Erin Patterson, the Australian woman accused of killing her relatives with death cap mushrooms, admitted that she disposed of a food dehydrator after learning her lunch might have fatally poisoned her former in-laws.
Ms Patterson, 50, said she did not tell anyone after realising that death cap mushrooms could have been in the meal that she served her in-laws in July 2023. She had earlier testified she became interested in wild mushroom foraging during the Covid lockdown.
Ms Patterson took the stand for the third day on Wednesday as her murder trial continued in the Victorian town of Morwell.
She is charged with deliberately serving death cap mushrooms to her estranged husband’s parents Don and Gail Patterson, Gail’s sister Heather Wilkinson and Heather’s husband Ian during a lunch at her home in Leongatha, Victoria. Ian Wilkinson was the only guest to survive after spending days in hospital. Ms Patterson has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
“I was scared that they would blame me for it, for making everyone sick. And I was scared they would remove the children,” she said, referring to child welfare department workers.
She had disposed of the dehydrator, she said, because she thought there might be “evidence of foraged mushrooms in there”.
She felt scared after child protection got involved. Knowing they were coming to her home, Ms Patterson said she decided to throw out her dehydrator.
On Tuesday, she told the court she had added dried mushrooms from her pantry to the beef wellington that she served her in-laws which might have included foraged wild mushrooms. “I tasted it a few times and it seemed bland to me, so I decided to put the dried mushrooms in the pantry,” she said. “At the time I believed it was just the mushrooms I got from the grocer in Melbourne. Now I think there was the possibility there were foraged ones in there as well.”
She also told the court about a conversation with her estranged husband, Simon Patterson, just days after the fatal meal that killed three of her relatives. She said Mr Patterson asked her if she had used the dehydrator to poison his parents.
The question made her think about whether foraged mushrooms might have accidentally got mixed with the mushrooms she had brought from Asian stores in the dehydrator.
“I do not remember if it was Simon or I that initiated it, but there was a conversation about how I had used a dehydrator to do that and he said to me: ‘Is that how you poisoned my parents, using that dehydrator?’ I said, ‘Of course not.’ It got me thinking about all the times I had used it,” she said.
“Simon seemed to be of the mind that maybe this was intentional. I was really scared.”
Ms Patterson said she did not tell a health official that the supermarket ingredients in her lunch were likely not to blame because she was scared.
She said she still considered the Asian store mushrooms a possible cause, but knew it wasn’t the only explanation. “I was starting to think: what if they had gone in the container with the Chinese mushrooms?” she claimed, referring to foraged mushrooms. “Maybe that had happened.”
She said she tried to tell police she wasn’t sure where the mushrooms had come from but believed they were from Woolworths and the Asian grocer. That was “what I thought” at the time, she added.
Prosecutors have alleged that she had used citizen science app iNaturalist to find locations where deadly death cap mushrooms were known to grow.
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Ms Patterson on Wednesday also admitted to factory resetting one of her phones the day police searched her home after the fatal lunch. She told the court she did this out of fear and concern about the investigation, but did not initially disclose this to authorities.
“I’d put all my apps on it, including my Google account, including my Google Photos, and I knew that there were photos in there of mushrooms and the dehydrator. I just panicked and I did not want them to see them,” she said, adding that it was “really stupid”.
The trial continues.
