Pod Insights Crime, Conspiracy, Cults and Murder Ep. 113 | The HORRIFIC Mushroom Murders About this episode Get 40% off select Lola Blankets products at https://lolablankets.com with code CCCM at checkout.
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A family lunch ended in tragedy after a meal laced with deadly mushrooms left three people dead and another fighting for his life. Was it a horrifying accident - or a carefully planned murder hidden behind a homemade meal?
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Transcript 10,235 words · 2 speakers
0:00 Speaker 00 At Humana, our Medicare Advantage plans are easy to understand and easy on your wallet. Like offering more benefits than you'd get from original Medicare alone. And including dental, vision, and hearing coverage in every plan. And the best part is, every plan has a $0 or low monthly plan premium, which makes it easier to save, too. So this Medicare planning season, plan well with Humana. Learn more at gethumana.com. Humana is a Medicare Advantage, HMO and PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal. At Humana, our Medicare Advantage plans are easy to understand and easy on your wallet. Like offering more benefits than you'd get from original Medicare alone. And including dental, vision, and hearing coverage in every plan.
0:42 Speaker 00 And the best part is, every plan has a $0 or low monthly plan premium, which makes it easier to save, too. So this Medicare planning season, plan well with Humana. Learn more at gethumana.com. Humana is a Medicare Advantage, HMO and PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.
1:00 Speaker 01 A small town in the south of Australia. A few streets, a pub, a petrol station, hours from the nearest city. The kind of place where nothing really happens. And there were five people in a quiet house at the end of a long road, enjoying a few hours together. It should have been a forgettable day, but it wasn't. This is the story of the Mushroom Murders. Crime, conspiracy, cults, serial killers, and murder. All things that I love to consume, and I know you do too, you sick, twisted, beautiful, intellectually-minded freak. Today, we are talking about the Mushroom Murders. So without further ado, let's unbuckle our seatbelt, go Mach 5 down the highway, slam on the brakes, and bust through the windshield into this infamous Australian case together.
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2:27 Speaker 01 Erin Trudy Scudder was born in 1974 in suburban Melbourne. And she grew up in Glen Waverley, a quiet residential neighborhood about 19 kilometres south-east of the city centre. Yes, we're talking in kilometres today, people, all right? We're in Australia. Also, as a Canadian, I'm loving it. But it was a kind of place where families put down roots and just never really left. And this suburb had undergone rapid growth in the 1960s. And by the time Erin was a child, Glen Waverley was home to nine primary schools and four high schools. And homes sat on big lots along organised streets, just a solidly middle-class Australia. And her family fit that mould because her father, Aiden Scudder, worked for the government
3:12 Speaker 01 and her mother, Dr Heather Scudder, held a position at Manash University as a literature lecturer. And Heather specialised in children's literature, specifically Australian studies and women's writing. And she authored an academic book called Displaced Fictions: A Detailed Study of Contemporary Australian Teen and Young Adult Fiction. And Erin's sister, Cainwyn Ruth Scudder, would study geology at Manash, following the family path. So with an academic mother, a public servant father, and two university-bound daughters, the Scudders were a modern Australian family on paper. And by every measure, Erin was right at home in it.
3:54 Speaker 01 She was bright, she was bookish, she was quick with commitment. And her teachers would notice her really well. She had the kind of mind that picked things up faster than anyone in the room around her. And by the time she finished high school, she had a place at the University of Melbourne waiting for her. Just a bright, full life ahead of her. And Erin had a mind that just didn't sit still. She kept picking up new qualifications and new fields and new subjects to dig into. And she started at the University of Melbourne in 1992, where she earned a place in the science program. And science eventually gave way to accounting, which became her first job, which offered her very stable, very conventional work. But she wasn't done collecting qualifications.
4:38 Speaker 01 And in February 2001, she joined Air Services Australia and began their air traffic control training program in Melbourne. And the course ran 10 months long, and it was very competitive, technical, and not everyone made it through. It's very difficult. My grandpa used to do it, and it's one of the most stressful jobs you can actually ever do, ever. And air traffic control is one of those professions most people never think about until something goes wrong. Controllers manage the movement of aircraft in real time, sequencing takeoffs, landings, and routing across packed airspace. It's, again, just very stressful. You have hundreds of lives in your hands at every given moment, essentially. And a single miscommunication can end those lives.
5:23 Speaker 01 So by the time the program was finished, Erin had earned her place in the tower. So she was a university graduate and a qualified air traffic controller. And a manager who worked with her remembered her this way, saying, quote, "colorful, smart, very smart. She was no dummy." So Air Services Australia lasted less than two years. And by November 2002, she would eventually move on. But her next stop was local government. And she picked up a position at the Manash City Council in Melbourne. And the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, the RSPCA, ran an animal management office inside the council. And by 2004, Erin was there as an administrative assistant, filing paperwork, basically, and
6:08 Speaker 01 handling the unglamour- ...daily rhythm of local government, a world away from the control tower, which again is like an extremely stressful job, so I don't blame her for switching jobs. But the fact that she can just like toss around all these high qualifications and just kind of pick and choose whatever she wants to do because she's so smart is very impressive. So Erin's government job turned out to matter more than even the title suggested because also working at the city of Manash was a civil engineer named Simon Patterson and a group of council employees had formed what Simon described as quote unquote "a fairly eclectic circle of friends" and Erin found her way into that group. And by July 2005, Erin and Simon were together, but she'd met his parents even before the
6:54 Speaker 01 relationship had really begun. And it was March or April 2005 and she and Simon had gone camping with a group of friends and somewhere along the way, they swung by the family Patterson home. Now, the Pattersons lived in Corumburra, a small town in the green hilly country of South Gippsland, roughly 90 minutes southeast of Melbourne. And that afternoon was the first time Erin met Dawn and Gail Patterson. Now Dawn and Gail's lives had followed similar paths from the very beginning. Both were in scouts and guides as children, both took up piano and tennis and both spent holidays at the same beachside towns on the Moreington Peninsula, Rosebud and Germana. And their paths first crossed at Sunday School in Hughesdale, a suburb east of Melbourne's centre.
