The Mushroom Murders [2]

[Part 2 of 2] The mushroom lunch moves from medical emergency to criminal investigation as doctors, police and health officials try to trace the source of the poison. As Erin Patterson’s explanations begin to shift, new evidence emerges from hospital CCTV, phone data, a local garbage dump – followed by a dramatic courtroom showdown. Find Australian True Crime https://pod.link/1217681421 on your favourite podcast player. Watch Australian True Crime’s episode about the Mushroom Murders on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XlZb2xCDCI. Watch Kristi in conversation with Meshel Laurie https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqNIyX-zvlw about the murder of Connie Grandinetti. Look for early, ad-free release on CTC premium feeds: available on Amazon Music https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/fbe63977-5737-4910-a067-1745b99fae36/canadian-true-crime (included with Prime), Apple Podcasts https://apple.co/3LZBCxa and Patreon https://www.patreon.com/c/canadiantruecrime. Canadian True Crime donates monthly to those facing injustice. This month we have donated toCanadian Resource Centre for Victims of Crime https://crcvc.ca/ , who offer support, research and education to survivors, victims and their families. You can learn more at crcvc.ca. Full list of resources, information sources, credits and music credits: See the page for this episode athttps://canadiantruecrime.ca/episodeswww.canadiantruecrime.ca/episodes/214 http://www.canadiantruecrime.ca/episodes Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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• 1:59Speaker 04

  This is part two of the mushroom murders case with special guest Michelle Laurie from Australian True Crime. Where we left off, Erin Patterson invited her estranged husband Simon and his elderly parents and other family members for lunch, out of the blue, saying she had something important to discuss with them. Simon declined because he'd already suspected Erin had tried to poison him several times, allegedly, but his parents, Dawn and Gail Patterson, and his aunt and uncle, Ian and Heather Wilkinson, said yes to the invitation. Over lunch, Erin announced that she'd been diagnosed with serious cancer as she served them individual beef wellingtons on grey plates. The guests

• 2:44Speaker 04

  noticed that Erin's plate was orange. Within 12 hours, all four elderly guests were violently ill. Their organs began to shut down and they were rushed to hospital. Simon put two and two together and sounded the alarm to the hospital that this might be an intentional poisoning and death cap mushrooms came up. Doctors needed to find out more about the meal that they ate. But where was Erin Patterson?

• 3:18Speaker 05

  Anyway, the doctor who was there is a great character in this story, Dr Chris Webster. He was in charge of the unit that day, just happened to be on shift at Lea and Gathas as this was unfolding. And when she arrived, he was like, oh, thank God, because he knew there was one person unaccounted for. From talking to all the people about the story, he's thinking, where's the other one? Where's the other person who ate this lunch? She shows up, he goes, yes, great. We've been looking for you. Fantastic. But of course, the jury didn't know that he had already been warned, we think she's the poisoner. Right? So again, the jury's a bit perplexed by this guy, but, but he says, look, I know, I was just glad to see her because I knew there was a person missing. So when she came

• 4:01Speaker 05

  to, it's a tiny emergency room, you know, because it's a tiny hospital. And she walks through these sliding doors and the nurse says, great, you're here, the doctor wants to see you, take a seat. Where they sit her ends up two metres away from where Ian Wilkinson and Heather Wilkinson are fighting for their lives. They're still there at the little hospital. There's CCTV of this. Erin doesn't go over to them. She never asks anybody about them. They're lying right unconscious, right near her. And she doesn't acknowledge them at all.

• 4:34Speaker 04

  Does she know that they're there?

• 4:36Speaker 05

  She can see them very clearly. There's no curtain between them. There's nothing between them. She's in a chair, they're in beds two metres away. And of course, there's not much conversation because she was only at the hospital less than five minutes. But Dr Webster and Erin did not hit it off, I think is fair to say. She said later that he is a guy with no inside voice. That was the way she described him. And he wasted no time in asking Erin where she got the mushrooms for her Wellington. So now everybody knows the Wellington is the suspect, it's the mushrooms. And he says, while I've got you, where did you get the mushrooms for that Wellington? She says without hesitation, Woolworths. He says later, she said one word and it was Woolworths. And in the witness box, Dr Webster offered no judgement about that conversation.

• 5:22Speaker 05

  But after the trial, he was more candid. He said, once she said that answer, my thoughts were, holy fucking shit. You fucking did it, you crazy bitch. You poisoned them all.

• 5:38Speaker 05

  And he got in a little bit of trouble for saying that. There was sort of a moment where people went, hey, you are a doctor. You can't actually say that. And, and so in the end, I think he had to do a course about, um, you know, communications or something.

• 5:50Speaker 04

  Sensitive language and stuff.

• 5:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I think most of the community appreciated what he was saying. Because again, so much of this case didn't seem to make sense because of all the bits left out in the court case. That when he finally came out and said, listen, if she had said to me, oh, some of the mushrooms in there, I foraged. I went and, and found some mushrooms. Oh my God, what if I've made a terrible mistake? It would have been a completely different ballgame. But he said, the minute she looked at me and said Woolworths, I knew she was lying. And I knew, oh my god, they're right. These crazy bitches poisoned all of these people.

• 6:27Speaker 04

  And just for my Canadian audience, Woolworths is just a major grocery store chain.

• 6:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, see, you're a big, perfect grocery store that won't sell a bent carrot, let alone a poisonous mushroom. So it was insane. It was an insane thing to say. And this again is where Erin lets herself down. You think, hang on a minute, aren't you a genius? But I honestly think she never seemed to think beyond the plan working. I think for her, the plan goes, I have them over for lunch, I feed them these mushrooms. They're dead in a couple of days and nobody knows why. And nobody will ever know why and why I survived. Well, good luck figuring that out because you won't find that, you know, the toxin. So when it started to unfurl, she didn't seem to have a backup plan, right?

