was a beef stew, which Simon ate for lunch. Again, illness struck in the dead of night, leading to another brief hospitalisation.
Finally, that September, during a return camping trip to Wilson’s Promontory, she served up a chicken wrap which, he said, caused him to first start vomiting and then lose muscle function.
‘By the end I could only move my neck, tongue and lips,’ he said, recalling yet another hospital stay during which he also suffered a series of fits.
Simon had, by now, experienced four serious medical incidents, in little over a year, which could not be adequately explained by doctors. So he decided to turn detective, compiling a spreadsheet that listed common elements of the various illness, and the events leading up to them.
It revealed an intriguing fact: each coincided with occasions when he’d been fed something unusual by Erin.
Shortly afterwards, in late 2022, Simon told his GP, Dr Chris Ford (‘an old mate from church’) that he feared his wife had been trying to poison him. He also resolved to avoid unnecessary contact with her.
He then listed himself as single on his tax return. This move had significant implications for Erin’s financial affairs, since it stopped her claiming various tax breaks available to married people.
She responded by filing for child support, and the couple began arguing over money and who would pay their children’s school fees and medical bills.
Efforts by Erin to persuade Don and Gail to intervene in this falling-out met with no success, and she subsequently fired off a series of hostile messages in a Facebook forum, berating his extended family, saying (among other things) that she was ‘sick of this shit’ and ‘f**k em!’
In the spring of 2023, Simon began telling family members about his belief that Erin was trying to poison him.
He confided initially in his 70-year-old father. But Don asked him not so share the concerns too widely because ‘he felt it could create issues in the way people related with Erin and our family’.
That February, Erin presented him with a batch of cookies, which she claimed had been baked by their nine-year-old daughter. Over the ensuing days, she repeatedly messaged to ask whether he’d eaten them. Regarding this a red flag, he decided throw them out.
Simon then told his sister, Anna, and brother, Matthew, that he suspected his wife had been repeatedly trying to poison him. Matthew told the pre-trial hearing that he recalled Simon saying ‘that he would probably need to be a little careful about interaction with Erin’.
It was in this context that Simon received an invitation to the now famous ‘beef wellington’ lunch at his estranged wife’s house on Saturday 29 July, 2023.
For obvious reasons, he decided to decline, a decision that may very well have saved his life. Tragically, however, he assumed that his parents, aunt, and uncle, would be safe.
When all four guests then fell sick, the family immediately suspected foul play.
Indeed, Don was so convinced that Erin had sabotaged the lunch, he turned up at hospital carrying a container filled with his own vomit, saying it ought to be handed to police ‘because he presumed this could be significant evidence because he thought it could be a deliberate poisoning’.
That, we can now reveal, was the context in which the homicide squad first began investigating Erin Patterson.
Yet none of Simon’s evidence about these events was ever tested in front of a jury. For after at the pre-trial hearings, the judge, Justice Christopher Beale, decided that Patterson should face not one, but two separate trials.
One would involve the various ‘attempted murder’ charges involving Simon, majoring on events that saw him hospitalised in 2021 and 2022. The other would involve charges related to the murders of Don, Gail and Heather, and attempted murder of Ian Wilkinson, in July 2023.
Justice Beale’s decision was a massive blow for the prosecution, who wanted to present a single, sweeping narrative to the jury incorporating all Erin’s various alleged attempts on Simon and his family members’ lives. They appealed it all the way to the Supreme Court of Appeal, without success.
Then, weeks before long-awaited proceedings were due to get underway in Morwell, Victoria’s Director of Public Prosecutions, Brendan Kissane KC, decided to dump the attempted murder charges involving Simon altogether.
This decision had further serious consequences. For Justice Beale then ruled that nothing about the alleged poisonings in 2021 and 2022, or Simon’s suspicion that Erin had repeatedly tried to kill him in the run up to the ‘beef wellington’ lunch, could be mentioned in front of the jury.
That evidence has remained secret to this day.
Indeed, a suppression order imposed by Justice Beale after the verdict means it remains illegal for news organisations to publish details in Australia, meaning the Mail has been forced to block readers based in the country from accessing this story via the internet.
At the blockbuster trial in Morwell, where I have spent much of the past ten weeks, prosecutors were instead forced to rely on a variety of other evidence to support their case against Erin.
It included data from Erin’s computers suggesting she’d used the website iNaturalist to search for death cap mushroom sightings near her home, plus mobile-phone triangulation records demonstrating that she was likely to have travelled to relevant locations in April and May 2023 to gather them.
Receipts from a local homeware store proved she’d purchased a food dehydrator at this exact time. Three photographs retrieved from a Samsung tablet seized from her home then showed the death cap mushrooms being weighed on scales in the device’s drying trays days later.
