A pathetic graveyard of fiction: At last, the full Erin is outed

Erin Patterson was found guilty of three counts of murder on Monday.

3 min read

8:27PMJuly 07, 2025.

Updated 2:28PMJuly 08, 2025

Erin Trudi Patterson gave nothing away until it came to her mother-in-law Gail Patterson.

At 70, Gail was one of the four victims, all deeply appreciated people of the small town of Korumburra in country Victoria, where their lives had revolved around religion and education.

You had to be sitting close to see it, but Patterson’s throat moved ever so slightly, almost as if she was about to gulp, when Gail’s name was raised.

But not even the guilt of killing a kind old soul like her children’s grandmother was enough to make her break out in proper, heaving – humane even – emotion.

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Remember, there were often times in court when Patterson cried or tears welled as she went through her evidence or listened to the words of others.

No, what the court got on Monday was the full Erin.

Cold, mean and vicious.

The verdicts came relatively quickly. Guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty. All in less than 10 minutes.

Patterson’s eyes flickered at times as they often did when she was in the witness stand for those eight, fraudulent days when lies were the centre of the legal battle.

The flickering was nerves but nothing else.

Patterson had lied so much that it was hard to determine fact from fiction.

Rubbish about ovarian cancer, deception about the use of her phones, lies about foraging and the food dehydrator and the utter nonsense of wearing white pants on the day she claimed to be suffering from “explosive” diarrhoea, taking a toilet stop in the bushes en route to her son’s flying lesson.

At the centre of her life was a pathetic graveyard of fiction.

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She dispatched her victims in the cruellest way possible; full-bore organ failure, pain so intense the drugs struggled to keep up after the death cap mushrooms did their work.

After 46 days of the trial and nearly two years after the lunch, few in that room outside of the jury could have felt confident it would be like Wimbledon and that Patterson would go out in straight sets.

After the jury was slow to return, police and the prosecution had been walking the corridors in a state of deep concern.

Having been handed a case that was full of challenges for the defence, there was angst that the prosecution may have fumbled.

Instead, their private prayers or thoughts were answered and detectives could be seen hugging each other, deep in emotion, after the decision, more for the victims and their families than anything else.

After it ended, Jess O’Donnell, who has been Simon Patterson’s eyes and ears in the courtroom, did what Erin Patterson couldn’t, displaying two years of relief at what had unfolded.

None of the Patterson or Wilkinson families was at the court for the verdict, Ian Wilkinson having been there pretty much every day.

While the consensus had been that the prosecution had most things going for it, the defence team had done well to paint a picture of a woman of 50 who had panicked when she feared she would lose everything if she was blamed for the meal.

Patterson spoke to her legal team after the verdicts, then she was gone again down the lift and back in the Morwell police cells, before being dispatched to Dame Phyllis Frost women’s prison.

One of the quirks of this case has been that most Australians may not have known that Patterson had been in jail since November 2023.

Erin Patterson was in jail the whole time, but the Mushroom Trial jury couldn’t know

The media was restricted about what it could publish about Patterson, especially anything that showed she was in custody during the trial.

This had meant she was spirited from the court each day and through a tunnel to the adjacent police cells, where she had complained about the conditions at the start of the trial.

It was very clear that, as my father would have said, she was a piece of work, a woman with a reputation for being caustic.

She was also extremely well read, well versed in literature and a woman who had inherited millions of dollars.

Her three murder victims were all such different people; kind, easygoing and devoted to public service, and with little to no interest in money or the perception of wealth.

For her estranged husband, Simon, the jury verdicts were the ultimate Pyrrhic victory.

The woman whom he had wed in 2007 had killed his mother and father, had taken out his aunt as well, and caused his uncle Ian to suffer a terrible illness.

His children now had a mother in name only, and their grandparents were gone. The jury clearly saw through the emotion of the case and couldn’t climb over the slag heap of lies that Erin Patterson had built.

For nearly three months, the Supreme Court sat in country Victoria so Patterson could be judged by her peers.

In my very long experience with country people, they don’t like liars.

They like killers even less.

Erin Patterson killed and lied.

Now she is going away for a very, very long time.