Erin Patterson has spoken in court, nearly two years after the death cap mushrooms lunch

Erin Trudi Patterson was sitting in the witness box, gently swivelling her chair when her silk Colin Mandy confirmed to the court his client would be giving evidence in the mushrooms murder trial.

Erin Patterson. Picture: AAP

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Erin Trudi Patterson was sitting in the witness box, gently swivelling her chair when her silk Colin Mandy confirmed to the court his client would be giving evidence in the mushrooms murder trial.

“I call Erin Patterson,’’ he said.

For more than five weeks Patterson, 50, of Leongatha in South Gippsland, has been a deeply interested observer of the proceedings from the back of the court as witnesses dissected her life and the death cap mushrooms that were served in the lunch that killed three elderly people at her house nearly two years ago.

The jury got to see Patterson unplugged on Monday, in a way few but perhaps her closest confidantes, relatives and work colleagues might have.

An outwardly confident mother of two who at one point put her hand up to Mandy like a veteran traffic cop, before correcting a minor fact of hers uttered in an ­answer. She spoke with clarity and was considered and careful when asked questions on topics ranging from her marriage, parents, child birth and her travels.

With long brown hair pushed forward over a well-worn paisley shirt, Patterson laid out the landscape of her life, from the start with former husband Simon to the slow decay of their relationship.

Her evidence will be an important aspect of the alleged triple murder case to be decided by a jury in a court 60km northwest of her home town of Leongatha.

Patterson also revealed herself to the jury as a midlife woman who had, conversely, suffered self-esteem issues while battling weight gain.

“I’d been fighting a never-ending battle of low self-esteem most of my adult life, and the further inroads I made into being middle aged, the less I felt good about myself, I suppose,’’ she confided to the jury. “Put on more weight. Could handle exercise less.”

Shortly before Patterson was quizzed by Mandy, the police informant in the case, Leading Detective Stephen Eppingstall, finished evidence after five days (off and on) in the stand, having detailed the prosecution story from the beginning to the end.

A court sketch of Erin Patterson on Monday. Picture: NewsWire / Anita Lester

Now, the jury discovered, it was Patterson’s chance to tell it from her perspective, under questioning from Mandy and then later in the week the defence.

Mandy had roughly 45 minutes left in the late afternoon to begin the questioning that would lay out Patterson’s narrative as Pastor Ian Wilkinson and other family members of the three dead sat in the public area.

“I was what you would probably call a fundamentalist atheist,’’ Patterson told the jury when asked about her early relationship with her estranged husband Simon. “He was a Christian. Like, I was really very atheist.

“We had a lot of conversations about life, religion, politics and a lot about religion, and I was trying to convert him to being an atheist, but things happened in reverse and I became a Christian.”

After meeting in 2004, she had a road-to-Damascus conversion that left her “really excited” about religion, confirmed as it was when she attended the Korumburra Baptist Church where the jury was told a banner declaring faith, hope and love had impressed her.

“I had what can be described as a spiritual experience,’’ she said.

She was the atheist RSPCA rep at the City of Monash and Simon a committed Christian and traffic engineer.

It would be 2007 before the pair married in the Anglican Church in Korumburra, 120km southeast of Melbourne.

“We wanted Ian (Wilkinson, one of her alleged victims) and Heather (now dead) to be able to come and relax as guests,’’ she said.

And her own parents? “In Russia, on a train,’’ she explained. In the end, she said, she had begun to have concerns that Simon was not wanting her to be too involved with his family and that they had a communications issue. “We just couldn’t communicate well when we disagreed about something,’’ she said.

Patterson was asked about how her life was in July 2023, the month that she served the meal to her parents-in-law Don and Gail Patterson, both 70, and Simon’s uncle and aunt, Ian Wilkinson, 71, and Heather Wilkinson, 66.

She told the jury how she had loved her new house in Leongatha, where the lunch was served, and painted a picture of domestic harmony, with her and her two children living there pretty much full-time.

“I saw it as the final house,’’ she said. She added that she wanted the children to grow up there and return when they were older.

“And I’d grow old there. I really liked living in the house,” she said.

But, she told the jury, by the middle of 2023, while being financially comfortable and able to contemplate studying for a nursing degree, she had weight-related self-esteem issues.

“I was planning to have weight-loss surgery,’’ she said.

Patterson told the jury that she had had a difficult birth with her first child, a son now aged 16, requiring forceps and an emergency caesarean.

The child had spent time in neonatal intensive care but soon afterwards they went on an outback adventure, along the Gibb River Road in Western Australia and then “down the guts” on the Tanami to Alice Springs, before she decided to fly back to Perth and leave Simon and her son to make their way back from Queensland.

“I’d had a gut full,’’ she said.

But when their son was born in 2009, she had greatly appreciated the support of the now dead Gail Patterson, who had travelled to WA with Don to help the new parents.

“I remember being really relieved that Gail was there because I felt really out of my depth,” she said. “I had no idea what to do with a baby and I was not confident and she was really supportive, and gentle and patient with me.”

Patterson will give more evidence today, guaranteeing interest in a case that has attracted global attention to two small rural towns.