Prosecutors alleged that Patterson then ground dried death caps into powder, which could then be secreted in food. The images showed her trying to calculate a lethal dose, they claimed.
Police searches of her computer had found that the device had accessed a document titled A Case Study: What Doses of Amanita phalloides And Amatoxins Are Lethal To Humans? Amanita phalloides is the scientific name for death cap mushrooms.
Controversially, this wasn’t shared in court, either: the defence told Justice Beale that Erin’s laptop might have somehow automatically downloaded the document. He agreed.
The jury was, however, told that in the summer of 2023, Erin claimed to be undergoing biopsies and scans for suspected cancer. She then told lunch guests that she wanted to use the ‘special’ occasion to share important details about her condition.
This was all a lie. In fact, she was undergoing no such tests.
Then, when she came to cook the lunch itself, she adapted the traditional beef wellington dish, in which a whole beef fillet is encased in pastry then served in slices.
Instead, each guest was served an individual ‘wellington,’ similar to a Cornish pasty. Prosecutors say that some contained poisonous death cap mushrooms, while others didn’t.
When Ian Wilkinson gave evidence, he told how the wellingtons were served with mashed potato, beans, and gravy from a packet. Erin used an orange plate for her dish, he said, while her guests ate from grey ones.
The Crown alleged this was to ensure she avoid accidentally eating one of the sabotaged wellingtons.
In the aftermath, as her guests became seriously ill, Erin pretended to be sick, too. But hospital tests suggested nothing was seriously wrong with her, and she turned out to have taken a number of long car journeys, despite telling doctors she was suffering from chronic diarrhoea every 20 minutes.
As police and public health authorities began investigating, Erin lied about the source of the mushrooms in the dish (saying they’d come from a Chinese supermarket), falsely told police she didn’t own a food dehydrator, and insisted that she never foraged for mushrooms.
Then she tried to secretly dispose of the food dehydrator that she claimed not to own at the local tip.
After CCTV footage of her dumping the device emerged, she changed her tune and alleged that she’d actually ‘panicked’ over the fact her lunch guests had fallen ill.
And when police eventually raided her home, she managed to wipe data from one mobile phone (by conducting four ‘factory resets’) and somehow dispose of another, which was never found.
Patteson’s defence against this mountain of evidence revolved around a number of ambitious claims.
Despite having told police she never picked wild mushrooms, she claimed to be a keen forager who used a dehydrator to preserve them.
Despite initially claiming the mushrooms that found their way into the beef wellington came from a Chinese supermarket, she’d instead accidentally used death caps in her recipe after adding supplies of dried wild mushrooms from a Tupperware box in her kitchen.
Erin had then fallen sick, the defence claimed. Just not as sick as her guests.
The only person who could properly explain this series of events was, of course, Erin. And so it came to pass that as the trial entered its sixth week, she entered the witness box to give evidence.
Here, she put on quite a performance, telling the jury that she’d avoided the worst of the poisoning by devouring left-over orange cake and then making herself sick a couple of hours after the lunch. This was something she did regularly, she alleged, announcing that she’d been secretly suffering from bulimia for most of her adult life.
Erin said her various fibs to investigators shortly afterwards were silly mistakes committed at a time of great stress.
There was an explanation for falsely telling her family that she had cancer, too. She was due to undergo gastric bypass surgery, she claimed, so would need help with childcare from relatives. However, Erin said she was too embarrassed to state the real nature of her operation.
Under cross examination, Erin twisted and turned, disputing almost every contention, however petty, put to her by prosecutor Nanette Rogers. The performance showed her to be a peculiar character: undoubtedly intelligent and highly calculating, yet simultaneously cold, prickly and socially awkward.
Eventually, her endless lies began to unravel.
At the end of her fifth day in the box, she claimed that her alleged gastric bypass surgery had been booked to take place at The Enrich Clinic in Melbourne. It quickly emerged that the clinic is a cosmetic dermatology facility which doesn’t carry out major operations and has never offered gastric bypass procedures.
When I heard this fact being shared in court, I realised Erin Patterson’s goose was finally cooked. The revelation that she was now lying to the jury, under oath, had utterly destroyed any remaining chance she had of building rapport with them.
Five weeks later, the jury confirmed that suspicion. In a country which takes a firm line on law and order, her sentence is likely to span decades.
As for Simon, he must now attempt to rebuild not just his life, but that of Erin’s two children. Having been prevented from sharing his awful story in court, this poor man will presumably seek a different medium for making himself heard. But for now, at least, justice has been served.