• 7:18Speaker 05

  As soon as they've had this mushroom, you know, Woolworths conversation, I think she realised that she was in trouble. So she left, she left the hospital. So he said to her, don't go anywhere. And then he had to run off and help patients. She started leaving, two nurses grabbed her and begged her, please, please stay. You, you have to stay. The other people who ate your lunch are in a really bad way, let's say. She's, no, I'm not ready for this. I have to go home and feed my animals and pack my daughter's ballet bag. And they're like, um, under the circumstances, no, no, I have to do this. She goes, I'll be back in 20 minutes. And she walks out the door and there's nothing they can do about it. Forty five minutes later, she's still not back.

• 7:56Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 7:57Speaker 05

  So Dr Webster decides he has to call the cops. He's like, look, as far as I know, there's a woman around, driving around the community, who may have been very severely poisoned. I have to call the police, right? So the police arrive at her house just as she's arriving back at the hospital. Dr Webster's on the phone to everybody, he's on the phone to the police. He goes, she's here, don't worry about it. But actually, while you're there, he goes, Erin, are there any leftovers from this meal in the bins or anything that we can analyse? She said, yes. And she directed the police to the bin, outside bin that had leftovers. So the leftovers were analysed later and found that they did contain traces of the mushrooms, the death cap mushrooms. So when we're hearing this evidence in court, we're thinking,

• 8:42Speaker 05

  okay, well, maybe it is just a miracle that neither Erin nor her children got severely ill from eating this same meal. But then, of course, we have to remember that Erin made a big song and dance about the fact the meal was all prepared the night before when Simon texted to say he wasn't coming. So a person would be forgiven for thinking that perhaps that portion in the bin was the portion originally intended for Simon.

• 9:09Speaker 04

  Right.

• 9:10Speaker 05

  That he dodged. When Erin got back to the hospital after 45 minutes, they admitted her straight away. They said, where have you been? Like, we tried to explain to you that this is a crisis, this is a very potentially serious situation for you and your children. Where were you? She goes, oh, I just had a nap. I just got home and I fed the animals and I packed the ballet bag. And then I thought, I just, I need to lie down. But the prosecution presented phone tower evidence that they say proved that she actually took a little trip during that 45 minutes to the nearby town of Altrum. Altrum has a tip. So just remember that because that will come back.

• 9:56Speaker 04

  Quick note, the tip in Australia is what we here in Canada call the dump, the landfill, the waste disposal facility.

• 10:05Speaker 05

  So Tuesday, 1st of August, so we're now four days out from the lunch. Everybody's in hospital at the Austin Hospital in Melbourne. Gail and Dawn, Heather and Ian and Erin and her children. By this stage, they've got everybody in the Austin Hospital, which specialises in poisons. So the four elderly patients are all deteriorating. I think they maybe conducted the first liver transplant around this time, but these poor people are fading fast. Erin, luckily, has found to be clinically well and her vital signs are all normal and she is discharged. She and the kids are discharged and allowed to go home. But the Victorian Department of Health starts to get involved, of course, because they've

• 10:49Speaker 05

  heard that people are dying from death cap mushroom poisoning and they want to know, very importantly, where have they come from. They ring around the doctors and one doctor says she reckons they came from Woolworths. And they have to treat that seriously and go, is it our biggest supermarket chain selling poisonous mushrooms in the vegetable department? We need to really try and get to the bottom of this. So they get on to Erin and Erin mentions for the first time, a Chinese grocer. She says, actually, now that I think about it, I had some fresh mushrooms and I thought for a bit of an interesting taste, I might mix in some of these dried mushrooms that I'd bought at a Chinese grocer. And that must be the problem behind all of this.

• 11:31Speaker 04

  Oh, she's blaming the Chinese.

• 11:33Speaker 05

  There's definitely a racist tinge in all of this. There's definitely an idea that, oh, you never know what the Chinese will sell you.

• 11:41Speaker 04

  Right.

• 11:42Speaker 05

  And there was a portion of the population that would go for that.

• 11:45Speaker 04

  Especially at that time, you know, a couple of years after, after Covid.

• 11:50Speaker 05

  Exactly. This was disproven, obviously, very quickly. From the outset, the people from the health department said, that's not really, you can't really farm death cap mushrooms. They never, they don't grow in the same places that edible mushrooms grow. Like, how would that happen? But they went and visited every Chinese grocer in Melbourne and just, and checked just to be sure. And of course, found nothing, no evidence.

• 12:15Speaker 04

  What do these mushrooms look like?

• 12:18Speaker 05

  At the bottom of their stem, they have a rim around there that most mushrooms don't have. So just above the soil line, they have this rim. They're sort of yellowy-green, quite a long stem. And the top of them, the cap, the death cap, if you will, yellowy-green and white fronds underneath. The biggest giveaway is they only grow under oak trees. It's some relationship they have with the oak tree, which is introduced to Australia. So that's another thing we've got to thank England for. But they don't grow everywhere. They don't pop up often. People who forage mushrooms can avoid them pretty easily. You know, you don't have to be a mushroom expert. To really quickly read, don't pick those really bright yellow ones under the oak

• 13:01Speaker 05

  trees, just leave them alone. That's what they looked like. I could go into about three days of evidence about them if you want, but it's really tedious. And I remember one day, they, they went to lunch or whatever. So the jury's out, everyone's out. And the judge says to one of the lawyers, he goes, how much longer do we have on this evidence? Because there's at least one juror sleeping a lot.

• 13:21Speaker 04

  Oh my god.

• 13:24Speaker 05

  Between the anaphylloides evidence and the phone tower evidence.

• 13:28Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 13:29Speaker 05

  Days of learning the technology. And I get it. Like, they have to tell us how they work before they can tell us how it's pertinent to this. But it's like you're doing a crash course in telecommunications for two days, just to then get to, oh, and by the way, it means that Erin drove to lock. Oh, okay.

• 13:48Speaker 04

  Right.