7:37 Speaker 01 And Dawn came out of Melbourne University with a science degree and he had the foundation for a research career in Australia, but he and Gail decided on a different direction and the couple just packed up and moved abroad. Botswana first, then China, and both stints centered on mission work and teaching. And when they eventually returned, Dawn took a position at Corumburra Secondary College, where he taught for 25 years and at one point served as deputy principal. And Richard Collier, who taught alongside him, described Dawn as "a man who earned deep respect from students, parents and staff." And the exchange program he helped create sent Corumburra students to China, which of course was a country he and Gail had already poured years of their lives into. Gail's contributions ran just as deep.
8:22 Speaker 01 In Botswana, she'd homeschooled their children using lessons materials sent from Australia. And Simon liked to joke that he, quote, "reached his academic peak in grade four," unquote, which he insisted was, quote, "no reflection on the teachers that followed, but on mom's ability as a teacher," unquote. And back in Corumbura, she worked in the school office at the secondary college alongside Dawn. Now, beyond the school, her volunteer work was described as, quote, "quietly extensive." Bible study groups, youth events, community meals, producing the Bura Flyer Newsletter, reading newspapers aloud for people who couldn't see, welcoming overseas visitors and newcomers to the town, et cetera, et cetera.
9:05 Speaker 01 These people are saints, it seems, doesn't it? Like, they're just giving everything they have to everyone around them. And when a fire destroyed the secondary college's records in 1993, Gail helped piece them back together. So it was said of the couple, quote, "they just got on with living generous lives quietly and without fanfare," unquote. And Gail's younger sister was Heather Wilkinson, born Heather Young, and her husband was Ian Wilkinson. And together, they raised four children, David, Luke, Ruth, and Elizabeth. And Heather taught English to adult migrants, and she never stopped. And she was called a gifted teacher, and under her influence, more parents started volunteering at the school than ever before.
9:50 Speaker 01 And one friend, who had known Heather her entire life, said, quote, "the spirit of God was always evident in Heather," and, quote, "peaceful, grateful, calm, joyful. She is kind, friendly, even-tempered, and with a quirky sense of humor," unquote. And Ian had been the pastor of Corumbura Baptist Church for more than two decades, marking his 25th year in the role in February of 2024. And for these families, faith wasn't something they set aside after Sunday service. It really just shaped the way they lived every single day. So when Erin and Simon married on June 2, 2007, at the Corumbura Anglican Church, they chose that church deliberately. And Aaron said they wanted Ian and Heather,
10:33 Speaker 01 quote, "to be able to come and relax with guests," unquote, "rather than working the ceremony at their own Baptist church." And the reception was held under a marquee in Dawn and Gail's backyard in Corumbura. But Aaron's parents weren't able to be there. So the person who walked her down the aisle was David Wilkinson, which was Ian and Heather's son. But faith hadn't always been part of Aaron's world. And she actually said she'd actively tried to convert him away from belief, saying, quote, "I was trying to convert him into being an atheist, but things happened in reverse," unquote. And then around 2005, she walked into Corumbura Baptist Church for the first time. And something shifted. Ian Wilkinson stood behind the pulpit.
11:16 Speaker 01 And up to that point, faith had been nothing more than an intellectual puzzle to her. But something hit her in that room. It, quote unquote, "quite overwhelmed her." And it pulled her into the orbit of the very people sitting in those pews. The Pattersons, the Wilksons, and the small-town faith community they'd spent a lifetime building. And after the wedding, Aaron and Simon didn't settle down right away. And instead, they would use money from Aaron's inheritance and buy a Nissan Patrol, Patrol, Patrol, sorry if I'm saying that wrong, and drove into Outback, Australia. Sorry, I couldn't, I couldn't help it. I had to, I had to do it once. Okay, I won't do it again. But Simon described those months as a, quote unquote, "meander through the country's vast interior."
12:01 Speaker 01 And from there, they flew to Africa, traveling through South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Namibia. And Botswana, as you may recall, was one of those places where Dawn and Gail had lived decades earlier as missionaries. And by September 2007, they'd settled in Perth. And their first child, a boy, arrived in January of 2009. And the birth was pretty rough. Forceps failed during delivery, and the doctors had to perform an emergency C-section. And their newborn ended up in the intensive care unit. But even before the doctors cleared her, Aaron signed herself out. She wanted to be at her baby's side. Dawn and Gail came to help with the new baby. And Erin said she felt, quote, "out of my depth," unquote,
12:47 Speaker 01 and was, quote, "really relieved that Gail was there," unquote. So she had that support system. And she described her mother-in-law as, quote, "really supportive and gentle and patient," unquote. And Gail told Erin to, quote, "just relax and enjoy your baby." And those words landed deeply. And for a stretch in 2011 and 2012, the family was living in Pemberton, a tiny timber milling town in the southwestern region of Western Australia. And Erin opened a secondhand bookshop there, and it became kind of a hub for serious readers in a place where you wouldn't necessarily expect one. And eventually, after their first child, a daughter would follow in 2014. And as it turned out, Simon's sister Anna Tarrington was also expecting.
13:30 Speaker 01 So the two babies were born within three days of each other. So the family started affectionately calling them "the twins." And that same year, Erin and Simon bought a house in Corumbura so they could be closer to Simon's parents. And this was the town where Dawn taught, where Ian preached, and where Gail had spent decades quietly holding the community together. So the entire family was putting down their roots. But trouble arrived with their first child. And even with the baby, Simon wanted to keep road tripping. The family headed north along the Gib River Road, a remote track through Western Australia's Kimberley region. And somewhere around Queensland, the trip fell apart. And Erin booked a flight to Perth and left.
