Korumburra community warned about dangerous fungi just when Erin Patterson was accused of looking

It was no secret in Korumburra that dangerous mushrooms were in the midst of the region, with a warning issued in the days before the murderer was accused of looking for death cap mushrooms.

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In the days before Erin Patterson was accused of looking for death cap mushrooms, dozens of people in Korumburra were warned about the dangers of picking the wrong fungi at the site where the murderer said she foraged during Covid-19.

It was widely known to people with an interest in gardening and mushrooms that South Gippsland was sometimes home to death caps, or – at the very least – had the conditions that were perfect for the killer fungi.

So much so that on May 21, 2022, 40 souls gathered at the local Korumburra botanic gardens to hear about the dangers of some mushrooms in the areas, with local social media sites detailing how they were alerted to good and bad mushrooms.

The prosecution accused ­Patterson of looking up the ­iNaturalist website a week after the event at the botanic gardens, where observations of death cap mushrooms had been posted by other users on the site.

Patterson, who was found guilty for the poisoning deaths of three of her husband’s relatives in 2023, said at the Supreme Court in Morwell that she began foraging during the early months of the first Covid-19 pandemic.

She later admitted to drying wild mushrooms in a food dehydrator she had purchased in April 2023, just three months before the fatal lunch, but insisted she never intended to serve anyone toxic fungi.  

But in the heart of her old town in Korumburra, mushroom education was already a grassroots priority and government departments and community groups had commonly warned of the dangers of death caps, which killed Don and Gail Patterson, 70, and Heather Wilkinson, 66.

Free mushroom “forays” were run in the town – a hands-on community workshop to teach residents how to safely identify edible mushrooms – warning of the exact dangers of which Patterson would later claim ignorance.

One such event, that of May 21, 2022, at the Korumburra Botanic Park, featured local permaculture planner Simon Marshall, who took locals on a walk through nearby reserves and pointed out both edible mushrooms and their poisonous lookalikes. 

The workshop aimed to teach locals how to be cautious when foraging, given how easily deadly mushrooms could be mistaken for safe varieties.  

“Simon Marshall took everyone through a few samples of mushrooms he had recently found locally, emphasising how careful you need to be when foraging as so many species look similar to edibles but are quite dangerous,” Grow Lightly wrote in a Facebook post.

The post attracted attention in the community forum, where locals praised the effort to spread awareness, but the dangers also were already widely known.  

In court, Patterson insisted she never knowingly served death caps and maintained the poisoning was an accident. She testified that her mushroom knowledge came largely from the internet and her own foraging experience during lockdown, despite living in a town where mushroom education was literally served up on a plate. 

The court heard Patterson’s interest in mushrooms had, by May 28, 2022, prompted her to investigate whether the highly toxic mushrooms grew in South Gippsland. She allegedly turned to iNaturalist, a global community map where users log flora and fauna sightings. At the time, no death cap sightings had been recorded in the region.

But in April 2023, just months before Patterson served a meal laced with the toxic fungus, two death cap sightings were posted to iNaturalist at Loch and Outtrim, both small communities not far from Korumburra.

Prosecutors alleged Patterson saw those updates and travelled to both locations shortly afterwards to collect the deadly mushrooms. They said mobile phone tower data supported the assertion, a claim the defence challenged.  

Patterson’s lawyers told the jury the data was unreliable and said she had instead been foraging locally, at places like the Korumburra Botanic Park — the same site used by Grow Lightly’s tours — in the lead-up to the fatal lunch.  

The court was shown evidence from digital forensic experts that a computer in Patterson’s home had accessed the website on May 28, 2022 but Patterson said she had no memory of visiting the site.