Nature finds a way at the Loch Memorial Reserve, where wooden seats bow with age and daisies spring from the football field.

The paddock sits in a steep hollow, like a fault line from an ancient earthquake. Oak trees line the ground, plaques set at their bases for fallen World War 2 soldiers.

Here lies the “right” mix of moisture and temperature, as well as the crucial presence of those oaks.

From time to time, the fruit body of a fungus springs from this dark dirt underneath the oak tree canopies. It’s a natural win-win: the tree gets better nutrient absorption because of the fungus; the fungus gets sugars from the tree for growth.

Each mushroom is five to 15cm tall, with caps almost as wide as the fungus is tall. This particular variety, known as death cap, is shiny on top and often sticky to the touch.

A crop of death cap mushrooms erupted under one of the oaks here in April, 2023. They were yellow-tinged and likely giving off a slight whiff of ammonia.

Death caps don’t often sprout in Gippsland, and a retired pharmacist posted her find of them on the iNaturalist website.

It seems that Erin Patterson – full time mum, part time crime buff – read the post.

Her movements, on April 28 of that year, should be treated as theory, not fact. Unless Patterson tells the world, which seems unlikely, we may never know the difference.

Patterson is curious of nature, a lover of books and the outdoors.

She said she had begun mushroom foraging in Covid lockdowns, and could confidently identify honey and slippery jack mushrooms.

She once fried some up with butter. They tasted good.

Let’s assume she got in her red MG after 8.30am for the 25-minute drive to Loch from her home in Leongatha. Phone tower data indicates that she went there and stayed almost an hour on the Friday morning.

Death caps, as the name suggests, are a source of anxiety in foraging communities. Cooked, soaked or dried (when they reek), they are equally as deadly, and they can be confused for other varieties by less experienced foragers.

They deliver doom in stages. There is a lull after ingestion, usually six to 12 hours, before the mushroom’s amatoxins begin to destroy the organs of any man, woman, child or dog, in attacks which usually trump the most modern of medical responses.

Death cap mushrooms have led to 10 or so accidental deaths in Australia. Only last year, Loreta Maria Del Rossi, 98, unwittingly picked them from her Bayswater garden in Melbourne’s outer-east, cooked and ate them, and died a week later.

Rain threatened on April 28. Perhaps Patterson, armed with a parka or umbrella, took her black Labrador to poke around at the base of oak trees honouring Frank Fitzpatrick, who died as a Japanese prisoner of war, and Bill Wells, who was killed in Europe.

No one noticed her here. Late 40s, overweight, thick hair which defied taming, she was shy of bearing and secretive of nature. She would have appeared so ordinary. Yet her reasons for being here were not.

If Patterson did find death cap mushrooms in the drifts of fallen oak leaves that day, she picked them, as the retired pharmacist had 10 days earlier.

Unlike the pharmacist, she did not destroy them.

By lunch time, she had headed to Betta Home Living on Allison St in Leongatha and bought a $229 Sunbeam dehydrator which she would later claim to police she had never owned.

She would love her new kitchen toy. Just slice the mushrooms, place them (no overlapping) in the dehydrator for 4-12 hours, until they are leathery or crispy, then store the dried mushrooms. They last a year or longer – just rehydrate them, then cook.

Soon, Patterson was “hiding powdered mushrooms in everything”. She slipped them in chocolate brownies for her daughter, who did not like mushrooms. Patterson was pleased by this successful deception.

In early May, it appears that Patterson took photos at home. Mushrooms sat on electronic kitchen scales. The haul looked a lot like death cap mushrooms.

Why did Patterson go to Loch, and probably return here a few weeks later? And why did death cap mushrooms end up in a lunch she served?

We may never know. Yet the verdict is in. The jury sided with the prosecution, which argued that Patterson deliberately sourced, deliberately included and intended to kill.

Patterson is guilty of inviting four people to lunch to kill them. If you accept this, you probably accept that she wanted to kill five people, including the father of her children.

The record shows that Patterson poisoned her lunch guests in a deception which thrusts her into a pantheon of poisoner villainy that traces to ancient Greece.

Cue books and exclusive victim interviews. Expect chatter about a TV streaming service series to be binged by morbidly fascinated viewers worldwide.

