Mushroom Recap: The Cover-up

Hey, I'm Sana Kadar, and I host All in the Mind on ABC Radio National.

It's a show where we investigate why people behave the way they do.

But there's some perspectives we don't often hear about.

Like, what makes people cross the line into criminal behavior?

Are they evil or are they damaged?

Are they both?

Join me for Criminal Psychology, a special series diving into some of these questions.

Hear it now on the ABC Listen app.

ABC Listen.

Podcasts, radio, news, music and more.

Lies and more lies, a quicksand of them.

The things Erin Patterson did and said to deflect suspicion and blame.

I'm the ABC's True Crime Investigative Reporter, Rachel Brown.

And I'm Stephen Stockwell.

This is the final instalment of a five-part series that takes you back through the whole story that started with a homemade meal and ended with a triple murder trial.

In this episode, the cover-up.

Welcome to the case of the mushroom lunch.

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.

In the week following Erin Patterson's Beef Wellington lunch, she lied a lot.

In an attempt to cover up her crime, she misdirected and made up stories, even as the evidence mounted against her.

And in this episode, we're going to walk you through each one of these.

Yes, Docie.

And as her guests are lying in hospital for what will be the last week for most of them of their life, Erin has a week of cover-ups.

And these lies start almost immediately after the lunch.

She says she was also sick, but clearly not as sick as her guests.

Right.

And I mean, while the focus of the kind of 29th, 30th of July is on the Beef Wellington meal that she cooks and serves to Don, Gail Patterson, Ian and Heather Wilkinson, there's another meal that weekend that will later come under scrutiny.

And that is what Erin Patterson feeds to her children on the Sunday night.

That's right.

She says she fed them the leftovers from the lunch, but that she just scraped off the mushrooms because her kids don't really like mushrooms all that much.

But then, Stocky, as you know, we've had heaps of questions about that.

Why,

knowing that a lunch that you've cooked the day before has made so many people sick, why would you give these leftovers to your children?

I mean, her son did say this was the best piece of meat he has ever eaten.

And this I find kind of strange because that's despite Erin's claim that she microwaved what at this point would have been a day-old meal.

And again, like you say, it's also kind of hard to believe that after learning how sick everyone else is, that she wouldn't, you know, immediately want to bring her children into the hospital.

It took Dr.

Webster, the guy who's looking after folks at Lee and Gather Hospital, basically shouting at her, they can be alive and scared or dead to kind of get her across the line to bring them in for healthcare after she supposedly fed them the leftovers.

And one of the other early misdirections also with Dr.

Webster is the source of the mushrooms.

So he'd been treating the lunch guests, Heather and Ian Wilkinson.

He'd got that crucial call at seven o'clock in the morning from Dan Inong Hospital saying, we think it's death cat poisoning.

So when Erin Patterson arrives,

he knows these guests are seriously unwell.

Here's the cook.

She might be sick too.

He asks, where did you get the mushrooms from?

And she says, Woolies.

There was no doubt in my mind from the moment she said Woolworths that she was guilty of deliberately putting these poisonous mushrooms in the meal.

Erin leaves hospital immediately following that conversation.

And,

you know, there was a question about whether or not the question was, where'd you get the mushrooms?

Where did you get the ingredients for the meal?

I mean, knowing that Dr.

Webster has come straight from hearing that this is death cat mushroom poisoning.

An hour earlier.

An hour earlier, you know, you can see how that would be the question he asks.

But yeah, Erin Patterson disappears after that.

And when she returns,

she has a different story to just Woolies.

She does.

When she comes back to the hospital she gets a call from her estranged husband Simon's brother Matthew Patterson and this happens at 1030 and he asks the same question where did you get the mushrooms from and she says Woolies

and she adds something and dried mushrooms from a Chinese grocer in the Oakley area.

And she tells this to other people too, hospital workers, a paramedic, a child protection worker.

And so this news gets to the health department and a search starts because they're, I mean, if this is true, there might need to be a recall.

It's, you know, it's public panic, it could be.

So someone is assigned from the Monash City Council, Troy.

