Erin and Simon Patterson face each other in court during mushroom murder trial
They started out as friends and fell in love, but now, defendant Erin Patterson and her estranged husband Simon face each other in a courtroom after poisonous mushrooms changed everything.
The Mushroom Cook
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Breaking up is hard to do.
So went the story of Simon Patterson, the first witness called in the murder trial of his estranged wife, mushroom cook Erin Patterson.
The accused woman couldn’t catch his eye as he entered the hushed courtroom passing her as she sat, dressed in pink, in the dock.
Ms Patterson, who is charged with having murdered her husband’s parents, Don and Gail, his aunt, Heather Wilkinson and is also accused of attempting to kill his uncle, Ian Wilkinson, barely moved a muscle as he stepped into the witness box.
Prosecutor Dr Nanette Rogers SC then asked Simon something strange.
She asked Simon if he knew the accused woman, Erin Patterson.
“Yes, I do,” Simon replied.
“In what way do you know her?” the prosecutor asked.
His answer was blunt: “I’m married to her.”
It has been almost a decade since the Pattersons separated for a final time, ending the numerous breakups that counselling could not cure.
They had been friends at first when they met at Monash City Council in the early 2000s.
Over time Simon, the god believing civil engineer, fell in love with her mind.
“Erin is very intelligent. I guess some of the things that attracted me to her in the first place was definitely her intelligence,” he said.
“She is quite witty and can be quite funny.”
He liked her book smarts, that she’d worked as an accountant and was a qualified air traffic controller who had once worked at Tullamarine Airport.
The study, Simon said, continued during their marriage, including courses in vet science and legal studies.
But there was something else between them.
It was a religious awakening of sorts.
When they met, Erin the RSPCA rep, was an atheist.
Simon recalled a trip to his hometown, Korumburra, where they went to mass at the Baptist church his family attended.
“Do you recall that Erin was moved by the sermon?” Simon was asked by Colin Mandy SC, his wife’s barrister.
Simon corrected him.
“I think during the communion she quickly walked, stepped up and left the church building and went outside,” he said.
He remembered his future wife looking upset because she was spiritually, religiously, moved.
“Yes, she was moved,” the witness said.
The binding ties of religion would be a constant in their lives.
They were married in June, 2007.
It was Simon’s cousin, Dave, who walked his bride down the aisle to him, but it would be Erin who would soon start walking away.
“When we lived together, it was always her leaving me,” Simon told the Supreme Court, which is sitting in Morwell.
“However, there were a couple of times when we tried to reconcile and I stayed with her for a short period and then went back to my home, I guess.”
They remained “amicable”, even friendly, following their final 2015 separation.
They holidayed together, messaged one another, and Ms Patterson even bought properties and put his name on the title.
In the end, it was a tax return that seemingly burst the bubble of civility.
Somehow, Ms Patterson found out her husband had told the taxman he was separated.
Although it was true, she confronted him in October 2022, Simon testified, about the implications it would have for her.
“So she said that mattered, I think for the family tax benefit, something of that nature, so she would be obliged to claim child support off me …. she was upset about it,” he told the court.
Then came the fighting.
Simon testified he paid child support and was told to pay no more.
It was under $40 a month.
It caused “friction”.
Ms Patterson wanted him to pay half the private school fees, a cost he used to cover, which he refused to do.
He testified that it was on the advice of the “child support” agency not to end up “double paying.”
She called his parents who urged them to talk.
The financial entanglements went deeper than that.
Two significant inheritances Ms Patterson received — the first in 2006 of roughly $2m left to her by her grandmother, set up the family she was about to marry into.
The money not only bought the house they newly wed Pattersons bought in Quinninup, where they settled just south of Perth, but loans amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars were given to Simon’s three siblings, interest free.
Ms Patterson received another inheritance in 2019, when her mother died.
It was this windfall she used to buy a Mt Waverley unit and her property in Leongatha.
