Erin Patterson trial: Defence begin closing address, argue alleged killer did not want in-laws dead
Lawyers acting for alleged triple-killer Erin Patterson have told the jury the case against her is flawed and she had no motive to want her loved ones dead.
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Lawyers acting for alleged mushroom poisoner Erin Patterson have argued the case against her is flawed and the accused woman had no motive for wanting her in-laws dead.
Prosecutors concluded their final address shortly after midday on Tuesday by urging jurors to reject Ms Patterson account as a “carefully constructed fiction” and find her guilty of the charges.
In his response, Ms Patterson’s barrister, Colin Mandy SC, submitted the prosecution’s theory of the deadly lunch “makes no sense” and questioned why his client would want to kill her husband’s family.
He told the court there was “positive” evidence in the trial of Ms Patterson having a loving and supportive relationship with her parents-in-law.
“Erin Patterson had a motive to keep these people in her world... especially so they could keep supporting her and her children,” he argued.
Ms Patterson, 50, is facing trial after pleading not guilty to murdering three of her in-laws and the attempted murder of a fourth on July 29, 2023.
Prosecutors allege she deliberately poisoned Don and Gail Patterson, and Ian and Heather Wilkinson with a beef Wellington lunch spiked with death cap mushrooms at her home in Victoria’s southeast.
Don, his wife Gail, and Gail’s sister Ms Wilkinson died in the week following the lunch, with Ms Patterson’s defence arguing the case is a tragic accident.
Jury must consider ‘inevitability’ of attracting suspicion: Defence
Mr Mandy told jurors that the Crown’s case against his client was that she had carefully planned and prepared for this fatal lunch for months.
He then turned to the hypothetical “careful murderer” suggesting there was no way they would not know suspicion would almost instantly fall on the meal’s cook.
“This careful murderer would know the spotlight would be on her as soon as these people were hospitalised,” he said.
“It would be very easy for someone to work out what got them sick.”
Mr Mandy submitted this was a “powerful reason” against the Crown’s theory of the lunch, suggesting the more likely explanation was Ms Patterson didn’t plan it and never planned to kill anyone.
He turned to the focus the prosecution had put on Ms Patterson’s disposal of the dehydrator the morning after she was released from hospital on August 1.
He argued that the careful murderer would have disposed of the dehydrator far earlier given, on the Crown’s case, she had used it to dehydrate the deaths caps in late April or early May.
When they did get sick she panicked because she knew the spotlight would be on her,” Mr Mandy argued.
“It can only have been panic, not because she was guilty, but that was how people might think.”
Judge gives update on mushroom trial timeline
After a short break in the afternoon, trial judge Justice Christopher Beale gave jurors an update on the timeline of the trial, indicating they would likely be sent out to deliberate mid next week.
He told the court the case would conclude half an hour early on Tuesday as Mr Mandy’s voice was “failing quick”.
“I won’t commence my charge to you until Monday,” Justice Beale said.
“That charge is not likely to finish, lets say this it may spill over into Wednesday. With the wind at my back I might finish it by Tuesday afternoon.”
Motive is ‘fundamental’ to proving murder: Defence
Mr Mandy has turned to the “absence of motive” in the case.
He began by highlighting that Don, Gail, Ian and Heather were clearly kind and good people, noting the three deaths were “desperately sad”.
“Why on earth would anyone want to kill these people or cause them serious injury or cause them any harm at all?” he asked.
“Why would Erin Patterson want to kill them or cause them serious harm? Because of a brief period of tension in December of 2022 which had absolutely nothing to do with Ian and Heather?”
Mr Mandy agreed with Dr Roger’s comments earlier in the day that the prosecution did not have to prove a motive, but suggested a key element of murder and attempted murder was intention.
“Our argument to you is; motive is important to intention and usually fundamental to it,” he said.
He told the jury much of the prosecution case was “scratching” around looking for evidence of animus between Ms Patterson, her husband and his family members.
He suggested Simon’s evidence of a communication breakdown over child support and Ms Patterson’s messages venting to her online friends was an attempt to prove tension.
“Was that to try and show there was a motive? Maybe,” he said.
“It doesn’t provide any kind of motive to murder someone’s parents and aunt and uncle.”
Mr Mandy submitted there was “anti-motive” or positive reasons for Ms Patterson to not want to murder her in-laws.
“Erin Patterson had a motive to keep these people in her world... especially so they could keep supporting her and her children,” Mr Mandy said.
“Why would she take active, loving grandparents away from her own children?”
Defence begins their closing arguments
Shortly before the lunch break, Ms Patterson’s barrister Colin Mandy SC stood up and began giving the defence response to the case.
He told the jury the case came down to two simple issues they would have to consider.
“Members of the jury, your consideration of the evidence in this trial comes down to two simple issues you have to determine,” she said.
“First, is there a reasonable possibility that death cap mushrooms were put into this meal accidentally?