• 13:49Speaker 05

  I can't, unfortunately, you can't just take their word for these things. They have to actually prove every single element of it. So on the Wednesday, this is an important day. This is, you know, four days out from the lunch, Erin's back home after the hospital. The health department by this stage are still visiting every Chinese grocer in Melbourne, saying, can we have a look at your mushrooms? And they find that they're all in sealed packages, they're all perfectly safe, there's, you know, nothing going on. And I think, to be honest with you, this was when the community got a bit sus. It's when I got a bit sus, because this was a minor story at this stage. Like, oh, it's terrible, tragedies happened out in beautiful Gippsland, is the sort of name of the greater region. These lovely people are in hospital, they're desperately ill, they might die from food poisoning.

• 14:34Speaker 05

  Then they started to mention this mushroom theory sort of crept into the media. And I know I wasn't the only person who thought, well, then why aren't they pulling mushroom sales from Melbourne? If they suspect at all that there are poisonous mushrooms for sale anywhere in Melbourne, they would be telling us, oi, don't eat a mushroom for a while, yeah? Yeah, just let us get to the bottom of this and, um, don't eat any mushrooms for a while. But they never did. There was never a warning about mushrooms whatsoever. And that made me sus right from that moment. But on the Wednesday, Erin did something interesting. She did two important things that day, actually. She did a factory reset on one of her mobile phones. And of course, the police were able to see that that had happened a little bit later on.

• 15:19Speaker 05

  But there was, there was another part to this that actually was kind of smart. It was, it, it doesn't look great, but she did manage to pull off a little coup around this time. But, um, so yeah, she did a factory reset on one of her two mobile phones. No one knew she had two, by the way. Not her family, nobody knew she had two. And, um, and she also made a trip to the Outram tip. Another one.

• 15:42Speaker 04

  Another tip?

• 15:43Speaker 05

  No, same tip, different trip. So this is two trips so far that we know about, yes. Uh, we don't know what she's doing there, but, but the evidence later, the phone pings tell us she went back out to Outram. Now, on the Thursday, the health department, still in communication with Erin, and the media is starting to really pick up on this. As I said, I'm not the only one who's going, mm, I don't think they believe her story about the mushrooms. On the Friday, after the lunch, so this is six days, both Heather and Gail died.

• 16:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 16:16Speaker 05

  So this is when the story is getting serious. And honestly, in the media coverage up to that point, it was not a bit of fun, but it was like, just that quirky story in the news.

• 16:28Speaker 04

  And you would have expected, if they're in hospital, that they were being treated and that the worst was behind them.

• 16:34Speaker 05

  Yeah, because it's six days. So, but again, this is the insidious nature of the poison. It is the most horrible way to kill someone. It's really unbelievable. Um, these people suffered for so many days. Their family talked later about the conversations they were having with them. They were still conscious for several days. Um, there was a talk about Heather thanking every healthcare worker who walked past her, basically, thanking the Ambos for driving her to the other hospital. Thank you, oh, thank you so much for caring for us. Like, again, just the most beautiful people. Heather and Gail both died on the Friday. On that same day, police received a tip off from our friends at the Outram tip. Somebody at the tip, because by this stage we're seeing a bit of Erin on the news.

• 17:19Speaker 05

  And someone at the tip went, hey, that lady was here a couple of days ago. I might just ring the cops and tell them, please tear us out there to the Altrum tip. And they have a look at their CCTV and there is Erin in her car reversing up, pulling out a box, throwing it in this spot in the tip, they run straight out there to that spot and they find, they find the dehydrator, the food dehydrator, complete with remnants of dried mushrooms still inside. She didn't even wash the bloody thing, but I suppose you don't want it in your dishwasher or in your sink or anywhere. Because this is so toxic.

• 17:59Speaker 05

  So they found the food dehydrator, they have a vision of her putting it where they found it two days earlier. On the Saturday, August the 5th, Don Patterson died. Don had definitely had a liver transplant. So in the seven days since he'd eaten that lunch, he had been through to hell and back. He, he, yeah, had been in hospital, had had a liver transplant and in the end it didn't work out. So he passed away and police made it clear that they thought these deaths might be suspicious by executing a search warrant on Erin's house. Now, the media by this stage is camped out, out the front of her house, which is very helpfully on a very quiet road. So there's plenty of room for all the cameras, all the crews to just go out there

• 18:42Speaker 05

  and sit there chatting, gossiping, hanging out, waiting for something to happen, which they obviously knew was going to happen. And sure enough, the police roll up and they search her house. They seized one mobile phone, now known as phone B. This is the phone that she had already done the factory reset on, right? At the time, thought to be her only phone. But what they weren't aware of was that she had her other phone. She had it stashed around there in the house somewhere, they never found it. And we call that one phone A. And to this day, we have never found phone A.

• 19:10Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 19:11Speaker 05

  Now, the suggestion is that if it was her primary phone, there was probably searches, I don't know about you, but while the kids are in doing something, you know, I'm on my phone.

• 19:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:21Speaker 05

  I'm getting on with my life on my phone. So the suggestion is that that's the phone that had various searches and things on it. And that maybe she wasn't confident in trying to factory reset it. I mean, like most of us, you'd think, oh, the coppers can find everything. Even if I think it's reset, even if I think I've deleted it, they can find everything in there. And to that, the police took phone B, right? The following day, Erin did a remote factory reset on it. So it's sitting in an evidence drawer at the police station, and she did a remote factory reset from her house.

• 19:55Speaker 04

  That's really something, isn't it?

• 19:57Speaker 05

  And she said, she said in court, "I just wanted to see if they were dumb enough to leave it on."

• 20:03Speaker 04

  Well, that bodes well.

• 20:05Speaker 05

  So again, this goes to her attitude.

• 20:12Speaker 05

  On the Monday, so a week and a bit after the lunch, Erin did the thing that made this story go stratospheric, I think. And tell me if you, I'm sure you remember this moment. Was this a moment Canada woke up to Erin and got excited? It was the day that she came home from somewhere in her car and decided to give an impromptu press conference in her front yard. Remember that?

