Cold, snarky, cynical, a liar: how Erin Patterson revealed herself
There’s a reason accused people don’t usually give evidence. It’s a huge risk: a threefold gamble that the accused is smarter than the crown prosecutor, capable of charming a jury, and telling the truth.
There’s a reason accused people don’t usually give evidence.
It’s a massive risk to take – a threefold gamble that the accused is smarter than the crown prosecutor, capable of charming a jury, and telling the truth.
In Erin Patterson’s case, none of those was true.
When Colin Mandy SC was directly asked by the judge on May 28: “You don’t have to answer this question if you don’t want to, but is your client giving evidence?” Mandy said: “I don’t want to answer that question, your Honour.”
That exchange, of course, was in the absence of the jury, who must have been exhausted by the constant requests for them to leave the courtroom so the lawyers could hash something out.
Mandy did call Patterson to give evidence – maybe at her insistence, maybe out of a rush of confidence that, until that point, things had been going so well for the defence.
Mandy should have quit while he was ahead.
Catastrophe
Patterson’s time in the witness box was a catastrophe.
As soon as she opened her mouth, her deficiencies as a witness became clear.
She began introducing ideas and theories the jury had never heard before; not in the police record of interview, not in Mandy’s brief opening statement, not in any of her statements to witnesses who’d previously given evidence, such as her online friends, her husband or the various medical professionals she spoke to at the hospital.
The crown’s case was that Erin Patterson faked a cancer scare to lure her husband and his elderly relatives to her house, in the absence of the children, for that lunch.
So how would Patterson explain this to the jury?
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Cold, snarky, cynical, a liar: how Erin Patterson revealed herself
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In pre-lunch text messages to Gail Patterson the jury had already been shown, Erin Patterson lied to her mother-in-law that she was having a needle biopsy, then an MRI.
In her evidence, Patterson also had to explain why the only surviving guest, Ian Wilkinson, clearly recalled her telling the group she believed she had ovarian cancer, and then her joining the group in a post-lunch prayer, led by Ian, for her safe recovery.
Patterson’s story, presented to the jury over three days of friendly evidence-in-chief elicited by Mandy, went like this: her real reason for holding the lunch was that she wanted help from the extended family with school pick-ups and drop-offs during a planned medical procedure.
Not for cancer, mind, but for gastric band surgery – something she’d resolved to do in convenient secrecy, and was conveniently too ashamed to tell anyone the truth about.
She said she allowed the guests to think there was a possibility of ovarian cancer because she had so deeply valued the loving concern Don and Gail had previously shown for her health.
Patterson had booked a pre-surgery assessment for the gastric band, she told the jury, for September.
Mandy didn’t ask why in July she would need to ask anyone for help with the children at least two months into the future, for a type of minimally invasive laparoscopic surgery that typically requires a single day’s stay in hospital.
And then, what Patterson clearly thought was the ace: she was suffering from bulimia, and that’s why she had not suffered the ill-effects of death cap mushroom poisoning.
Patterson said, after her lunch guests went home, she polished off two-thirds of an orange cake Gail Patterson had baked.
Then she threw up – and although the court was mercifully spared a description of exactly what was in the toilet bowl, Patterson’s implication was that she had expelled poisoned beef Wellington along with the ex-cake.
Before entering the witness box, Patterson had sat through the entire trial, watching from the dock.
She had observed the jovial, collegial atmosphere that emerges in long trials: the judge, lawyers and even some witnesses naturally become familiar with one another, and the odd laugh emerges.
When detective senior constable Stephen Eppingstall was in the witness box, he charmed the jury with apparent ease.
They chuckled at his self-deprecating asides, like when he said his boss didn’t like him spending too much money.
Patterson clearly thought she, too, could get the odd laugh out of the jury.
She described, on the evening before the fatal lunch, trying to talk to her son, and having to lift one headphone can off his ear to tell him something.
The jury didn’t laugh.
She mentioned a building professional looking at the plans she’d drawn up for her dream home, and telling her they were hopeless.
Not a chuckle.
Similarly, Patterson’s few moments of breathy tearfulness and distress seemed to fall flat.
