Mushroom cook trial: Erin Patterson’s eight days of questions at murder trial
The 50-year-old old mother was the last witness to be called in a trial that has gained pace as it has drawn nearer to its end.
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It all ended in tears.
For eight days, Erin Trudi Patterson had been questioned, over and over, about the meal that changed her life and ended the lives of three others.
On Thursday, she reached for the tissues and dabbed at her eyes as she answered her final questions – about her daughter’s ballet and her son’s flying lessons.
“I didn’t want to disappoint him,” she told her defence barrister Colin Mandy SC, when he asked why she drove him to his lesson the day after that lunch, the one that poisoned people.
But minutes earlier, Patterson faced questions of a different kind from Crown prosecutor Nanette Rogers SC.
Patterson denied she was a murderer, shooting down the suggestion that she deliberately picked death cap mushrooms and placed them in the beef wellington she served as a “fancy” lunch on July 29, 2023.
Or that she intended to kill anyone, including the man who survived her cooking, Ian Wilkinson, who has watched her give evidence from only metres away.
Patterson was the last witness to be called in a trial that has gained pace as it has drawn nearer to its end.
The 50-year-old mother of two will now listen again from the dock at the back of the courtroom as people talk about her, not to her.
The last word will not be Patterson’s.
The lawyers from the prosecution and defence will deliver closing addresses before the judge has the last say in his instructions to the jury.
The entire trial, and the thousands upon thousands of questions asked of those who entered the witness box of Courtroom 4 at Morwell, boils down to one simple question for the 12 who will decide her fate.
Is Patterson a calculated killer or a klutz?
Or in other words, did she deliberately lace a beef wellington with death cap mushrooms with murderous intent or did she make a fatal mistake?
The Crown claims she used a citizen science website to track down the toxic fungi on April 28, 2023, and then bought a dehydrator the very same day to “preserve” her discovery.
But she maintains it was all an accident; that she may have unwittingly added mushrooms she foraged to the meal with dried mushrooms she purchased from an Asian grocer.
Crown prosecutor Nanette Rogers SC wasn’t mucking around when she got her chance to probe the accused, her cross-examination of Patterson a gruelling five-day interrogation.
“Are you making this up as you go along, Ms Patterson?” she asked.
In this case, there are the lies Patterson has admitted telling to police and others, such as having never foraged for mushrooms nor having ever owned a dehydrator.
She has also conceded she misled her guests to make them believe she had ovarian cancer to cover for her gastric bypass surgery.
But then, there are the lies she is being accused of telling.
They include buying dried mushrooms from an Asian grocer, experiencing diarrhoea as her guests were dying in hospital and feeding her children the leftovers of the beef wellington.
Dr Rogers accused Patterson of lying about drinking herbal tea the morning after the lunch, suggesting her son, in his evidence, was right, it was coffee.
Seconds later, Dr Rogers was raising Imodium and suggested Patterson had lied about taking it that same day to settle her “explosive diarrhoea”.
Dr Rogers’ suggestion was that she was never really sick at all – not from eating death cap mushrooms anyway.
“Disagree,” she replied to both accusations.
Dr Rogers also tried to cast doubt on Patterson’s claim that she was planning to have gastric bypass surgery, informing the jury that the clinic she booked had never performed the procedure.
At times, the accused told the Supreme Court jury she believed the lunch survivor, her estranged husband and even their children were “mistaken” in their recollections.
She rejected Ian’s evidence that Don and Gail Patterson, his wife Heather Wilkinson and he ate off grey plates at the lunch, while she ate off a smaller, “orangey-tan” plate.
She denied ever telling Simon Patterson she was worried she would “poo her pants” as she drove their son’s friend home that evening.
And she claimed their children were “wrong” about her preparing a plate of leftovers for herself the following night.
Patterson has pleaded not guilty to three counts of murder and one of attempted murder.
The trial continues.
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