• 20:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, I saw that. But I'm not sure if it was because I was subscribed to...

• 20:40Speaker 05

  A Current Affair, probably. A Current Affairs is one of those news magazine shows that's on every night. And, and their journalist was the one who kind of got the scoop. Because when she pulled into her driveway, all the, the journos seemed a bit timid. They were like, ugh, what do we do? What do we do? Do we approach her? Do we stay outside her gate? What do we do? And this one brave soul crept forward with his cameraman following him. And he said, "Hi Erin, can I just ask you a few questions?" And he's probably expecting, we're all expecting her to scream, "Get off my property!" and "No comment!" and run into her house. She instead turns around, steadies herself, looks down the barrel of the camera,

• 21:21Speaker 05

  and then sort of gets emotional, looks up to the sky and starts talking and starts making sounds like crying, but there's no tears coming out.

• 21:34Speaker 06

  Can you tell us about the meal that you cooked?

• 21:35Speaker 04

  The journalist is Sam Kuciara for A Current Affair. These clips have been edited for clarity and brevity.

• 21:46Speaker 07

  Devastated by what's happened, by the loss of Dawn. Dawn is still in hospital, the loss of Ian and Heather and Gail. Who were some of the best people that I've ever met. Gail was like.

• 22:00Speaker 06

  Take your time.

• 22:01Speaker 07

  Gail was the mom that I didn't have. And Gail's never been anything but good and kind to me. And Ian and Heather were some of the best people I've ever met. They never did anything wrong to me and I'm so devastated about what's happened.

• 22:18Speaker 05

  They never did anything to me. Isn't that a weird thing to say?

• 22:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's like indicating a kind of a under the surface feeling that she's got going on.

• 22:30Speaker 05

  It's a defence to me that, don't think I killed them, don't think I poisoned them because they never did anything to me. And I remember thinking, no one said you did love. Like, what are you? But again, behind the scenes, what we didn't realise was that she'd already been questioned by the police. She'd been interviewed, she knew full well that, so she's communicating with the police, actually, in this, this moment. By the way, she's wearing the same white pants, so she, she must have had one pair of pants.

• 22:57Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 22:57Speaker 05

  Loves them, them and the Birkenstocks. She's wearing the same outfit she was wearing a few days earlier.

• 23:03Speaker 07

  I just can't fathom what has happened.

• 23:07Speaker 06

  And you must be pretty shaken up by this as well.

• 23:09Speaker 07

  I'm devastated, I loved them.

• 23:12Speaker 05

  Don't think for a second we didn't all pick up on the past tense of that.

• 23:15Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 23:16Speaker 05

  I loved them, well, two of them are still alive, Erin, so at this stage.

• 23:22Speaker 07

  And I can't believe that this has happened and I'm so sorry that they have lost their lives. Just can't believe it.

• 23:32Speaker 06

  Can you tell us where the mushrooms came from?

• 23:38Speaker 04

  She now appears to be breaking down as she walks around to the other side of her car to grab something out of that before walking inside. The reporters chase her.

• 23:48Speaker 07

  Leave me alone now, please.

• 23:50Speaker 06

  Police say you're a suspect. Do you have anything to say about that?

• 23:54Speaker 07

  I say I didn't do anything, I loved them and I'm devastated that they're gone. That's what I have to say.

• 24:01Speaker 06

  Where did the mushrooms come from? Were they picked by you or?

• 24:07Speaker 05

  What meal did you cook them? She has this emotional moment and then she walks inside very calmly and a current affair got their scoop and the rest of us got our moment with Erin to see who is this person? And I'm not body shaming anyone, but she looks like a little garden gnome. I mean, as I said, she's a middle aged lady. She just looks like a normal lady like all of us, any lady you'd see at netball. And then she's giving this performance. So it is hard to believe. It is hard to believe that this little lady could be an evil poisoning mastermind. But this is the story that's starting to emerge. And the things that she said that day were sus. We were like, again, we feel like we've missed something in this story. And we had, we didn't

• 24:51Speaker 05

  realise that she knew that the police were looking at her hard for homicide. So then it went sort of quiet media wise. Everyone was talking about it though. Everywhere you went, people were going, you know, you're on public transport, you're getting your nails done, you're at the doctor's surgery. People are going, hey, what about that mushroom lady? Everyone's just calling her the mushroom lady. Everyone's going, whatever happened about that mushroom lady? It's like you and I were saying earlier, you know, about true crime podcasts versus journalism. Journalism gives us these headlines. And in this case, every couple of weeks, we'd get a little crumb. We'd get, oh, by the way, Ian Wilkinson survived. The one last guy survived and they're moving him out of hospital. And we go, oh, yeah. Whatever did happen about that mushroom lady? So it was like that for about three months.

• 25:36Speaker 05

  And then all of a sudden, on the 2nd of November, so three months after the lunch, Erin Patterson arrested and charged with three counts of murder. And then, I mean, it's on for young and old, isn't it? Then everyone in the world's talking about the mushroom lady. Then we start to get all the theories. People talk about the fact that women, historical poisoners.

• 25:57Speaker 04

  That's the method of choice when a woman kills somebody, yeah.

• 26:01Speaker 05

  Yeah, because you don't have to subdue the person. And so we get all the stories and documentaries start coming out about previous poisoners and all that kind of stuff. And Aaron is locked up for this period of time, waiting to go to trial. And it took ages. I don't know about Canada, but in Australia, we're still trying to catch up from COVID. It was like there was this huge backlog. And all these years later, it still takes years now for a trial like this to, to happen. So it was about a year and a half later, when we finally got more headlines about the mushroom lady. And we're like, oh my God, this trial is actually going to happen. It's going to start. And by this stage, we knew that lovely Ian Wilkinson, the pastor, had survived. He had gone back to his church in Corumburra.

• 26:44Speaker 04

  Do they know why he survived and, and the others didn't?

