An estranged husband’s blunt question: ‘Is that how you poisoned my parents?’

As his parents lay critically ill in hospital, Simon Patterson had a blunt question for his estranged wife.

The pair had just broken the news to their children that their relatives were unwell and a lunch Erin Patterson had served at their Leongatha home may have been to blame. With the children safely out of earshot, talk had turned to Erin’s use of a dehydrator to hide mushrooms in food.

Erin Patterson leaves court in April.Credit: Jason South

“He said to me: ‘Is that how you poisoned my parents, using that dehydrator?’ Erin recalled on Wednesday in her third day of evidence to a Supreme Court jury.

“I said: ‘Of course not.’”

Erin, who is accused of killing her in-laws, Don and Gail Patterson, and Gail’s sister Heather Wilkinson using a beef Wellington meal laced with death cap mushrooms, says she engaged in a string of lies in the aftermath of the lethal lunch fearing she would be blamed for everyone’s illness and have her children taken away.

The 50-year-old told the jury in the Latrobe Valley town of Morwell that she dumped evidence, wiped her mobile phone when it was in the possession of police and tried to hide photographs she had of mushrooms dehydrating in her home out of fear.

Don and Gail Patterson.

She also admitted to lying about having cancer because she wanted to keep secret her plans to get weight loss surgery and she enjoyed the care and kindness that version of events could garner.

Erin Patterson has pleaded not guilty to three counts of murder and one of attempted murder after pastor Ian Wilkinson survived the lunch at her Leongatha home on July 29, 2023. She concedes death caps were in the food she served but claims the fatalities were a tragic accident.

While revealing details of the fatal lunch for the first time, including which plates she used, the mother of two said she chose the beef Wellington as a special meal after serving her family shepherd’s pie at a gathering earlier that year.

“I remembered on really important occasions my mum would make a beef Wellington as a kid, and I thought I’d do that too, I’d give it a go,” she told the jury.

After being unable to find a large enough piece of meat for a “log” version of the recipe, she said, she instead bought steaks to make individual portions. The accused said she cooked mushroom paste over hours, cutting up garlic and shallots and adding prepackaged mushrooms from Woolworths.

“I cooked that for a very long time. You’ve got to get almost all of the water out so it won’t turn the pastry soggy,” she said. “As I was cooking it down, I tasted it a few times and it seemed a little bland to me, so I decided to put in the dried mushrooms I bought from the grocer that I still had in the pantry.”

Those dried mushrooms, she said, had been stored in a container from an earlier trip to an Asian grocer in April that same year. However, she told the jury she now believed foraged mushrooms may have also been in that Tupperware container, sobbing as she gave her evidence.

When the guests arrived at her home for lunch, she had soon begun plating up the meal, fending off attempts from her female guests to help serve.

She told the jury she owned a couple of white plates, one that was red on top and black on the bottom, and a kindergarten-type plate from her daughter. The leftover beef Wellington had then been put on a tray in the fridge to worry about later.

The accused said she did not see who took which plate, telling the jury she was heating up gravy at the time before returning to the kitchen bench to see one plate left, taking that to the table for herself.

During the lunch, she said, the guests spoke about politics and current affairs before, at the end, she broke the news about her cancer. She agreed this was a lie and she had misled the family about her health.

“I’m not proud of this, but I led them to believe that I might be needing some treatment in regards to that in the next few weeks or months,” she said. “They all showed a lot of compassion about that. Ian said, ‘Why don’t we pray for Erin’, and so that’s what we did.

“I did lie to them.”

During her hours in the witness box, Erin Patterson said she continued the lie about her health for two reasons: because she enjoyed the care Don and Gail showed her in response and to cover up her secret plans to have weight loss surgery.

“I shouldn’t have done it,” she said. “I had come to the conclusion that I wanted to do something for once and for all for my weight and poor eating habits.

“I was planning to have gastric bypass surgery, so I remember thinking I did not want to tell anybody what I was going to have done. I was really embarrassed about it, so I thought perhaps letting them believe I had some serious issue that needed treatment meant maybe they’d help me with the kids.”

Erin said she didn’t eat all of her meal because she was doing a lot of talking, but after her guests left she had had a piece of the orange cake they had brought with them.

“I had a piece of cake. And then another. And another,” she explained. “I felt sick. I felt overfull, so I went to the toilet and brought it back up again.”

The accused said she later developed diarrhoea and when she had to take her son to flying lessons the next day, she was forced to pull over and relieve herself behind a bush, using tissues to clean herself which she placed in a doggy bag.

During that trip, the jury heard, CCTV captured her visit to a service station, where she said she disposed of the doggy bag in a bathroom bin before buying food for her children.

As her lunch guests’ conditions deteriorated and Erin Patterson presented herself to hospital for ongoing symptoms, doctors insisted on her children receiving health checks because they had eaten leftovers from the meal.

Later, when Erin was at a hospital in Melbourne, Simon Patterson accused her of deliberately poisoning her guests.

“It caused me to do a lot of thinking about a lot of things; it caused me to reflect on what might have happened,” Erin told the jury.

The accused said that in the day that followed she began to feel scared and responsible for making everyone sick, becoming frantic when she returned home before dumping the dehydrator at the tip, fearing child protection would find out about the device and take her children away.

The jury heard she did not tell anyone about foraging mushrooms but knew there was a suspicion by now that death cap mushrooms had made the others ill. Blinking fast as she spoke, she said she still believed mushrooms from an Asian grocer were responsible but by now “knew it wasn’t the only possibility”.

The accused said she factory reset her phone on August 3 fearing police would find a Google account where she had stored photographs of mushrooms on her dehydrator.

“I just panicked and did not want them to see them – the detectives,” Erin told the court.

When she returned home after being interviewed, she said, she was curious to see if the police had been “silly enough” to leave the seized phone connected to the internet, so she hit factory reset, again.

“It was really stupid,” she said.

The trial continues.

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