For five weeks, the fate of Erin Patterson has hinged on a single, contested question: how did she survive the toxic meal that left three of her guests dead and the fourth in a near-fatal coma?
On Wednesday, we finally got the answer. Or rather, we got Erin’s version of the answer, via a blow-by-blow account of the fateful day that she made beef wellington, using poisonous death cap mushrooms, then served it to members of her estranged husband Simon’s family for lunch.
It was the 50-year-old housewife’s third day in the witness box of a tiny court in Morwell, a mining town roughly two hours’ drive south-east of Australia’s second city, Melbourne, and half an hour from her home in Leongatha, where these tragic events played out.
Erin is standing trial for the murder of three of her guests: Simon’s elderly parents Don and Gail, along with Gail’s sister Heather Wilkinson, in a case that has drawn global attention to this corner of rural Victoria. She is also charged with the attempted murder of the fourth: Gail’s husband Ian, a local Baptist pastor.
The Crown’s case is simple. It says she used the internet to locate and pick death cap mushrooms during the growing season, in April 2023, before preserving them in a food dehydrator. Three months later, she allegedly added them to a ‘duxelles’, or mushroom paté, used to make the four individual beef wellingtons she served to the alleged victims.