• 26:48Speaker 05

  There was much, much evidence about it in court. And at the end of the day, nobody knows. It's, it's, it's pure luck of the draw. His personal, his health, he didn't need as much as Don. We know Don, bless him, ate one and a half Wellingtons. Ian ate one whole Wellington. And certainly he had a liver transplant as well, and his health has never recovered. So he survived by the skin of his teeth, but something about his metabolism just meant that he somehow survived. By the time it came to trial, we learned that there were three extra charges on the docket. So Aaron was facing three murder charges and four attempted murder charges. That was for Ian Wilkinson and for the three

• 27:33Speaker 05

  alleged poisonings of Simon, her husband.

• 27:35Speaker 04

  Aha.

• 27:36Speaker 05

  For these two years, people started dropping rumours. We started gossiping with each other. You know, she tried to poison her husband a couple of times. Bullshit. No, she did. I swear to God, she did. And one of the reasons was that people started looking at Simon's social media. And he had Facebooked quite a bit about these terrible illnesses. There was that, that really bad one in particular. He posted, so glad to be back at work and thank you to my workmates. I've been in hospital, I've been in a coma for weeks and doctors don't know why, have had life-saving surgery and just thanks God and thanks to my workmates for welcoming me back. So people started to join the dots. I think probably words started creeping out of their family.

• 28:19Speaker 05

  It started to get around the community that she tried to poison Simon earlier. And by the way, another interesting tidbit is part of the reason that Simon's income was judged to be so low in his tax return that he only had to pay her $40 a month was because of the amount of sick leave he'd taken in the previous 12 months because he'd been poisoned.

• 28:40Speaker 04

  Oh my gosh, because it went from unpaid, yeah.

• 28:45Speaker 05

  Yeah, it affected his income. When that came out in court, oh, and Erin found out about the tax thing and he only had to pay $40 a month. People, women were saying to me everywhere I went, oh, he's a bit of an asshole, isn't he? He's a bit of a tight, because so many of us have had negative experiences with the family court, with men not wanting to pay and all of that kind of stuff. And I felt I corrected all of them when I had the opportunity to go, hey, whoa, whoa, whoa, no, there's lots more to this than that. Don't cling to that one detail because he's actually, and this is the, the evidence is showing, he's actually a really good guy. He was trying to do the right thing.

• 29:27Speaker 05

  He was told this was the right thing to do by his accountant and by the tax department, blah, blah, blah. But it was one of those moments that I thought, is she going to get away with this? Because certainly public sentiment was really swinging in her favour at that stage. And you wonder if the jury, are they feeling the same way? The important moment came when Erin took the stand, but we'll come to that because there was no more sort of erring on the side of she might be okay after we actually heard from her. So those, those three charges of attempted murder for Simon were dropped days before the trial. And, and nobody really knows why they were dropped. Then the trial ended up going for so long, there was so much evidence that it was suggested that maybe it was just too much.

• 30:09Speaker 05

  Maybe the prosecution decided, oh my God, we'll be here for months if we try and prosecute all of these. Maybe they felt in the end they didn't have the evidence to prosecute for those earlier poisonings. So they were left off the docket. Erin applied for the trial to be conducted in her community, as is her right, but it created a nightmare for the court in the small town of Morewell, which is the closest courthouse to Lee and Gathers. So it's this tiny country courthouse. And all of a sudden, as you said earlier, journalists from all over the world are flying in to see her in court to be part of this process. The locals are going, I met a bloke from the BBC yesterday. Like, this is crazy.

• 30:51Speaker 05

  There's one hotel in the town, it's booked out. At one stage, there was a drama because they realised that the jury and some journalists were staying in the one hotel, so they had to move people. But then they realised, but it's school holidays, of course, there's no other hotels in town for people to stay at. Like, it should never have been held here. But again, once we hear from Erin herself on the stand, we realise she's a contrarian. She loves to make things difficult for other people. That is definitely a part of her personality, and especially if she's upset with them. She's a bit passive aggressive, but she suffered in the end because she didn't realise that she would have to stay in Morewell for the whole trial. She would have to stay in the tiny lockup

• 31:35Speaker 05

  in the police station that's designed for a drunk to stay in for a couple of hours. She had to stay in there for 11 weeks. On Friday nights, she got to go back to the normal prison. She had to come back on Mondays. But she starts complaining very early on, going, Jesus, it's cold in here. And can I have a proper doona? And like, the pillow's really uncomfortable. And they were saying to her, well, this is your idea, mate. This is your accommodation for the entirety of this trial. So it was a nightmare for Erin, and she definitely got grumpier.

• 32:05Speaker 04

  It's bizarre because usually they don't want the trial in that area because it could taint the jury. They specifically request for the trial to be moved to a different location where there's less chance of like a jury knowing what's happened.

• 32:21Speaker 05

  There was a theory kicking around that statistically, country juries don't convict as often or something. So there was some kind of magical thinking going on. So yeah, I don't know why she pushed for that. She pushed for it, she got it. She wished she hadn't in the end. So hundreds of lawyers, you know, legal teams, assistants, support staff, journalists, everyone had to move and stay in Morewell. Now, I couldn't do that, unfortunately. I wish I could have. I mean, I would have given anything to have been there every single day. But I have children and like Erin, I'm a single mum. So I tuned in every day. I had a link, so I got to listen every day. But I know that they had a raffle system every morning for journalists because there are

• 33:06Speaker 05

  only about 12 seats in the court for journalists. So every morning, everyone from the local Leinster newspaper to the BBC had to roll up to the court and hope that their number got pulled out of the raffle to go and sit in the courtroom. And everyone else went and sat in an overflow room where they had a video. So everyone could hear what was going on. And then Erin decided to take the stand. We're weeks in, we've all learnt how telecommunications towers work, we're all experts on mushrooms, and we're all wondering, will Erin testify? Will she testify on her own part? And finally, we got to the moment where her defence barrister said, Your Honour, I call my next witness, Erin Patterson.

