As a barrister, there was one question I desperately wanted to ask Erin Patterson

There is a particular detail about the so-called “mushroom trial” in Gippsland that I can’t get out of my head. Police located and catalogued over 400 books in the home of the defendant, Erin Patterson. The forensic purpose of this analysis was revealed when prosecutor Nanette Rogers, SC, put to the defendant in cross-examination that not one of the books found in her home was devoted to the subject of mushrooms. The point was to demonstrate to the jury that Patterson’s purported interest in foraging for fungi was a recent invention, and no more than a feint.

I am a barrister, albeit not of the criminal variety, and I wanted to throw on my robes and be permitted a cameo in Gippsland. I had a question for Patterson. Among the hundreds of books located in her belongings, is there a copy of Shirley Jackson’s classic gothic novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle?

Credit: Matt Davidson

Jackson’s macabre tale, told from the perspective of Mary Katherine (Merricat), offers a number of eerie parallels with the beef Wellington meal served in Leongatha. Six years before the story starts, Merricat’s parents and younger brother have died of arsenic poisoning after sitting down to eat a meal prepared by her sister, Constance. Uncle Julian ingested poison, but survived, and lives with his nieces. Constance was charged with murder, but has been acquitted. Towards the end of the novel, Merricat confides: “I said aloud to Constance, ‘I am going to put death in all their food and watch them die’. Constance stirred, and the leaves rustled, ‘The way you did before?’ she asked. It had never been spoken of between us, not once in six years. ‘Yes,’ I said after a minute, ‘the way I did before’.”

No reason or motive for the murders is ever revealed. The reader is left to sit with the uncomfortable knowledge that Merricat has poisoned her family, but has not told us why.

Spotted among the regular attendees at Patterson’s trial were Melbourne authors Chloe Hooper, Sarah Krasnostein and Helen Garner. Hooper is the author of The Tall Man: Death and Life on Palm Island (2009), a powerful book about the death in custody of Cameron Doomadgee, and Garner’s books about trials and crimes, including This House of Grief: Story of a Murder Trial (2014) deserve their legendary status. Later, it was confirmed that the trio will soon release a book. No doubt it will be a poignant account of the deaths of Gail Patterson, Don Patterson and Heather Wilkinson and the trial of Erin Patterson. I cannot hope to emulate their writing, I have nothing more august to offer than this short piece: This House of Beef (Wellington).

Sebastian Stan, Taissa Farmiga (as Merricat) and Alexandra Daddario in the 2018 film adaptation of We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

But thinking about the family tragedy behind the mushroom trial has now caused me to dwell on a triumvirate of notorious cases of Victorian children murdered by their fathers that have intersected with my life: Darcey Freeman, the Farquharson boys, and Luke Batty.

My connection with the death of Luke Batty was direct and intimate. I was briefed to appear for his mother Rosie Batty in the 2015 inquest into the death of her son. The tragedy of Luke’s murder at the hands of his abusive father haunts me to this day. During the inquest, I experienced but a fraction of the intense media scrutiny that the legal teams have endured during the Patterson trial. And I know how destabilising it can be.

Each day of the inquest there was a phalanx of cameras waiting for us outside the Coroners Court. I was pregnant with my daughter who is now 10 years old. My swelling belly, proof of the life within, felt utterly obscene in light of the tragedy that we were there to attempt to make sense of. By the time of the last sittings in December 2014, I was nearly six months pregnant. I was in the public bathrooms often – attending to the frequent urgent needs of a heavily pregnant woman aged 43. In those small, too close stalls, I could hear women milling near the wash basins tsk-tsking and tutt-tutting over the evidence that had been adduced before the break. I overheard some of them confide in one another that they had nothing to do with either the proceedings or the Batty family, but had taken leave to watch the inquest as a form of spectacle. I remember feeling overcome in the tiny bathroom and needing to move deftly to dodge the outstretched hands of matronly types attempting to touch my growing belly – as if the baby inside me were as much available for public consumption and commentary as the child whose awful death we were all there to bear witness to.

