Erin Patterson, the Australian woman accused of murdering her people with a poisoned beef Wellington, took the stand on Monday to give evidence about her fractured relationship with her estranged husband and his family.
Ms Patterson, 50, is charged with deliberately serving death cap mushrooms to her former in-laws Don and Gail Patterson, Gail’s sister Heather Wilkinson and Heather’s husband Ian during a 2023 lunch at her house in Victoria. Ian Wilkinson was the only guest to survive.
She spoke of a rift with her separated husband and his family. “A bit more distance or space between us,” Ms Patterson said.
She had started to have “concerns” that her estranged husband, Simon Patterson, no longer wanted her involved with his family. “Perhaps I wasn’t being invited to so many things,” she said, describing their relationship at the time as “functional”.
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Ms Patterson also spoke about the highs and lows of her relationship with Mr Patterson, telling the court they had separated several times following the birth of their son in 2009.
“Obviously our relationship was struggling to cause a separation, it was really important to both of us to cooperate about [our son] and make it as easy on him as possible,” she said. “Primarily what we struggled with over the entire course of our relationship ... it was, we just couldn’t communicate well when we disagreed about something. We could never communicate in a way that would make each of us feel heard and understood.”
Ms Patterson met her husband in 2004 while working at the Monash council, a local government authority, and early in the relationship she was a “fundamentalist atheist” trying to convert him despite his Christian faith. But a service at the Korumburra Baptist Church, led by Mr Patterson’s uncle, Ian Wilkinson, and centred on “faith, hope and love”, had a profound effect on her.
“I had what can be best described as like a spiritual experience,” she said. “I had been approaching religion as an intellectual exercise up until that. Does it make sense? Is it rational? But I had what I would call a religious experience there and it quite overwhelmed me.”
Ms Patterson told the court she had envisioned her Leongatha home as the “final house” and even designed the initial layout herself. “I was involved right from the beginning of the design. Simon and I were involved through the whole design process. I drew a design first myself in Microsoft Paint,” she said.
“I saw it as the final house, meaning I wanted it to be a house where the children would grow up, where when they moved away for university or work they could come back and stay whenever they want, bring their children. and I’d grow old there. That’s what I hoped.”
She admitted to struggling with “low self-esteem” for much of her adult life, which worsened as she grew older. “I had been fighting a never-ending battle of low self-esteem most of my adult life,” she said. “And the further inroads I made into being middle aged, the less I felt good about myself, I suppose. Put on my weight, could handle exercise less.”
The trial continues.