Any accurate telling will feature religious overlays which heighten this story’s diabolical wrongness, including a “last supper” which opened with grace, because this was a community of godly people, as described by a trial lawyer, who were “eternally polite” to one another.

It will present a scene, post Patterson’s lunch, in which the condemned, led by a church pastor, offered a group prayer for the good health of their killer.

Patterson was a courtroom defendant who shielded her face from the sketch artist’s gaze, and who lay on the floor of her transports to and from court to outfox the media photographers. Now her face will be internationally infamous.

Patterson killed decent people, including in laws who served as her de facto parents in the absence of her own. She killed people she said she loved; people whom she called her family.

It doesn’t make much sense; to be fair, in the conflicts presented by the trial evidence, nor does a more innocent explanation. These events seem so unlikely – a mum of two, amid the travails of parenthood and the petty anxieties of everyday life, who exploded with wholesale malice.

The case against Patterson was circumstantial. There was no confession, no smoking gun evidence which tipped her guilt into obvious irrefutability. She must have done it, it goes, because there is no other reasonable explanation.

After a ten-week court case, after tens of thousands of questions were asked, including 4267 questions of the suspect herself, we don’t know who Patterson is – not really, anyway.

We don’t know why Patterson did it or how she thought she could get away with it.

Her victims were doomed by meal’s end, gifted only an afternoon’s ignorance for what lay ahead. They would suffer despite the heroic efforts of medical teams.

Gail Patterson, in a closing fog of cramps, groans and bodily expulsions, said that the poisonings must have been accidental.

She knew Patterson to be a good daughter-in-law and mother. Why would it occur to her that Patterson wanted her dead?

********

A potted look at Patterson’s life offers few clues to her choices in July, 2023.

She met Simon at the City of Monash; they married in 2007.

She worked as an air traffic controller, ran a second-hand book shop, and once enrolled in a veterinary degree.

She suffered body image issues for decades (bulimia would figure in her excuse for not getting seriously ill from the lunch). Weekly weigh-ins as a child, supervised by her mother, wouldn’t have helped.

Her parents didn’t go to her wedding (they were on a train, in Russia, at the time).

She inherited her grandmother’s estate of about $2m in 2006 and lived comfortably. Interest-free home loans given to her husband’s siblings, said to be about $400,000 each, seemed very generous.

Patterson and Simon kept breaking up – her choice – soon after the birth of their son in 2009. They both hoped to reconcile – and tried to, again and again – like magnets which both repel and attract.

We can recall Patterson’s introduction to the mass media outside her Gibson St home in the weeks after the lunch when observers strived to find out what had happened from the only person who knew.

She stood in front of her red MG, handbag strapped across her body, all beleaguered and teary, lamenting her apparent perch in public life as an “evil witch”.

Was she a Kathy Bates villain? Or a hapless sponge for misfortune? She had to be one or the other.

Patterson was a victim, she asserted. She probably felt like she was. Child protection officers were about to remove her children from her care. She was always lost without her children.

Patterson appeared far simpler that day than she is. That media offering seems like a performance now, given we now know her response to a police visit to her home a few days earlier.

She lied to them about mushroom foraging and her possession of a dehydrator. She swapped a SIM card from one phone to another, while police searched other rooms of her house, so that they never recovered her usual phone.

If Patterson was a victim, she was a scheming one.

A few months later, she was charged with murder after another police raid of her home. She appeared in court the next day, fresh from her first night in prison, wearing a beige jumper and tortoise shell glasses. She was a study in detachment, careful to avoid the eye of journalists.

Towards the end of Patterson’s murder trial, her defence barrister, Colin Mandy SC declared that Patterson had gotten through her marathon questioning in the witness box “unscathed”.

Others saw it differently.

Patterson had answered questions for eight days. She had chosen to be there; no defendant can be compelled to give evidence. Being questioned was a legal gamble; in explaining a “terrible accident”, Patterson would be exposed to numerous inconsistencies in her accounts.

This was “box office” courtroom drama. Outside the court complex each day, prospective courtroom attendees materialised in the pre-dawn mist, armed with camp chairs and puffer jackets, in the hope of snagging a courtroom seat.

