She Killed Three People with Poisonous Mushrooms. Did She Mean To?

In 2023, a woman named Erin Patterson had her husband's family over for a lunch of beef Wellington. A week later, three people were dead. Phoebe interviews Guardian reporter Nino Bucci about what happened next. You can also watch this interview at ⁠youtube.com/criminalpodcast⁠. Say hello on ⁠⁠Facebook⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠TikTok⁠⁠. Sign up for our ⁠⁠occasional newsletter⁠⁠. Follow the show and review us on ⁠⁠Apple Podcasts⁠⁠. ⁠⁠Sign up for Criminal Plus⁠⁠ to get behind-the-scenes bonus episodes of Criminal, ad-free listening of all of our shows, invitations to virtual events, special merch deals, and more. We also make ⁠⁠This is Love⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠Phoebe Reads a Mystery⁠⁠. Artwork by ⁠⁠Julienne Alexander⁠⁠. Check out ⁠⁠our online shop⁠⁠. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:02Speaker 00

  I'm Ina Garten and each week on Happy Hour, I invite new and old friends for a drink and a fun conversation at my kitchen table in New York City. On this week's episode, I'm joined by Julia Louis-Dreyfus. We talk all about attending a fashion show in Paris together, throwing dinner parties and making her Broadway debut in other desert cities. New episodes of Happy Hour are available every Wednesday. You can watch on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts. Cheers.

• 0:40Speaker 01

  How far would you go to have a healthy baby?

• 0:42Speaker 02

  Embryo editing is very much illegal in the United States. It is illegal in most countries. But there is growing interest as the technology has gotten better.

• 0:54Speaker 01

  This week on Explain It To Me, the ethics of embryo maxing. Listen to new episodes Sundays wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:10Speaker 03

  Basically, when she speaks to police, she's seemingly as baffled as they are about why these three lunch guests have died and another one's on death's door. And yet she's fine.

• 1:27Speaker 04

  Today I'm talking with Nino Bucci. He's a justice and courts reporter at Guardian Australia. And last year, he covered a trial there that made international headlines. A case that involved poisonous mushrooms.

• 1:42Speaker 03

  Back in July 2023, a woman called Erin Patterson hosted her parents-in-law and also their relatives. So her auntie and uncle of her husband are at her house, which is on a piece of land in country Victoria, which is sort of one of the southernmost mainland states in Australia. And she invited them around for Saturday lunch, a lunch of beef Wellington. Erin said, didn't give a reason exactly for the lunch, but basically wanted to talk to them about something. And she was in this quite new house. So they came around, most of them hadn't been there before.

• 2:25Speaker 03

  It was quite an unusual thing for her to invite them all over. And she showed them around a beautiful house, did what people normally do when they have people over for lunch and fussed a little about plating up. And then eventually they all sat around her dining room table and had a beef Wellington.

• 2:45Speaker 04

  You said that her in-laws were there, but was her husband there?

• 2:50Speaker 03

  No, so her and Simon were estranged at that time. Simon didn't live there. He'd actually been invited to the lunch and cancelled late the night before. So he wasn't there. And his absence was something that, as this sort of went on, became somewhat more interesting.

• 3:10Speaker 04

  So you said they were having beef Wellington. This seemed like a kind of a proper Saturday lunch. For people who don't know what beef Wellington is, what is beef Wellington?

• 3:21Speaker 03

  Sure, so there's a few different ways around it. And effectively what it is though is a piece of beef wrapped in pastry. So this particular version that Erin was making was from a quite a well-known Australian chef. Her version is not sort of one big log of beef, as is traditional, wrapped up in pastry. But Erin sort of made single bits of beef wrapped up in pastry. And there was, quite importantly in this case, between the beef and the pastry, there was a mushroom mix that was placed in there. Sort of down mushrooms that were sort of put on top of the meat

• 4:04Speaker 03

  before the whole thing was wrapped up in little individual parcels. So each of those lunch guests had in front of them effectively a little individually made parcel of beef mushrooms on top, wrapped in pastry.

• 4:17Speaker 04

  So they sat down, they had their beef Wellington, and what happened next?

• 4:22Speaker 03

  Well, the discussion continued. They were, at that point Erin was sort of raising concerns she had about cancer. They then realized that was why she invited them all around there to talk about her cancer diagnosis. But it ended the way most of these lunches ended. Everyone was sort of waxing lyrical about the meal, very glad to have been there, hopped off in their cars and went home.