14:14 Speaker 01 And Simon had no choice but to drive back with the baby. So it was a week on the road, just him and his infant. And when he finally got back, she'd already arranged a rental cottage for herself. And Simon wound up at a caravan park nearby. So this would be the first time Erin would leave. And they were apart roughly two to three months before getting back together. And it kind of became a pattern. From 2009 to 2015, the couple separated and reconciled multiple times. And Simon felt that she was the one who always left despite his desire to have a solid marriage. Quote, "What I understood from Erin was..." That she was struggling inside herself. Unquote. Now Erin framed the problem differently, saying, quote, "If we had a disagreement or any kind of conflict,
14:59 Speaker 01 we didn't seem to be able to talk about it in a way where either of us felt heard or understood." Unquote. And eventually she told him the way they related to each other was toxic. And the marriage drifted through towns along the way. And they would try counselling and patch things up together and would actually move to York, which is in Western Australia. And then came the tiny timber settlement of Quinninup. And they came back to Victoria in 2013, a short stop in Benah, then a house in Corumbura. And the final split came in November of 2015. She picked up a place of her own in Corumbura and the family home was behind her. Quote, "I didn't want to be separated, but I felt there was no choice."
15:42 Speaker 01 Unquote. But still, through it all, they never divorced. And what made the split unusual was how little seemed to change on the surface. Custody was split, but they continued texting regularly and they still sat in the same pews on Sunday. And they even travelled together as a family. And Erin noted that Dawn and Gail never changed after the separation. Quote, "They just continued to love me." Unquote. She would say. And they treated her, quote, "like their own daughter." Unquote. And Simon confirmed Erin, saying, quote, "Got along very well with his parents, especially with dad." Unquote. So in February of 2022, Dawn reached out to offer video call tutoring for Erin's eldest child,
16:26 Speaker 01 telling her he was happy to help with any subject he had some competence in. And both Erin and Dawn had what Simon described as inquiring minds, and the two of them bonded over shared curiosity. Financially, Erin was pretty well off because her grandmother's death in 2006 had left behind a substantial estate. And Erin's share was evaluated at around $2 million Australian, parceled out over eight years. And her father had died of cancer in 2011. And when her mother died of cancer some years later, another inheritance followed. And called her very generous with his family and the numbers backed that up. She lent hundreds of thousands of dollars to each of his three siblings.
17:09 Speaker 01 And his brother Matt alone received three hundred to four hundred thousand dollars, Australian dollars, to help build a home. And she would buy property of her own, a unit in Mount Waverley, and a place on Gibson Street in Lee and Gothah, still being finished when she moved in. So, pretty generous, I'd say. And she called Gibson Street her final house, the place where her children would grow up and she'd grow old. But they lived with her only part-time under the shared custody agreement. And she wasn't working at that time. And she had actually deferred a place in a nursing and midwifery course. Because she was pretty comfortable from her assets, saying, quote, "I could afford to go to university and I didn't need to work a job at the same time," unquote.
17:54 Speaker 01 Teach their own, if you got it, why not? So on Mother's Day of 2023, Gail sent Erin a text saying, quote, "Happy Mother's Day, Erin. May God bless you. Love, Dawn and Gail," unquote. And Erin wrote back, quote, "Thanks, Gail. Happy Mother's Day to the best mum-in-law anyone could ask for. X X O O." So regardless of Simon and Erin's separation, the family was still really close-knit. But something awful was about to take place. So on Saturday, July 29th, 2023, Erin invited five people to lunch at her home on Gibson Street. Simon, his parents, Dawn and Gail, and Gail's sister Heather, along with Heather's husband Ian. So just that whole close-knit family.
18:38 Speaker 01 And it was to be an adults-only gathering. And Erin's kids were spending a day with a friend, so it was really just all the adults getting together for a nice lunch. But Erin had some news for the family, and the purpose of this gathering was medical. Because Erin told the family she was dealing with a health scare and needed help figuring out what to say to her children. And the night before, Simon texted to say he wouldn't be coming. And he would tell her he felt too uncomfortable to attend. But he offered to have the conversation over the phone if she still wanted his input. Now Erin wrote back at length because she had spent the entire week getting prepared mentally and getting the house ready and the meal and just everything.
19:20 Speaker 01 And she would say to him, quote, "The work had been exhausting in light of the issue I'm facing," unquote. And she even said she'd put, quote, "a small fortune toward beef eye fillet to make beef Wellingtons because she wanted it to be a special meal. I may not be able to host a lunch like this again for some time," she would add, quote, "It's important to me that you're all there tomorrow. I hope you change your mind," unquote. But Simon would never reply, and he would stay home, and his chair at the table would sit empty. But the remaining four guests arrived that Saturday, Dawn and Gail, Heather and Ian. And for the Wilkonsens especially, the invitation had carried real weight.
20:02 Speaker 01 They were very happy to be invited, and Ian had taken it as a hopeful signal, a sense that maybe our relationship with Erin was going to improve, unquote. Because the family was still close, but the separation had caused, you know, some friction in the family, so everybody was just happy to be getting together. So before they sat down to eat, Erin took her guests on a tour of the house. And then, once lunch was ready, Heather and Gail offered to bring the food out. So Erin would plate the portions and all the women would bring out the food together. Then they would bow their heads and say grace before the first bite. And the conversation over the meal was light. Family talk, easy laughter, no one was in any sort of rush. And the Wilkonsens ate their meal, and Gail got through about half her portion before
20:47 Speaker 01 pushing the plate over to Dawn to finish. And between his own plate and hers, Dawn ate close to a serving and a half. And there was the teasing around the table about, quote, "Husbands helping their wives out by eating extra food," unquote. So the lunch was going really well. And then dessert was already waiting, and it was a cake Gail had baked and a fruit platter Heather had prepared. And the group managed a little of each, but after the Wellingtons, there wasn't much appetite to go around. But once the plates were cleared, the mood of the afternoon changed, and Erin told the group she discovered a lump on her elbow. And she'd said it had been diagnosed as cancer, quote, "very serious, life-threatening," unquote.
21:29 Speaker 01 And Ian said she'd appeared, quote, "very concerned," unquote, about what the diagnosis meant. And she asked for the guidance on whether to tell her children, and if so, how. So the news would settle over the room. A cancer diagnosis in this circle wasn't something anyone would carry alone. And Don was the first to respond. And he told her, quote, "that the best approach was to be honest," unquote. And then they prayed, asking for God's blessing on Aaron. And they held her in that prayer the way they'd held each other through every hard chapter for nearly 20 years. And the afternoon wound down quietly after that. And the guests left sometime in the late afternoon. And Heather said that the food had been delicious and beautiful.