Patterson was better groomed now than her first court appearance. There was lots of blinking, an occasionally squeaky voice, and glimpses of her deeper self, such as the dabbing of her eyes when she spoke of her children.

Patterson did not buckle in the witness box. She wasn’t defiant, but she wasn’t submissive. The problem was that her detailed explanations for the four months of 2023, before and after the deaths, did not tally with logic or common sense.

Her mix of garlic, shallots and mushrooms had tasted “a little bland” while simmering on the stove on the morning of the lunch. She said she reached for a plastic container in the pantry, for dried mushrooms she had bought and stored.

Patterson said she had foraged, and dried, mushrooms, which she may have combined in the same container with the dried mushrooms purchased in Melbourne.

But she didn’t explain why she had foraged death cap mushrooms, or from where, or explain how she might have confused them with edible mushrooms.

(Authorities, fearing at the time that killer mushrooms were on the market, never tracked down the supposed Melbourne purchase of dried mushrooms from an Asian grocer.)

At times in the witness box, Patterson’s attempts to dismiss or marginalise inconvenient facts appeared to be aimed at dodging the truth, not telling it. Facts seemed vulnerable to retrofitted manipulation; in each version, for example, over almost two years, the portion of the lunch she ate would shrink.

For prosecutor Dr Nanette Rogers SC, no detail was too small. She pressed why Patterson’s recollections differed from everybody else’s, including her children’s.

Rogers accused Patterson of being unable to keep up with her lies. In this lay an indisputable truth. Patterson was already a “liar” – her own defence introduced her as such in its opening statement.

She had lied to her lunch guests. She spoke of a “serious medical issue” to get their attendance. It was fake news about fake cancer.

She alluded to the desire for sympathetic attention, and told the court she invented the cancer ruse to cover for planned weight-loss surgery.

Yet even this detail was muddled. She had booked an appointment with a specialist at a cosmetic clinic in Melbourne. Yet the booking was with an allergist.

Patterson spoke of explosive diarrhoea, including an unplanned pit stop on the Sunday after the lunch by the road’s edge.

Her son was in the car for the so-called “bush poo” – he told police that they did not stop unexpectedly on the drive.

The next morning, she left the local hospital after being told, in effect, that she might be dying.

Cause-and-effect logic lacked. She had fed her children lunch leftovers, she said, but did not want them medically assessed. She had explosive diarrhoea, but wanted to do the three-hour trip to collect the kids from school.

In The King v Patterson, the defendant’s evidence was at odds with the police, the children, the doctors, the scientists, the health officials and the welfare officers.

It stood opposed to the recollections of the surviving lunch guest, now widower Ian Wilkinson, who wore a cross in the witness box and spoke without rancour.

Perhaps the most significant of the discrepancies, the most unyielding of unhelpful facts?

All of Patterson’s guests were poisoned by her food.

But she was not.

*********

On Facebook, Patterson was an avowed atheist. She stated that her husband had been “coercive” and too hung up with the church.

She was embittered that his parents had not intervened in their financial disputes. There was a party for Gail which Patterson believed she had not been invited to. According to Simon Patterson, Patterson felt her in-laws favoured their other grandchildren over her own children.

Did she feel abandoned by them as her relations with Simon Patterson dimmed towards the end of 2022? After all, Patterson had trusted in the kindness of her in-laws for many years.

There was an earlier lunch, with Don and Gail, at Patterson’s home a few weeks before the lunch, when no one got sick.

She and Don were long ago bonded by their shared love of knowledge. Simon’s parents had never hurt her; instead, they were unfailingly decent to her. And Patterson had no reason to harm her other lunch guests, Ian and Heather Wilkinson.

None of the above points to murder. If Patterson hated her in-laws with murderous intent, evidence for it was missing at her trial.

Motive need not be proved for a murder conviction. As Dr Rogers said in her closing statement: “You don’t have to know why a person did something in order to know that they did it.”

Patterson is now a triple murderer. She armed herself by getting in her red MG to go to a wet footy ground and sniff out nature’s random offerings of doom.

She did it. She killed them on purpose. Yet no one, including her husband, seems to know why.