• 33:50Speaker 05

  And you could hear the squeals of delight go up across the country, across the world. We were like, oh my God, we're going to get to hear from Erin. Of course, for two days, she's talking to her lawyer. So it's all, you know, it's all great, it's all terrific stuff. She's just a mum having a go and she's had a great relationship with these lovely people. And why on earth would she want to hurt anybody? And why would she want to hurt them of all people? And Simon, bit of an asshole, but you know, she's dealing with it, she's getting on with it, she wasn't happy about the tax stuff, but she got over it. That was ages ago and it's all delightful. And then they finished up and we got to cross-examination.

• 34:31Speaker 05

  And we all knew this was going to be electric because the prosecutor was a lady called Dr. Nanette Rogers.

• 34:45Speaker 04

  That's coming up in a moment.

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• 36:44Speaker 04

  We're back with the mushroom murders trial and Aaron Patterson's cross-examination. Here's Michelle Laurie.

• 36:51Speaker 05

  Now, if Aaron is a garden gnome... Dr Nanette Rogers is like a cartoon character prosecutor. But she's that quirky woman who's like, I'm not here to have nice hair, guys. I'm here to make sure the law, you know, is done, that the justice is done. So she's got this curly hair, she's wearing bright yellow tights and flat shoes. And she might have a tartan skirt on and she might have some kind of scarf wrapped around her head and halfway up her, you know, her neck and halfway up her head. She's just a really, eh, energy, she's just a little tiny energy ball, little glasses. She just takes no rubbish from anybody. She's fabulous. And she's obviously got a brain like a steel trap, like she is brilliant.

• 37:35Speaker 05

  And we've been listening to her make the most boring things interesting for three weeks or something by this stage. And now she gets her hands on Erin and it did not disappoint. It was amazing. These women hated each other. They made no effort. Erin flipped on a dime, like she was suddenly a different person. Again, mistake by Erin. She'd been a great mum and all that for two days. All of a sudden, it's like she locked in on this woman, she hated her and she was going to try and outwit her. She was going to try and make her look silly. She was so defensive. They fought about things. She corrected Dr Rogers on dates and times.

• 38:16Speaker 05

  It was insane. They had a moment where Dr Rogers said to her, are you making this up as you go along, Miss Patterson? And Erin was like, no, that's outrageous. It was crazy. And Erin did start bringing up some stuff that we hadn't heard before. And it seemed like it came as a surprise to her defence team as well. Um, at one point she said, I never told them I had cancer. That was her thing all along. I never told them I had cancer. Then all of a sudden she went, okay, well, I did tell them I had cancer, but I didn't mean it. And I wasn't trying to trick anybody. What it was, was I wanted weight loss surgery.

• 38:54Speaker 04

  Oh my god.

• 38:56Speaker 05

  Exactly. We're all like, what? Where is this coming from? This is completely new information. Okay, what it is was, I wanted weight loss surgery because I've got such low self-esteem. And I thought if I told them it was cancer, that they would be sympathetic and supportive to me when I had my weight loss surgery, and they would help me with the kids. But I thought if I told them it was weight loss surgery, they wouldn't be as.

• 39:21Speaker 04

  So she never had cancer, but she was going to play, like, make them believe.

• 39:26Speaker 05

  Yeah, so initially for months, years, she said, I never said I had cancer. Now, all of a sudden, she goes, okay, I did, okay, I did say I had cancer.

• 39:33Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 39:34Speaker 05

  But this is the reason why. I was actually gonna have this weight loss surgery and, um, and I wanted them to help. So then Dr. Rogers is like, oh, what? And again, on her feet, she just, she just goes, well, what sort of, where were you gonna have weight loss surgery? What sort of effort had you put into getting that surgery? And Erin comes up with this, I went to this clinic. She names the clinic. Dr. Rogers goes, oh, Your Honour, can we have an early lunch, please? We could, let's just have a little early lunch and we'll come back. I just need to gather my thoughts. By the time she comes back from lunch, an hour and fifteen minutes later, they have called the clinic.

• 40:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 40:08Speaker 05

  They have ascertained that Erin was never a patient, and that the clinic doesn't offer weight loss surgery.

• 40:14Speaker 04

  Oh, my gosh.

• 40:16Speaker 05

  It's crazy. And this is the kind of thing that happened for three days. Like, Dr. Rogers just battered everything straight back at her so hard. And Erin, as I said to you in a Trumpian way, just stood there and eyeballed her and said, no, I am not lying. And she was clearly lying about so many things. It was bizarre, and I think the turning point for the jury, for the public. Suddenly, she just was clearly such an un, deeply unlikable woman. And the whole idea that everyone was kicking around, but why would she do this? And that was what her defence was really relying on.

• 40:59Speaker 05

  Cause in Australia, as, as in Canada, you don't have to prove a motive, right?

• 41:03Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 41:03Speaker 05

  It's great if you can suggest one, but you don't have to prove one because some people just do crazy stuff. And that's just the way life is. So that was their big thing, was like, there's no motive, there's no motive. And hoping that the jury would pick up on that. But after three days of seeing Erin on the ropes and seeing how nasty, how arrogant.

• 41:24Speaker 05

  Hearing her say things like, I just wanted to see if the police were dumb enough to leave the phone on. It changed everything. It just changed everything.

• 41:32Speaker 04

  It's like, you don't need a motive. She's just.

• 41:35Speaker 05

  She's just a nasty piece of work, you know? And then in summing up, Dr Rogers just kind of put it all together, the most incredible display I've ever seen. Look at me, I'm fangirling so hard.