Both Erin and Simon Patterson’s name went on the title — at least initially in a “puzzling” act of generosity — until it was Ms Patterson’s alone in 2021.
The weatherboard house was designed with their two children in mind.
The idyllic home in Gibson St, Leongatha, was ready for her and the kids to move into in 2022, just months before the “change” Simon said occurred in their relationship over finances.
By July the following year, the friendly banter over messaging app Signal had eroded.
Ms Patterson was consumed with online friends she met via a Keli Lane true crime Facebook group, using two phones and revealing to the Patterson family she was undergoing medical tests for a lump on her elbow, the prosecution says.
The 50-year-old was close to her husband’s father, Don, bonding over their love of facts, and shared a strong relationship with her mother-in-law, Gail.
Asked whether she loved them, Simon answered: “She seemed to, yeah.”
In June 2023, a month before she served them up the fateful poisoned beef Wellington which killed them, Ms Patterson had her in-laws over for lunch with the grandkids.
Her husband declined his invitation and would again turn down a lunch gathering at the Gibson St home she had signalled was important with his mother and father, his aunty Heather and Uncle, Ian, on July 29.
The rejection bothered his former lover, firing off a text to him describing it as “disappointing”.
When her four guests arrived they were shown the new house and as they sat down to their beef Wellington, they said grace.
The meal was a hit, but Ms Patterson had bad news, the court heard.
She told them she had the big C, cancer.
Ovarian cancer to be precise.
They prayed again.
But there was no need to pray for her, not for cancer anyway.
She was never diagnosed with cancer.
And now her guests were the ones on death’s doorstep.
As the poison took hold in the hours ahead, the diarrhoea and vomiting was unrelenting.
Her four guests were hospitalised — at Korumburra and Leongatha — and later transferred to Dandenong.
Simon recalled a desperately ill Heather Wilkinson asking him a question, both at her home and as he drove her to hospital.
“Is Erin short of crockery? Is that why she would have this different kind of plate that she served herself with?,” Simon told the court was the gist of her question.
It has been alleged that her plate was smaller, and tan. The others, grey.
Medical intervention could not save three of her guests.
Simon became emotional when testifying how he saw his father “struggling”.
“He was lying on his side, he was hunched quite noticeably …
“He wasn’t right inside. He was feeling pain.”
Sisters Heather and Gail died on August 4. Gail’s husband, Don, died on August 5.
But there was one guest who would survive the poisoning, Heather’s husband, Ian Wilkinson.
The prosecution in this case allege that Ms Patterson was never sick, despite complaining of diarrhoea, and, reluctantly, was admitted to hospital.
It is alleged that she travelled to areas near Leongatha where wild death cap mushrooms had been spotted and posted to a website called iNaturalist.
And they allege she lied to doctors, nurses, a health official and police about where she bought the mushrooms.
That she also lied about the dehydrator she said she did not own, although now admits dumping it in the days after serving the deadly meal in a trip to the tip.
And to lying to police about having never foraged in her life.
The curve ball this week was that Erin Patterson has also admitted to lying.
She is a forager, her barrister Colin Mandy SC told the court.
But Mr Mandy maintains his client did get sick from the meal.
And that the panic she felt over the harm her lethal meal caused led to the lying as the stress of having cooked the meal consumed her.
“The defence case is that Erin Patterson did not deliberately serve poison food to her guests at that lunch on 29 July 2023,” Mr Mandy told the court.
“She didn’t do it deliberately, she didn’t do it intentionally. The defence case is she didn’t intend to cause anyone any harm that day.
“The defence case is that what happened was a tragedy and a terrible accident.”
And that is the battleground of this trial — intent.
The prosecution will not attempt to prove motive in this case, and they don’t have to.
The question for the jury is, did Ms Patterson deliberately set out to commit murder?
Or was it a horrific mistake?
Ms Patterson has pleaded not guilty to three counts of murder and one count of attempted murder.
The trial continues.
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