• 4:46Speaker 04

  So everyone leaves after lunch, goes on their own way. And then what happens?

• 4:53Speaker 03

  So later that night, the lunch guests start to fall ill. And they fall ill with symptoms that are quite similar to acute food poisoning or gastroenteritis, vomiting, diarrhea, stomach cramps. They all think basically they've eaten something bad. And when it becomes clear that it's all people who are at Erin's place for lunch, they assume it's something they've eaten that day, that they've potentially all had a bad piece of meat, for example. But as it kind of went from the early hours into dawn, they realized that we really need to get ourselves to hospital here

• 5:36Speaker 03

  because of how violently unwell they were. They went there into the emergency department. They started receiving treatment. But it became pretty clear pretty quickly that things weren't getting any better. And eventually they were sort of rushed off to bigger hospitals in Melbourne.

• 5:58Speaker 04

  How quickly did the doctors figure out that this wasn't just regular food poisoning?

• 6:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, it took a while. There was some stuff about their presentation and about, I guess, their liver function and the function of other major organs that sort of suggested this was something far more significant than eating a bad piece of steak, as they thought early on. And eventually they sort of, through a process of elimination, decided it was probably ammonita floidis or death cap mushroom poisoning. Now, they weren't necessarily in a position at that hospital to diagnose that really clearly from that point. So they started speaking to people in Melbourne who were experts on it. And they started treating them as a presumptive case of that fairly early on,

• 6:49Speaker 03

  even before that was actually evacuated to those bigger hospitals. And it became, obviously, once that was the presumptive diagnosis, they were really concerned that these people might not survive.

• 7:03Speaker 04

  What happens to the body when you eat death cap mushrooms?

• 7:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's quite horrific really. And it's effectively, it's quite a slow and painful process for which there's very little that can be done. And something really stuck in my mind that was particularly frightening about the people that kind of eat death cap mushrooms is that you go through this process of really intense symptoms of vomiting, diarrhea, exactly as you would when you've got a really bad food poisoning. But then there's this kind of period where it eases off. And a lot of people who are suffering kind of think they're kind of getting better.

• 7:50Speaker 03

  But what's actually happening at that point is that it's this, the organs have failed to such a point that they're not even doing that anymore. There's such a relentless, progressive and frightening deterioration of everything that even those symptoms stop. But that doesn't mean you're getting any better. It in fact means that you've almost progressed to the point where you're beyond saving. And I found that quite horrifying.

• 8:15Speaker 04

  Once the group gets to the hospital and they realize, Erin Patterson, the woman who had the house they'd been at, she also comes to the hospital complaining of stomach issues.

• 8:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, so more than a day after the others, Erin also goes to hospital. She's not as unwell, but she's also half their age and somewhat healthier. So yeah, she's sick, but she's not as bad. I mean, she walks in, for example, as opposed to having to be taken there by ambulance is a kind of fair indicator of the difference between the two. And she also, somewhat strangely, at this point, they're fairly confident that it is death cap mushroom poisoning. And so the local hospital, when she comes in, are far more alive to the prospect.

• 9:13Speaker 03

  This could be something really serious than they were when her other lunch guests came in more than a day earlier. So they basically say, hey, you got to come in here straight away. And she actually leaves. She leaves the hospital, says she's got stuff to take care of at home and kind of comes back later on, which again, was something that people at the hospital found unusual at the time, but also was very different to how the lunch guests were reacting to that poisoning.

• 9:44Speaker 04

  What happened to everyone who got sick?

• 9:48Speaker 03

  So of those four people who became terribly unwell after eating beef Wellington at Erin Patterson's house, three died. And the only survivor was Ian Wilkinson. He spent months in intensive care. He was in an induced coma for large parts of that. And still to this day, we're almost three years on now, sort of has ongoing health complications from that meal.

• 10:17Speaker 04

  How quickly did the police launch an investigation after the deaths?

• 10:24Speaker 03

  By the time the family had been taken to that major hospital in Melbourne, it's called the Austin Hospital, they do a lot of toxicological deaths, poisonings, that sort of thing. By the time the family were there, which was within days of the lunch, police were looking at the case. And by November, so some four months after that lunch, Erin Patterson was in fact charged with those three murders and the attempted murder of Ian Wilkinson.