“Secondly is it a reasonable possibility Erin Patterson did not intend to kill or cause serious injury?”
Mr Mandy said if either of these were a reasonable possibility, then the jury would have a reasonable doubt and the law says they must acquit her.
He argued the prosecution had a “flawed” approach to the case, working back from the presumption Ms Patterson was guilty, and had “cherry picked” convenient fragments while discarding inconvenient truths.
To highlight this, he pointed to two examples, Ms Patterson’s daughter's evidence she saw her mother go to the toilet about 10 times on July 30, and nurse Kylie Ashton’s evidence of the accused woman raising the prospect her children had eaten leftovers during her first hospital appearance.
He told the jury Ms Ashton said she believed she told the two doctors at the hospital this, but neither of those doctors had mentioned knowing this in their evidence.
Mr Mandy told the jury they’d heard from about 21 witnesses who’d spoked with Ms Patterson in the 24 hours following the lunch.
“She was giving the same account over and over again to many people asking questions,” he said.
“There’s very little meaningful variation.”
He will continue his closing remarks when the trial continues after lunch.
Crown urges jury to find Ms Patterson guilty
Finishing her closing address to the jury on Tuesday, Crown prosecutor Nanette Rogers SC said jurors had no option but to disregard Ms Patterson’s claim this event was a horrible accident.
She pointed to seven parts of the evidence she alleged would conclude the accused woman, deliberately sourced and served death cap mushrooms to her guests intending to kill or at least seriously injure them.
Dr Rogers said these were;
A) She prepared and allocated the meal;
B) She was the only person who did not fall seriously ill;
C) She was familiar with the iNaturalist website;
D) Her phone records were consistent with visits to two locations in the Gippsland region where death caps were posted online;
E) Photos located on a tablet were consistent with her dehydrating death caps;
F) Evidence of the lengths she went to to conceal her actions;
G) She told “many, many lies” about the true source of the mushrooms.
Dr Rogers urged the jury to reject Ms Patterson’s account, saying she came up with a “carefully constructed narrative” that almost fits with the evidence.
She argued that while Ms Patterson was on the stand, she either ignored inconvenient evidence, said she couldn’t remember or said other people are just wrong — “even her own children”.
“She has told too many lies and you should reject her evidence,” the prosecutor said.
Crown turns to expected ‘no motive’ argument
Dr Rogers moved on to a second argument she said she would expect Mr Mandy to make – that the accused woman had no motive to kill and, in fact, had positive relationships with her in-laws.
She told the jury that motive was not an element of the charge of murder, and the prosecution did not need to prove a motive.
“The question is not why she did this, the question you have to determine is; have the prosecution proved beyond reasonable doubt the accused did this deliberately,” she said.
Dr Rogers said sometimes a motive is only known to the person themselves and that she expects Mr Mandy to make a lot of the lack of reason for the alleged crimes.
She said the evidence was Ms Patterson’s relationship with her parents-in-law, Don and Gail Patterson, was “not always harmonious” and had soured after a child support dispute with Simon in late 2022.
The prosecutor suggested the accused woman’s messages to her online friends revealed she was living a “duplicitous life”.
Dr Rogers pointed to messages where Ms Patterson wrote her in-laws were “a lost cause”, said she was “sick of their s--t”, and allegedly mocked their religious beliefs.
“What the accused outwardly portrayed did not align with her true feelings,” she suggested.
‘Dummy phone’ used to frustrate police: Crown
Dr Rogers then moved to the evidence of Ms Patterson’s mobile phones, claiming she handed over a “dummy phone” to police during the search warrant at her home on August 5.
The prosecutor said the evidence showed this device was not the accused’s usual phone, did not contain her usual SIM card and was factory reset three times.
Dr Rogers said the phone was wiped at 11.09am on August 2, about 20 minutes before Ms Patterson dumped the dehydrator, on August 5 and again remotely on August 6 while the device was in police custody.
“It was not a phone or phone number the accused could truthfully claim was her phone when she handed it over to police,” she said.
Dr Rogers said the SIM handed over was first placed in “Phone B” on August 3 and Ms Patterson’s usual phone was never recovered by police.
“All of this was designed to frustrate the police investigation of the matter,” she said.
“We suggest she knew the information on Phone A would implicate her in the deliberate poisoning of the lunch guests.”
Dr Rogers next addressed a series of arguments she expected Ms Patterson’s barrister, Colin Mandy SC, to make when he addressed the jury later on Tuesday.
The first, she suggested, would be that the jury could not exclude the possibility that Ms Patterson innocently foraged for wild mushrooms and the matter was a “horrible foraging tragedy”.
Dr Rogers urged the jury to reject this argument, saying that the only evidence Ms Patterson was a mushroom forager came from her own mouth.
“The suggestion now that these mushrooms may have been accidentally foraged we suggest was a late change,” she said.
“It may have dawned on her that the Asian grocery story didn’t stack up … she had to come up with something new.”