He hits the road, wears down that boot leather.

tries to scout out all the Asian grocers in Oakley, Clayton, Mount Waverley with a trusty spreadsheet.

Yeah, he's been given a bit of information.

You know, at this point, the health authorities have had a quick chat with Aaron Patterson.

She's given them those suburbs that you've run through, Rach.

And this search gets underway.

And yeah, the scale is pretty massive, as well as Troy going around to all the Asian grocers.

The police are also having conversations with Woolies about where they're getting their mushrooms from because, you know, they don't want Woolworths, you know, one of the biggest retailers in the country, to be selling poisonous mushrooms to people.

They quite quickly kind of clock that actually that's not something that's going to happen.

So they don't worry about that.

But this Asian grocer search continues.

You've got got Troy rolling through different grocers.

He's finding little plastic bags.

You know, this one's got a white label on it.

It's a clear plastic bag, like what Erin Patterson had said

her bag looked like.

And he's sending those photos to someone at the health department.

And she's trying to get in touch with Erin Patterson to be like, hey, is this the bag?

Like, is this what you've got?

Trying to get more details.

But Erin Patterson, not super cooperative.

You know, she's not, she's not answering the calls from the health department who are trying to track this down.

Yeah, Erin at times replies, look, I've been busy looking after the kids, I'm being at hospital.

And so the woman from the health department running this search, Sally Ann Atkinson, she gets a call from a child protection worker who is going to be looking after the safety of the children.

This worker's planning a visit to Erin Patterson's house on Wednesday at 1 p.m.

So Sally Ann Atkinson, very resourceful, thinks, ah, here's an opportunity.

So she says, to the child protection worker, can you call me when you're at Erin's house and put her on the phone?

So pretty ingenious way of getting hold of someone.

Very clever.

And on that phone call, Sally Ann finally gets to talk about packaging and sizes and labels.

And it's on this call on the Wednesday that Erin throws Glenn Waverly into the mix.

Adding another suburb that, oh, maybe the Asian grocer was here.

Correct.

So Sally says she passes this information on to Troy, who's probably sick of mushrooms and mushroom shops by now.

So she says she passes it on.

He says, I've no memory of that.

And by the end of the week, he's pretty much exhausted his search and he doesn't look at any Asian grocers in Glen Waverley.

Yeah.

The search kind of peters out.

I found this really interesting actually.

Like I really wanted a resolution to this part of this story, but there isn't one, you know, there's a bit of information on one side that doesn't seem to get passed across.

Someone doesn't continue a search.

And then there's no will to really, you know, encourage them and continue the push.

I mean, I do wonder if maybe all these people collectively were like i really don't think there's much in this so we can we can let that go um it's also why this was end ended up being put down to a wild goose chase totally yeah and the thing i find so interesting about it is that you know erin's kind of apparent lapses in memory around where she got these dried mushrooms from.

You know, there's a strip mall, there's a big, busy shopping arcade, could have been a tiny little shop here, oh, maybe it was in this other other suburb.

I mean, you need to remember that Erin Patterson owns a house in this area.

She worked for the Monash City Council.

And this wasn't a really long time ago.

You know, we are at this point.

We're in early August.

She says she bought these mushrooms in April.

So we're, you know, we're not like several years down the track.

We're only a number of months down the track.

And, you know, we also see in other occasions that Erin Patterson has, you know, this incredible recall, that she has an incredible memory and can remember all sorts of details over such a long period of time.

So, yeah, I find it strange that she wasn't able to clearly identify this place and help the people that were looking for this.

And that's why people start thinking:

is this a wild goose chase?

Is this classic magician misdirection?

You know, instead of looking over here, look over here, look over here, you know, and was she trying to distract authorities?

Because potentially, she's surprised when Death Cat Mushrooms comes up up so early in the piece as a potential reason of poisoning.

You know, I'm not sure I would, that would be my first thought if someone said they've had food poisoning.

You'd think about the beef.

And I think that's where doctors' minds did go.

So this came up pretty quickly,

which is perhaps a reason why she leaves the hospital and comes back with a new story.