• 10:55Speaker 04

  What did she tell police had happened?

• 10:58Speaker 03

  So this is an interesting one because what Erin Patterson did in her first interview was effectively kind of say, look, I don't know what's happened here. I have never gone foraging. I have no reason to harm these people. I was sick as well. I bought the mushrooms from the supermarket and an Asian grocer.

• 11:28Speaker 03

  Beats me what's happened effectively, you know, but I've got no reason for to hurt them. I loved them and

• 11:39Speaker 03

  it could have been me, you know, at a basic level, that's what she's saying.

• 11:46Speaker 03

  That story would change somewhat as, as the sort of months rolled on, but basically when, you know, she speaks to police, she's

• 11:57Speaker 03

  seemingly as baffled as, as they are about why these three lunch guests have died and another one's, you know, on death's door, and yet she's fine.

• 12:09Speaker 04

  We'll be right back.

• 12:21Speaker 05

  Are you tired of hearing about business, tech and finance from the bros? We are the Tiger Sisters, a top business podcast with the Vox Media Podcast Network. Tiger Sisters releases every Monday and we decode money, power and love. And who doesn't love all those things? We are the internet's Wall Street and Silicon Valley big sisters. Tune in every Monday for late night sister talk meets boardroom strategy. Check out Tiger Sisters on YouTube, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the Tiger fam.

• 12:53Speaker 04

  You said Erin Patterson was estranged from her husband. Did she have a good, I mean, if she's having lunch with her in-laws, even if her husband wasn't around, did she have a good relationship with them?

• 13:06Speaker 03

  As you might imagine in a case like this, the question of what Erin's relationship was like with Simon was somewhat contested and, you know, even pieces of evidence that seemed quite open and shut about that relationship could be interpreted in a number of ways. I guess if you sort of think about, for example,

• 13:33Speaker 03

  she'd be, there'd be text messages handed about conversations she was having just with him. And it seemed maybe a little heated and, you know, there'd be discussions about money or whatever, but they were, you know, progressing. Then at the exact same time, she's having these conversations with him, she's having separate conversations with her friends where she's, you know, speaking in quite a disparaging way about Simon and his family. So it is not easy to say what that relationship was like, not only because of obviously what followed and the context in which we were learning about it being, you know, a triple murder trial, but also because

• 14:12Speaker 03

  there was seemingly kind of two sides to Erin and how she engaged with people about that relationship.

• 14:19Speaker 04

  Once the police initially interviewed Erin, what happened with their investigation? What else did they learn after interviewing her?

• 14:30Speaker 03

  These interviews fairly early in investigation, they've kind of been explained to me before by, you know, people in, you know, homicide squads and things like that, it's, it's effectively a chance to get people to kind of hang themselves with their own rope. So they're hoping that Erin is going to say enough about what helped happen to that lunch, that they're going to be able to prove her wrong. And she kind of did that. There was enough that she gave away there to sort of indicate that what she was saying wasn't true. Part of that revolved around, you know, material they'd get later on from, from her phone and other devices.

• 15:15Speaker 03

  Part of that was also around, they were able to establish that she had dumped a food dehydrator at a local, you know, what we call it a tip in Australia, but basically like a dump. They were basically able to put together these bits and pieces that contradicted very much what she said in that interview. And if you kind of, you know, look at the timeline of that, that interview sort of occurred, you know, that first interview occurred. You know, I think roughly about three months before she was actually charged. So, you know, the police kind of went away and did a little bit more work and kind of were able to find in their mind enough to,

• 15:52Speaker 03

  to sort of point to the fact that this wasn't some accidental death, but that Erin Patterson had, had intended to kill those people.

• 16:01Speaker 04

  When was she arrested?

• 16:03Speaker 03

  She was arrested and charged in November of 2023. So there's a kind of four month period almost between that lunch and when she's, when she's charged with, with the murders. And it became fairly clear early on in that trial that the essential issue was whether she'd meant to put death cap mushrooms in the beef Wellingtons. So somewhat differently to the story that had been presented, you know, up until that point, it no longer was in dispute that she'd fed death cap mushrooms to her lunch guests in those beef Wellingtons. What had become in, you know, the central issue of the trial is whether she'd meant to do it.

