Mushroom murderer Erin Patterson's decision to testify fails to convince jury

By Alasdair Pal

MORWELL, Australia (Reuters) -A month into the trial of the Australian woman accused of murdering three of her estranged husband’s elderly relatives with poisonous mushrooms, her barrister Colin Mandy stood and delivered one of the case’s pivotal moments.

“The defence will call Erin Patterson,” Mandy told the court. 

Patterson, who was convicted on Monday of three counts of murder and one count of attempted murder, was the only witness for her defence in a 10-week trial that gripped Australia. 

She told the court she had a loving relationship with the three people who died, including her mother and father-in-law, saying they were all she had in a frequently troubled life. 

In fact, she murdered three of them and attempted to kill a fourth by slipping lethal death cap mushrooms into individual Beef Wellingtons she served at a July 2023 lunch, a jury found. 

An alleged murderer testifying as a witness in their own defence is a rare strategy and normally a last resort, said Nicholas Papas, a veteran criminal barrister based in Melbourne who frequently acts in murder trials. 

“The risk is that when you call your client, then suddenly people start focusing on your client,” he said. 

Patterson’s decision also opened her up to five days of tense cross-examination by prosecutor Nanette Rogers, with whom she repeatedly clashed over minor details. 

Patterson’s version of events – that she had included the deadly mushrooms by accident and she had not died herself after eating the tainted meal due to an eating disorder – was rejected by the jury as unreliable. 

“You're actually putting (the case) in the hands of your client, and lawyers don't tend to want to necessarily do that,” Papas said. “We like to control the process if we can.”

TROUBLED LIFE

Patterson, 50, grew up Melbourne, the daughter of an academic. She qualified as an air traffic controller and had been accepted to study nursing at the time of her arrest, after a life marred by a tempestuous marriage and problems with her weight and low self-esteem, the court heard. 

In her own testimony, she hinted at a strained relationship with her now-deceased parents, who were “in Russia, on a train” on her wedding day in 2007, she told the court. 

During a 2009 road-trip across Australia with her estranged husband Simon, she left abruptly in one of their many separations, leaving him alone with their son, then only a few months old.

She frequently wept as she spoke of her close bond with the Patterson family, including her father-in-law, Don, with whom she shared a love of learning, she said.

The judge presiding in the case, Justice Christopher Beale, instructed the jury that Patterson could only be found guilty if they rejected her testimony, which they did unanimously. 

Patterson initially told police she had bought the mushrooms used in the meal from a local supermarket, before then saying she had got them from an Asian grocer in Melbourne.

A 2023 search of Asian grocers in the city found no evidence death cap mushrooms had been sold. During the trial, Patterson said she may have foraged for the mushrooms but did not ultimately know where they had come from.

She had also lied about a cancer diagnosis to her guests because she was embarrassed to admit she was actually having gastric band surgery, Patterson said in evidence. 

She told the court she wanted her relatives' advice and assistance with looking after her two children while she had the surgery, and named a clinic in Melbourne that was later found never to have offered the procedure.

From the wood-panelled dock at the back of Court 4 at the Latrobe Valley Magistrates Court in Morwell, where Patterson sat for most of the trial, she stared intently at the jury as they entered and exited the courtroom. 

Flanked by two custody officers, she appeared alert but relaxed during the proceedings, occasionally donning a pair of black-rimmed spectacles to study evidence on a court-issued tablet. 

The prosecution offered no motive for Patterson’s decision to murder her in-laws. Under Australian law, it did not have to prove one to secure a conviction. 

Patterson will be sentenced at a later date, at a hearing that will consider the reasons for her offending. 

For now, the only person who truly knows why she poisoned the lunch is Erin Patterson herself.

(Reporting by Alasdair Pal in Morwell; Editing by Kate Mayberry)