Australia’s mushroom trial
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A family lunch in rural Australia ends with three coffins, one survivor, and a nation asking whether death by Beef Wellington, which contained deadly mushrooms, was a tragic mistake or murder. On this special episode of Reuters World News, we dive into the alleged mushroom murders which have gripped Australia and the world. I'm Kim Van Nel in Whanganui, New Zealand. ♪

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Mother of two Erin Patterson is on trial accused of murdering her in-laws and another relative in 2023 by serving them up a beef wellington lunch which contained death cap mushrooms.

Our reporter Alastair Powell has been covering this case since the beginning. Hi, Alastair. Hi, Kim. Thanks for having me. Thank you so much for joining us. This is a case with so many twists and turns, but let's start by taking everyone to the place where this drama, this tragedy is now all playing out. Do you keep your seatbelt fastened to wherever you are seated?

You go from Sydney to Melbourne to get to the small town a few hours out from there. How's it going? How about you? Good, thank you. I've just arrived in Morwell. It's a fairly unassuming former coal mining town of about 15,000 people. And one of the first things I saw, or one of the first things I heard, was camera shutters. Because the defence team were leaving a nearby cafe, heading back to the court after lunch. They were being trailed down the street by photographers.

At least in the town centre of Morwell, this case has completely taken over. This town is bustling, cafes are doing a roaring trade with journalists from all around the world and Alastair, there's even been lines of people waiting outside the court.

We've seen people from all over this part of the world turning up at the court to queue for hours for the hope of getting one of the limited seats in the public gallery. Yeah, so I am a true crime fanatic, so I do take my true crime quite seriously. And I thought, well, I may as well. You know, it is unique.

It's really been wall-to-wall coverage in Australia. A lot of publications are running daily live blogs from the trial. There's a couple of documentaries in the works. And there are several daily podcasts recapping what's happened in court that day. And they call it the mushroom case.

Let's start at the start and get a handle on the main characters here. There are five, and the first we need to know about is the accused, Aaron Patterson.

Alastair, tell us about her. Yeah, so Erin Patterson, she is 50 years old. She's a mother of two. And by all accounts that we've heard in the trial, including her estranged husband, Simon Patterson, she is a very intelligent and articulate woman. She trained as an air traffic controller briefly. She was editing a local newspaper or newsletter shortly before her arrest. And I think it's fascinating

fair to say not the kind of person that's normally arrested for an alleged triple murder. Her estranged husband you just mentioned, Simon Patterson wasn't at this lunch but his parents were.

So at the lunch, we have Simon's parents, Don and Gail. We have Gail's sister, Heather Wilkinson, along with Ian Wilkinson, Heather's husband. There were five guests who were supposed to be there. Simon was invited, but he pulled out the night before the lunch, saying he didn't feel comfortable at

attending. What was the relationship like between Erin and her former partner Simon and why were her in-laws and the others invited? The court has heard that there were problems in Simon and Erin's marriage soon after they married.

in 2007, they went through a number of periods of trial separations before separating for good, although they do still remain legally married. However, their relationship, the way it's been characterised in the court, and this obviously very much varies depending on whether you believe the prosecution or the defence, they did seem to have a functional relationship for much of that time.

They co-parented their two children amicably. And as we know from this lunch, there was still a relationship between Erin and her in-laws, even at the time of these deaths.

And the reason that Erin wanted them to be at the lunch, or at least this is what the court has heard, is that she had some medical issues that she wanted to discuss with those present. And those medical issues become part of this as well, right? Because she had...

been claiming that she had cancer. At the lunch we've heard from Ian Wilkinson, who is the sole surviving guest of the lunch, that Erin told those assembled that she had cancer. Now the prosecution alleges that this cancer diagnosis, which it's not in dispute that Erin lied about this cancer diagnosis, the prosecution alleges that this was in fact

a way for Erin to lure those guests to the lunch to get them to attend even if Simon wasn't there. Okay, so Erin admits she lied about having cancer. We'll get to what she says is her reason why in a bit. But first, walk us through what happened when the guests arrived for this lunch. They arrived...

around midday or just after midday. The four of them had a brief look around downstairs in the kitchen, they had a look in the garden, and then they went back into the kitchen where Erin was preparing lunch. Now the exact events of what transpired are in dispute. Another very key piece of prosecution evidence we heard in the testimony of Ian Wilkinson

is that when this lunch was plated, so it was beef wellington, mashed potato and green beans, Ian Wilkinson said in his evidence that Erin served herself on a different coloured plate. Yeah, the prosecution says Erin Patterson ate off an orange tan coloured plate while everyone else ate off grey plates.

Now, obviously the inference from that that the prosecution is trying to make is that that was a way for Erin to be sure that she wasn't feeding herself a poisoned meal. Now, the defense disputes this. They say that the plates were mismatched in general and there was no matching set of plates and it's possible that Ian Wilkinson might have been mistaken about that. So they eat this meal. What happens after that?