But she also...

She needs to keep alive an alternative source of death cat mushrooms that wasn't her fault.

But her hope that using this as a distraction doesn't work because police are told by doctors that there's concerns she mightn't have been as ill as the other patients.

In air quotes, basically.

So suspicious.

So police start keeping an eye on Erin.

Yeah, they go as far as keeping an eye on her bank transactions, in fact.

And while they're looking through where she's spending money and what she's doing, they notice that she spends $13.50

at the local tip on the Wednesday morning.

So they head down there and they discover that just before Erin Patterson was meeting with the child protection worker, just before she got on the phone to Sally Ann Atkinson to talk about the mushrooms, she was at the tip dumping the dehydrator.

Why?

Well, she knows death caps are suspected.

And she must fear that remnants of them might still be in her dehydrator.

She knows child protection's visiting that day.

She knows this dehydrator will make her look guilty.

And she fears, and I think genuinely feared, losing the kids.

So Wednesday morning, she's just out of hospital.

She's just dropped the kids at school.

Child protection work is due at 1 p.m.

So that morning she has work to do and she dumps the murder weapon.

But police find it.

and later test it and sure enough alpha and beta amanitin so the death cap toxins are detected in her dehydrator.

It seems strange that she wouldn't realize

following this lunch that she would be a suspect.

Well, like I said, with food poisoning, death caps aren't the first thing that you think of.

Maybe she thought, oh, people are just going to think everyone's got gastro and it's affected them worse because they're older.

And then that conversation with Dr.

Webster on arriving to hospital, that's the...

the kind of alarm bell that starts to ring.

And the police interest and I mean, even Erin's cover-up does not end at this point.

Exactly a week after the lunch, police are knocking on the door to her house.

They tell her that two people have died following the lunch, and Erin says, this is the first she's heard of it.

She says, no one's been telling me anything that's been going on, and it's been really hard.

They search her home.

They're looking for anything.

Devices, books, whatever they could find.

USBs.

They ask for her phone, and she gives them one.

But later, police will realise it's been reset earlier that day and this phone will also be reset later back to factory settings when it's sitting in a police locker.

So that's phone B and police realise that's a dummy phone because this phone, this dummy phone that she gives police, isn't the one that she's been using for most of the year and that's the one that the prosecution says would have implicated her in deliberate poisoning.

One of my clearest memories is the video of Erin Patterson giving the the phone to police.

She's sitting around her kitchen table.

She's been sitting in or around that space the whole time they've been searching her house.

This is a process that goes for hours.

It's not a quick thing.

They're in her house for hours looking for all these various bits and pieces.

And yeah, at the end, she is sitting at the table and there's a video of police officer asking for her to hand over a phone.

And she puts a phone on the table and hands it over.

And the police officer says, does it have a passcode?

And she says, yeah, I think it does.

And he says, oh, is it four or six digits?

And she actually doesn't know if it's four or six.

And then, as he opens the phone to slide it up, it opens without needing a pin, just like a recently factory reset phone would.

And then Erin Patterson heads off with the police to sit down for a chat, have an interview.

And she just continues to lie.

She does.

So police say,

Do you own a dehydrator?

She's like, no, don't have one.

I think I might have had one years ago, but no, I don't have one.

This I find incredible, right?

So, you know, during the search, police find, you know, manuals for a dehydrator.

But, I mean, we know that they know that she owns a dehydrator because they have her dehydrator, that they have recovered from the tip.

And it is incredible that they are sitting there with a straight face, just kind of giving her the rope.

And they just keep giving her the rope.

I've thought about that a lot too, Stocky, and that incredible poker face from the informant, Stephen Eppenstall, ex-Army, maybe that's helpful.

But just imagine knowing that information and hearing, nope, nope, never owned one, and him having to go,

okay, next question.

Have you ever foraged before?

And Aaron says, nah, never.

And this lie, have you ever foraged before?

No.

This ends up being like a, this is a pretty big one.

A big one and one that gets flipped 180.

So Erin Patterson is arrested in November 2023 and when she gets to trial, it goes from a woman who has never foraged before to foraging becoming her key defence.