22:14 Speaker 01 So by every measure available to the people sitting at that table, it had been a warm Saturday. But by nightfall, every one of them would fall ill. Diarrhea and vomiting started to set in after dark, and it wouldn't stop. Both couples spent long hours assuming it would pass. But by Sunday morning, it was clear it wouldn't. The Pattersons and the Wilkinson's compared symptoms by phone and realized all four of them were sick. And Don and Gail actually called the ambulance. And they arrived at Corombe Borough Hospital at 10:10 a.m. on July 30. And between the two of them, Don had taken the harder hit. And Simon drove the Wilkinson's to Lee and Gothah Hospital at 10:57 a.m.,
23:00 Speaker 01 a different hospital roughly 20 minutes away because Corombe Borough didn't have the capacity for all four patients. But at both hospitals, the initial assessment was the same: suspected food poisoning or gastroenteritis, which essentially is an inflamed stomach and intestine, often from infection. But all four patients were conscious and alert and able to talk. And from his hospital bed, Don walked the doctors through everything that happened at Saturday's lunch. But as He went on, he kept going downhill and his lactate levels climbed dangerously high and his liver began failing and signs of sepsis started to set in. And doctors realized that gastroenteritis alone couldn't explain what they were seeing.
23:45 Speaker 01 So toxicologists were consulted and the symptoms pointed toward a specific culprit. Ammonita phalaroids, death cap mushrooms. Now, death caps are behind more than 90% of fatal mushroom poisonings worldwide and they contain amitoxins which are heat stable, or in other words, cooking does nothing to neutralize them. So the poison makes its way to the liver after ingestion and it locks onto the cells there and kills their ability to produce proteins. So the cells literally die and the organ follows. And the poisoning follows a very cruel pattern.
24:25 Speaker 01 First, violent stomach symptoms hit within 6 to 24 hours of eating, then the patient seems to rally for roughly a day, and then 3 to 5 days after ingestion, the liver collapses along with other major organs afterwards. In other words, sepsis. And it takes remarkably little to have a devastating effect. Just 0.1 milligrams per kilogram of body weight can be fatal and one mushroom can take down a grown person. And in light of this discovery, the decision was made to move all four patients to major hospitals in Melbourne because the rural facilities could not manage what was coming.
25:05 Speaker 01 Now Erin had told Simon she'd also been sick since Saturday night and she arrived at Lee and Gotha Hospital on Monday morning at 8:05 and then was transferred to Manash Clayton later that day, but she would be discharged the next day. And 6 days after the lunch, on August 4th, Gail and Heather would pass away. And Gail was 70 years old at the time and Heather was 66 years old and she had still been teaching that week, working with her English students right up until the end. And doctors listed the ...cause as liver dysfunction and cascading organ failure, all traced to amanita mushroom toxicity. And by the time they died, their medical teams had already accepted that there was
25:50 Speaker 01 nothing more that they could do. And Dawn would receive a liver transplant in a last ditch effort to help save him, but unfortunately, it wouldn't be enough. And Simon would say, quote, "Sadly, the rest of his body was already too sick to go on past that point," unquote. And Ian nearly suffered the same fate. And he had spent weeks in an induced coma. And he would also receive a liver transplant of his own. And he was taken off the ventilator on August 14th. So 54 days passed between his admission and his release on September 23rd. And when news came of his release, his family spoke publicly for the first time, calling it "a moment of immense relief and gratitude."
26:33 Speaker 01 And the following Sunday, the Baptist church congregation gathered to support each other and pray for Ian's recovery. And local mayor Nathan Hershey spoke for the town. And the three who died, he said, were, quote, "exceptional people who had given generously to the local community," unquote. And councillor Jenny Keery said, quote, "We've lost a great store of kindness in Corumbura this weekend," unquote. So on August 31st, the memorial service for Dawn and Gail was held at Corumbura Memorial Hall, and hundreds of mourners filled the space. And tribute letters arrived from China, Botswana, and the United Kingdom, all saying Dawn and Gail were "the most capable, kindest, and generous people they had ever met."
27:16 Speaker 01 And Simon stood before the crowd and read Gail's final words. And she had typed them from her bed at Dandingung Hospital, one last message to the family group chat, quote, unquote, "Lots of love to you all." And on October 4th, Heather had her own memorial service. And more than 400 people came to say goodbye. Ian stood among those mourners, frail and still deep in recovery. And it was his first public appearance since that lunch. Now, Victoria Police assigned its homicide squad to the case on August 4th. 2023, the same day Gail and Heather had passed away. And Detective Sergeant Luke Farrell led the search of Patterson's Lee and Gotha home the following morning.
27:59 Speaker 01 And over the next three months, investigators pulled at every single thread. And what they found dismantled the picture, piece by piece. Now, the first alarm had sounded at the hospital when Dr. Chris Webster told Erin that death cap mushrooms may have been involved in her guests poisoning. And he asked what kind of mushrooms she'd used in the meal. And she said Woolworth's, the supermarket chain. And death cap mushrooms are not sold in supermarkets, obviously. And those kind of contradictions kept coming. And Erin's medical results showed no clinical or biochemical evidence of amanita poisoning. And she had claimed to have eaten the same meal as her guests and to have become ill.
28:43 Speaker 01 But her blood work didn't reflect anything close to what the others were showing. And even her presence at the hospital began to look strained in retrospect. And Nurse Cindy Monroe had treated the other lunch guests and was now treating Erin, saying, quote, "She didn't look unwell like Ian and Heather. I recall Ian being so unwell, he could barely lift his head off the pillow. Erin was sitting up in bed in the trolley," unquote. And Erin had stayed about five minutes that Monday morning. Despite her doctor's objections, she had gotten up and just walked out, saying she needed to feed the dogs and pack her daughter's ballet bag. And when she failed to return in an agreed 20-minute window, a concerned doctor at the hospital contacted police.
