All the times Erin allegedly poisoned Simon – and much more

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Everything the jury didn't hear.

And everything we've been desperate to tell you.

I'm ABC Investigative Reporter Rachel Brown.

And I'm court reporter Christian Silver.

And I'm Stephen Stockwell.

Welcome to Mushroom Case Daily.

Just a week after four people sat down for a family lunch in rural Victoria.

Three of them were dead.

Homicide detectives are still piecing together what exactly happened at the lunch.

It's certainly looking like the symptoms are consistent with death cap mushrooms.

Erin Patterson said she bought the dried mushrooms at a supermarket and an Asian grocery store months earlier.

I cannot think of another investigation that has generated this level of media and public interest.

This is our biggest episode because there has been so much we have not been able to tell you throughout the trial of Erin Patterson.

Today, we are going to reveal some of the biggest secrets of a case against Erin Patterson.

The dropped charges that relate to her estranged husband Simon Patterson, that she allegedly attempted to poison him on a number of occasions prior to the fatal lunch in 2023.

We've also also got in this episode conversations that Simon Patterson had with his family talking about fears that he had for his life and Aaron Patterson's cat.

Socky, since the trial, so many people have asked me about the evidence against Erin Patterson and, you know, do you think the police had a good case or do you think she did it or all these types of questions.

And I always say

If you were blown away by what you heard during the Aaron Patterson trial, you'd probably be shocked by some of the things that didn't make it into the trial.

Some very, very interesting information.

There have been restrictions on what we've been able to tell you since the trial ended, but today that restriction was lifted.

So in this bumper episode, we're going to take you through these things that the jury didn't hear.

But first, Rach, can you explain to us why this restriction was in place to start with?

Basically, Stocky to protect her appeal rights.

So Justice Beale thought in the event of a retrial, we don't know whether one will happen yet, but in case there is one, he doesn't want to prejudice potential jurors of that retrial with certain information.

Yeah, right.

And Christian, is this common?

You know, at the end of a trial, do we often see judges put a suppression over things that happen in pretrial or things that have been said without the jury in the room?

No, it's not common at all.

Normally, when a trial is finished, all the stuff that happened in the pretrial is kind of fair game.

And that was the way we thought things were going to pan out.

There were a lot of things that we thought we'd be able to drop straight after the verdict that we had to keep concealed in the box.

It is a pretty conservative step that Justice Beale took and one that has required the media outlets to actually lawyer up to try to unseal this box so we can tell you all these things from the pretrial.

Yeah, and the box has been unsealed today, as I mentioned.

So we can finally talk through some of the things that the jury didn't know.

We'll give you detail or more detail on some of the things the jury didn't hear.

And I mean, the first one of these, probably the biggest one that the jury actually did know a little bit about, were the charges relating to Simon Patterson, Aaron Patterson's estranged husband.

First day of the trial, the jury is told, put them out of your mind.

But a lot of the pretrial hearings actually revolved around

the charges relating to Simon Patterson, the court hearing that Aaron Patterson, he says, had tried to poison him in the past.

Christian, can you just take us to to those pretrial hearings?

What were they?

What was the purpose of some of them?

Well, some people will remember that when we started this podcast, we were talking about Erin Patterson being charged with trying to kill her relatives at the lunch and then trying to kill Simon Patterson.

And then when it came to the trial, we kind of

miraculously forgot about the Simon Patterson charges.

And that was for this reason that what happened was those charges were actually what's called severed from the lunch charges.

And we were, in effect, going to have two trials that were going to run back-to-back.

And then, at the last minute, the prosecution dumped all the Simon charges.

So, when we were back in that pre-trial phase, when the prosecution was really hoping to run this all as one giant trial, Simon Patterson was asked a lot of questions about his own personal health and times when he fell sick, allegedly, when Aaron Patterson had fed him meals.

Now, it's worth noting that Erin always denied poisoning Simon Patterson but obviously the police at that time saw fit to charge her with attempted murder over several instances.

And yeah, we had a series of instances that we heard about

prior to any of this getting to court.

So we had a number of charges relating to Simon Patterson.

I think there were three or four attempted murder charges initially relating to Simon Patterson.

And then during the pretrial hearings, what we call 198Bs, we get a bit more detail of three instances between 2021 and 2022.

That's right, Stocky.

So three alleged poisonings in 2021 and 2022.

And that, as Simon said, this was through a Penne bolognese, a chicken corma curry, and a vegetable wrap.

And they all happened during or around camping trips that he and Aaron took together.

Yeah, and at this point in Simon Patterson and Aaron Patterson's relationship, they are separated, but they're still on pretty good terms.

I mean, obviously they're going on camping trips together, the like.

You know, the big blow-up that we heard of during the trial, that was end of 2022, so that was after these instances.

Rach, you've mentioned, you know, three different meals, pasta, curry wrap, veggie wrap.

Can you take me through each one in a little bit more detail?

Sure.

So the first one, November 2021, it was just before a camping trip to Wilson's Promontory.

Simon Patterson claims that Erin brought him over a Penne Bolognese to have the night before, the camping trip.