• 16:48Speaker 03

  And effectively, you know, Erin was pleading not guilty, saying that, look, I foraged these mushrooms. I didn't realize our death caps. I accidentally put them in the beef Wellingtons. That's killed the lunch guests. I got sick too, but for various reasons, I didn't get as sick as them. That's basically what the trial come, came down to was that, that question of intent.

• 17:09Speaker 04

  There were charges that were eventually dropped, um, attempted murder charges against her husband, Simon, who hadn't been there.

• 17:18Speaker 03

  That's right. So one of the things that was really fascinating about her arrest and charging back in November is we had no idea about this background or alleged background or history of, of attempting to poison Simon. And so that really was a bolt from the blue when that came out. So police, as part of their investigation into what happened at the lunch, they spoke to Simon and he spelled out to them these four occasions where he said she'd tried to kill him before. Now, they were all occasions where, you know, police alleged it was just those two together. He was eating food that Erin had prepared for him. Their children weren't there.

• 18:03Speaker 03

  Uh, and it all occurred when they were away from, from home as well. So, you know, Erin Patterson, when she was charged in November with, with the lunch charges, which in and of itself wasn't a huge surprise, given everyone knew she was kind of the only suspect. Uh, she was also charged with these, these matters involving Simon that nobody had any idea about. But between her being charged in November and the trial starting the following April, there'd been a lot of legal argument and back and forth about these two sets of charges, what were called, you know, the lunch charges and the Simon charges effectively. And, and right before the trial started, there was a, a, a ruling that came down and the judge effectively said,

• 18:46Speaker 03

  these have to be, these trials have to be held separately. You can't have one trial on the Simon charges and the lunch charges. You're going to have to do them separately. And eventually the, you know, the, um, the director of, of public prosecutions here decided that they'd dropped the Simon charges and they proceeded with the lunch charges.

• 19:04Speaker 04

  What was the trial like?

• 19:05Speaker 03

  Incredible in the sense that we all knew it would be this completely uncontrollable kind of raging storm. And yet it still sort of took us by surprise, I think, all the, the many reporters who covered it. There was, you know, evidence that was obviously really sort of heart wrenching from, from, from Ian Wilkinson, who was at the lunch, but also from Simon Patterson, um, about losing his parents and, and also sort of, I suppose, reflecting on, you know, his relationship with Erin and the future for his kids and that sort of thing. And then, you know, later on in the trial,

• 19:49Speaker 03

  the very sort of final witness was Erin Patterson herself. And, you know, that was quite remarkable as well, because you sort of go from, from seeing this, this person in a doc every day, but sort of having seen her on, on television for, you know, months before that and in newspaper photographs and all the rest of it. And, and then, you know, she sort of comes to life before your very eyes and it's, that, that was quite an experience too.

• 20:20Speaker 04

  Where did the prosecution say they thought she'd gotten the poisoned mushrooms?

• 20:26Speaker 03

  So the prosecution said that it was open to the jury to find that she'd got them from one of two locations. And this was a fairly laborious part of the trial, because basically what they were doing was measuring up location data to sort of say Erin Patterson was in this location at this time. And then kind of cross referencing that with public posts on a website called iNaturalist, which is basically a citizen science website. You can log posts on there about things you've found in, in the wild, you know, whether it be types of plant, like mushroom or, or animals. And what the prosecution was saying was, look,

• 21:12Speaker 03

  it's open to you as the jury to find that Erin Patterson was in a place called Locke and another place called Outrum, after there were public posts put on iNaturalist identifying those locations as having death cap mushrooms. So they didn't know exactly, but they were saying our case is that she got them from either Outrum or Locke on either of these occasions in the weeks leading up to lunch, effectively.

• 21:42Speaker 04

  What did Erin say when she testified?

• 21:46Speaker 03

  She, you know, effectively sort of said that she hadn't made that recipe before, but she wanted to do something different because it was a special lunch. She couldn't find the exact ingredients to follow the recipe that she'd found. So she'd sort of ad libbed and instead of, you know, buying one big sirloin, she divided, decided to just buy individual sirloin steaks. She said she was, you know, cooking down the mushrooms as the recipe sort of called for, but then they didn't, you know, taste particularly good. They tasted a bit bland, so she threw in some dried mushrooms that she had in the pantry. Very much the, you know, I guess the, the sort of through line of her evidence was one of.