Dr Rogers said the jury “simply cannot” take Ms Patterson’s word on the matter and argued all the evidence could satisfy the jury that she deliberately sought out and picked death caps for the lunch.
Mushroom trial jury urged to reject ‘wild panic’
Jurors in the triple-murder trial of Erin Patterson have been urged to reject the proposition she dumped a dehydrator as part of a “wild panic”.
Continuing her closing address to the jury on Tuesday, Crown prosecutor Nanette Rogers SC said Ms Patterson’s actions in taking the dehydrator to the tip was an “important piece of evidence”.
She told the jury it was one of the first things Ms Patterson did after she was released from hospital in the afternoon of August 1, travelling to the Koonwarra Transfer Station at 11.30am the following day.
“The prosecution says the only reason the accused would dump the dehydrator in this way and at this time is because she knew she had used it to prepare the meal,” she said.
“Defence may argue this is part of a wild panic … you should reject that proposition.”
Dr Rogers pointed to Ms Patterson’s evidence in the witness box about panicking after she claimed her husband, Simon Patterson, accused her of using the dehydrator to poison his parents while in hospital on August 1.
The prosecutor called the story “nonsense” and said Simon had categorically rejected this in his own evidence.
“If there was nothing incriminating about the dehydrator why hide it? There is only one possible reason; she knew it would incriminate her,” Dr Rogers said.
Crown details timeline of mushroom poisonings
In her closing remarks, Dr Rogers said “four calculated deceptions” sat at the heart of the Crown’s case against Ms Patterson.
These were allegedly: a fabricated cancer diagnosis to explain the reason for the lunch, the lethal dose of mushroom poisons “secreted” in the meal, Ms Patterson’s feigned illness, and a series of lies told to “conceal the truth” after the lunch.
As part of her closing remarks, Dr Rogers took the jury through a comparison of the medical trajectories of those present at the lunch.
“In total, the accused spent just over 24 hours in hospital care. Not one medical professional observed her appearing unwell,” she said.
“The evidence overwhelmingly indicates that she was certainly not sick with death cap mushroom poisoning.”
Dr Rogers said each of the lunch guests first started feeling ill about midnight on July 30 and each attended hospital the following morning.
“Even early on Sunday morning, it was obvious just by looking at them that the lunch guests were very sick,” Dr Rogers said.
The prosecutor said Leongatha Hospital’s Dr Chris Webster reported seeing Heather and Ian both vomiting and unable to hold down water the morning after the lunch.
Compared to Ms Patterson at the time, her son gave evidence she was sitting at her dining table drinking a coffee when he woke.
Late on Sunday, Dr Rogers said Simon visited his father Don, giving evidence “he was really struggling” with a discoloured face and noticeable hunch lying on his side.
By 3pm Dr Rogers said Don Patterson’s blood tests were “extremely abnormal” while Ms Patterson drove the more than two hour round trip to her son’s flying lesson in Tyabb.
On Sunday evening, the court heard Don, who ate the largest serving of lunch, was showing signs of organ damage and was admitted to the ICU.
Overnight, Don’s wife Gail declined and was admitted to the ICU, the jury was told.
The following morning a nurse observed Heather was continuing to have “active vomiting and diarrhoea” while Ian was particularly unwell and did not move around.
Dr Rogers said this was the same morning Ms Patterson prepared her children for school, dropped them at the bus stop and took herself to hospital.
“On that same day, July 31, by the time Ian and Heather Wilkinson were also transferred to Dandenong Hospital, Ian was reported to be extremely nauseated and constantly vomiting,” the prosecutor said.
“This is around the time that the accused had discharged herself from Leongatha Hospital and drove home … You saw for yourselves how she appeared on the CCTV.”
At 2.30pm on July 31, Dr Rogers said Don was critically ill and in multiple organ failure while Ms Patterson was “calm and chatty” in an ambulance on her way to Monash Medical Centre.
“By August 1, 2023, all four of the lunch guests had been conveyed to the Austin Hospital ICU on life support and in an advanced state of multiple organ failure, with their organs essentially shutting down,” Dr Rogers said.
“This is the day the accused was discharged home from the Monash Medical Centre with no clinical or biochemical evidence of amanita mushroom poisoning.”
Dr Rogers told the jury she expected Ms Patterson’s defence to argue she was sick, just not as sick as the others.
She said she expected the defence to make the case she was less sick because she ate less, her claim of binge eating cake and vomiting after the lunch and that the lunch guests were more vulnerable.
“The prosecution invites you to find that she embarked on a course of conduct, over the days that followed the lunch, designed to make it seem that she also fell ill as a result of the lunch,” she said.
“She knew she had not eaten death cap mushrooms but realised she needed to look sick like the others so that suspicion would not fall on her.”
The trial continues.
Originally published as Erin Patterson trial: Defence begin closing address, argue alleged killer did not want in-laws dead
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