Erin Patterson murder trial day 26 as it happened: Mushroom cook says fear of estranged husband’s actions led to phone resets; details dumping food dehydrator at local tip after fatal lunch

• Erin Patterson said she did a factory reset of her phone on August, 2, 2023, to remove her son’s information from it so she could add her own information.
• Patterson said she took her dehydrator to the tip on August 2 because “I was scared that they would blame me for it, for making everyone sick”.
• A doctor suggested the Patterson children come into the hospital for testing as they had eaten some of the lunch leftovers, but Patterson said she didn’t want to unless it was strictly necessary. The children eventually did go into the hospital.
• Patterson recalled visiting urgent care at Leongatha Hospital where she was greeted by a doctor who said they’d been expecting her and that she may have been exposed to death cap mushrooms.
• On the evening of the lunch, Patterson remembers feeling “really nauseous” and between 10pm and midnight began to suffer diarrhoea and strong abdominal cramping.
• Patterson said she vomited straight after the lunch, after having eaten about two-thirds of an orange cake baked by Gail Patterson and brought to the lunch as dessert.
• “I did lie to them,” Patterson admitted when she told her lunch guests that she may need some treatment for ovarian cancer that had been diagnosed “a year or two earlier”.
• Patterson said she “felt a bit hurt … a bit stressed” after receiving a message from her estranged husband Simon, advising that he wouldn’t attend the lunch at her home.
• A tearful Erin Patterson admitted she lied to her in-laws about her medical appointments because “I didn’t want their care for me to stop”.
• Patterson said at one stage she became aware of poisonous mushrooms growing in Gippsland, including some growing on her property that were probably toxic to dogs, so she photographed them.

• Erin Patterson said she did a factory reset of her phone on August, 2, 2023, to remove her son’s information from it so she could add her own information.
• Patterson said she took her dehydrator to the tip on August 2 because “I was scared that they would blame me for it, for making everyone sick”.
• A doctor suggested the Patterson children come into the hospital for testing as they had eaten some of the lunch leftovers, but Patterson said she didn’t want to unless it was strictly necessary. The children eventually did go into the hospital.
• Patterson recalled visiting urgent care at Leongatha Hospital where she was greeted by a doctor who said they’d been expecting her and that she may have been exposed to death cap mushrooms.
• On the evening of the lunch, Patterson remembers feeling “really nauseous” and between 10pm and midnight began to suffer diarrhoea and strong abdominal cramping.
• Patterson said she vomited straight after the lunch, after having eaten about two-thirds of an orange cake baked by Gail Patterson and brought to the lunch as dessert.
• “I did lie to them,” Patterson admitted when she told her lunch guests that she may need some treatment for ovarian cancer that had been diagnosed “a year or two earlier”.
• Patterson said she “felt a bit hurt … a bit stressed” after receiving a message from her estranged husband Simon, advising that he wouldn’t attend the lunch at her home.
• A tearful Erin Patterson admitted she lied to her in-laws about her medical appointments because “I didn’t want their care for me to stop”.
• Patterson said at one stage she became aware of poisonous mushrooms growing in Gippsland, including some growing on her property that were probably toxic to dogs, so she photographed them.

The court is adjourned and today’s hearing comes to an end.

Here are some of the photographs that award-winning photographer Jason South, who is in Morwell to cover the case, took today outside court.

Ian Wilkinson outside court.Credit: Jason South

Outside the Latrobe Valley Law Courts in Morwell. Credit: Jason South

Media at the hearing outside the Latrobe Valley Law Courts in Morwell.Credit: Jason South

Members of the public line up outside the court in the early hours of the morning.Credit: Jason South

Erin Patterson, on trial for murder, has spent hours in the witness box today.

Just then, she broke down in tears, explaining how close her children were to their grandparents, Don and Gail Patterson.

Don and Gail Patterson.

Defence barrister Colin Mandy, SC, resumed his questioning after a brief afternoon break by asking his client about a series of text messages she exchanged with family members.

Mandy asked Patterson about a message she had sent in a group chat with Don and Gail which Simon described as “extremely aggressive” during his evidence earlier in the trial.

Patterson said she could not recall the exact words in the messages, but remembered Simon was upset with her about their son being exhausted and suggested it was due to her poor parenting.

Mandy has also asked Patterson about messages she exchanged with her in-laws in 2022, where they discussed topics ranging from her back issues to tutoring sessions with her son during the pandemic.

Patterson said her children had a close relationship with their grandparents. She said her son had a particularly close relationship with Don, who continued to give him Jitsi [a video-conferencing platform] tutoring lessons beyond the COVID-19 pandemic.

“They were two minds separated by 50 years. [My son] just loved him,” she said, biting her lip.

Erin Patterson, on trial for murder, has spent a full day in the witness box providing evidence about the lunch, the night after the lunch and the days following the meal.

Now her lawyer, Colin Mandy, SC, is directing her to an image police took during a search of her house showing a black case sitting on a windowsill.

When asked by Mandy what the case was, she identified it as phone A.

Detective Leading Senior Constable Stephen Eppingstall.Credit: Jason South

Patterson said that when police asked for her phone, she gave them phone B, which had a SIM card that ended with the number 835.

“I remember coming home and being a bit confused because they’ve given me the property seizure record which showed two Samsung [phones] had been taken, which I thought there must be the Nokia left behind,” she said.

Patterson said that when she got home she found that device in a basket, and then she saw phone A sitting on a windowsill.

“I thought if there’s two Samsung in the seizure records, and this is here, what’s the other Samsung?” she told the jury.

Patterson said she took the SIM card out of phone A and put it in the Nokia sometime around midnight.