• 22:32Speaker 03

  Having a great deal of love and respect for the, for the people she was alleged to have killed, having no reason to want them gone, having had some issues in her relationship with Simon, but that, you know, had no reason at all to have, to have done what she was alleged to have done.

• 22:49Speaker 04

  What was the end of the trial like? What, what, what happened?

• 22:53Speaker 03

  Trial went on and on and on. It dragged far longer than anyone thought. It went for 11 weeks in the end. And, you know, Erin Patterson's evidence was, was, you know, the most dramatic period of, of those 11 weeks. And there was, there was a point, you know, in her evidence where I could see a path to her being found not guilty. Again, you know, just to sort of emphasize, this is not, you know, criminal trials are not about, a lot of the time are not about someone's innocence, you know, they're, but they're about whether there's enough evidence for them to be found guilty, you know, beyond

• 23:35Speaker 03

  reasonable doubt. And there was just enough, I thought, at, at times early on in her evidence to suggest that a jury, or, you know, it could be enough for, for a single juror to have some doubt about whether she'd intended to kill people with those, you know, poisonous beef Wellingtons. But eventually the jury came down and, and they found Erin Patterson guilty of all charges.

• 24:05Speaker 04

  And what was her sentence?

• 24:07Speaker 03

  Basically in Australia, once there's a guilty verdict held down, you know, the, the jury get sent out, they're, they're thanked for their work. And there then is, is what's effectively called a plea hearing for, you know, where the prosecution give their side of, of the sentence they think Erin Patterson should get. And Erin Patterson's, you know, lawyers basically say, well, these are the mitigating sort of circumstances. You know, in Erin's case, there, there wasn't a lot of them, you know, she'd, she'd taken it to trial, sort of indicates a lack of remorse. But, you know, that she had never been, you know, found guilty of any, any other serious sort of criminal offending, you know, this was her first major crime. So, you know, it was all weighed up. And in the end, she

• 24:50Speaker 03

  was given a, a minimum sentence of 33 years with a maximum of, of life. Now, it's important to sort of say that Erin Patterson's appealing that conviction. She's not appealing the sentence, but she's appealing that conviction. And, you know, she maintains her innocence. And there's going to be an appeal hearing, you know, in her case later this year.

• 25:11Speaker 04

  Her husband has a book deal.

• 25:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, Simon Patterson has been represented by a, a, you know, a media spokesperson since fairly early on in this. One of the things that we don't know a great deal about that, that Simon certainly can talk to are those, you know, alleged attempted murders that Erin committed on him where, you know, police had alleged and, and, you know, he certainly suspects and continues to suspect that she had attempted to kill him on a number of occasions before the lunch. Look, if, if that's the focus of the book, I'm sure that'll be the focus of, of even more headlines as well, um, in the coming months.

• 25:55Speaker 04

  But you know what? The motive, if he was, if she was trying to kill him, he wasn't at that lunch. So why would she still serve if, if she is guilty? Why would she go ahead with serving the beef Wellington to his family?

• 26:11Speaker 03

  I've really tossed this around a lot. I suspect that possibly Erin's thinking was that Simon may come. And if, for example, like he'd taken their kids out that day, if, for example, he'd come back early and happened to see his whole family sitting around eating, maybe he was more likely to partake as well. She did have extras. She had extra beef Wellingtons that she could have served to other people who came. Perhaps she wanted to see, obviously, the previous attempts at Simon, alleged attempts, you know, involving Simon had been unsuccessful. Maybe it was a dosing test and it was, let's see how far

• 26:54Speaker 03

  I can push this. I mean, ultimately where I kind of land with this is that you're on a hiding to nothing when you try and, and get inside the mind of, of someone who will murder three people. And it's a very difficult thing for, for most of us to do, to try and consider their motives, especially when they've been questioned about this particular thing for, for days on end. And, and, you know, I've sat in the same room while she's doing that and I'm still no close to understanding why.

• 27:27Speaker 04

  Well, Nino, thank you.

• 27:29Speaker 03

  Thanks, Phoebe.

• 27:32Speaker 04

  You can read more of Nino Bucci's reporting for Guardian Australia at the link in our show notes. Erin Patterson's appeal will be held this August. If you'd like to watch the video of this interview and all our other video interviews, follow us at youtube.com/criminalpodcast or just click the link in our show notes. I'm Phoebe Judge. Thanks for listening.