Erin Patterson leaves little to the imagination
Day 26 of the mushrooms trial delivers more on Erin Patterson’s alleged eating disorder and the accused’s case of getting caught short.
The trial with too much information just got more.
Erin Trudi Patterson throwing up after allegedly gorging on two-thirds of an orange cake.
The same woman having a bout of diarrhoea in the bushes along a major highway before cleaning up with tissues, disposed of in a doggie bag at a petrol station.
There were also more tears as the accused spent another full day in the witness stand.
Some of the detail was enough to make a collective courtroom look the other away.
The mushrooms murder trial jury on Wednesday heard Patterson, 50, of Leongatha, detail how she binged on her mother-in-law Gail Patterson’s orange cake after guests from Korumburra had left mid-afternoon, having eating their meals of beef Wellington, mashed potatoes and green beans.
The court heard that Patterson had lied – points that Patterson accepted with, at times, emotion – and listened for the first time to the accused’s explanation of what happened in full at the lunch on July 29, 2023.
Patterson said that when the elderly lunch guests left she kept cleaning up her country house as her son and a friend played on a computer device. Then, she alleged, came the cake.
“I had a piece of cake, and then another piece of cake, and then another,” she said.
Patterson said she ate what was left of the cake.
Colin Mandy SC, for the defence, asked what happened after she had polished it off.
“I felt sick. I felt over-full, so I went to the toilets and brought it back up again,” she said.
Day three of Patterson giving evidence led to another round of Erin emotion, at one stage wiping her eyes with a tissue, another appearing to sob as she confronted the difficult task of telling her story.
By day’s end, when talking about her son and his late grandfather, more tears.
The lies included to her husband Simon’s elderly relatives when she said she had ovarian cancer.
Her real problem, Patterson told the court, was that she was planning to have an operation to deal with a long-standing weight issue.
She had a medical issue, she told the jury, just not the one that she had mentioned and that she was thinking she would need help in the future.
The fallout from her eating disorder was real, she said.
“I was really embarrassed,” Patterson told the court.
“I was ashamed of the fact I didn’t have control over my body or what I ate. I was ashamed of that. I felt embarrassed.” Patterson said those at the lunch gathering had discussed her alleged cancer diagnosis after talking about an illness faced by Don Patterson’s brother.
“I’m not proud of this but I led them to believe that I might be needing some treatment in regards to that (ovarian cancer) in the next few weeks or months,” she told the jury.
At this stage Patterson’s emotions took hold again during a day of evidence where she ranged from tired and puffy-eyed to deeply engaged, wearing a sage-green woollen jumper, black slacks and black sandals.
It was on the Sunday after the lunch that Patterson said she had taken a drug to treat gastroenteritis symptoms before setting off on an hour’s drive to her son’s flying lessons.
But she was caught short en route.
“I went off into the bush and went to the toilet,” she said. “I had diarrhoea.”
It’s tiring business giving evidence in court and when it came to discussing her son and his late grandfather, Don Patterson, Erin Patterson struggled again.
“They were like two minds separated by 50 years. (Her son) just loved him,’’ she said.
The court has heard that Patterson and her two children were sent to a Melbourne hospital after the lunch to check whether or not they had suffered any serious illness.
Patterson said she found herself alone with her estranged husband, Simon. After they discussed how she had used a dehydrator to do “taste tests” to see if their children could detect the taste of mushrooms if they were included in muffins, she told the jury that he said to her: “Is that how you poisoned my parents, using that dehydrator?’
She had replied that she hadn’t but the alleged exchange made her consider the impact of the lunch, with several severely ill people, and the meal having been prepared by her in her Leongatha house.
“It caused me to do a lot of thinking about a lot of things,” she said.
“I was starting to think, what if (death caps had) gone in the container with the Chinese mushrooms? Maybe that had happened.
“Simon seemed to be of the mind that maybe this was intentional and I just got really scared.”
The court has previously heard that Patterson dumped a dehydrator at a nearby tip. It was later discovered by police.
Patterson also said she wiped data from her phone in the days after the beef Wellington lunch to erase any images of mushrooms in a dehydrator that detectives might see.
The mushroom trial continues.
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