Yeah, so around midnight on the evening following the lunch, and this is according to the testimony of Ian Wilkinson, he and his wife, they started to feel quite unwell. There was vomiting all through the night. And then dawn on the morning after the lunch, Heather called Don and Gail, who said they had similar symptoms.

All four lunch guests go to hospital and doctors fairly quickly figure out this is a suspected case of poisoning by what's called death cap mushrooms. They're transferred to a specialist hospital in Melbourne. In the next few days, Erin Patterson's former in-laws, Don and Gail, as well as Gail's sister, Heather, die.

Heather's husband, Ian Wilkinson, is critically ill. He gets a life-saving liver transplant and ultimately survives. Alastair, what about Erin? Did she get sick? She claims that she was also unwell and she began feeling unwell around that afternoon. And she also attended a local hospital.

the morning after the lunch. She then very quickly left the hospital saying she had to attend to some things at home against the advice of medical professionals. She even has to sign a waiver to leave the hospital, right? That she's leaving despite doctor's advice because they've connected her to the other patients and already suspected this was a case of poisoning.

Erin does return though? She eventually returned around an hour and a half later. They also moved her to a specialist hospital as they believed, as she was the cook of the lunch, she may also have been affected. But it certainly seems that she did not become as sick as the four guests at the lunch. Erin's vitals look good and she's discharged. A police investigation begins. Oh.

And just over a month later, Erin Patterson is charged with three counts of murder and one of attempted murder. That brings us to the trial, where everything comes out. So the prosecution puts forward what they call

four deceptions. What are they? So the first deception is the fabricated cancer diagnosis. That was a way to lure the guest to the lunch when they may have not attended. If it had been something less serious, the invitation might have seemed more unusual. That's a prosecution's allegation. The second deception is obviously poisoning the meals while serving herself an untainted portion. Then the

Thirdly, is the allegation that Erin Paterson was lying about being sick in order to avoid suspicion. The prosecution says that her symptoms were clearly not as serious as the other four. There was no evidence that she'd ingested death cap mushrooms, and her claims to be sick were a fabrication. And the fourth deception that the prosecution alleges is that she then began

a cover-up when police began investigating the deaths. Now that includes disposing of a dehydrator that was later found to contain death cat mushrooms, that includes factory resetting mobile phones that she owned on numerous occasions, and that also includes lying to investigators

and experts who were looking into this case. What did they say about the deadly mushrooms in the meal? They say that these mushrooms were dehydrated and then they were blitzed into some kind of paste, which was then combined with

other mushrooms that she'd bought at a local supermarket, a local grocer. Beef Wellington obviously has a kind of mushroom pate in between the beef and the pastry, and that's how the prosecution alleges that she hid these mushrooms in the meal. Death cat mushrooms are an invasive species in Australia. They can appear greenish, yellowish, brownish or off-white. They're commonly found near oak or pine trees, often in forests.

The Australian Botanic Gardens website, which gives information about Australia's fungi, says they're similar to the harmless straw mushroom.

Alastair, where did the mushrooms Aaron allegedly used come from? Well, according to the prosecution, these were death cat mushrooms which Erin Patterson had picked herself and then dehydrated and introduced into the meal. Now, the evidence they have that this is the case is there's a website called iNaturalist where people can post sightings of all kinds of animals and plants, one of those being death cat mushrooms.

And there is evidence that she visited this website, visited pages containing sightings of death cat mushrooms. And the prosecution says that forensic evidence, sort of an examination of her mobile phone, shows that she visited these areas after visiting this website and actualist. Okay, let's come to the defense case now. And staying with those death cat mushrooms, what did Aaron say about that?

Her story has changed somewhat in the two years from the lunch to the trial. This happened almost two years ago now. Initially, when she was asked by police where the mushrooms had come from, she said from a local grocery store. Then she said they were dried mushrooms from an Asian grocer in Melbourne. Health and safety officials visited

all the Asian grocery stores in the areas that she said she may have bought them. They found no evidence of death cat mushrooms. Really now, during her testimony, she says she simply doesn't know. She had containers of dried mushrooms at home. She believes that maybe some forage mushrooms had gotten to those containers of dried mushrooms.

And really, the presence of death caps in this lunch was a tragic accident. So she doesn't say that she actually foraged anything? She does say that she foraged mushrooms, but she says she never knowingly foraged death cap mushrooms, which is what the prosecution alleges. And that's really what's required to secure these convictions. They have to demonstrate that Erin Patterson

not only forage her deathcats, but she knowingly did so, and she knowingly introduced them into the lunch. And what about the plating up of the meals?