He said to the court, she told me she'd made pasta for all of us, i.e.

including their kids, and that she'd fed it to the kids that night.

At that time, the couple were living separately, as you said.

Now he ended up, Simon ended up in Lee and Gather Hospital for an overnight stay, suffering from vomiting and diarrhea, and he was put on a drip, an anti-nausea medication.

The next incident he claims that he was potentially poisoned was May 2022, camping trip at Upper Hauqua.

They had chicken korma curry on the second night.

Now this was the time that he says he suffered the most.

He had vomiting and diarrhea again, was taken to Mansfield Hospital.

He was discharged, but then a couple of days later he called Erin for help to get to the toilet.

And then next thing, he's in Monash Hospital in a coma for some time.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

And Erin, as his next of kin, was asked for permission to operate.

She was told if they didn't, Simon Patterson would die.

And so during that surgery, I think a large portion of his bowel was removed and then he went back and lived with Erin for some time.

She helped look after him, look after his house as well.

The third alleged poisoning was September 2022, camping trip to Wilson's Promontory.

He says that Erin brought items to make a curry for her and a vegetable wrap for him.

Same thing again, nausea, diarrhea.

Erin drove him to his parents' home.

He says he started vomiting, having slurred speech and possible seizures.

An ambulance to Monash Hospital was called and Simon told the court by the end of the journey, all I could move was my neck, my tongue and my lips.

That's right, Rach.

And I was also in this pre-trial hearing and you mentioned the name of the hearing 198B.

It's a complicated legal term, but basically what it is, is it's a pre-trial cross-examination.

of a witness.

So it's almost like a test run in a way, a test run for the lawyers, obviously a test run for the person who's on on the stand.

So Simon Patterson was questioned for days in the Supreme Court in 2024

and I remember back to this Wilson's prom incident September 22, he was questioned about his memory and he said he trusted his memory about

Erin.

bringing the curry and the vegetable wrap and he said the wrap was prepared and he could picture it inside the aluminium foil and he could picture the ingredients in her lunch which weren't wrapped.

And one of the common themes that ran through Simon's allegations was that these were all meals that Erin Patterson prepared specifically for him and that it did not appear as if others were eating the same thing that Simon had.

So there was an absence of the children.

It was a commonality that she gives him something and he eats it in isolation.

And you mentioned Test Run and we should probably say too that these 198Bs becoming more and more common now because people are electing to skip the committal hearing, which is when a lot of this stuff is usually thrashed out, what's admissible, what's not.

So

that's what these do.

They weed out some of the things that we may not be allowed to hear in the trial.

And, you know, when we're looking at Simon Patterson getting sick on these instances, these meals that have been prepared by Aaron Patterson for him,

I mean,

what did we hear about the alleged kind of poison that was used in these instances?

I mean, are we talking mushrooms?

There was no unifying diagnosis for Simon's presentations, and that's the evidence that Professor Andrew Burston gave to the court.

So in the first instance, Penne Bolognese Wilson's prom, no test confirmed Simon's symptoms.

The second one, camping at Upper Hauqua, the chicken called Macuri.

Professor Burstyn gave evidence to the court that it looked like stressed bone marrow consistent with infection, but there was no evidence for an infective cause.

Professor Burstyn said it was unlikely it was a primary liver injury.

And then the third one, camping to Wilson's prom, vegetable wrap that Christian was just talking about, Professor Burstyn said it looked like an arrhythmia caused by low potassium.

He went on to say, look, it's highly unlikely that Simon's presentations were consistent with a toxin poisoning, and if it was caused by that, it would be atypical.

But then he continued to say, you know, ultimately there was no infective cause found.

So it's possible a toxic substance was ingested.

Now, interestingly, Stocky, at a later court session, Dr.

Nanette Rogers told the Court of Appeal that around this time, around the third alleged poisoning, there was an article on barium carbonate that was discovered on Aaron's computer.

Now, barium carbonate is a rat poison.

Do you remember that, Christian?

You were in the Court of Appeal that day.

When Dr.

Rogers said this in the Court of Appeal, our ears pricked up because we'd never heard this through weeks and weeks of pre-trial it was actually a new piece of information that the prosecution had so we didn't get to sort of see the full depth of it but what what she said was was that some sort of article was found on Patterson's computer then the prosecution had gone back to Professor Burston and said hey what about rat poison

as a potential option?

Yeah, that's right, Christian.

But then the defence jumped up and sought down to play this additional report and said, look, Professor Burstyn has initially given low potassium as his early reading, you know, based on the medical records and not on his analysis and his consultation with Simon Patterson.

So Colin Mandy, a C was like, the prosecution might seek to adduce evidence that something else is also consistent with that presentation.

But Colin Mandy said, look, I'm sure that Professor Burstyn won't back away from his original evidence.

And this is an interesting thing because we never really saw the Defence argument to this play out.

We never got to hear whether Simon's medical records matched what he told police in his police statement because the Defence never had to contest this, given the charges were severed.

So we've been wondering, you know, how many times has Simon eaten Erin's food and not been sick?

