Erin Patterson says she ‘picked all the mushrooms I could see’ out of fear for family dog

Accused mushroom murderer Erin Patterson has told a court she secretly battled bulimia, developed an interest in wild mushrooms during Covid lockdowns and inherited money from relatives.

Two hours and four minutes into a stroll down memory lane, Erin Patterson was finally asked a question somewhere near the heart of the case alleged against her. A question about mushrooms.

It was precisely 12.37pm on Tuesday and Ms Patterson was still dabbing her eyes after making a tearful revelation that she had secretly indulged in binge eating followed by bulimic vomiting ever since her 20s – something she described as “a very private thing.”

She would make herself vomit sometimes two or three times a week, she said, but nobody else knew about her “unhealthy relationship” with food until “now”.

Her counsel, Colin Mandy, gave his client a long moment to compose herself then turned to the subject of mushrooms. First, he raised a Facebook chat from 2020 or so that discussed mushroom dehydration.

Erin Patterson's barrister Colin Mandy. Picture: Getty

The defence team with Sophie Stafford and Colin Mandy leave the court in Morwell. Picture: David Crosling

At that point the courtroom’s master screen was filled with a screenshot of a dehydrator featuring trays full of shrivelling fungi. This was not some promotional shot, apparently, but a picture the defendant had taken herself.

Invited to comment, the witness said: “I think I was experimenting with different ways” (of dehydrating and cooking mushrooms for home cooking). This was the cue for the next question.

“Did you have an interest in wild mushrooms?”

Answer: “Yes, yes I did.”

It all went back to the Covid lockdowns, the accused recalled. She and her two children would go for walks in the Korumburra Gardens or along the rail trail or around their own three acre block – and there, poking through the grass after rain, would be wild mushrooms.

Question: “Why eat them?”

Answer: “They taste good and are very healthy.”

But collecting wild mushrooms is one thing and buying them is another. Ms Patterson said she became a keen buyer of a wide variety of edible mushrooms “from farmers’ markets and from Asian shops”.

Erin Patterson says she secretly battled an eating disorder. Picture: Jason Edwards

She and her children went to Melbourne “roughly every school holidays” and she took the opportunity to buy mushrooms at Asian stores in the eastern suburbs from Oakleigh to Mt Waverley.

One thing that had sparked her interest in wild mushroom varieties was that she’d seen the family dog eat one in the paddock and wondered if it might be dangerous and so “I picked all the mushrooms I could see” in order to have them identified if the dog became sick.

At first, she was wary of eating them herself, she said. “But I cut a bit off one and fried it in butter and ate it and I didn’t get sick. It tasted good.”

She warmed to the topic, explaining that she added mushrooms to her children’s meals “chopped small” so the kids couldn’t pick them out. But the prosecutor, Nanette Rogers SC, put an end to discussing that subject in front of the jury at that point.

By the time the jurors left the courtroom just before the lunchbreak, they’d heard enough to know that multiple houses and long and expensive holidays surely hadn’t made Erin Patterson happy.

The Leongatha house of Erin Patterson. Picture: Ian Currie

On the contrary, inheriting a tidy fortune first from her grandparents and then from her mother seemed to have complicated her life in ways that made it worse, not better.

Her ongoing stream of inherited income gave her and her husband Simon Patterson the double-edged advantage of choice. The long road trip holiday followed by the ill-fated adventure of moving to Western Australia and buying a country house (in a “little hamlet”) without a mortgage.

Spare cash gave her the choice of taking over an empty shop and renovating it to set up as a second-hand bookshop at quite some expense only to discover after a year that it was a waste of her time and her grandma’s money. The same money that gave her husband the opportunity to arrange big interest-free loans for his siblings so they could pay off their houses when and as they liked.

Erin Patterson told the court she had developed an interest in wild mushrooms.

At one point in the question-and-answer session, the accused listed off each of the several houses she had bought during her marriage, including the one her husband lived in after the most permanent of their several separations.

If there’s an obsessive edge to that series of purchases, it’s matched by something else Erin Patterson revealed yesterday: her years of self-diagnosis of potentially fatal-illnesses that turned out to be nowhere as serious as her fears.

Regardless of the verdict, when it comes, her case is full of the threads that all dramas contain: love and hate, right and wrong, alleged crime and possible punishment, all smeared with religion.

That’s why there were three known authors sitting in the Supreme Court media monitoring room all day, not missing a word.