• 41:47Speaker 05

  In her summing up, her final arguments, she listed off hour by hour, everything Erin was doing and the four other people were doing after the lunch. So she's like, okay, so now 10 o'clock Sunday morning, when Gail was in and out of consciousness and crying and saying, you know, praying, Erin was having a coffee outside, as her son said, she was having a coffee outside in the sunshine and they were chatting about whether or not they should blah, blah, blah. Six hours later, you know, Erin's driving around country, Victoria, looking at sandwiches. These guys are unconscious and looking at liver transplants. So those were the facts, the absolute unassailable agreed to facts. And then she gets into the

• 42:32Speaker 05

  lies. You know, Erin said this, we were able to prove that. The other thing that I found extraordinary was then, so then the jury go and deliberate, right? And again, everywhere I go, everyone's talking about it. Everyone to a man said to me, I think Erin did it, but I think she's going to get off.

• 42:49Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 42:50Speaker 05

  And I've asked so many, I've asked police about this, I've asked lawyers, I've asked judges, why do you think people thought she was guilty, but she wouldn't be convicted? And, you know, there are different theories, but generally they say, look, it was the motive. They said it was all circumstantial evidence and the lack of motive. Like, no one can understand, no one can feel it in their gut. No one can think, yeah, I might have done that. It's such a heinous crime. The victims are so innocent. The crime itself, we're talking about sitting at your kitchen table, watching elderly people eat food that you know is going to kill them, and you're chatting with them. It's unfathomable.

• 43:33Speaker 04

  And just to go along and act like everything was normal.

• 43:37Speaker 05

  Yep. Thanks for coming. Does anyone want tea or coffee? No, you're off? All right, great. Thanks so much for coming, guys. Yep. See you at church next week. Yep. Thinking, no, you're gonna be dead.

• 43:49Speaker 05

  That's the way it played out and eventually the, the jury, they deliberated for seven days as well, which was another reason that people were saying to each other, nah, I don't think so. I think they can't convict her. I think they can't. They feel like they haven't got the evidence. They can't do it. They came back and they convicted her. They, they found her guilty. Guilty of murdering Gail Patterson, Don Patterson and Heather Wilkinson, and guilty of attempting to murder Ian. I mean, these are all people in their seventies, by the way. So again, Ian's survival is miraculous. I was at the, the court the day of her sentencing, because this is back in Melbourne now, right? So we're back in the big courtroom, we can all fit. And I went in there, I had seen her before, I had been to a, a hearing before, but it,

• 44:34Speaker 05

  I don't know if you've been to court, I, I hadn't been until about a year ago. I start, I started going about a year ago. What I wasn't prepared for was the depth of the feeling of shame, like,

• 44:44Speaker 04

  Right.

• 44:44Speaker 05

  after everything's happened, we're there, it's sentencing day and the feeling of shame that's directed at the accused, at this stage, the convicted murderer, I just found almost too much for me. I was like, I was not expecting this. Here, we're all sitting here looking at this woman like she's in the stocks outside the village and we're all allowed to throw things at her. It's, she's just standing there having to absorb it all. And then the judge eviscerates her for 20 minutes while he gives the reasons for the sentence that he's about to give her. And he commented about the brutality of the crime and the innocence of the victims.

• 45:24Speaker 05

  And it's not even directed at me, but it was like, oh God, I'm struggling to breathe. This is so horrible. The family, victim's family, who are her family, by the way, are all sitting together staring her down. All the journo's are sitting together staring her down. And in the end, he gives her 33 year minimum. He gives her life with a 33 year minimum. And he realises and he acknowledges as he's speaking that a lot of people are going to think that's not enough. He's like, you know, and I understand that criticism. You've taken three lives in a brutal way. And a lot of people are going to say to me, she should just go to jail for the rest of her life. But he said, I'm acknowledging

• 46:08Speaker 05

  the humanitarian limitations of that because, he said, you are going to spend a lot of time in solitary confinement, probably years. That's the advice that's been given to me, is that because you're so controversial, other prisoners might try to harm you and you're going to be in solitary confinement. And he said, that is cruel and unusual punishment. And for that reason, I'm not giving you a whole life sentence. Interestingly, the Daily Mail reported just this week that she is out of solitary confinement. So it's less than 12 months. Yeah. The other thing is that she's appealing the conviction, actually, and the Department of Public Prosecutions is appealing the sentence. So everybody's going back to court at some

• 46:50Speaker 05

  point, and three judges at that stage will then go back over the evidence. So they don't have another whole trial. It's, it's judges going back over the evidence, going over her complaints about the, the trial and making a decision from there as to whether they're going to uphold the conviction and uphold the sentence. Are they going to increase her sentence? Are they going to vacate the conviction? Do we go back to court? We don't know. But waiting on that news, of course, is Simon Patterson. So Simon, her husband, who is now her ex-husband, of course, they did divorce during this process, has custody of the children and has made it clear through a spokesperson that he doesn't want to speak to anyone, that

• 47:30Speaker 05

  his purpose, his primary purpose in life is helping these children. You know, your mum's in jail for murdering your grandparents. It's unbelievable. So he won't speak publicly, he said, but it's, it's come to pass that he is now writing a book. Simon Patterson is writing a book and potentially working on a podcast because he does want to tell his story. But he's like, I don't want to give interviews over and over again. I mean, 60 Minutes would have offered him god knows how much money to sit down and tell this story. But He seems to me to be a man of integrity, who just wants to tell his story his way, what he thinks is important about it, once. And we were waiting with bated breath to hear it, but he said, well, I can't even do that yet because it's not over, because we've got this appeal to get through.

• 48:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 48:14Speaker 05

  That's where we're at with Erin Patterson, the mushroom lady. Isn't it the wildest story?

• 48:21Speaker 04

  And can you imagine if she actually succeeded in, in, you know, if Simon did come to the lunch and she poisoned him and he died and then she's off to jail and the two kids have got no parents?

• 48:36Speaker 05

  Well, that's the other part of the, of the defence's strategy is saying, A, she had no motive and B, why would she do this to her children? We have proven, everybody in the world knows she's an amazing mum and obsessed with her children, devoted to her children. I don't know why, mate. There's no money motivation, she's got heaps of money, there's no custody battle. We don't know. The only thing we can assume, and thank God I don't know, thank God I don't understand because I don't have, my brain doesn't work the same way, but this feeling of rejection, this feeling of being treated unfairly, being taken for granted, it, it all just worked in some way in her brain to think that this was reasonable behaviour.