Or how many times has Simon been sick from food that Erin didn't make?

And these are questions that we'll never get answers to because they never played out in court.

It's really interesting, you know, kind of listening to both of you explaining this and the detail we get.

And I mean, there's a lot of detail there, but you compare that to how much detail we would hear, we would hear during the Patterson trial from the medical experts around the condition of the lunch guests and all that.

Like there was days and days of interrogation of like the, you know, the rolling out of various facts and then the picking apart of them.

And, you know, you would listen to something and go, oh, well, you know, that's obviously that situation.

Then you hear it pulled apart by the defence.

Like, we never got to that with any of these.

No, the rat poison thing was an untested claim that the prosecution made.

And I think that's how it's going to remain.

And I mean, I guess the million-dollar question here is, why didn't these get to trial?

Why weren't these included in the trial of Aaron Patterson so they could be tested and hurt in this way?

This comes back to really how this case and this trial was going to be framed.

The prosecution was very keen to have it all lumped in in one case.

But the problem that they had was

they had instances from 2021, 2022, and then you've got this lunch in 2023.

And the defense argued that if the jury was hearing about potential poisonings from 21 and 22,

that they're going to be too biased.

They're going to be prejudiced into thinking, well, if she did the first couple, then she must have done the lunch poisonings.

But the way that the system works is each charge has got to be proved on its merit.

And Justice Beale made the call that

they would be too influenced from hearing about the prior incidents

to fairly judge the lunch.

And that's why he ordered that the charges be severed, to be split.

And the plan was to have the lunch trial first, as it was dubbed, and then at some point after that,

the Simon charges.

That would have thrown up a whole bunch of issues around suppression orders, which we can get into.

But let's just say that we really weren't sure if we were going to be able to report much of this trial.

Yeah, and the prosecution pushed this, though, didn't they?

Because they took this to the Court of Appeal and Dr.

Rogers said, Look, this is coincidence evidence.

Coincidence evidence is a bit different to tendency, but coincidence is the similarity of two two or more events or acts.

And so Dr.

Rogers argued the similarities were that what Christian mentioned earlier, that Ms.

Patterson, she said, allegedly prepared and allocated the food for each meal.

The children weren't present at any of the meals, and that Simon Patterson said he became sick after consuming that.

So Nanette Rogers was trying to argue this should be included.

under coincidence evidence.

As Christian said, Justice Beale decided on severance in case the jury was led to make a decision on an improper basis, like an emotional one.

The prosecution in the Court of Appeal lost that, what's called an interlocutory appeal.

The Court of Appeal upheld Justice Beale's decision.

In the hearing, one of the appeal judges, Philip Priest, seemed to agree with the defence that it would be unfair prejudice.

He said, quote, I suppose it could be said the evidence of the four lunch charges appears to be stronger than the evidence on the three Simon charges.

And Justice Priest said it's a very short hop, skip, and a jump to convicting on the other three.

Just on Justice Priest speaks his mind.

He really does.

Forthright character who made

some strange pop culture references.

Yeah, usually you don't know what judges are thinking, but we could read pretty early that Justice Priest seemed to be agreeing with Colin Mandy as he.

But the pop culture reference, I'm laughing because he referenced a Danny Kaye movie, The Court Jester, and said, the palate with the poison has a vessel with the pestle, the chalice from the palace has a brew, that is true.

And everyone looked a bit confused.

And I'm like, oh, I love this movie.

I watched it as a kid with my dad.

The other thing I remember from Justice Priest was

the guy's a pretty straight talker.

And

He was talking to the lawyers and he said, basically, the prosecution case is, she's a poisoner, right?

And Nanette Rogers looked a bit stunned and said, yep, that's

essentially that is the case.

And he's like, right, okay, move on.

Now, Christian, you mentioned a bit earlier, you know, how close we got to not being able to make that podcast.

It's something I want to come back to later in this episode and talk through, yeah, really, how close we came to not being able to bring you Mushroom Case Daily in the way that we were able to.

You know, ultimately, the Simon charges were dropped though.

Day one of the trial, those charges were dropped.

Again, as I mentioned, Justice Beale told the jury to put them out of their mind.

I mean, Christian, why

are charges usually dropped in a situation like that?

Was it that they just weren't going to hold up, that they weren't going to be able to win that case?

Like, am I oversimplifying that?

Well, the OPP never really goes into great detail about why they dropped charges.

But the kind of stock line that they often

dole out is that they didn't think that there was a reasonable prospect of a guilty verdict.

Now, we don't know specifically whether that's the case in the Simon matter.

Sometimes the OPP will discontinue a case because they don't believe it's in the public interest to continue pursuing it.

But exactly why they decided not to go ahead, we don't know.

I hope they've consulted with Simon Patterson and explained the decision to him.

Yeah, I mean, you know, Christian, you...

you know, you're sort of saying you hope that Simon Patterson kind of understands all this and gets why it wasn't there.

But I mean, there was a moment, Rach, in court when Simon Simon Patterson was sitting in the witness box.

The jury was out of the room, I think, at this moment.

That's right.

