On July 29, 2023, Erin Patterson invited her in-laws over for lunch. Before they arrived at her home, she purchased expensive ingredients, asked friends about recipes, and sent her children to the movie theater. After consuming the beef Wellington that she prepared, three of her four guests died. The meal contained poisonous death cap mushrooms. Now, for the past six weeks, an Australian jury has been trying to determine if it was Patterson’s intention to kill her in-laws or if she served the deadly foraged mushrooms by accident.
Patterson lied to her in-laws about her health.
There are several strange occurrences surrounding this friendly dinner. First off, Patterson led her guests to her home under false pretenses. She told them that she had been diagnosed with cancer and was planning on undergoing treatment. In reality, she was going to have weight-loss surgery but was too embarrassed to share those details.
“I was ashamed of the fact that I didn’t have control over my body or what I ate,” Patterson said during the ongoing trial. “I was ashamed of that, I felt embarrassed. I didn’t want to tell anybody, but I shouldn’t have lied to them.”
Patterson claims she used mushrooms in the recipe to help with the “bland” flavor, the Associated Press reports. Her attorneys argued that the inclusion of the death cap mushrooms was an unfortunate mistake that was a result of a storage issue.
Patterson forages for mushrooms and inadvertently swapped them for the mushrooms she’d purchased from an Asian grocer in Melbourne. After that lunch, her husband Simon’s parents, Don Patterson and Gail Patterson, and his aunt, Heather Wilkinson, died. Ian Wilkinson, Simon’s uncle, is the only survivor of the lunch beside Erin Patterson.
Patterson says she was not more sick because she vomited after the meal.
Another strange detail: Patterson testified that she believes she survived the poisoning because she intentionally vomited after the meal, a purging habit she had been practicing for many years. She claims she had diarrhea afterward and eventually went to the hospital for treatment. At that same hospital, her in-laws’ health was rapidly deteriorating. While there, she ran into Simon, who asked her if she’d used her food dehydrator to poison his parents. She told him, “Of course not.”
Fearing that she’d be blamed for their sickness, she discharged herself from the hospital, against medical advice, went home and threw the dehydrator out. Then she reset her phone to hide the fact she’d searched for mushrooms on her phone.
She could spend 25 years to life in prison.
Prosecutors claim Patterson was reluctant to take treatment for ingestion of the death cap mushrooms. They also argued that Patterson faked her own illness to make it seem like she’d eaten the mushrooms as well. Ian testified that while she served the four of them on gray plates, she served herself on a smaller colored one. Patterson argued that she doesn’t own gray plates.
If found guilty, she faces life in prison for murder and 25 years for attempted murder.