The defence says that the plates, evidence from Ian Wilkinson, he was honestly mistaken. There were not four identical plates and one different plate that Erin Paterson served herself on. In fact, these plates were all mixed up. And the defence also says that there was no separate recipe for Erin's own Beef Wellington. These Beef Wellingtons were all identical.

and Deathcap mushrooms were introduced into all of them, and that Erin Paterson became sick herself. So why didn't she get really, really sick? Yeah, so we heard in her evidence that she did not eat the entirety of her meal. We also heard she had problems with binge eating and purging.

And after the lunch, she had eaten the large majority of a cake that had been brought by one of the guests and then purged that food along with, the defense argues, the contents of the beef Wellington where the death caps were contained. Let's go now to another one of the deceptions, as the prosecution put it, the cancer lies. What did the defense say about that?

Yeah, so this was something that we heard in Erin Paterson's testimony. She struggled with her weight and with eating throughout much of her life. That's according to her and also according to Simon Paterson. And she claims that she was planning to have some kind of weight loss surgery, whether that was some kind of liposuction or gastric band surgery. She was planning to have that and

She had effectively invented the cancer diagnosis because she was embarrassed about those true reasons. And also she felt that she might need help with things like childcare. And so she needed really that reason if she was recovering from such a surgery.

What was she like when she was giving evidence about that? Erin Patterson, she gave evidence in her defense for around three days. And she was very, very emotional when she was giving that evidence, especially talking about her low self-esteem and her health issues.

and the impact this has had on this family and on her children. She was very emotional when she was giving that evidence. And the defense made a point, right, of saying, you know, there's a difference between lying about having cancer and committing murder. That's correct, yeah. The defense does not dispute that Erin Patterson told lies before this lunch event.

and told lies after this lunch to people investigating the causes of these deaths. But the defense's argument really is, well, just because somebody did not tell the truth doesn't mean that they committed three murders and one attempted murder. If we come to the fourth deception, as the prosecution puts it, what did the defense say about what happened after the lunch, the so-called cover-up and the dehydrator?

So this dehydrator is a very key piece of prosecution evidence. We have seen receipts that show it was purchased in April 2023 and the prosecution alleges that two and a half hours before she bought the dehydrator her mobile phone suggested she visited areas where death caps were growing. Now the lunch took place on 29th of July 2023. A few days later on the 4th of August

They found this dehydrator in a rubbish dump, dumped by the accused in the days after the lunch. Now,

The prosecution alleges this is clearly incriminating conduct. The defense says Erin Paterson panicked. She was overwhelmed by the situation. She was overwhelmed that a meal that she had prepared had led to the deaths of three people. And she was worried what was going to happen. She worried that social services were looking into this case and they'd visited to check on the welfare of the children. She was worried that her children were going to be taken off her. And that's the reason, she says,

that she disposed of this dehydrator. What about motive? What was the motive? Was there one? What did both sides say about that? So the prosecution has been keen to stress that it does not have to prove a motive. A motive is not required to secure a murder conviction.

in the state of Victoria where this case is taking place. Having said that, the prosecution did spend quite a long time hearing evidence that this relationship between Erin and the rest of the Passon family had deteriorated or was deteriorating at the time of this lunch. So while the prosecution

does not have to prove motive, that there has been some introduction of the idea that perhaps things were not well in the Patterson family. These spats and frustrations, as they've characterized it, in the Patterson family would lead a woman to try to murder four people, including the grandparents of

of her own children. The defense says this is just beyond the realms of rationality. So motive is not required to secure a conviction.

So we come to the end of this very long trial. Can you sum up for us how the defence, to begin with, characterises this whole thing? How they tie all of this together? So the key thing for the defence is the defence does not have to prove anything. The burden of proof is entirely on the prosecution and they have to convince the jury, beyond all reasonable doubt, that Aaron Patterson

deliberately murdered three people and tried to kill a fourth.

And that is something that Patterson's barrister, Colin Mandy, was very, very keen to stress during his closing address. He told the jury, if you have any shred of doubt in your mind, you must acquit her. The defense characterizes Erin Patterson as somebody who made a mistake, a terrible mistake, but a mistake nonetheless. They say that the allegation that she disposed of evidence or tried to cover up evidence is not evidence of her guilt.

It was evidence of someone just panicking at the enormity of what they'd done, of what she had done. Okay. What about the prosecution's closing arguments? How do they put this all together and how do they want the jury to look at what's been presented?

Yeah, so we've already discussed the four main deceptions and the prosecution really says that all throughout the lead up to this lunch and after the lunch, Erin Paterson acted in a calculated, deliberate and incriminating manner. Now they say the forensic evidence, the evidence from her cell phone,

the evidence of her visiting these websites, the evidence of the dehydrator, the coloured plates, these all add up to someone deliberately trying to poison these people. After nine weeks of listening to evidence, the jury will on Monday begin deliberating. If convicted, Erin Patterson faces life in prison. If she's acquitted, she will, after almost two years in custody, walk free.

We'll have the results on Reuters World News when it breaks.

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