But he made a reference to the charges and there being this stuff that he's not able to talk about and he didn't really understand why.

Yeah, it was in early May and he referenced these discontinued charges while sitting in the witness box.

And he said, the legal process has been very difficult, especially the way it's progressed in terms of the charges relating to me and my evidence about that or non-evidence now.

He said, I'm sitting here half thinking about the things I'm not allowed to talk about.

I don't actually understand why.

It seems bizarre to me, but it is what it is.

So you can imagine sitting there

self-censoring as you go, like we've had to do about the things that we're not allowed to tell you.

But he's sitting in the witness box, probably thinking, Oh, I can't say that.

Yeah, and that really takes me back to that moment when he was in the witness box and he was asked, How come you bailed out of the lunch the night before?

And his answer was something to the effect of, I felt too uncomfortable.

And

that probably sounded like a bit of a lame answer, but

he wasn't able to say what he said in the pre-trial.

And when he was asked a similar question in the pre-trial, his answer was, I thought there'd be a risk that she'd poison me if I attended.

So it must have been tough for him to sit there and hold his tongue

when the same question was asked months later with very different circumstances and rules that he had to play inside.

And also at that pre-trial we heard from other people that Simon didn't think others were at risk, that he thought he was the only target and that's why he didn't warn his parents when they decided to go to Erin's lost.

There's absolutely no suggestion at all that

he thought his parents were going to be in danger and it seems that he believed that Erin's alleged behaviour was just something that was targeted at him.

And I mean, during the pre-trial, I mean, a lot of this I put out of my mind.

I deliberately kind of tried to avoid any of that just to lower the risk of me accidentally mentioning it in the middle of a Mushroom Case Daily episode when we weren't allowed to.

But there's so much context and detail that comes out of that.

And there's so many things you learn from that process.

You know, there's all of this background to Simon Patterson and these other alleged poisoning attempts.

But there's also, Rach, things that we learned about Ian Wilkinson, the surviving lunch guest, that never came up during the trial.

Yeah, that's right.

So this was a really intense day, I think, for him at pre-trial.

Ian Wilkinson, under cross-examination, was talking about his state of mind in the weeks after the poisoning.

And he said, after a stint in intensive care and after periods of sedation, that he sometimes found himself in a state of delirium and having really strange dreams.

And he says, in one, you know, I thought I was in a medical helicopter with my daughter-in-law, who's a nurse.

And, you know, she was on the helicopter with me and we were going somewhere for treatment.

He said, I didn't think I was in hospital.

And then he was asked by Colin Mandy if he'd tried to escape the intensive care unit.

And he gave that little chuckle that we came to know.

of him during the trial and he said, yeah, I very much wanted to go home.

Yeah, right.

And Christian, during this process, during Ian Wilkinson's, you know, kind of evidence at the pre-trial hearings, you know, this is when we got the first detail of the lunch.

This is when we found out about the individual Wellingtons, the cancer claim, and the different plates that everyone was served on.

Yeah, but we weren't allowed to tell anyone.

Just really, really hard thing to do as a reporter.

Look, these pre-trial hearings are not meant to be things that we can report on because they're so close to the trial proper.

So, you know, that's not unusual at all.

But we were hearing all this stuff and our minds were just exploding.

So, what did we hear?

The orange plate thing that came out for the first time when Ian Wilkinson was in the pre-trial.

This is the, you know, the detail that, you know, Ian Wilkinson says Erin Patterson served the lunch guests on these large grey plates and herself, a different colour plate, individual Wellington's on these, but yeah, hers, different colour.

Well, even the individual Wellington's, I'm pretty sure.

That was new.

And the CancerCon.

So that...

was

just mind-blowing when we were hearing that for the first time.

And then really understanding,

okay, now we can see where the prosecution's going to go with this.

Because up until that point,

we didn't understand.

It didn't make sense.

And this was the start of us being able to piece together what that police investigation had looked like for months and months.

Yeah.

And there was a point during the trial of Aaron Patterson in Wilkinson cross-examined at great length about whether or not Aaron Patterson said she had cancer or if she suspected she had cancer.

This is a real thing that kept going on and on.

And, you know, for me, during the trial, I wondered why all of this time is being spent on it.

And then Rach, you know, going back through the pretrial, I'm learning that, you know, Ian Wilkinson in the pretrial said it was a suspected cancer diagnosis himself, which is where that's come from.

Yeah, he said after the lunch, Erin revealed that she suspected she had ovarian cancer.

Ian said that was the major issue, really, that there was this brief description of some kind of diagnostic test which which showed cancer and that Erin expressed she was particularly concerned about the children since their father had nearly died fairly recently and that's one of those alleged poisonings that we've been speaking about

and that she was potentially facing a life-threatening situation so she was worried how the children were going to cope with that there's one

other thing as well that's

a really significant moment in the story of Erin Patterson, you know, particularly around, you know, the way the Patterson and Wilkinson families are thinking about what's happening to Don and Gail Patterson and Heather and Ian Wilkinson as they're lying in their hospital beds, you know, all approaching death.

