You could have cut the atmosphere with a steak knife as Simon Patterson crossed the threshold of Court Four at Latrobe Valley’s Magistrates Court.
Looking dead ahead, he bowed to Judge Christopher Beale, walked to the witness box, and then turned and briefly eyeballed the dock.
There sat Erin Patterson, a dark-haired woman Simon married 18 years ago but hadn’t seen since the autumn of 2023. Flanked by two uniformed police officers, she wore a baggy pink shirt and brown trousers, along with something of a frown.
The 50-year-old housewife had good reason to feel glum. For she is currently on trial for the murder both of Simon’s parents, Don and Gail, along with his aunt Heather. She also stands accused of the attempted murder of his uncle (and Heather’s spouse), Ian.
Simon, a civil engineer with whom Erin has two teenage children, was appearing as the first witness for the prosecution.
Dressed in a blue suit, and speaking in a soft Australian accent, he swore to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
So began Thursday’s cross-examination, which extended into yesterday and will continue on Monday. It marked the first significant exchanges in a courtroom drama that is sparking intense interest from true-crime enthusiasts across the world.
The trial of Erin Patterson, scheduled to last six weeks, has brought a bona fide media circus to Morwell, a small and somewhat impoverished mining town in rural Victoria, a few hours’ drive south-east of Melbourne.
The trial of Erin Patterson, scheduled to last six weeks, has brought a bona fide media circus to Morwell
Don and Gail Patterson, victims of the suspected mushroom poisoning incident on July 29 in Leongatha, Victoria
I’ve been here all week and was one of a handful of reporters (there are only six official press seats in the tiny court) who enjoyed a ringside seat throughout Simon’s first day.
To understand the intense public fascination in the case, we need only detail the bizarre nature of Erin’s Patterson’s alleged crime.
Specifically: she is accused of poisoning her husband’s relatives by deliberately feeding them a lunch of beef wellington, made with toxic death cap mushrooms.
This deadly dish was served with mashed potatoes and green beans at a small family gathering on Saturday, July 29, 2023.
The venue was Erin’s home on the outskirts of a small town named Leongatha, half an hour’s drive from Morwell in a dairy farming region named Gippsland. At the time of the incident, she and Simon had separated and were living apart, sharing custody of their children.
No alcohol was served, since the Patterson family are devout members of a local Baptist Church.
By all accounts, everything went down well. The court was told that, in the immediate aftermath, Heather, 66, declared the beef wellington to have been ‘delicious and beautiful’.
Yet later that night all four of Erin’s guests fell seriously ill with vomiting and diarrhoea. The next day, they were rushed to hospital. Within a week three of them had died, in highly-distressing circumstances involving multiple organ failure, detailed by prosecutor Nanette Rogers.
Simon’s aunt Heather, who died from the mushrooms pictured with her husband Ian who survived after several weeks in a coma
Ian, the 68-year-old sole survivor, spent several weeks in a coma and survived with the help of a liver transplant. He’s expected to give evidence next week.
The prosecution case can be summed up as follows: the fatal incident, which attracted global attention at the time, was the culmination of an intricate murder plot which had been planned and executed by Erin Patterson over the preceding months.
No motive has been suggested, but relations with her estranged husband appear to have become strained during this timeframe.
Outlining how Erin’s scheme was allegedly executed, Rogers told the jury how she cooked five individual beef wellingtons, each of which consisted of ‘eye fillet’ steak, surrounded by mushroom pate in a parcel of pastry.
Four of the portions were made using a mixture of supermarket mushrooms and death caps, she said. They were served on ‘large, grey-coloured dinner plates’. The fifth, which did not include the highly poisonous mushrooms, seems to have been placed on a smaller, orange plate which Patterson kept for herself.
Later that day, the court heard how all four guests began to feel seriously ill, suffering vomiting and diarrhoea so severe that they were hospitalised the following morning.
Erin also showed up at hospital, another 24 hours later, complaining of an upset stomach. She initially refused treatment and left, before returning later.
But she never fell seriously ill. The Crown alleges that she was faking symptoms of poisoning. They argue that it formed part of a cover-up designed to convince the authorities that she, too, had eaten the contaminated meal.
