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Mushroom cook Erin Patterson has confessed to dishonesty, recounted past embarrassments, and expressed remorse while giving testimony at her trial for triple murder.
The 50-year-old has entered a plea of not guilty regarding the deaths of her former in-laws, Don and Gail Patterson, aged 70, and Gail’s sister, Heather Wilkinson, 66, following a lunch in July 2023.
Patterson also rejects the accusation of the attempted murder of Heather’s husband, Ian Wilkinson, the sole survivor of the meal.
The church pastor has been present for most of the trial daysafter providing his own testimony and this week observed quietly from the back of the courtroom as Patterson testified.
She insists that the poisonings were accidental.
‘I shouldn’t have lied to them’
The Supreme Court trial in Victoria’s regional town of Morwell has run into its sixth week, with curious spectators queuing before dawn to grab a coveted seat from where they could witness the accused give evidence.
Sitting behind a varnished timber stand, Patterson told the jury about having low self-esteem as an adult and wanting to do something about her weight and poor eating habits.
She also admitted lying to her lunch guests about it.
“I was planning to have gastric bypass surgery, and so I remember thinking, ‘I didn’t want to tell anybody what I was going to have done’,” she told the court.
“I thought perhaps letting them believe I had some serious issue that needed treatment might mean they’d be able to help me with the logistics around the kids.”
She told the jury she had also invited her estranged husband Simon Patterson for lunch that day to talk about “some health stuff” but he did not attend.
Patterson said she mentioned at the table an issue she had “a year or two earlier where I thought I had ovarian cancer and had various scans about and related to that”.
“I’m not proud of this but I led them to believe that I might be needing some treatment in regards to that in the next few weeks or months.”
“Did you lie to them?” Defence barrister Colin Mandy SC asked.
“I did lie to them,” she replied.
When questioned about her reasons, Patterson explained: “I was really embarrassed. I was ashamed of the fact that I didn’t have control over my body or what I ate… I didn’t want to tell anybody but I shouldn’t have lied to them.”
Crown prosecutor Nanette Rogers SC asked about that conversation but Patterson denied she told her lunch guests she had been diagnosed with cancer and needed advice on how to break this news to her children.
“I suggest you never thought you’d have to account for this lie about having cancer because you thought the lunch guests would die,” Rogers said.
“That’s not true,” Patterson replied.
“What I was trying to communicate was … that I was undergoing investigations around ovarian cancer and might need treatment in that regard in the future.”
Mandy cited the accused’s police interview on 5 August 2023, where she told them she had never dehydrated food and denied owning a dehydrator.
“Were those lies?” Mandy asked.
“Yes,” Patterson replied.
Asked why she lied to detectives about the dehydrator, Patterson said: “I had disposed of it a few days earlier in the context of thinking that maybe mushrooms that I’d foraged for the meal I prepared was responsible for making people sick.”
After police told her Gail and Heather had died during a search of her home before the interview, Patterson said she had a “stupid knee-jerk reaction to just dig deeper and keep lying”.
“I was just scared but I shouldn’t have done it,” Patterson said.
He asked Patterson if her answer to police that she had “never” foraged for mushrooms was also a lie.
“Yes, they were both lies,” she replied.
Patterson pressed on apology to in-laws
Months before the fatal lunch, Patterson revealed she had apologised for sending Facebook messages to her online friends about her relatives after a dispute between her and Simon about child support and schooling.
She said she did not mean the messages, “this family, I swear to f***ing god” and “I’m sick of this shit, I want nothing to do with them”, insisting it was her “venting” frustration.
“It wasn’t Don and Gail’s fault. It wasn’t the family’s fault. It wasn’t even entirely Simon’s fault. I played a part in the issue too,” she told the court.
After returning from a family holiday to New Zealand, Patterson said she apologised to her in-laws.
“What were you apologising for?” Mandy asked.
“For trying to involve them in something that they didn’t need to be worried about,” she said.
“I wasn’t asking them to take sides but, in effect, I was.
“I wanted them to agree with me that I was right and Simon was wrong, and that wasn’t fair.”
She denied Rogers assertion she was angry with them for taking Simon’s side in the dispute or that those comments were her true feelings towards her in-laws.