And that's a kind of conversation that Simon Patterson has with the family, bringing them together to let them know, you know, about the alleged attempts that he believes Aaron Patterson has tried on him.

And this was another thing that had to be cut out of the trial because the trial was about the lunch and not about Simon's personal experiences.

So it was dubbed the chapel meeting and it happened in the Austin Hospital Chapel.

Now the Austin is where

all of the lunch guests ended up and Don, Gail and Heather died at the Austin.

So

what we heard in the pre-trial was that Simon actually called a meeting with his cousins, I believe, and some extended family members and said, look, I think Erin is responsible for this.

and he explained to his family members that he believed that she had tried to poison him on several occasions.

This was news to a lot of his family.

He had told a couple before,

and I know we're going to get into this, that it was something that he'd kept under wraps because I imagine going around telling people that your wife is trying to poison you does sound...

pretty full-on.

Yeah.

Yeah, this is such a visceral scene in all of our minds, isn't it?

And this chapel meeting is said to have happened on the Wednesday.

So the same day that she dumped the dehydrator, that she reset phone B.

So this chapel meeting is that night.

And Ian Wilkinson's daughter, Ruth Dubois, gave evidence at pretrial saying that Simon wanted to tell us his own illnesses had been a deliberate act, that he'd stopped eating food Erin had prepared because he suspected she might have been messing with it.

And then Ruth told the court Simon was sorry he hadn't told his parents before, but he thought he was the only person that she was targeting and he'd be safe.

And I mean, we've spoken about his previous trips to hospital following meals that he says were prepared by Erin Patterson.

And, you know, again, during pretrial, we heard a bit about how he was kind of like trying to monitor or keep track of what was going on.

Well, Socky, I know you've got an interest in spreadsheets and tracking things.

And

I guess it's no surprise that Simon Patterson an engineer also looks at the world maybe in a similar way so he actually started tracking his meals in a spreadsheet and this was after a discussion with one of his doctors and it was there that he raised this pretty sensitive allegation that he reckons that Aaron Patterson was trying to poison him.

So this was a doctor named Christopher Ford, not to be confused with Chris Webster, another doctor.

And Simon Patterson in the pretrial said that when he told told Chris Ford

about this, that Chris was very thoughtful and said, I suggest you don't tell too many people about that.

And around that time,

Simon Patterson actually removed Aaron as his medical power of attorney as well.

And we heard in the pre-trial that Simon actually told his brother about this claim.

And they were at a Ben Harper concert.

And yeah, as you'd remember, Matthew Patterson, the brother, is who called Erin as his parents lay in hospital and asked where the mushrooms came from.

So, and as well as Matthew Patterson, pre-trial heard that Simon Patterson told Don Patterson his suspicions as well.

Simon Patterson told the court Don was very thoughtful.

And Don allegedly said, I suggest you don't tell too many people.

That could create issues in the way that people relate, especially.

you know, with Erin and our family.

But then this idea came up about, you know, this maybe is why Don brought a container of his vomit to the hospital.

With Simon's words playing in the back of his mind.

Another thing we didn't hear at the trial, but that came up in pre-trial.

The thing is as well, like we've heard varying numbers about the size of this police brief, which is the giant document with all of the police evidence.

I've heard 50,000, I've heard 100,000.

There's so much information in these documents.

Maybe some of it's irrelevant, but there's so much to this this story that we still don't know.

And yet, not tested, not corroborated.

It hasn't been given the full thrashing by a court yet, we should point out.

That's why we're saying he or she says.

Yeah, and I mean, there's so much we haven't been able to tell.

I mean, Christian, you know, you talked before about not confusing Dr.

Chris Ford and Dr.

Chris Webster, the doctor at the Lee and Gather Hospital, but there is a crossover there.

There is a crossover.

And this was something that Dr.

Webster wasn't able to say at the trial either, that he was able to say at

when news started coming in about the sick people in Lee and Gatha with gastro-like symptoms, Chris Ford picked up the phone and called Chris Webster and gave him a heads up.

And I guess that probably adds a bit of context to some of the media interviews that Chris Webster's done since the end of the trial,

where he said that, you know, once Erin Patterson turned up to hospital and gave an explanation, he knew that she'd done it.

Something to that effect.

That's what he said.

And I think

when you consider that Chris Ford had tipped him off, that

that probably makes a bit more sense.

It does add precious context, doesn't it?

Because I'm just looking through my notes here and pre-trial heard that Chris Ford called Chris Webster at 9.06 a.m.

on the Sunday morning.

So I'm not even...

The day after the lunch, yeah.

Ian and Heather Wilkinson haven't even got to hospital yet, I don't think, by this point.

So Don and Gail are in.

Chris Ford calls Chris Webster and says, there's two people coming to you who I suspect might have deliberate food poisoning based on previous events that have gone on with my patients.

So it's worth keeping an eye on their electrolytes.

And this might help explain why they got onto it so quickly.

Remember how we were saying that it's weird that you first jumped to death caps as a possible source of poisoning?

This might have played into all of that.

I mean, all of this extra context may have come out if we had one giant trial, but

yeah,

that's not the situation we were in.