Simon Patterson makes his way out of court on Thursday
That, in a nutshell, is the case for the prosecution. But Patterson’s defence is offering a very different interpretation of events. Their case hinges on convincing the jury that the poisoning of Simon Patterson’s parents and aunt, and the near-death of his uncle, was instead what Erin’s barrister Colin Mandy has called a ‘tragedy and a terrible accident’.
Mandy has told the jury that Erin takes full responsibility for preparing the deadly meal and feeding it to her guests and concedes she behaved erratically in its aftermath.
However, Erin’s side insists that she did not deliberately use death cap in the dish.
Arguments over which of these two very different versions of events is right will, it seems, hinge on a number of intriguing sub-plots outlined to the jury.
One of them involves the exact provenance of the deadly mushrooms, which in the Australia’s south-eastern state of Victoria typically grow under oak trees following rainy periods in April or May.
The prosecution has claimed that Patterson’s mobile telephone data indicated that, during those months of 2023, she twice visited areas near a town called Loch where rare sightings of death caps had been logged on a website named iNaturalist. Her death caps were then preserved using a food dehydrator, they say.
Although Patterson has denied owning such a device, the court heard she had purchased a model made by Sunbeam from a homeware store in Leongatha on April 28, the day of her first visit to Loch.
Police established that Patterson visited a local rubbish tip to dispose of the food dehydrator on August 2, four days after the deadly lunch.
Erin Patterson is accused of poisoning her husband’s relatives by deliberately feeding them toxic death cap mushrooms
The court was this week shown a CCTV footage of her unloading an item matching its description from a red car. Forensic analysis of a device recovered from the tip revealed Erin’s fingerprints on it, as well as traces of death caps.
At the time the photo was taken, Erin was denying to public health authorities that she used ‘foraged or wild mushrooms’ and instead claimed to have made the dish using fresh mushrooms from a local branch of Woolworths as well as a bag of dehydrated ones from an Asian supermarket in Melbourne.
However, she was unable to identify this shop and investigators who visited every such premises in the area did not find any products matching their description.
In court, Erin’s defence team have attempted to square this circle by conceding that her various initial claims about the mushrooms were untrue, but arguing that she lied because she ‘panicked’.
Mandy told the jury: ‘She did forage for mushrooms.’ However, he added, ‘she denies that she ever deliberately sought out death cap mushrooms.’
As for the dehydrator, he said: ‘She admits that when she was interviewed by police on the same day one of the lunch guests died, she lied about getting rid of the dehydrator’.
So much for the mushrooms. A second major sub-plot revolves around Patterson’s use of mobile telephones. The prosecution says she used two devices in the run up to the incident, but only one was ever recovered by police. It appears to have been given a ‘factory reset’ at least three times in the days that followed the lunch.
The devices were used to access Facebook, on which Patterson seems to have spent significant time in ‘true-crime forums’ participating using various usernames and posting images of mushrooms and food dehydrators.
Erin Patterson as she appeared in court on Monday
Yet more fascination surrounds the reason why the four guests had been invited to the lunch in the first place.
The court was told that roughly a month earlier, Erin had told her estranged husband Simon’s parents that she’d found a lump in her elbow that was being tested via a biopsy and an MRI scan. She then told them she was organising a meal ‘to discuss some medical issues she had and to get advice about how to break it to the kids’.
During the lunch itself, she told her guests that she’d been diagnosed with ovarian cancer. ‘They had a discussion about it being best to be honest with the children,’ the court was told.
But it later emerged that Erin’s claims about her health were also false. An examination of medical records uncovered no evidence that she was suffering from any form of cancer.
The prosecution contends that Erin told porkies about her health to ‘ensure and explain why her children would not be present at the lunch’. In her defence, Erin’s team have conceded that she has indeed ‘never been diagnosed with cancer’.
However, they insist the issue is entirely irrelevant to the question of whether she deliberately poisoned her relatives.
Into this maelstrom of intrigue strode Simon Patterson, a mild-mannered 50-year-old who, prior to this week’s trial, has never publicly discussed the events leading to the death of his parents and the arrest of his estranged wife. His testimony was at times emotionally charged, with proceedings having to briefly pause when he came close to tears.
Relatives in court were also handed tissues by the staff.
Simon Patterson entered court with his media cohort Jessica O’Donnell
Erin, who has a couple of friends supporting her in court, became agitated just once, when the jury was shown a family tree carrying the names of various relatives, including the three who she stands accused of murdering. As their names were read out, she appeared to dab her eyes.
