Jury hears in detail how computers work as mushrooms trial hits middle of week four
The mushrooms murder trial jury gets a thorough lesson on how computers work, and how hi-tech forensic expertise is employed.
At first it felt like this was no court for old men.
We had a police forensics officer called Shamen Fox-Henry, who specialises in extracting data from computers and phones, signalling a wave of technical terms the Beatles generation might struggle with.
Things such as EML files, portable cases and strings. The sort of computer mumbo jumbo Gen Z takes in its stride.
Alas, what followed on Wednesday afternoon was an elite lesson for the jury in simplicity; the basics of computers, devices that have been around for decades now but remain a mystery to many.
There was a point to this, of course, the court later hearing about electronic searches allegedly done on a computer seized from Erin Trudi Patterson’s home in 2023.
First, though, a walk through basic computer terms for the luddites in the Supreme Court, sitting in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley. Nothing was left to chance. What is a computer? “A device that takes a user input, processes/interprets it and returns a result,’’ the powerpoint presentation shown to the court read.
The central processing unit is the brain and controller of it, the slideshow went on, and this was where it started going south for the Beatles brigade, the narrative switching to RAM and hard drives, the creation of portable cases and the role of digital forensics in the process of investigations.
Fox-Henry is a tall man with glasses and alert eyes who joined Victoria Police in 2020, rising through the ranks on the back of digital forensics.
The jury heard it was his task to help extract information from people of interest to investigators, a job description that led him to the death cap mushrooms case, now in its fourth week of trial.
Fox-Henry took up most of the jury’s time on Wednesday as he explained in detail how he went about his work.
It was alleged that information mined from Erin Patterson’s computer seized at her house showed its user visited a post on the iNaturalist website titled Deathcap from Melbourne, which took users to a reserve in Melbourne’s south-east in a suburb called Moorabbin.
It was one of a series of alleged searches performed on May 28, 2022, where the jury is being told of what investigators say they have found.
Patterson has pleaded not guilty to three murder charges arising from the death cap mushroom lunch in 2023 and has consistently denied any wrongdoing.
Having been informed about the notion of thumbnails, browsers and strings, the jury was told about internet searches of multiple iNaturalist posts about 7.20pm on that night in late May. Jurors were even told the computer seized at Patterson’s house had looked up the Korumburra Middle Pub.
Fox-Henry, under questioning from Jane Warren for the prosecution, said the information from the iNaturalist website visit showed someone examined a post about death cap mushrooms at Bricker Reserve in Moorabbin at 7.23pm on May 28, 2022.
There were four occasions relating to iNaturalist on May 28, 2022, about 7.20pm.
The court was recently told that iNaturalist was a citizen science website where sightings of fungi, including death cap mushrooms, can be recorded, including precise locations of where specimens were found.
The court has also heard that several devices were retrieved from Patterson’s house on August 5 and November 2.
The case is continuing.
More Coverage
Compliance or defiance? Cosmetic injectables industry in turmoil
Compliance checks of the cosmetic injectables industry are being conducted, as Queensland grapples with its own newly enforced rules.
Swings and misses: party’s polling debacle
In the Liberals’ war room in Brisbane, the catastrophic reality dawned early in the May 3 count. Recriminations began over internal polling. Funding could have been better directed. Defeated MP Luke Howarth shares his ‘what went wrong’.