A search of devices found at Erin Patterson’s home reveals a visit to a science website showing the location of death cap mushrooms about a year before serving up a poisoned beef Wellington, a jury has been told.
Patterson, 50, wore a black-and-white striped top and glasses today as she faced the fourth week of a triple murder trial in regional Victoria accused of deliberately poisoning her former in-laws.
She has pleaded not guilty to three counts of murder over the deaths of Don and Gail Patterson, 70, and Heather Wilkinson, 66, and the attempted murder of Ian Wilkinson who survived the July 2023 lunch.
Patterson claims she did not intentionally poison her lunch guests and it was a terrible accident.
Victoria Police digital forensics officer Shamen Fox-Henry gave evidence today about examinations he did of devices seized from Erin Patterson’s home by police on August 5, 2023.
He said he applied keyword searches to the seized devices for terms including “death cap, death cap mushrooms, mushrooms and poison”.
Analysis of a Cooler Master computer taken by police, which had three storage devices inside it, revealed that on May 28, 2022, the iNaturalist science website was searched for via web browser Bing, he said.
The iNaturalist website was also accessed, about 7.22pm, and “observations” were visited, the jury was told.
Then at 7.23pm “death cap from Melbourne VIC Australia on May 18 2022” on the iNaturalist website was visited on the device.
It further detailed it was at “Bricker Reserve, Moorabbin” and the post was by Ivan Margitta, with two visits to the web page.
“That URL was visited twice in that browser,” Fox-Henry told the jury, who were shown records of the website visits.
The device then used Google to search “Korumburra middle pub” at 7.23pm.
The trial before Justice Christopher Beale continues.