My connection with the death of little Darcey Freeman is less direct, but more shocking and strange. I saw Arthur Phillip Freeman within minutes after he had stopped his car on the West Gate Bridge and thrown his tiny daughter over the edge. By coincidence, on January 29, 2009, the stinking hot day which was to be Darcey’s first day of school, I was briefed to appear in a mediation in the Federal Court building. I arrived in the foyer just after Freeman did. As I put my bag through the security screening, he was standing leaning against the glass walls that line the entrance. I thought it odd that anyone would lean against those walls, as their glass was radiating an intense awful heat during that heatwave, which would culminate days later in the Black Saturday bushfires. Two other striking details caught my eye: the first was that he was sobbing in an animalistic way. There were great gobs of snot running down his face; he was red-faced, inconsolable. What also caught my eye was one child sitting slumped at his feet, and another was barefoot, walking in circles nearby and wearing only a nappy. I made the same initial mistake as the court staff that day. We all leapt to the conclusion that he was a stressed Family Court litigant, crying because he was late for a hearing, and nervous about a custody or access application concerning the two boys with him.

Of course, I was wrong in my assumption. In fact, Freeman had driven into the city after performing his deadly act on the West Gate Bridge, parked his car nearby and rushed into the building with his sons. He was sobbing uncontrollably because he had just perpetrated the most heinous act of murder.

It was only the next day, when I saw his photo across the front page of the newspaper that I knew what I had really seen. I had been standing next to a murderer in the court foyer; casting sympathetic glances at him, imagining his stress related to being a litigant in Family Court proceedings.

And so I learnt that sometimes when you see something (a man crying in a court foyer, accompanied by two tired and hot children), you can later describe accurately exactly what you have seen. But you have no means of accessing the true meaning of what you have seen. The things you remember did happen, but tell you nothing at all about what it actually means for a man to be standing sobbing in the lobby of the Family Court. And so your encounter with him is therefore rendered squalidly meaningless and wrong.

I have no direct connection with the murder of the Farquharson boys. But if you are a lawyer in Melbourne, then you have surely done both of these things: you have waited in line to sit on a milk crate and drink a coffee at Patricia’s cafe in the dingy laneway that runs off to the side of the Supreme Court and you have (or ought to have) read This House of Grief, Garner’s book about the trial of Robert Farquharson. In 2005, he was driving his three young sons (aged 10, seven and two) home to their mother when the car veered off the road, crashed through a fence, and plummeted into a dam. The boys drowned.

This House of Grief contains Garner’s observations of those involved in the trial, recounted in the context of evocative descriptions of the physical and psychological architecture of the Supreme Court and the awful theatre of filicide.

Garner’s book also holds another (guilty) pleasure for members of the Victorian Bar: portraits of counsel and the way their work is received by judges and juries. I have always loved her description of the prosecutor, as: “a lean, contained-looking man, with a clipped grey beard and a mouth that cut across his face on a severe slant, like that of someone who spent his days listening to bullshit”. Garner is at her most brutal when describing the impact of long-winded cross-examination on the jury, referring to their mouths going “square with the effort to control their gaping yawns”. For barristers, reading Garner’s assessment of counsel’s style is equal parts guilty pleasure and an exercise in roiling anxiety: do I commit the sin of prolix cross-examination? Does my advocacy bore the audience rigid?

There is much to horrify and fascinate in these classics of the legal writing genre. No doubt the same will be the case in the story Hooper, Krasnostein and Garner will tell about a deadly beef Wellington served in rural Victoria. They will strive to make sense of the perplexing details about purchases of cuts of meat from a local supermarket, episodes of explosive diarrhoea and mismatched plates at the lunch table. And they might ask rhetorically who among us has not prepared a meal to serve to relatives who (we feel) do not appreciate us as they ought? Who among us has not served up the dish of resentment cooked three ways?

At the heart of the stories told by Hooper and Garner are tragic deaths, and the pain and sorrow of those who are left behind to grieve. Both of these authors also resist the urge to wrap up every scrap of evidence in a tidy bow and label it true or untrue. Towards the end of This House of Grief, Garner writes: “What was the truth? Whatever it was, it seemed to reside in some far-off, shadowy realm of anguish, beyond the reach of words and resistant to the striving of intellect.”

In the wake of the trial in Gippsland, devoted and more casual observers alike must sit with the unease of not knowing everything. The evidence presented in a courtroom serves the forensic purposes of prosecution and defence and must only be presented via the prism of the rules of evidence that govern criminal trials. There is no objective truth, only the evidence, which either does or does not satisfy the jury beyond reasonable doubt. Like Jackson’s protagonist Merricat, there is no need to know a motive; there is no need to understand why.

Rachel Doyle, SC, is a Melbourne barrister.

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