Erin Patterson trial: ‘Is that what you used to poison my parents?’ asked estranged husband Simon
A frantic Erin Patterson dumped her dehydrator and wiped data from her phone out of fear investigators would blame her for baking a poisonous beef Wellington and strip her children from her care, a court has heard.
A frantic Erin Patterson dumped her dehydrator and wiped data from her phone out of fear investigators would blame her for baking a poisonous beef Wellington and strip her children from her care, a court has heard.
Ms Patterson on Wednesday detailed allegations her estranged husband, Simon Patterson, levelled at her after the lunch, asking her: “Is that what you used to poison my parents? Using the dehydrator?”
Giving evidence in her own murder trial, Ms Patterson said she made herself sick after eating the beef Wellington meal and two-thirds of a cake, having long-suffered from binge eating and low self-esteem. She told the court she lied to her lunch guests about having ovarian cancer in order to seek their help when undergoing weight-loss surgery she was “ashamed” of.
Ms Patterson is standing trial for the murder of Simon’s parents, Don and Gail Patterson, and his aunt, Heather Wilkinson, after allegedly deliberately feeding them a beef Wellington laced with death cap mushrooms on July 29, 2023. She has also been charged with the attempted murder of Heather’s husband, Ian Wilkinson, who ate the meal but survived after a lengthy period in hospital. Ms Patterson has pleaded not guilty.
Returning to the witness box for the third day, Ms Patterson gave her first public account of the fatal meal. On the morning of the lunch, she said, she “fried up garlic and chopped shallots” before emptying the contents of two tubs of mushrooms into her Thermomix machine. She said the meal tasted a “little bland” so she added mushrooms she bought from an Asian grocer in Melbourne months earlier and had stored in the pantry in a Tupperware container.
Asked what she thought was in the Tupperware, she said: “At that time I believed it was just the mushrooms I had bought in Melbourne.” But she added: “Now I think that there was a possibility that there were foraged ones in there as well.”
Ms Patterson said she made a few deviations to the RecipeTin Eats method she followed, and did not include prosciutto because “Don doesn’t eat pork”. She also said she made individual servings of beef Wellington, because she “couldn’t find the big log (of meat) that the recipe called for”.
Ms Patterson recalled the four guests arriving at her home about 12.30pm. Heather Wilkinson had brought a fruit platter and Gail Patterson an orange cake. Ms Patterson’s two children, she said, had gone to the movies with a friend.
While Don Patterson and Ian Wilkinson stood “over near the bookshelves” talking, Ms Patterson said she was mashing potatoes and Gail Patterson and went to “look in my pantry”. “I was proud of the pantry but it was probably a little bit messy,” Ms Patterson said. “I think I had hidden my garbage around there or something. It was fine for them to go in.”
Asked what plates she used to serve the meal, Ms Patterson said: “Just the dinner plates I had.” She said she did not own any grey plates. Mr Wilkinson previously told the court Ms Patterson appeared reluctant to allow her guests to look in her pantry, and said he remembered the lunch guests eating off large grey plates while Ms Patterson ate off a smaller, tan-coloured one.
Ms Patterson recalled Ian and Heather Wilkinson ate their individual beef Wellingtons, Gail Patterson ate half her meal, and Don Patterson ate his and the remainder of Gail’s. She said she ate about a quarter or a third of her beef Wellington.
The conversation at the meal had centred on politics, current affairs and “what the kids were doing”, Ms Patterson told the court, but it eventually turned to Don Patterson’s brother’s throat cancer battle. Ms Patterson told the court she then lied when telling her guests she was going to require treatment for ovarian cancer. Instead, she had planned to get gastric bypass surgery, she said.
“I’m not proud of this but I led them to believe that I might be needing some treatment in regards to that in the next few weeks or months,” Ms Patterson said, crying.
Ms Patterson said she was “really embarrassed” to get the gastric bypass surgery. “I was ashamed of the fact that I didn’t have control over my body or what I ate,” she said.
After her guests left, Ms Patterson said she “had a piece of cake and then another piece of cake and then another” until it was all gone.
“I felt sick. I felt over-full, so I went to the toilets and brought it back up again,” she told the court.
The evidence followed Ms Patterson’s earlier testimony that she had long struggled privately with binge eating, and would sometimes make herself vomit.
Ms Patterson told the court on Wednesday she started to feel ill later that evening, and started having diarrhoea every 20 minutes or so throughout the night. She woke up the following day about 10am and drank herbal tea. “I still had nausea, I still had diarrhoea, it wasn’t as bad as the early hours of the morning but it was still quite regular,” she said,
She said the family chose not to go to church that morning. Later in the day, she took her son to his flying lesson, an hour away from her home. On the way, she pulled over and “went off into the bush and went to the toilet”, she said.
Ms Patterson presented to Leongatha Hospital on the morning of July 31, 2023. She said she discharged herself against the advice of doctors because she had been told she needed to be transferred to Melbourne for treatment, which made her feel “anxious and stressed and confused”.
Upon returning about 9.48am, she told the doctors she had fed her children the leftover beef Wellington the day after the lunch.
She was hesitant to let anyone else collect her children from school and take them to the hospital, because “I was their mother and they were my children and I wanted to be responsible for them”. But she eventually allowed their father to pick them up, and she at the children were treated at the Monash Medical Centre.
On August 1, 2023, while in hospital, she said the family discussed “taste tests” she had performed with the children using her dehydrator, in which she would hide powdered mushrooms in muffins to see if they could tell the mushrooms were in there. When the children left the room to go to the vending machine, Ms Patterson said Simon asked her: “Is that how you poisoned my parents? Using that dehydrator?”
She said his comment “caused me to reflect a lot on what might have happened”. “It got me thinking about all the times that I’d used it and I … had dried foraged mushrooms in it weeks earlier, and I was starting to think, ‘what if they’d gone in the container with the Chinese mushrooms?’” she said.
Ms Patterson said she started to feel “scared” and “responsible”. The following day, she dumped the dehydrator in the Koonawarra tip “Child Protection were coming to my house that afternoon and I was scared of the conversation that might flow about the meal and the dehydrator and I was scared that they would blame me for it,” she told the court.
She added: “I was scared they’d remove the children.”
Ms Patterson said she did not tell anyone she had come to the realisation foraged mushrooms might have been in the meal.
She said she wiped data from her phone in the hopes of erasing images of mushrooms in a dehydrator that detectives might see.
The court was shown a chart showing factory resets performed on a Samsung Galaxy A23 on February 12, August 2 and August 5, 2023. A remote factory reset was performed on August 6, 2023.
Ms Patterson said the February wipe had been conducted by her son who was setting it up for personal use.
She performed the August 2, 2023 reset, she said, when she took back the phone to use herself.
Asked about the August 5, 2023 reset, Ms Patterson said: “I knew there were photos on there of mushrooms in the dehydrator so I just panicked and didn’t want them to see them.“
Defence counsel Colin Mandy SC asked: “When you say them, who do you mean?”
She replied: “The detectives.”
Ms Patterson said she performed a remote factory reset on the device on August 6, 2023, after it had been seized by police.
“I thought ‘I wonder if they’ve been silly enough to leave it connected to the internet’ so I hit factory reset,” she said.
The trial continues.
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