The murder trial of ‘Mushroom Lady’ Erin Patterson enters its fifth week with public interest peaking. Dozens of people have crowded the entrance of the Latrobe Valley Law Courts in rural Victoria. The magnet for the courtroom gawkers is that Patterson herself has finally taken the stand to testify.
Erin Patterson is accused of lacing a beef Wellington meal with poisonous death cap mushrooms to kill three of her estranged husband’s elderly relatives at a lunch at her home in 2023. An attempted murder charge relates to the fourth guest, who survived after months of intensive care in hospital.
Patterson has pleaded not guilty and denied wrongdoing.
With the prosecution’s case hanging on establishing that the poisoning was deliberate rather than a tragic chain of circumstances following an enthusiasm for foraging wild mushrooms, many people are apparently keen to see how Patterson comports herself on the stand. “I want to see how she behaves and reacts,” says member of the public, Di Holleley.
Six courtroom seats are balloted off to journalists, about 12 are reserved for family members, and the rest are open to the public on a first in, best dressed basis […]
Many remained queued outside the courtroom after it was cleared for the lunch break, to ensure they did not lose their seats.
Patterson’s first day of testimony was a fairly pedestrian recounting of the breakup with her ex Simon Patterson, and the subsequent dynamics of relationships with her in-laws. Patterson denied a particular testimony from her ex-husband, that their previously amicable separation deteriorated markedly when she discovered that Simon Patterson had listed himself as single on his 2022 tax return.
Patterson also addressed a key part of the evidence against her: that she lied about having cancer. Needing to discuss how to break the news to the children was understood to be the reason for both hosting the lunch and excluding the children. But there was NO cancer.
Defence counsel Colin Mandy SC asked Ms Patterson whether she had ever had ovarian cancer.
She replied: “I have not.”
The court has also previously been shown text messages between Ms Patterson and Gail Patterson in which she claimed she needed to get a needle biopsy on a lump in her elbow.
Mr Mandy asked her if she had ever had a needle biopsy.
“I have never had a needle biopsy anywhere,” she said.
Patterson said that she was worried about her health and “consulted Dr Google”. She also had a family history of cancer on both sides, she said.
The questioning then turned closer to the nub of the matter: how death cap mushrooms ended up in the lunch. Patterson had joined mushroom foraging groups on social media, some of which listed the locations of death cap mushroom sites near her home town.
Erin Patterson says she developed an interest in exotic mushrooms during the Covid-19 pandemic, saying they “just taste more interesting”.
She told the court she and her children would go for a walk through the Korumburra public gardens during the first Covid-19 lockdown, which was where she saw wild mushrooms for the first time.
“The first Covid lockdown when you’re allowed out for an hour or day, I would force the children to go out and get away from their devices for an hour,” she said.
“There were lots of them (mushrooms) at the gardens, I remember that,” she said.
Ms Patterson said she would buy lots of various types of mushrooms.
“I’d buy all the different types that Woollies would sell, I would get different sorts there, from grocers up in Melbourne,” she said.
She told the court she would also buy mushrooms from Asian grocers.
The latter is a key issue in the trial. Patterson had told police that she had bought dried mushrooms from an ‘Asian grocer’ in Melbourne, though she couldn’t name the exact one. Public health officials, concerned at the possibility of deadly mushrooms being sold, investigated a number of Asian grocers in the suburb Patterson named. None showed any trace of death cap mushrooms.