Christian, again, talking about Dr.

Chris Webster.

You know, we hear some of the detail of these other interactions and conversations he's having during the pretrial hearings.

We also hear a maybe more uncensored version of Dr.

Chris Webster

during these hearings, right?

Yeah, this is the man that says he doesn't have an inside voice, so he has to take private phone calls in the car park.

And has one hell of a TikTok page.

So back in the pretrial, Dr.

Webster was being asked many of the things that he ended up inevitably talking about at the trial,

about

the presentations of the sick people and Aaron Patterson also coming to hospital.

We all remember how Erin turned up at the hospital and then very quickly bailed back home.

Webster was asked about how

he called the police.

police and that was a pretty unusual thing to do, but he was explaining, you know, he was so worried that Aaron Patterson might have been exposed to death cap poisoning.

And during

this questioning,

he said that

he was talking to a nurse about this.

And he said that he might have used some expletives and quick language warning.

And then the prosecutor, Jane Warren, decided to ask him tell us exactly what did you say

and it was a bit awkward but you know Chris Webster it's under oath he's got to tell the truth so he said his exact words to a fellow nurse was where the fuck did she go which

yeah you know in the grand old Supreme Court with a

highly educated doctor on the stand

We had to stifle a few chuckles.

But Chris Webster said that, you know, he'd had that reaction because he'd just told Erin Patterson that she'd been exposed to a potentially fatal dose of poison.

And he thought hospital would have been a good place to stay.

And as we know of Dr.

Webster, he speaks his mind.

So as we've come to learn more about him, perhaps...

that response isn't such a surprise.

And Rach, you know, saying this man is a man with a very loud voice, he does have a very loud voice.

I can only imagine these expletives echoing through the halls of the Leon Gather Hospital as he finds out that Aaron Patterson has left.

And he never said it at the trial, perhaps decided to self-censor a bit.

I think he might have wanted to.

But yeah, it'd be interesting what kind of bedside manner

might have.

And one of the final characters I want to kind of touch on in the pre-trial, this is someone who we heard from during the trial.

It's one of Aaron Patterson's Facebook friends.

Although during the trial, Colin Mandy did point out that he thought the friend in the context of this witness was being used quite liberally.

This is Daniella Barclay.

Friend in quotation marks.

That's probably how Mandy would have said it.

I think so, yeah.

And Daniella Barclay, you know, we heard from her during the trial, but again, Christian, very different things or, you know, kind of an extra little piece of information that emerged during the pre-trial that

I think Mushroom Case Day listeners will be very interested to hear about.

In the pretrial, witnesses have been called into the box.

And often we have no idea who these people are because as reporters, you're not given any context.

So eventually you figure out pretty quickly, oh yeah, they're a medical expert or a relation to one of the people in the case.

So when Daniella Barclay got called up, we weren't entirely sure who she was.

And then it did come out that yes, she was one of Erin Patterson's Facebook friends.

And then Colin Mandy went down a route that I didn't expect and was pretty awkward for the guy who was sitting next to me.

His name's John Ferguson.

He's a reporter with The Australian.

And while Ferg is in the room, Colin Mandy asked Daniela Barclay, the witness, whether she'd been talking to Ferg.

And Daniela explained that they were both actually writing books about the case.

And Colin Mandy asked her, is your book really about the case?

And she explained that it was a broader book, including things about her life, things about this Facebook friend group that Erin Patterson was allegedly part of.

And the working title of the book was What Tore Us Apart?

But interestingly,

Colin Mandy continued to ask how detailed this book was, and she said she'd written 50 to 60,000 words and it was incomplete at that point.

Probably didn't realize

the puddle that she was stepping into because after telling the court that she'd written 50 to 60,000 words the defence then called for the entire manuscript of the book and I presume it was handed over.

We did hear more details about some of the inner workings of this Facebook group and

I'm just glad that no one else had to sit through that.

It just sounded like a group of very dysfunctional people and for good reason it was left out of the trial.

What do you mean like big little eyes vibes?

Like small town gripes?

Is that what you mean?

Some interesting characters

and using the word interesting in the way that Stocky uses it.

Yeah, they sound like interesting people is probably all I'll go with there.

And I mean look we had half a day's conversation about some emojis.

God forbid what would have happened.

You know, I don't want to think about what would have happened had all of these messages come up, the conversations about emojis, slang that we would have been subject to during the trial of Aaron Patterson.

There were other moments in the courtroom, Christian, when the jury was out of the room that you gave us an insight into other things that weren't included or that they didn't hear to kind of help them make their judgment on Aaron Patterson.

And these seem like such small things in the moment.

One of them was a receipt that we saw from Aaron Patterson's local tip.

This was really intriguing because the jury was shown this receipt, which showed Patterson's visits to the tip.

And from memory, there were some very old visits, you know, in the distant past where she'd gone to the tip.

And then there were entries from August 2023.

And this is the famous tip visit when she dumps the dehydrator.

What the jury didn't know is that receipt actually had more rows, more entries.