29:26 Speaker 01 And that was the first time anyone in a position of authority had treated the lunch as something other than a medical event. And investigators began to suspect that her brief hospital appearance had never been about getting treatment. It had been about being seen as sick. And her behavior the day before only reinforced the suspicion. So on Sunday, while Dawn and Gail were on their way to Corinboro Hospital, while the Wilkons were arriving at Lee and Gotha, Erin had told Simon she'd had diarrhea since Saturday night. And that same afternoon, she had loaded- Her son into the car and driven him to a flying lesson in Tayab. And the drive was more than an hour each way.
30:07 Speaker 01 So after her transfer to Manash Clayton, Simon's sister-in-law, Tanya, came to visit. And Tanya told Erin the others were going downhill quickly. And Erin pivoted. And she asked about taking her children on a boat cruise. And Simon would later say that through all of it, Erin quote unquote, "never actually asked about how his relatives were doing." And then there was the question of the children. And at the hospital, she had told staff her kids had eaten leftover Wellingtons. But she said she'd scraped off all the mushroom before giving it to them. And Nurse Monroe warned that toxins could have seeped straight through the mushroom and into the beef. And Erin resisted bringing the children in, saying, "They did not eat the mushrooms.
30:51 Speaker 01 I just don't want them to be panicked and stressed." She eventually agreed. And the children were kept overnight and found not to be ill, luckily. So the implication landed quietly. Erin, by her own account, had already known which part of the food was dangerous. And she had scraped it away from her children's portions. And she went public with a story. And Erin told the media that beef Wellingtons had contained store-bought mushrooms, along with dried ones, from an Asian grocery shop somewhere around Mount Waverly. "I am now devastated to think that these mushrooms may have contributed to the illness suffered by my loved ones," she told the media. And she also addressed reporters in a doorstep interview at the Leon Gotham home
31:36 Speaker 01 after police described her as a suspect, saying, "I didn't do anything," she said. "I loved them." And health authorities moved quickly. And over the course of a couple of days, a city of Manash public health officer named Troy Shankenek hit every Asian and Indian grocery store he could find in Oakley and Clayton and Mount Waverly. And not one sold anything matching her description. And she had no name for the shop and no address and no way to send investigators anywhere near it. So it looked like the shop didn't really- And then the footage surfaced. And CCTV showed Erin pulling into the Coonwora
32:17 Speaker 01 transfer station on August 2nd, four days after the lunch. So her guests were fighting for their lives in intensive care units across Melbourne, and she was at the local tip carrying a sunbeam food dehydrator into the electronics waste shed, and police would recover it from the dump two days later, and her fingerprints were on the device. And forensic testing found traces of death cap mushroom inside. And her first response to detectives was flat denial. She said she didn't own a food dehydrator, never had, but her own friend had already given police screenshots from a Facebook group conversation, and the photos showed mushrooms arranged
33:00 Speaker 01 across the trays of a dehydrator. Maybe if you're doing something bad, don't post it on Facebook, or do, you know, it's good that it's good that she did. Um, that's crazy. And she would eventually have to admit the truth, saying, quote, "I knew that there were photos in there of mushrooms and the dehydrator, and I just panicked." Unquote. And detectives identified two phones in Patterson's possession. Now, the first was the device she'd been carrying in the weeks leading up to the lunch. And the last time it appeared on any footage was a hospital security camera on July 31st. And by the time investigators got inside the Gibson Street House on August 5th, the SIM card had already been pulled from that phone and dropped into a Nokia.
33:45 Speaker 01 And the movement log put the swap at 1:45 PM, which was while detectives were still working their way through the rooms. And the physical phone was never actually found. And the phone she did hand over had been factory reset four separate times during 2023. A little bit suspicious, I'd say. Sorry, that's, I'm, that's the last time I'm gonna do it, I swear. And once, on August 2nd, the same day she drove to the tip with the dehydrator. And once again, August 5th, while police were conducting the search. And then, once more. After investigators already had it in their possession. Someone triggered a remote wipe while it was sitting in an evidence room. The detectives also seized her desktop computer.
34:30 Speaker 01 A forensic officer ran keyword searches including death cap, death cap mushroom, and poison, and the cached data turned up iNaturalist, a citizen science site. And people log where they've spotted different species of plants and fungi in the wild, including death caps. And the trail stretched back more than a year before the lunch. And someone using that machine had gone looking for death cap mushroom sightings around Marabyn back in 2022. And when confronted, Patterson said she couldn't recall visiting the site, and then added, quote, "Well, somebody did, and that somebody could have been me," unquote. Why you even say, just say you did it. What do you put?
35:13 Speaker 01 And her phone records pointed in that same direction. And cell tower data placed her device near the town of Outrim on May 22, 2023. And the day before, a mushroom specialist had flagged a death cap sighting on Nielsen Street through iNaturalist. The puzzle pieces are puzzling together. And her phone also connected to towers near the town of Locke on April 28, around the same time she purchased the dehydrator. And photographs were pulled from her tablet with photos of death caps sitting right there on her kitchen scale. And it was photographed like someone was measuring out portions. And as a cherry on top, or should I say mushroom, the cancer she disclosed to her
35:58 Speaker 01 guests that Saturday afternoon was also fabricated. Doctors went through her medical records, and an intensive care specialist couldn't find a single thing pointing to cancer. No diagnosis, nothing. Erin's name was absent from the Victorian Cancer Registry, a database that captures every cancer diagnosis in the state. And the lump on her elbow, the very serious life-threatening condition, the request for her family's guidance, the prayer they had said over her, all of it.
36:30 Speaker 01 ...on a story that had zero foundation. So the lunch itself began to look pretty different, too. And Simon told investigators that Erin almost never hosted. He called guests at the Gibson Street property "very rare", and Heather and Ian had never set foot there before that Saturday, hence why she gave them a tour of the house. And if the family ever got together, it was at somebody else's place. So the effort she had poured into the meal, a week of preparation, beef eye filet, individual Wellingtons now stood out against the backdrop of someone who never had people over. And Ian's account of that house tour came back, too.
