How Erin Patterson’s family money helped build a comfortable life
The proceeds of Erin Patterson’s first inheritance trickled slowly down the family tree, all the way from Alexandria in Egypt and the Nile River delta.
It took forever for the proceeds of Erin Trudi Patterson’s first inheritance to trickle slowly down the family tree, all the way from Alexandria in Egypt and the Nile River delta.
It was the death in 2006 of her Egyptian-born Adelaide grandmother Ora Scutter, who died at the Klemzig Nursing Home in the city’s northeast, that would trigger a complicated rollout of money that bolstered the family finances.
It has been widely reported that Patterson, who faces court on Monday charged with three murders by death cap mushrooms, is a woman of wealth.
In truth Patterson, 49, is more financially comfortable than wealthy.
Patterson became better off rather than conspicuously wealthy when her grandmother’s will was carved up among the family, the beneficiaries being a relatively large group of people that included Patterson.
Most of the money appears to have stayed in South Australia, although the will does not spell out the value of the assets.
Ora Scutter, who had lived in a wealthy Adelaide suburb, was elderly when she died, company records show, but there are conflicting dates on official records that have her as 102 and 85, perhaps a product of being born in Alexandria either before or after the confusion of the Great War.
More money flowed to Erin Patterson after the death about five years ago of her mother Heather, an academic, leaving her better off than a lot of people in the rural Victorian town of Leongatha, where she lived before being charged last year with three counts of murder and five of attempted murder.
Since then Patterson’s unoccupied white, two-storey home on a lonely dirt road on the edge of Leongatha has being cared for but has become a target for thieves.
Ora’s death gave, a family friend says, gave Hugh (Eitan) and Heather some financial assistance, having lived comfortable but not ostentatious lives in Melbourne’s sandbelt and the outer east, in homes that were not on their suburb’s golden mile.
According to family friends, the daughters were educated at select entry government schools and their lives were suburban normal, except for one thing.
“There were books everywhere,’’ a family friend recalls of the main home in Hampton.
“They were an educated family. A good family.’’
Heather Scutter ran the show, Hugh Scutter taking a relative back seat in the daily hum of family life in a neighbourhood that was friendly and filled with open houses, people eating relatively often at each other’s.
Guide dogs were trained in the Scutter house, a friend says, and Heather would clean the floors most days with Domestos; her husband would often ferry Erin across town towards her school.
“They were good people,’’ a neighbour says.
“Everyone knew Erin was smart. She was singled out as bright from a very young age.’’
In later years, the family moved to an unremarkable brick home in Glen Waverley in Melbourne’s east, to make it easier for Heather to travel to nearby Monash University, where she taught children’s literature. She had studied previously overseas.
Hugh, meanwhile, was a Second World War baby born in the baking hot South Australian Riverland town of Renmark. He died of cancer in Eden on the NSW far south coast about 2011. He was quieter than his wife but respected at the same time, chosen by his mother as one of the executers to unwind her estate when she died.
The chief beneficiary appears to have been a grandson, who was assigned the original family home in Adelaide’s inner east. The will does not state how much in dollar terms was to be handed out but friends say the recipients are comfortable but not necessarily highrolling through life.
There was a complicated series of private companies Ora left behind, some of which still exist and at least one of which appears to be property-related.
Hugh and Heather eventually bought a waterfront property at Eden that sold for less than $1m in 2019 after both parents had died.
Costly court case
Like everyone, money matters to Erin Patterson, who is due in the Latrobe Valley Magistrates Court via videolink on Monday for a procedural hearing, just days after Victorians were exposed to another possible mushroom death, this time at a wellness retreat near Ballarat.
Fifty-three-year-old Rachael Dixon, from Ringwood North, is believed to have consumed magic mushrooms in a drink, although the cause of death will be determined by the coroner.
Patterson has engaged a formidable but expensive legal team, led by Philip Dunn KC, a true legal legend who has successfully represented everyone from gangland figures to former West Australian premier Carmen Lawrence.
Her solicitor is Bill Doogue, another high-profile lawyer who recently helped former governor-general Peter Hollingworth navigate the latest developments over his handling of the child sex abuse issue while running the Anglican Church in Brisbane.
Depending on how long the process goes for, Patterson could face a legal bill of hundreds of thousands of dollars; she has sold a three-bedroom unit for about $1m, leaving her $1m home in Leongatha, which has been robbed and narrowly escaped a violent wind storm that dropped gum tree branches on and near her property.
The former air-traffic controller has a group of friends mainly outside the Leongatha area with common interests.
Patterson, who studied business-accounting at Monash University’s Caulfield Campus, served a beef Wellington meal last July 29 that allegedly killed her former in-laws Don and Gail Patterson, both 70, and her former aunt through marriage Heather Wilkinson, 66.
She is charged with murdering the three elderly people and also with attempting to murder her former husband, Simon Patterson, 49, several times and Heather Wilkinson’s husband Ian, 68. Ian, a Baptist minister, was at the lunch.
Simon Patterson was invited but chose not to attend, police allege.
They also allege she had made previous attempts to kill her former husband, who lives at nearby Korumburra, a 10-minute drive from Leongatha.
‘Done nothing wrong’
Prisons are odd, melancholy places with their own rhythms, relationships, hierarchies and isolation.
Patterson has spent almost all her time at Dame Phyllis Frost Centre for women in Melbourne’s western suburbs and is expected to appear via videolink from there for the procedural hearing.
The brief of evidence was handed to the defence last month and her legal team will know much, but probably not all, it will face.
At the time of the November 3 hearing last year, lawyer Doogue agreed to a 20-week delay after police seized electronic equipment for analysis from Patterson’s home and said the expectation was that proceedings could be drawn out.
“It’s likely to be a committal, and it could well go for a very long time,’’ he said.
The length of the overall legal proceedings will be contingent on whether she opts to challenge some or all of the evidence at a contested committal and how she pleads.
Patterson was adamant last year that she had done nothing wrong, but if convicted would likely face decades behind bars.
“I can’t believe that this has happened, and I am so sorry that they have lost their lives,” Patterson, her eyes filled with tears, said outside her house.
“I didn’t do anything; I loved them. I just can’t fathom what has happened.”
Town with heart
While so much has been written about Leongatha, the better-heeled cousin of nearby Korumburra, it is Korumburra where the heart of the story lies; nowhere more so than the local cemetery, where there were 61 burials in 2023 from a population of 4766.
Korumburra is where all those who attended the fatal beef Wellington lunch lived and died, with the two survivors still very quietly going about their business.
Simon Patterson attends the small weatherboard Baptist Church on Mine Rd. His parents Gail and Don were buried together on August 22. Heather Wilkinson was buried directly opposite the pair on September 11, the trio in patches of dirt that overlook a valley and the local rail trail.
Leigh Davis, who owns Burra Brew and Barbecue, moved to Korumburra seven years ago from Melbourne, one of a large number of city refugees adding to the town’s population by bringing children and metro dollars.
He works two jobs to try to get ahead, one in retail, the other in steel fabrication.
Korumburra, he says, offers a tight, well-mannered community.
“If you are prepared to give it a go, people will give you a go,’’ he says. “I think if you are in any trouble, anybody would be willing to lend a hand.”