“It baffled me why [the Nokia] was still in my house,” she said.

On August 5, 2023, Erin Patterson said she had a discussion with a child protection worker about changing her phone number.

Patterson said she told her she was going to change her number because she was becoming concerned about Simon’s behaviour and allegations.

“I was concerned about my security, so I wanted him to not be able to contact me any more,” she said.

Patterson said she had been updating the contact information for all her accounts from her old phone number to her new phone number.

Erin and Simon Patterson.

“My phone was damaged. The screen was becoming less responsive and harder to read, so I decided to ... use an undamaged phone,” she said.

Patterson said she had been setting up applications for her accounts on the new phone.

Erin Patterson’s defence lawyer Colin Mandy, SC, points to a record showing a series of factory resets on phone B, starting in February 2023.

Patterson said she was responsible for the last three factory resets, while her son had been responsible for the first. “That had been my phone since the start of the year but in February [my son] damaged his own phone and so he needed a new phone, so I bought a new [Samsung] A23 and gave him the one I’d been using, which was this phone,” she said.

Patterson said her son had factory reset the phone so he could set it up as his.

She said she did a factory reset on August, 2, 2023, to get her son’s information off the phone so she could add her own information. She said her son had used that phone until May, when he went on school camp and accidentally dropped it in mud. She noticed that the charging port had become a bit muddy, so she left the phone near a charging station she had set up in an ottoman in her loungeroom.

Patterson said that she reset the phone again on August 5, 2023, the day police searched her Leongatha home.

“I had put all my apps on it, including my Google account, including my Google Photos, and I knew that there were photos in there of mushrooms and the dehydrator. I just panicked and I didn’t want [the detectives] to see them,” she said.

Patterson said that on August 6, 2023, after the search of her house and interview with the police, she decided to log onto her Google account to see if she could see where her devices were.

She said she then wondered whether they had been “silly enough” to leave the devices connected to the internet, and she “hit factory reset”. “It was really stupid,” she said.

Erin Patterson’s defence lawyer, Colin Mandy, SC, is now directing his client to more text messages between her and Sally Ann Atkinson, from the Department of Health, where she was asked several questions about the meal, including when she had bought the ingredients from the supermarket.

At that stage, Patterson said, she did not believe that any of the ingredients she had purchased from the supermarket had made anyone unwell, but she did not tell Atkinson this.

Defence counsel Colin Mandy, SC.Credit: Justin McManus

“I was scared,” she said.

Patterson said she still thought it was a possibility that the mushrooms she had bought in the Asian grocery store could be to blame.

“But I knew it wasn’t the only possibility,” she said.

Following the conversation about the dehydrator and the hospital, Erin Patterson said she started to feel scared and to feel responsible.

The following day, August 2, 2023, Patterson said she drove the children to school and returned home.

From left: Don Patterson, Gail Patterson and Heather Wilkinson died after ingesting poisonous mushrooms. Ian Wilkinson (right) survived after spending months in hospital.

Afterwards, she took the dehydrator to the tip because she feared where the conversation with government workers might go when it came to the meal and the dehydrator. “I was scared that they would blame me for it, for making everyone sick,” she said. “And I was scared they’d remove the children.”

Patterson said she did not tell anyone that she had realised death cap mushrooms may have been served at the meal.

“I thought there might be evidence of that [in the dehydrator]. Evidence of any foraged mushrooms in there,” she said.

Slowing down her responses, Erin Patterson is telling the jury about a conversation with her estranged husband at the hospital on August 1, 2023.

That afternoon, she said she had a conversation with Simon Patterson and their children about why they were at the hospital, and some of their relatives were unwell.

“I remember explaining how there was a concern that the lunch I had served on Saturday might have made people unwell,” she said.

Erin Patterson and Simon Patterson.Credit: Jason South

Patterson said she remembered her daughter asking her why they were at the hospital if they hadn’t been at the lunch, and she explained it was because they had eaten the leftovers, but she had scraped the mushrooms off.

Patterson said that opened up a conversation about mushrooms, and they spoke about how their daughter had preferred eating muffins with mushrooms in them when Patterson had made a blind taste test.

“I don’t remember if it was Simon or I that initiated it, but there was a conversation about how I had used a dehydrator to do that and he said to me: ‘Is that how you poisoned my parents, using that dehydrator?’

“I said: ‘Of course not’,” she said.

That comment, which occurred after the children left the room, caused her to do “a lot of thinking about a lot of things”.

“It got me thinking about all the times I had used it [the dehydrator],” she said.

Patterson said the conversation got her thinking about whether foraged mushrooms could have gone into the container with the Asian mushrooms. “Simon seemed to be of the mind that maybe this was intentional. I was really scared,” she said.

On Tuesday, August 1, 2023, Erin Patterson woke up at Monash Medical Centre feeling, she says, a fair bit better. Her children were in the pediatric wing, where their father, Simon Patterson, had spent the night with them.

The jury heard Patterson got a phone call from Department of Health manager Sally Ann Atkinson about 8.30am that morning, where she spoke about the ingredients used in the lunch and the meal.

“I told her what I had told Leongatha [Hospital]: that the majority of the ingredients came from Woolworths and that there were dried mushrooms from an Asian grocer,” she said.

She told Atkinson she could not remember the exact location of the Asian grocer, but gave some possible suburbs from which the dried mushrooms could have come.

The jury has been shown a series of text messages between Atkinson and Patterson following that initial call.

Patterson said that at the time, she and Simon were looking after the children and in meetings at the hospital.

In one of the messages to Atkinson, Patterson said she would get information to her as soon as possible, but she was busy trying to look after the children and dealing with the meetings.