37:12 Speaker 01 Heather had been particularly eager to see the pantry, and she had a pantry project of her own at home and wanted to see Erin's layout. But according to Ian, Erin had been very reluctant about the visit to the pantry. And then there was the plating. Heather and Gail had both volunteered to help serve, and Erin had turned them away. And she plated every dish herself, but let them take it out after she was done. And the plates became evidence in their own right, because the four guests had been served on large gray plates, and Erin had carried her own plate separately to the table, and hers was a different color. It was like an orange tan color. And Heather actually made note of it in the car on the way to the hospital, that that was kind of odd.
37:58 Speaker 01 So as the investigation widened, the woman behind those clues began to come into focus. And almost nothing about her matched what the Patterson family had thought they knew. Investigators recovered private Facebook messages she'd sent to a circle of online friends. And the childhood she had presented as quietly middle-class, she had described very differently in those messages, saying, quote, "Mum was essentially a cold robot", unquote, she had written. End quote, "It was like being brought up in a Russian orphanage where they don't touch babies", unquote. And she described her father as a man who, quote, "wanted to be warm and loving to us, but Mum wouldn't let him because it would..." Spoil us, so he did as he was told.
38:42 Speaker 01 And she would shout at him if he did the wrong thing, so he became very meek and compliant. And my sister and I would hide in our room most of the time, so we couldn't do anything wrong. Unquote. And a neighbor who had known Heather Scudder for years described her differently, saying, quote, "A lovely woman, as was her husband." Unquote. So there's those two portraits, the public one and the private one. They didn't match. And old details took on a new weight. Because remember, Erin's parents hadn't attended her wedding to Simon in 2007. And when asked at the time, she had said they were on a train in Russia. There was no other explanation other than that, so we can safely assume she was not
39:25 Speaker 01 remotely close with her parents. And then there was also a documented history of deception that almost no one close to her had heard about. Because in 2002, during her brief career as an air traffic controller at Air Services Australia, management had grown suspicious of her hours. And they had reviewed security cameras in the employee car park. And she had actually been clocking full shifts on paper while routinely walking out early, which is horrifying to think about because she's an air traffic controller in charge of hundreds of lives. And when confronted, she just flat out denied it. And then management ran her through the timestamps from the footage, one by one. And like, she couldn't really say anything otherwise.
40:07 Speaker 01 And by November 2002, she no longer worked there. And in 2004, she had been convicted of property damage and multiple traffic offenses. Using an unregistered vehicle on a highway, failing to stop after an accident and driving 35 kilometers per hour over the speed limit. And her former coworkers from the air traffic control tower, who had been guarded in their earlier statements, began to speak more openly now. The woman they described was far sharper edge than the earlier impressions had let on. And one former colleague called her "a ritual, habitual, and pathological liar." Who would just say anything just-
40:50 Speaker 01 to get away with anything and others were less measured saying quote a bit strange or a loner someone who didn't engage with anyone very secretive about her family and multiple men in the tower had once been spitting with her and she managed to get guys wrapped around her little finger as one of them would put it and during her time at Air Services Australia she had earned a nickname among staff which was quote unquote scudder the nutter after her maiden name and the manager who once called her smart very smart as we talked about before had added something to his fuller statement almost too smart and then there was the bookshop because for a stretch in 2011 and
41:35 Speaker 01 2012 Aaron had run a secondhand bookshop in Pemberton a tiny timber milling town in Western Australia and the shop had fed a long-running personal fascination of hers true crime and she had been deeply interested in the genre for years reading widely immersing herself in cases long before she ever found herself at the center of one and finally there was the relationship she had told everyone was loving and warm and investigators recovered another cluster of Facebook messages and these ones were about Dawn and Gail and in late 2022 a dispute over child support had cracked the surface of the family and Simon's
42:14 Speaker 01 tax return had listed him as separated something he blamed on a mistake from his accountant and Aaron quote unquote took great exception and the change triggered a formal process that upended the formal arrangements they had kept for years around school fees and family expenses so the numbers made the sting feel worse and Simon's child support was assessed at $38 a month and meanwhile the change in status cost Aaron her eligibility for government family tax benefit payments roughly $15,000 a year because her inheritance put her above the threshold once the formal process kicked in and even Simon recognized the gap and he acknowledged that the low assessment was likely why Aaron had become so upset and there had also
43:00 Speaker 01 been the matter of Gail's 70th birthday lunch at the top pub in Corumbura. And Erin said the invitation she received had felt like it came as an afterthought. So Dawn had picked up the phone afterward and called her to talk it over. And he called it an oversight and said he genuinely wanted her at the table. And when the school fees fight intensified, Erin had gone over Simon's head. And she had actually taken it directly to Dawn and Gail, asking them to help the two of them talk it out. Quote, "I thought that if Simon knew that Dawn and Gail knew how he was behaving, he might change his behavior." Unquote. And Dawn had suggested she pray with Simon and withdraw the child support claim.
43:40 Speaker 01 And Erin's reaction, as she told her Facebook friends, quote, "My head nearly exploded and I was like, what?" And Dawn and Gail had eventually told her they, quote, "didn't want to get involved in financial matters." Unquote. And by December 2022, the friction had escalated to what Simon called an "extremely aggressive exchange", and to the point that he considered bringing in a mediator. And in private messages to friends on Facebook, her frustration was unfiltered, saying, quote, "This family, I swear to fucking God. I thought his parents would want him to do the right thing, but it seems their concern about not wanting to feel uncomfortable and not wanting to get involved in their son's personal matters are overriding that, so fuck them." Unquote.