During his day-and-a-half on the stand, Simon told how he’d met Erin in the early 2000s, when they both worked for Monash Council, in suburban Melbourne.
They married in 2007 and settled in Western Australia. A first child, whose identity is protected via a court order designed to protect the privacy of minors involved in proceedings, was born two years later.
First cracks in the marriage appeared shortly after the child’s birth, when Erin decided to fly home early from a road trip the young family was undertaking in a camper van, leaving Simon to spend over a week driving home with a four-month-old infant. Simon told the court he believed she ‘suffered from mental illness – post natal depression – especially after our son was born’.
From this point on, their relationship was strained. Although they took part in marriage guidance counselling, and lived together for periods, they would frequently separate.
‘It was always her leaving me,’ he told the jury. A second child, who came along in 2014, failed to improve things on the domestic front, and they separated more permanently in 2015 when Erin bought a new home.
Though living apart, Simon and Erin’s relationship was for years largely friendly, the court heard. Indeed, he had hoped they would eventually reconcile.
By now living in Gippsland, where many members of Simon’s extended family were based, they shared custody of the children and ownership of various homes, and went on a number of foreign holidays as a family.
Simon Patterson was cross examined by his wife’s legal team (pictured)
Erin was a wealthy woman, having inherited $2m AUD (approximately £1m) from her grandmother shortly before they married, along with a further significant sum when her mother died in 2019. She was, by all accounts, generous with her money, giving interest-free loans to various members of the Patterson family. ‘Money has not been the most important motivation to either Erin or me in our decisions’, is how Simon put it.
Things changed, however, one day in 2022, when Erin discovered that Simon had described himself as ‘separated’ on his tax return. She claimed this would have tax implications for her and began demanding child support. Soon there were squabbles over medical bills and school fees.
At one point, Erin messaged Simon’s parents on the app Signal, asking them to intervene over a financial dispute, but they responded that the couple ought to sort the matter out between themselves.
In court Simon was also asked about Erin’s self-image, with his wife’s counsel Colin Mandy suggesting that she’d become unhappy at having put on weight over the years. ‘I think Erin is not particularly happy with how she is. I don’t think she has a high self-esteem,’ he responded.
A number of angry text messages exchanged by the couple were shared in court. In October 2022, in one message, Erin responded angrily to an invitation Simon had sent her to his mother’s 70th birthday party. ‘Seems that my invite tomorrow is a bit of an afterthought and not even from your parents so I might pass thanks,’ she complained.
By the summer of 2023, their relationship had deteriorated to the extent that Simon felt ‘too uncomfortable’ to attend the fateful lunch, to which he’d been invited alongside his parents, uncle, and aunt. The jury was then shown a text message he sent to Erin on the eve of the meal, apologising and saying he’d be ‘happy to talk about your health and implications of that at another time’.
Erin responded: ‘That’s really disappointing. I’ve spent many hours this week preparing lunch for tomorrow which has been exhausting in light of the issues I am facing and spent a small fortune on beef eye fillet to make beef wellingtons because I wanted it to be a special meal as I may not be able to host a lunch like this for some time.’
The Trial of Erin Patterson is available now, wherever you get your podcasts. Listen here
That, of course, would turn out to be true. For the question of whether Erin Patterson will ever be free to invite lunch guests again now lies in the hands of a jury.
They will bear witness to proceedings over the coming weeks alongside a small army of journalists, bloggers, and real-life crime enthusiasts who have booked out every local hotel room.
Morwell certainly makes a bizarre setting for this major news events. Following the closure of a local power plant, it has become one of Australia’s poorest towns, with drug addicts and alcoholics pestering visitors and so few shops and restaurants currently open on it’s largely shuttered high street, that jurors are forced to rub shoulders with tables of reporters and lawyers working on the case during breaks in proceedings.
‘When you are outside at lunchtime or at other times, your paths may cross with lawyers,’ Justice Beale warned them this week, seemingly following one such incident.
‘If they ignore you, don’t think they are being rude. Justice must not only be done, it must be seen to be done, and if there is any interaction between jurors and members of the respective legal teams, it’s not a good look.’
And in that spirit, the bizarre yet utterly compelling trial of Erin Patterson continues.
