Tears, disagreements and dried mushrooms: how Erin Patterson responded over eight days in the witness box

It was 12.40pm on Thursday, and Erin Patterson was striding from the witness box to the dock.

“Just wait there, Ms Patterson,” Justice Christopher Beale said.

She didn’t hear him and kept walking, head down, tears in her eyes, a tissue in her left hand.

Beale asked again, and this time Patterson responded. She turned and headed back the way she came.

But it was over; there were no more questions, no more agree or disagree, correct or incorrect.

After eight days, Patterson had finished her evidence in her triple murder trial.

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Patterson, 50, is charged with three counts of murder and one of attempted murder over the alleged poisoning of four lunch guests with beef wellingtons served at her house in Leongatha on 29 July 2023.

Patterson has pleaded not guilty to murdering the relatives of her estranged husband, Simon Patterson – his parents, Don and Gail Patterson, and aunt, Heather Wilkinson – and attempting to murder his uncle, Ian Wilkinson, Heather’s husband.

Illustration: Guardian Design

The last of more than 50 witnesses, and the only one called by the defence, Patterson spent about 25 hours answering questions in the Victorian supreme court, sitting in Morwell.

For almost all of Patterson’s evidence, her seat in the dock was one of the only empty chairs in court four, with the public typically queueing for hours outside the Latrobe Valley law courts building to try and get inside.

The questions ranged from the perfunctory, such as confirming her full name and age, to the puerile, about “pooing your pants” and diarrhoea in roadside bushes, and the pointed, about whether she intended to kill her lunch guests by feeding them beef wellingtons laced with death cap mushrooms.

Patterson, at various points, disagreed or said she had a different memory from the evidence given by her children, Simon, Ian, medical workers, health department officials, and child protection workers.

For most of her time in the witness box, Patterson answered questions under cross-examination by prosecutor Nanette Rogers SC.

Crown prosecutor Nanette Rogers SC. Photograph: James Ross/AAP

It was clear on the first day of the trial, and remains clear after 30 days of evidence, that the key issue in the case is this: did Patterson mean to put death cap mushrooms in the beef wellingtons she fed to her lunch guests?

Patterson says it was an accident, and she explained during her time in the witness box how it may have happened: she foraged for mushrooms, sliced them, dried them in her dehydrator, in the weeks before the lunch, then put them in a container in her pantry.

Around April 2023, she also bought dried mushrooms from an Asian grocer in Melbourne for a different meal, but after opening the packet and finding their smell overpowering, she put them in a container too.

By Patterson’s telling, when she was preparing a mushroom duxelles for the beef wellingtons on the morning of 29 July 2023, she took a taste after cooking down button mushrooms for 45 minutes. They tasted bland, so she added some dried mushrooms from her pantry, after rehydrating them and chopping them up.

On 1 August, after she says her estranged husband accused her of using the dehydrator to poison his parents, Patterson started to panic, and came to a troubling realisation: some of the foraged mushrooms may have made their way into the dish.

This was the first time the accident alluded to by her lawyer, Colin Mandy SC, in his opening submission on 30 April, had been fleshed out.

“As I was cooking it down, I tasted it a few times and it seemed a little bland to me, so I decided to put in the dried mushrooms that I’d bought from the grocer that I still had in the pantry,” Patterson said on 4 June.

“You told the jury yesterday about the Tupperware container that was in your pantry,” Mandy asked, a short time later.

“At that time, to your knowledge, what was in that Tupperware container?”

Erin Patterson’s barrister, Colin Mandy SC, departs Latrobe Valley court on 3 June. Photograph: Asanka Ratnayake/Getty Images

“At that time, I believed it was just the mushrooms that I’d bought in Melbourne,” Patterson responded.

“And now what do you think might have been in that Tupperware container?” her lawyer asked.

“Now I think that there was a possibility that there were foraged ones in there as well.”

Most questions put to Patterson, however, did not relate directly to intent, but instead to other matters which the prosecution alleges can be used by the jury to find her guilty.

One of the questions the prosecution has said it will not expect the jury to answer is that of motive, with Rogers telling jurors in her opening address that they still may not know at the end of the evidence why Patterson had done as alleged.