44:23 Speaker 01 And she would later insist the messages were nothing more than venting. Quote, "I had a good relationship with Dawn and Gail." Unquote. And Simon's brother, Matthew, had also noticed something. And Erin had stopped coming to some family events entirely, and at others, she would barely stay. And the warm Mother's Day text from May 2023, sent three months before that devastating lunch, had been delivered against a backdrop the Pattersons never knew existed. She was starting to try to build up that relationship again to make them want to come to a lunch that she was eventually going to host. So it was just a long game for Erin. So on the morning of November 2nd, 2023, police arrived at Erin's door with technology detector dogs,
45:08 Speaker 01 trained to locate hidden electronics. Like USB drives. I didn't know these existed. That's awesome. And Erin was placed under arrest. And homicide squad detective Inspector Dean Thomas acknowledged the case had been subjected to incredibly intense levels of public scrutiny. And she was charged with three counts of murder for the deaths of Dawn Patterson, Gail Patterson, and Heather Wilkinson. And five counts of attempted murder were filed alongside them. Two related to that July lunch. One for Ian Wilkinson, who had survived, and one for Simon, who had been invited but stayed home. And now we realize why he stayed home, because they were not getting along at all. And the other three alleged she had attempted to murder Simon on separate occasions across
45:51 Speaker 01 2021 and 2022. So the trial opened on April 29, 2025, inside the Supreme Court of Victoria, sitting at the La Trobe Valley Courts in Morwell. And the courtroom sat in a small town. The home where the lunch had taken place was less than an hour's drive away. And Justice Christopher Beal presided. And before the first witness was called, the charges had already shifted. And prosecutors dropped every count connected to Simon Patterson. And the three attempted murder charges alleging she had poisoned him on separate occasions in 2021 and 2022 were now gone. And so was the charge that she had tried to kill him at the July lunch.
46:33 Speaker 01 But what remained was the three counts of murder for Dawn Patterson, Gail Patterson, and Heather Wilkinson. And one count of attempted murder for Ian Wilkinson. And Erin pleaded not guilty to all charges, because she's an evil piece of shit, as we now know. And the evidence phase alone consumed seven weeks, followed by six days of closing arguments and six and a half days behind the jury room door. And over those weeks, the courtroom heard two entirely different versions of the same woman. Prosecutor Nanette Rogers, SC, built her case around what she called four calculated deceptions. First, a fabricated cancer diagnosis invented to lure the victims to a table.
47:17 Speaker 01 Second, death cap mushrooms placed into the BP. Wellingtons in quantities meant to kill. And Rogers pointed to the photographs recovered from Patterson's tablet, which were death caps on a set of kitchen scales. Doesn't get much more guilty than that. And fungi specialist Tom May had examined them and identified the mushrooms as "Amenita phalloids", quote unquote, with a high level of confidence. And Rogers argued Patterson had weighed the mushrooms to "calculate the weight required for the administration of fatal dose for one person", and "the weight required for five fatal doses for five people", unquote. And third, a staged hospital visit meant to mimic poisoning symptoms she never had.
47:58 Speaker 01 And fourth, weeks of deliberate evidence destruction designed to keep anyone from finding out what she had done. The definition of premeditation and post-tampering. And then Erin took the stand. And she testified for eight days. She gave ground where she had to. Death cap mushrooms must have been in the meal because she had foraged for wild mushrooms since 2019. And she had bought the dehydrator, then dumped it while her guests fought for their lives. And the cancer announcement was a fabrication. And she had factory reset her phone to hide photos of mushrooms and the dehydrator. And the hostile Facebook messages about Dawn and Gail were hers,
48:43 Speaker 01 though she dismissed them as simply venting. But on everything else, she held firm. She had never deliberately sought out death cap mushrooms. And she had never traveled to Locke to collect them. And she had never used iNaturalist to track where they grew. And she never weighed them to calculate a fatal dose. And on the cancer claim, she offered an alternative. She had led the group to believe she might be needing some treatment, she said. But the real issue had been an embarrassment over a gastric bypass consultation. And prosecutor Rogers pressed her. And she suggested Erin had never planned to account for the cancer story because she had never expected to need to. Quote, "Because you thought that the lunch guests would die", unquote.
49:28 Speaker 01 And quote unquote, "That's not true." Aaron would answer, but it is. You felt like you didn't have to account for any of this because you thought all of your victims would die, but luckily, one did not, and thank goodness, he didn't. And the prosecution also called Simon Patterson to the stand, and he walked the jury through the crumbling marriage, the private hostility, and the night he had turned down the lunch invitation. And then, Ian Wilkinson testified as well, the only person who had eaten the mushrooms at that table and survived. And he recounted the gray plates, the odd colored plate Aaron had carried to her own seat, and the offer to help serve that she had turned away.
50:10 Speaker 01 And he described Aaron as someone who, quote, "just seemed like a normal person," unquote. And the relationship had been, quote, unquote, "friendly and amicable, but without, quote, 'much depth, more like acquaintances,'" unquote. And he told the court what he had told the police. He had been happy about the lunch invitation, hopeful it might improve the relationship with Aaron. Defense counsel Colin Mandy, S.C., offered a simpler story. What happened was a tragedy, a terrible accident. Aaron's lies, he argued, had been born from shock, not planning. She panicked because she was overwhelmed by the fact that these four people had become so ill because of the food that she'd served them, not buying it, but keep going.
50:55 Speaker 01 And on motive, he pointed to its absence. She had no money issues, lived in a big house, and had almost full-time custody of her two young children. But in the closing, Rogers, the prosecutor, told the jury they did not need to know why. Quote, "You do not have to be satisfied what the motive was, or even that there was one," unquote. The why was unnecessary to convict. Because guilty beyond a reasonable doubt doesn't necessarily mean that they have to have a motive. There just needs to be evidence as to if they did it, right? Motive helps, but it is not necessary. So, on July 7, 2025, the jury came back, and all 12 members were in agreement: guilty on every count.
51:43 Speaker 01 Just a round of applause for that jury. Three murders, one attempted murder, and media crews flooded the courthouse within minutes. And by then, the trial had become an international story. And sentencing came on September 8th. And Justice Beal handed down three concurrent life sentences for murder and 25 years for attempted murder. And the non-parole period was 33 years. And Erin, at this point, was 50 years old. And she won't be eligible for parole until 2056, when she'll be in her 80s. And Beal called her crimes, quote, "an enormous betrayal of trust. I have no hesitation in finding that your offending falls into the worst category."
52:24 Speaker 01 And he identified five aggravating factors: substantial premeditation, an elaborate cover-up, a lack of pity, and the suffering of her victims, and the betrayal of trust. And she had said nothing to the doctors fighting to save her guests. And never once, she revealed what she had put in their food. Quote, "Not only did you cut short three lives," Beal would say, "you inflicted untold suffering on your own children whom you robbed of their beloved grandparents." Unquote. And her complete absence of remorse, he added, quote, "pour salt into all the victims' wounds." Unquote. And the hearing ran almost 50 minutes and was broadcast live. And the court received 28 victim impact statements.