And Justice Beale had ruled some other visits to the tip inadmissible and instead of showing the jury a receipt which had a big black mark crossing out entries they edited it to conceal

the

record of the other visits.

Now

Erin Patterson's other visit to the tip around the vicinity of the lunch is very interesting.

It actually happened the day of the lunch.

It happened hours after the lunch.

Patterson went to the tip

and we have seen some footage, which has come out in some media reports, of this tip visit.

And

you can see Erin pulling up in the red SUV, just like she did when she was dumping the dehydrator.

But this time, she goes to a different part of the tip.

And the footage shows her carrying bits of cardboard, almost like parts of a cardboard box, and putting it into a paper cardboard bin.

Now,

the fact that she would go to the tip a couple of hours after the lunch,

I'm sure the police would say, is very sus.

I mean, Saturday Avo

tip visit to throw out some cardboard because on the police evidence, you've deliberately poisoned these people, they've left.

And then you've gone to the tip to throw out some cardboard.

But Justice Beale ruled this out.

Now, at the time of recording right now, we don't have the full context for why that is, but I can say from the footage that we've seen, it does show her throwing pieces of cardboard.

It's not clear that there's anything else in the footage.

But obviously the timing is pretty weird.

Yeah, and I guess, yeah, you know, we don't know what was being discarded.

So, yeah, the fact that it's kind of inconclusive is probably the reason we didn't see this included in the trial.

Yeah, and remember, Ian Wilkinson talked about orange plate and four grey plates, and then there appears not to be conclusive evidence of grey plates existing.

And questions have been asked.

Well, maybe she snuck the grey plates into

this visit to the tip.

I don't know.

The footage that we've seen doesn't show that, but

it's possibly why it was ruled out.

And there's another kind of interesting story that we were told in the courtroom while the jury was out of the room, kind of adding to the number of things the jury didn't hear.

This one, not quite on the same scale as some of the other things we've discussed, but it's a story about Aaron Patterson's cat.

This is a story that starts with some photos of mushrooms that weren't allowed to be included in what was being presented to the jury, right, Christian?

This was one of the most bizarre pieces of non-evidence, I guess we'll call it, because it never made it it into the trial.

But there was a Facebook post that Erin Patterson allegedly made in 2020, so, you know, three years before the lunch, where she's posted something to a page called Poisons Help Emergency Identification for Mushrooms and Plants.

And while the jury, you know, wasn't present,

the court heard that Erin Patterson wrote, my cat chewed on this mushroom just now.

He is having a vomit, was in grassland near trees.

I'm in Victoria, Australia.

And the prosecution said that this post was accompanied by photographs which were later extracted from one of Aaron Patterson's digital devices, and it appeared to show mushrooms that Aaron had picked in 2020.

20.

Now, the relevance that the prosecution tried to say was: well, this shows that Aaron Patterson has an interest in poisonous mushrooms.

But there was was also another

string to the argument

that

Erin Patterson never owned a cat.

And so what are they getting at with this?

Are they saying that Erin Patterson has like fabricated this story of a cat being sick to check to see if the mushroom she's picked are poisonous mushrooms?

And that she's a liar because she never owned a cat.

Yeah, such a wild story about a non-existent cat.

I mean, we almost had a non-existent podcast as well as we were going into this trial question.

We spoke about this at the start of the episode, you know, with the Simon-Patterson charges being severed, the potential of two trials being run.

Yeah, we were almost weren't able to make this podcast at all.

That was our big fear.

The pod.

with the name Mushroom Case Daily was seriously worried.

It was not going to live up to its name.

And the reason for that is because we thought there was going to be back-to-back trials.

We expected there to be a suppression on the first trial, meaning no reporting at all.

And the first trial was the so-called lunch trial.

So that was the big fear.

And this is a week before the trial is about to start.

The media and even the lawyers, not really sure how this is going to publicly play out.

There was the foreshadowing of a suppression application made by the prosecution.

So the prosecution wanted to keep the lunch trial secret.

Defence was happy to go along with this.

The application wasn't formally made and the reason why was when it was raised in front of Justice Beale, he actually said he thought a suppression order would be an exercise in futility.

I remember that too and I remember breathing a sigh of relief because we're thinking, you know, are we all going to be living together for 11 weeks and the public won't hear any of it?

But Justice Beale kind of did our job for us.

Like, usually, we have to jump up and say, excuse me, Your Honor, the media would like to be heard on this.

But yeah, I was surprised Justice Beale said, you know, my initial reaction to the application is that it would be an exercise in futility because it wouldn't prevent news of the outcome of the first trial spreading like wildfire.

Yeah, well, two things on that.

I mean, the notion that what's possibly the biggest case in decades would have been kept secret until the very end is just unthinkable and not a good advertisement for the principle of open justice.

Having said that, we have seen similar situations.

When George Pell was facing back-to-back trials, there was secrecy for a long time and some people may remember how trial verdicts were kept secret and that secrecy didn't last because

Outlets from other parts of the world published and then other media outlets in Australia pushed the envelope expressing their frustration that they couldn't report what was a huge story.

So I think, this is just my analysis of it, I think Justice Beale was well aware that this was a Pell-esque case in terms of its public

interest.