Not once did Justice Christopher Beale offer her a break, as judges often do when witnesses become distressed.
And not once did she let out a torrent of unfiltered distress, along the lines one might expect from someone deep in guilt-laden grief: “I cannot believe this has happened. I haven’t slept a full night since July 2023. I will never recover from my terrible mistake.”
Patterson kept her composure. Even when her voice quavered, she was fully in control.
It’s easy to seem reasonable and friendly in examination-in-chief.
You’d have to be a pretty terrible witness to get into a fight with your own barrister.
But Patterson then tried to foot it with the senior crown prosecutor, Dr Nanette Rogers SC, in cross-examination.
Cross-examination, as well as an opportunity to elicit evidence, is also a chance for the barrister to try to extract revelatory behaviour from the witness: an angry snap, a tantrum, tears.
Complete calm
Patterson stayed completely calm.
On June 10, under cross-examination, she continued calmly insisting she could not remember ever visiting the iNaturalist website, despite searches on that site for death cap mushrooms on her computer.
Rogers asked: “Who lived in your house on 28 May 2022?”
“Myself and my two children,” Patterson replied.
Rogers: “Are you suggesting it was (your son)?”
Patterson: “I’m not suggesting anything.”
Rogers: “Are you suggesting it was (your daughter?)”
Patterson: “I’m not suggesting anything.”
By not giving anything, Patterson gave Rogers exactly what she needed: the same flat, calm demeanour she exhibited after poisoning her family.
Patterson’s defence case was that she panicked after accidentally lacing the food with death caps.
But in the witness box, she showed she wasn’t a panicker at all.
She was testy and snippy – not the demeanour one might expect from a woman who had lost three dearly beloved relatives and potentially endangered the lives of herself and her children, too.
She argued the fine detail of Rogers’s questions, like this exchange on Friday, June 6 when Rogers was asking Patterson about searches about death cap mushrooms on the website iNaturalist, found on Patterson’s computer.
Patterson – who had a remarkable recall for detail, including the precise wording of conversations she’d had years previously and evidence given weeks earlier – said she had no recollection of making the searches, although she agreed with Rogers they appeared on her computer.
Rogers: “I suggest to you that this December 2024 world map looked fairly similar to the one you looked at in May 2022, agree or disagree?”
Patterson: “I can’t comment on that.”
Rogers: “Why is it that you can’t comment?”
Patterson: “Because I don’t remember this activity, and if I don’t remember the activity I can’t remember what each website looked like three years ago.”
Patterson was behaving more like another barrister than a witness.
Patterson: “Can I just make one comment? You asked me earlier if – you suggested to me or put to me that this was not the first time that I’d done this, but it looks like the computer record says it was the first time, so … ?”
Rogers: “No, I didn’t suggest it to you, I asked you if it was the first time or had you done it previously.”
Patterson: Oh, OK. I thought it was stronger than that.”
A day earlier, on June 5, Patterson had interrupted Rogers’s questioning.
Rogers: “You knew that if you told police the truth, then you would be immediately suspected by police of being involved in a poisoning event?”
Patterson: “That’s probably true, yes.”
Rogers: “I suggest that you had been dehydrating death cap mushrooms on or after the date of the purchase of the dehydrator to put into the beef Wellingtons. You served your four guests at the lunch. Agree or disagree?”
Patterson: “Can you ask that again, please? But before you do, I’m sorry to interrupt, but the microphone … it covers your face and it makes it hard for me to fully – I, I lipread a little bit.”
Another new piece of information for the jury – who’d never heard, from Patterson or anyone else, that she was hearing-impaired.
This persnickety, argumentative Patterson was very different from the patient, devoted mother who’d presented herself in evidence-in-chief.
She was more like the Erin Patterson who emerged in the Facebook Messenger chats the jury had also seen; the one who wrote things like “This family, I swear to f..king God” about the Pattersons, and who used eye-rolling emojis to describe her reaction to Don Patterson’s suggestion she and Simon pray for God’s help in sorting out their problems.
Cold. Snarky. Too smart by half. Cynical. A liar.
That’s who the crown said Erin Patterson really was.
Turned out the jury thought so, too.
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