53:09 Speaker 01 Seven were read aloud. And Simon was absent from the hearing. And a relative read his words to the court. Quote, "His children have been robbed of hope for the kind of relationship with their mother that every child naturally yearns for." Unquote. And Ruth Dubois, one of the Wilkinson's daughters, named the broader victims: medical staff, investigators, shop owners, mushroom growers, the health department, and taxpayers, all pulled into the aftermath. Quote, "I am horrified that our family is even associated, through no choice of our own, with such destructive behavior towards the community." Unquote. And Erin gave almost nothing away. And for most of the hearing, her eyes were closed. And when they were open, she looked At nothing because she is nothing.
53:54 Speaker 01 She's just an evil shit stain in this world who I hope is having a terrible time rotting in jail. And Ian Wilkinson may have survived the lunch, but his body never came back to the way it had been before. And his liver function remains diminished and respiratory problems followed him out of the hospital and never left. And he lives in Victoria, supported by the same church community that had held him up for decades. And he lost his wife of 44 years and he lost the couple he had described as the closest people to him after his wife and family. And quote, "My life is greatly impoverished without them." And he told the court, quote, "It's a truly horrible thought to live with that somebody
54:39 Speaker 01 could decide to take her life. I only feel half alive without her." End quote. Oh my God. This is so heartbreaking. I just, I don't understand how someone could take somebody away like that. It's just, it's so devastating. And when given the chance to speak about the woman who poisoned him, he chose an unexpected path and that path was forgiveness. And he offered it publicly and carefully, but only what was his to give. Cause he could forgive the harm that was done to him. What had been done to the others, he said, was beyond his power to absolve. And he had one prayer for Erin and that was, quote, "That she will use her time in jail wisely to become a better person."
55:24 Speaker 01 End quote. And outside the courthouse, after it was done, he spoke to the press and he thanked the police and the hospital workers for their efforts. And then he said what mattered to him most. Quote, "I'd like to encourage all those involved to keep turning up and serving others. Our lives and the life of our community depends on the kindness of others." End quote. Erin and Simon's two children live under a legal suppression order and their identities are sealed from public view, but they're believed to be in their father's care. And court records noted they had, quote, "settled into a new school better than expected." End quote. And Simon's victim impact statement noted that- His children live in an irreparably broken home with only a solo parent,
56:07 Speaker 01 when almost everyone else knows their mother murdered their grandparents. And the media hasn't let them breathe. And the Patterson and Wilkinson family still carry the lasting damage of what happened. And one of the victim impact statements came from Dawn Patterson's mother. She was 100 years old. She outlived her own son. So Erin is serving her sentence at the Dame Phyllis Frost Centre, a maximum security women's prison in Melbourne. And she spends at least 22 hours of every day inside her cell. But the case isn't over, and two appeals sit before the Victorian Court of Appeal. And Erin filed them on November 3rd, 2025, seeking to have the guilty verdicts quashed and a retrial ordered.
56:50 Speaker 01 The point at the centre of her case is during deliberations, the jury panel was booked into the same accommodation where police and members of the prosecution team were also staying. And she argues that arrangement alone constituted a fundamental irregularity that fatally undermined the integrity of the verdicts. And she raised multiple grounds: challenges to the phone tower evidence and iNaturalist data linking her to death cap mushroom locations; a claim that Facebook messages from her private group should have been excluded from the trial; and an argument Justice Beal erred by refusing to admit images and videos from an SD card found at her home; and an allegation of unfair and oppressive cross-examination by the prosecutor;
57:35 Speaker 01 and a charge that the prosecution shifted its position on motive between its opening and closing addresses, having opened with no motive and then implied one. The prosecution filed its own appeal earlier on October 6th, 2025, arguing the sentence was manifestly inadequate. And prosecutors contend Justice Beal erred in finding a substantial chance Erin would remain in solitary confinement for years, and that this finding infected his assessment of the non-parole period. Both sides must first seek leave to appeal. And three Court of Appeal judges will... We'll hear both if leave is granted. And if Aaron's appeal succeeds, the court may acquit her or send the case back for retrial,
58:20 Speaker 01 which is insane to think. And if the prosecution's appeal succeeds, the court can impose a longer non-parole period or order a re-sentencing, which would probably be good because I feel like her sentencing wasn't adequate enough. But as of early 2026, no date has been set. And after the verdict, a gag order was lifted and testimony Simon had given at pre-trial hearing became public. And he said he had turned down the lunch invitation because he believed she would poison him. And described falling severely ill after eating food she had prepared on prior occasions: a penne bolognese pasta, a chicken quorma curry, and a vegetable curry wrap. But the jury never heard any of it.
59:02 Speaker 01 And then there's the question that sits at the center of everything and has no answer, which is why? Prosecutors never offered a motive, and they told the jury they didn't need one, which they don't. And Justice Beal wouldn't speculate, but there were frustrations. There were financial disputes, the slow erosion of a marriage and the sharper edges that followed. But none of it explains the leap from resentment to poisoning an entire family. But she planned for months, as we saw, tracked where death caps grew online, drove to the locations, bought a dehydrator, weighed the mushrooms on a kitchen scale, and folded them into a meal for people who loved her. Justice Beal found she intended to kill Simon too, had he shown up. Five intended victims.
59:46 Speaker 01 And when they started dying, she said nothing. She has never explained it, and she may never explain it. But Ian Wilkinson asked the only question worth asking, which was, quote, "Foolishness possesses a person to think that murder could be the solution to their problems, especially the murder of people who have only good intentions towards her." A question no one can answer. And with that, that is the end of the mushroom murder case. As always, my heart goes out to the family, and I hope true justice is served and the prosecution's appeal goes forward. But let me know what other cases you would like me to dive into. I always read the comments, and until next time, please stay safe out there, and I will
1:00:30 Speaker 01 see your beautiful face in the next one, okay?
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