• 49:18Speaker 04

  Was there any, like, usually they'll undergo a psychiatric assessment or something before sentencing or something, especially if there's something weird like this that...

• 49:28Speaker 05

  No, and we were all hanging out for that as well. That, that was a question a lot of people were asking, when are we going to get the psych report here? Because it was quite an audience build up, you know, by this stage who were following it very closely. And that was something we were waiting for. It never happened. And again, I've asked lawyers and judges about this and they said, yeah, they were shocked as well, they were surprised that neither the defence nor the prosecution offered up a psychiatric report. So they said, well, maybe from the defence's perspective, maybe it didn't offer anything positive, but then equally, maybe from the prosecution's perspective, it didn't offer anything damning either. They said, look, they, they would definitely have been done, both sides would have done one. And for whatever reason, neither side thought it would help them.

• 50:09Speaker 05

  So they didn't use them, even in sentencing, there wasn't, as I said, Erin had no friends, there were no, she, she didn't have any character witnesses. The one friend, Facebook friend, gave evidence for the prosecution. And not, not in as much as, oh, now I hate her now and now I think she murdered people. But just in what she had to say, she was the lady who said, oh, well, she sent me a message saying fuck them. She sent me a message saying, you know, so even the one friend of hers who was called Give Evidence didn't help Erin. Although I have to say, I, I think there is an element of sexism to this story in that, you know, if a man had committed these crimes, we would have said, yep, men do that sometimes.

• 50:49Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 50:50Speaker 05

  You know, men snap and kill their families. It's called, there's a name for it, family annihilator. They do it. But because it's a woman, it's unfathomable. And everyone's like, but there's no motive. Yeah, but when is there? When is there a reason to kill all your family?

• 51:05Speaker 04

  Well, I guess statistically, it is more likely that a man would kill his family.

• 51:10Speaker 05

  A hundred percent it is, but I think we accept that. We accept that it can happen. And when a woman is accused of it, we go, no, it can't happen. Think of all the reasons why that's not possible. When a man does it, we don't stop to think why it's not possible. Cause it is, we know it is.

• 51:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 51:27Speaker 05

  She's definitely a, a character. And I will never forget, as long as I live, after the, the judge, you know, gave his whole thing in sentencing, 20 minutes talking about what a terrible person she is and the terrible things she's done. And then says, and therefore I am sentencing you to life imprisonment with a minimum sentence of 33 years. Um, you can take the prisoner now. The room was so silent. It was like it was sucking the air out of my lungs. And the only sound was the chink, chink, chink of her shackles as she went down the stairs. And she had to walk past, you know, in England, they have those beautiful courtrooms where they literally take them down, straight downstairs from the middle of the room.

• 52:08Speaker 05

  But here in Melbourne, she had to walk past the journalists who were all sitting, there's two rows of journalists. And she knocked on their table. It was so creepy. It was chilling.

• 52:18Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 52:18Speaker 05

  And they were stunned. Their faces were like, jaws on the floor. She just knocked on her knuckle twice on their table.

• 52:26Speaker 04

  That, yeah, that is psycho. Oh my gosh.

• 52:30Speaker 05

  Yes, it is. So, look, she's appealing. Who knows? Who knows what will come of it? I dare say, I assume, I hope, I guess, I predict that one day there'll just be another headline saying, tried and failed, and that's that. Because, as I say, it went for 11 weeks. The prosecution were meticulous in their evidence. I think she'll struggle. But one of the reasons she's using to try and get it overturned was the fact that for a couple of days, the journalists and the jury stayed in the same hotel. There's no evidence anywhere that they chatted, that they, that anything untoward happened. But the fact that they were in the same building for a couple of days is one of the reasons she's trying to, to use to get her conviction overturned.

• 53:15Speaker 04

  Well, good luck to her, I guess.

• 53:17Speaker 05

  She's mad, I tell you.

• 53:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, it makes me wonder like why, why her lawyer thought it would be a good idea for her to, to testify, you know? Or maybe he advised her not to and she insisted. Like, did she really, did they think that she was going to come across well?

• 53:35Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's the, the gossip is, the gossip out of the court is that they definitely did not want her to testify, but she insisted. Because again, she thought she was smarter. She thought she was smarter. And look, she had the best representation money can buy because she's a millionaire. So she was able to, I mean, she spent literally millions on this defence. Uh, so I don't know if she'll be able to afford them next time. We'll, we'll see.

• 54:00Speaker 04

  Thank you so much, Michelle. I really, really appreciate it. This has been great. And thank you for all the work that you put into this.

• 54:08Speaker 05

  Thank you for the opportunity to just sit down and tell the story of Erin. It was, it's been such a joy. Um, and again, I'm not obviously downplaying that crime, but it is such an amazing story. It's such an amazing story of a family, of relationships, of misunderstandings, of, you know, context. I guess in a word, context is what I'm always fascinated by. And this one's got heaps of it. So I appreciate the opportunity to chat it out with you.

• 54:37Speaker 04

  Thank you again to Michelle Laurie from Australian True Crime for joining us today, and to her team for setting this up. You can find her show on podcast players and on YouTube. Just look for Australian True Crime. To see photos and other media from this case, follow us on the Canadian True Crime Facebook and Instagram pages. We donate monthly to those facing injustice. This month, we have donated to the Canadian Resource Centre for Victims of Crime, who offers support, research and education to survivors, victims and their families. Learn more at crcvc.ca. Audio editing was by Crosby Audio and Eric Crosby voiced the disclaimer.

• 55:21Speaker 04

  Our senior producer is Lindsay Eldridge. Sound design and additional editing was by me, and the theme song was composed by We Talk of Dreams. I'll be back soon with another Canadian True Crime episode. See you then.

• 56:04Speaker 00

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