And he knew that if Patterson was found innocent or guilty at the lunch trial, everyone would have found out anyway.

The overseas outlets would have published.

It would have been, as he said, an exercise in futility to try to keep it secret.

In the end,

this particular suppression fight never happened because the Simon charges were dropped and it meant there was only one trial and no reason to suppress that.

Yeah, and it's been so interesting kind of going through that trial.

You know, this whole episode has been about what the jury didn't hear, what we haven't been able to tell you the whole time we've been going through that.

And, you know, I kind of hope you'll forgive us for holding this stuff back.

There's really important rules and laws that govern what we are and aren't allowed to report.

We're basically only allowed to report what the jury hears during a trial, so we don't influence them with anything that that falls outside the rules that govern the the legal process.

And so, Rach, it's been at times, you know, really challenging to try and balance all of this, you know, as we were going through the daily reporting a mushroom case daily.

Really challenging and we just had to remember our touchstone, right?

Like our role was to be your eyes and ears in the courtroom.

And so we could only give your ears what the juror's ears have heard, you know, to bring you the closest you can be to being in their shoes.

So for that, yeah, we had to put aside our feelings and other things we know or things we've heard.

And we couldn't even let that taint what we told you, you know, or let it bleed somehow into our tone or our language.

So yeah, it's been tricky.

And while we're here,

I would like to plug some of our older episodes that you and I did, Stocky, that we haven't been able to talk about.

Three in particular, one with Nick Pappas, KC, a very experienced lawyer who talks about being in the shoes of a prosecutor.

So you can go back and listen to that and you might get a sense of maybe what Nanette Rogers was thinking.

Rishi Nathwani talked us through what it's like being on the defense side.

That was a fascinating episode.

And then we also interviewed a man named Sven Berger.

who served on a jury in the United States.

And obviously the situation's pretty different to serving on the Patterson trial, but he gave us that insight as to what it's like being on the jury.

So please go back and listen to those episodes.

They were great fun to make and really, really insightful.

Yeah, it gave a great idea and understanding of what all of these different kind of parties and groups are doing throughout the trial.

And yeah, because the jury doesn't know any of that, we weren't able to promote or suggest you we go to listen to them.

We would talk about what it's like being on a jury and were unable to say, hey, you should go listen to this episode with Svenberger, who explains it, because we couldn't point to things outside of what the jury had heard.

Christian Silver, thank you so much for talking us through and taking us through all of this, the stuff on the pod.

And Rach Brown, ABC Investigative Reporter, thank you as well.

Such an incredible journey that we've all been on together.

It's been an absolute pleasure to be part of it.

And there's still more to come.

Of course, in the trial, Erin Patterson has got to be sentenced.

Once she's sentenced, we start the watch on the 28-day timer to see if that appeal application lobs in.

Yeah, thanks, guys.

It's been an honour to do this with you because we've seen not just fascination in the case, but what you hoped this podcast would be, Christian, which which is pulling that veil back on the legal system.

And we've found just how interested people are in this with sending us, you know, 8,300 emails about it.

Yeah, just blown away by people's interest.

And thank you so, so much for getting in touch for all of your feedback.

Yeah, I mean, the community that we've seen built around Mushroom Case Daily has been actually quite incredible.

So we're not going anywhere.

We're going to continue to be with you.

I mean, we'll have an episode for you in a few hours, a bit later this afternoon, with Erin Patterson's record of interview, her voice as she spoke to police that has been released by the court today so we'll have that for you very very soon also the next stages in this trial what happens with her sentencing

also hearing today a number of victim impact statements that will form a part of that so all the details of that and we'll be starting our next trial really really soon in fact in the next few days we're going to be taking you to the northern territory as we cover the trial of matt wright.

Olivana Lothures, the Darwin court reporter, will be putting you in the room there.

Matt Wright has been charged with perverting the course of justice following his alleged actions after a fatal helicopter crash in 2022.

It's a really incredible story.

A lot of interesting details have come out already.

And yeah, in the next couple of days, we will continue our exploration of the Australian justice system as we dive into our next trial.

He's one of the Territory's biggest stars.

Flashing cameras and waiting reporters.

As Netflix star Matt Wright fronted court.

The Territory tourism operator is facing a string of charges relating to the circumstances of a chopper crash.

This was a tragic event that took the life of the crocodile egg collector.

Mr.

Wright strenuously denies any wrongdoing.

Mushroom Case Daily is produced by ABC Audio Studios and ABC News.

It's presented by me, Rachel Brown, Christian Silver and Stephen Stockwell.

Our executive producer is Claire Rawlinson and a huge thanks to our true crime colleagues who continue to help us out.

Our commissioning executive producer Tim Roxburgh and supervising producer Yasmin Perry.

Thank you to senior lawyer, our legal queen, Jasmine Sims, for her legal advice as we've been making this podcast, and to the Victorian newsroom and audio studios manager, Eric George, for making this show a reality.

This episode was produced on the land of the Wurundjeri people.

Hi, I'm Sam Hawley, host of ABC News Daily.

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