
Monday, July 7, 2025 - Australian
woman Erin Patterson was found guilty of murdering three of her estranged
husband’s relatives by deliberately serving them poisonous mushrooms for lunch,
on Monday, June 7.
The jury in the Supreme Court trial in Victoria state
returned a verdict after six days of deliberations, following a nine-week trial
that gripped Australia. Patterson faces life in prison and will be sentenced
later.
Patterson, who sat in the dock between two prison officers,
showed no emotion but blinked rapidly as the verdicts were read.
Three of Patterson’s four lunch guests, her parents-in-law
Don and Gail Patterson, and Gail’s sister, Heather Wilkinson d!ed in the
hospital after the 2023 meal at her home in Leongatha, at which she served
individual beef Wellington pastries containing death cap mushrooms.She was also
found guilty of attempting to murder Ian Wilkinson, Heather’s husband, who
survived the meal.
It wasn’t disputed that Patterson served the mushrooms or that the pastries killed her guests. The jury was required to decide whether she knew the lunch contained death caps, and if she intended for them to d!e.
The guilty verdicts, which were required to be unanimous,
indicated that jurors rejected Patterson’s defense that the presence of the
poisonous fungi in the meal was a terrible accident, caused by the mistaken
inclusion of foraged mushrooms that she didn’t know were death caps.
Prosecutors didn’t offer a motive for the k!llings, but
during the trial highlighted strained relations between Patterson and her
estranged husband, and the frustration that she had felt about his parents in
the past.
The case turned on the question of whether Patterson
meticulously planned a triple murd£r or accidentally k!lled three people she
loved, including her children’s only surviving grandparents. Her lawyers said
she had no reason to do so she had recently moved to a beautiful new home,
was financially comfortable, had sole custody of her children and was due to
begin studying for a degree in nursing and midwifery.
But prosecutors suggested Patterson had two faces, the woman
who publicly appeared to have a good relationship with her parents-in-law,
while her private feelings about them were kept hidden. Her relationship with
her estranged husband, Simon Patterson, who was invited to the fatal lunch but
didn’t go, deteriorated in the year before the de@ths, the prosecution said.
The individual beef Wellington pastries Patterson served her
guests was one point of friction, because the recipe she used contained
directions for a single, family-sized portion. Prosecutors said that she
reverted to individual servings, so she could lace the other diners’ portions,
but not her own, with the fatal fungi but Patterson said that she was unable to
find the correct ingredients to make the recipe as directed.
Nearly every other detail of the fateful day was scrutinized
at length, including why Patterson sent her children out to a film before her
guests arrived, why she added additional dried mushrooms to the recipe from her
pantry, why she didn’t become ill when the other diners did, and why she
disposed of a food dehydrator after the deaths and told investigators that she
didn’t own one.
Patterson acknowledged some lies during her evidence
including that she’d never foraged mushrooms or owned a dehydrator. But she
said that those claims were made in panic as she realized her meal had k!lled
people.
She said she didn’t become as ill as the other diners since she vomited after the meal because of an eating disorder. She denied that she told her guests she had cancer as a ruse to explain why she invited them to her home that day.
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