Erin Patterson’s private battle before lethal meal was served
Food, and the poisoning of it, is at the heart of the Mushroom Cook trial. Now, Erin Patterson told of how a lifelong battle has affected her, before a fatal lunch was served.
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The life of Erin Patterson, in all its colours, was aired for all when she testified about family ties, her size and her lies.
A crowd queued outside Morwell’s courthouse to see the 50-year-old, sitting alone in the witness box, explain her lot in life.
From meeting her husband, Simon, the Christian who she tried to recruit to atheism before her own religious awakening.
Then there was her wedding day without the mother or father of the bride there to watch her walk down the aisle because they were on a train in Russia.
For the best part of five days her life was unpacked, for better or worse.
She told of her first labour and the trauma of complications as the doctors lost her baby’s heartbeat, the money she inherited and the communication breakdowns with her husband that foreshadowed her separation.
But food, and the poisoning of it, is at the heart of this trial.
And as Ms Patterson explained, food has been a lifelong battle for her.
Her mother, she said, had weighed her and her sister weekly during their childhood.
It manifested into her terrible relationship with food.
Her uncontrollable desire to eat and the resultant weight gain was at the core of her low self-esteem when she cooked a lunch that killed her husband’s family.
Ms Patterson testified she was planning to have gastric bypass surgery to address her weight issues, which she felt embarrassed she could not control.
“I’d been fighting a never-ending battle of low self-esteem most of my adult life, and the further inroads I made into middle age, the less I felt good about myself, I put on more weight, could handle exercise less.”
Ms Patterson testified that by the winter of 2023 her relationship with her estranged husband, Simon, was simply “functional”.
And she was concerned about the “distance” or “space” with the wider Patterson family.
“I had felt for some months that my relationship with the wider Patterson family and particularly Don and Gail perhaps had a bit more distance or space put between us – we saw each other less,” Ms Patterson said.
“I had ….concerns about Simon not wanting me to be involved too much with the family any more.”
Then there was the fatal lunch itself; six beef wellingtons individually cooked which she accepts included death cap mushrooms encased by pastry.
The sixth plate was meant for her estranged husband who messaged his wife the day before the lunch on July 29, 2023, to tell her he would not be attending.
“I remember feeling hurt he didn’t want to come,” Ms Patterson testified.
“I also felt stress about the upcoming surgery I was going to have…I just wanted to talk to him about that.”
The lunch itself was a success, that is until the vomiting and the diarrhoea took hold.
Ms Patterson and her guests talked about their lives, a bit of politics and current affairs, and of course her children.
When Don Patterson, her father-in-law, brought up his brother’s cancer fight, Ms Patterson seized the moment.
She had already flagged a medical issue before the gathering.
A fake cancer that may soon require treatment was a cover story for a health issue she felt embarrassment and self-loathing over, she testified.
“I was planning to have a gastric bypass surgery and I remembered thinking I didn’t want to tell anybody what I was going to have done. I was really embarrassed about it,” Ms Patterson told the Supreme Court sitting in Morwell.
“I’m not proud of this but I led them to believe that I might be needing some treatment in regard to that (ovarian cancer) in the next weeks or months.”
“I did lie to them.”
Ms Patterson confessed she continued to tell lies by denying to police ever owning a dehydrator or being a forager.
But she admitted that after being accused by Simon in the hospital of using the dehydrator to poison his parents, she worried that she had mixed foraged mushrooms with a pungent type she says she bought from an Asian grocer.
Patterson soon got the attention of Crown Prosecutor Nanette Rogers KC.
Dr Rogers’ rapid-fire questioning picked at the lying and to her intentions.
The barrister suggested Ms Patterson’s “so called cancer diagnosis” was concocted to lure guests to the lunch and that once it was over there would be no need to “account for this lie…because you thought the lunch guests would die.”
Three of them did die less than a week later of death cap mushroom poisoning.
Ms Patterson denied at the end of her examination in chief to intending to kill or seriously harm any of her guests, Don and Gail Patterson, both 70, and her sister, Heather Wilkinson, 66, who died.
Or intending to kill or harm the only guest who survived, 71-year-old pastor Ian Wilkinson.
Ms Patterson, who has pleaded not guilty to three counts of murder and one of attempted murdered, maintains what happened was “a tragedy and a terrible accident”.
Her lies to police were “a stupid knee-jerk reaction”.
A stealthy killer or a fatal mistake?
That is the question this jury will consider when deliberating its verdict.
Originally published as Erin Patterson’s private battle before lethal meal was served
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