Many questions related to key issues in the case: why did Patterson’s evidence contradict the evidence of others? Did Patterson actually eat the same lunch as her guests? Was she really sick? Where did the death caps come from? Why did she act the way she did after the lunch? Why did she tell the lies she has admitted to? What else has she lied about?

“I am going to take you first to the lie you told to the police about never owning a dehydrator?” was the first question asked by Rogers, late on the morning of 5 June.

“Yeah,” Patterson responded.

On it went, for the rest of that week, an extended break for the King’s Birthday weekend, and then again into the next.

Rogers asked more than 200 questions that included the words “agree or disagree” or “correct or incorrect”.

During her evidence in chief, while questioned by Mandy, and in cross-examination, a series of information emerged for the first time in the trial.

Patterson spoke about problems with binge eating and purging, dating back to her 20s, and issues with her self-esteem linked in part to her mother forcing her to weigh herself as a child.

She had a habit of consulting “Dr Google” about any affliction, and a distrust of the medical system.

“So your concerns had moved from ovarian cancer to brain lymphoma and then on to heart conditions and MS?” Mandy asked her at one point, about conversations she had with Simon in 2021.

“That’s right, yep,” Patterson said, acknowledging she had never been diagnosed with any of these conditions.

“The train just kept going.”

By 2023, Patterson was planning gastric bypass surgery, she said, and had a pre-assessment for that surgery booked at a Melbourne clinic. It later emerged the clinic offered no such surgery, with Patterson saying she must have been mistaken in her evidence, though it did offer liposuction.

On the day of the lunch, Patterson said, she ate a large portion of orange cake, and then, after her guests left, vomited it all back up again.

“Is it your evidence that the vomit was partly constituted by the beef wellington; correct?” Rogers asked her.

“I have no idea what was in the vomit,” Patterson responded.

“At all?” Rogers persisted.

“Well, it – how could I? It’s vomit. Unless you can see a bean or a piece of corn,” Patterson said.

“Well, you didn’t have corn at the lunch?” Rogers asked.

“That was an example,” Patterson said, later agreeing that she had not told any medical person she vomited after the lunch, but denying that the vomiting was a lie.

Rogers asked whether photos of dried mushrooms on an electronic scale showed Patterson was trying to calculate the fatal dose of death caps needed for humans; she disagreed.

Patterson said she had not deliberately travelled to two nearby towns to collect death cap mushrooms on days when information taken from mobile phone base stations suggests she may have been in the area.

Patterson said she did not own a set of four matching plates, let alone the four large grey plates that Ian said her guests were served, while Patterson used a smaller coloured plate.

“I suggest your whole story is untrue that you plated the food without discrimination,” Rogers asked her.

“You’re wrong,” Patterson replied.

The prosecution said she lied to her lunch guests about being diagnosed with cancer, thinking they would all die, and she could get away with it. But in Patterson’s telling, she may have misled people, in part because she liked their sympathy and wanted help with the logistics of the weight loss surgery.

She expressed regret, many times over, about the messages she was sharing with her Facebook friends, particularly about Don and Gail Patterson, but denied they were a representation of her true feelings.

Patterson was emotional at the start and the end of her evidence, but largely unmoved throughout.

Erin Patterson’s lunch guests from left to right: Don Patterson, Gail Patterson, Heather Wilkinson and Ian Wilkinson. Composite: Supplied/facebook

She would start to breathe heavily, her voice would catch, and she started to dab her face with tissues when speaking about Don and Gail Patterson, or about her children, as she did in her last few minutes in the box, when she was asked details of their ballet and flying lessons.

Patterson could become fixated on certain details, including correcting Rogers on what day of the week 28 April 2023 was (a Friday, not a Monday).

Her answer to the last question, on why she said she was not “very familiar” with the suburb of Glen Waverley, was: “I may have been being pedantic; I do do that.”

Occasionally, hints of dry humour and an appreciation of her circumstances appeared to show through.

When asked by Mandy who knew about her binge eating, Patterson responded, “Nobody. Nobody. Everybody now, but nobody knew then.”

The court did not sit on Friday. The trial, which was estimated to run for five to six weeks, will continue into an eighth on Monday.