Then, the Australian woman served them a dish containing poisonous death cap mushrooms — a meal that was fatal for three of her four guests.
But her lawyers say the tainted beef Wellington she served was a tragic accident caused by a mushroom storage mishap.
In a rare step for a defendant charged with murder, Patterson chose to speak in her own defense at her trial this week.
She then sought hospital treatment but unlike her lunch guests, she quickly recovered.
At the hospital where her guests’ health was deteriorating, her estranged husband asked her about the dehydrator she used to dry her foraged mushrooms, she said.
WELLINGTON, New Zealand — Erin Patterson purchased expensive ingredients, sought advice from friends regarding recipes, and took her kids to a movie before her in-laws and their family could join her for lunch.
The Australian woman then gave them a dish that contained deadly death cap mushrooms, which killed three of her four guests.
Australia has been engrossed in a triple murder trial for almost six weeks, with the central question being whether Patterson had that as part of his plan.
In the Victoria Supreme Court case, prosecutors claim the accused enticed her guests to lunch by lying about having cancer, then purposefully fed them poisonous fungi.
The tainted beef Wellington she served, however, was a tragic accident brought on by a mushroom storage mishap, according to her lawyers. She denies killing Heather Wilkinson and Don and Gail Patterson, the parents of her estranged husband.
Heather’s husband Ian Wilkinson survived the meal, and the mother of two also denies trying to kill him. Patterson decided to testify in her own defense during her trial this week, which is an uncommon move for a defendant facing murder charges.
She discussed the tragic lunch in July 2023 in public for the first time on Wednesday, providing details on how she prepared the meal and avoided getting sick.
In the rural town of Leongatha, Patterson, 50, served death cap mushrooms to her guests for lunch. No one disputes this, but she claims she was unaware of it.
According to Patterson, on Wednesday she spent a lot of money on pricey ingredients and did research to find “something special” to serve. She claimed that in order to enhance the “bland” flavor, she departed from the recipe she had selected.
She told the court that she thought she was adding dried fungi from a container in her pantry that she had purchased from an Asian supermarket.
She informed her attorney, Colin Mandy, that she now believes there was a chance there were also foraged ones present. Patterson testified in court on Tuesday that she had been gathering wild mushrooms for years and had stored some in her pantry just weeks prior to the deaths.
After formally divorcing Simon Patterson in 2015, Patterson claimed she was “hurt” when Simon told her the evening before the lunch that he “wasn’t comfortable” going.
She admitted to his family earlier that she had planned the dinner to talk about her health. This week, Patterson acknowledged that she had never had cancer, but she told her in-laws that she had following a health scare.
Patterson actually stated that she planned to undergo weight loss surgery. However, she claimed that she was too ashamed to tell anyone and intended to pretend to her in-laws that she was receiving cancer treatment.
A tearful Patterson stated on Wednesday, “I was ashamed of the fact that I didn’t have control over my body or what I ate.”. Although I didn’t want to tell anyone, I should have told them the truth. “.”.
The defendant claimed that because she self-induced vomiting soon after her lunch guests left, she feels she was spared the worst consequences of the contaminated meal. After eating the majority of a cake in one sitting, she forced herself to throw up, a problem she claimed to have had for decades.
Patterson added that she thinks the diarrhea she had later was brought on by eating too much of the meal. After that, she went to the hospital for treatment, but unlike her lunch guests, she recovered fast.
“Her estranged husband asked me about the dehydrator I use to dry my foraged mushrooms at the hospital where the health of my guests was declining,” she said.
She claimed Simon Patterson asked her, “Is that how you poisoned my parents?”.
She later disposed of her dehydrator, Patterson said, because she was afraid she would be held responsible for the poisoning and that her children would be taken away. She admitted to investigators that she had never owned one and had never gone mushroom hunting.
She claimed that she knew it was possible that foraged mushrooms had inadvertently made their way into the meal, but she insisted that she had purchased all of the mushrooms from stores while she was still in the hospital.
According to Patterson, she was too scared to tell anybody.
Patterson added that she remotely erased photos of mushrooms she had picked from her phone while it was in an evidence locker.
In their April opening argument, prosecutors claimed that she intentionally poisoned her husband’s family, but they made no mention of a motive. They claimed that she feigned illness and took care not to poison herself.
On Thursday, the prosecutors will cross-examine Patterson as part of the ongoing trial. She could spend 25 years in prison for attempted murder and life in prison for murder if found guilty.