I mean it needs to be, right?

If she's going to argue it was an accidental poisoning.

We hear all about the walks she would take during COVID, the places that she would often forage for mushrooms from, all places that she says she foraged for mushrooms from, mind you, you know, on her property, the Hannock Gardens, all those sort of places.

And foraging is the reason why Erin Patterson had to get in that witness box.

And as you and I know, it's risky, you know, it's not advised, you open yourself up to cross-examination, but she did it.

She took the stand because no one else could tell that story but her.

Yeah, but I mean, even at this point, Rach, there are still holes in her story.

For example, you know, she does not get get as sick as the other lunch guests.

She also gets sick at a different time to the other lunch guests.

According to her, she is sick earlier in the evening when the guests aren't sick until later on that Saturday night on the 29th of July.

But we end up being told a story that perfectly fits those holes, almost too perfectly.

Yeah, that's right.

So on the day of the lunch, an orange cake was brought for dessert.

Erin Patterson says that once the guests left, she ate the rest of the cake, so three quarters of the cake, and then threw it up.

So we're all thinking, oh,

is that her reason for not getting as sick?

I.e.

the toxins wouldn't have absorbed into her body.

And then why did she get sick earlier than the lunch guests?

Well, there was an answer for that too.

Her lawyer said that she was tasting the duck sell early in the morning, so tasting that mushroom paste.

So two things that very neatly plug some of the gaps.

And it didn't end there.

We also got, like, the 11th hour of the trial, Rach, the story of this weight loss booking that Erin Patterson said she had in the months following the lunch.

I think it was in September 2023.

She was supposed to be going to this place called the Enrich Clinic.

You know, she's talked about how she had long struggled with disordered eating, that her mum used to weigh her, and that she was booked in for gastric band surgery at this clinic.

And this moment was kind of wild because the lead informant, Stephen Eppenstahl, left the room once this was revealed, obviously going to investigate the claim, and then came back a couple of days later with further questions, with details from this clinic, challenging this story that Aaron Patterson had just told the jury in the witness stand.

Yeah, incredible to see.

all of that happening kind of in real time.

Again, this like very convenient story that is filling in all of the little gaps that exist in the case against Aaron Patterson.

And it's rare for investigations to be going on during a trial.

You know, it's rare for an accused to drop new stories in the witness box, but the jury must have decided these were just that, just stories, just lies, even during her trial.

And we've had a lot of questions, Stocky, about whether she did herself any favours by deciding to give evidence.

There are so many questions without Aaron Patterson standing in the witness box that remain unanswered.

But, you know, I do wonder if she hadn't been in there and told that story, that maybe the jury would have ended up with kind of enough doubt over some other parts of her story.

Yeah, I think that too, because without her answers, there's no explanation about how any of this could have been an accident.

The jury would have had to make too many mental leaps on their own, you know, and we've talked about clearing that bar of intent for 12 people beyond reasonable doubt, hard thing to do.

So perhaps there would have been too many gaps to fill.

So her getting in the witness box allowed these gaps to try to be filled with various stories, but the jury didn't buy it.

Clearly not.

You know, of all of the lies and the stories and the misdirection and the ruses and all the other words you can think of for the various distractions of Aaron Patterson.

They weren't swayed by them.

Maybe Stocky, they just stood back and looked at all of it and thought, well, yeah,

you've explained away this and explained away that and explained away this, and each of those components makes sense.

But when you look at it as a whole and the sum of all its parts, it's suspicious.

And after six days of deliberations, they found Erin Patterson guilty on all counts: of three counts of murder for Don and Gail Patterson and Heather Wilkinson, and one of attempted murder for Ian Wilkinson, the guests that went to her house on the 29th of July 2023 to sit down for a Beef Wellington lunch.

And Stocky, we know so much about what happened.

We've detailed it all through this series.

But there's something that we don't know, which is why.

We never got a motive.

And Simon Patterson and Ian Wilkinson might spend the rest of their lives asking themselves that.

And the only person who knows why is Erin Patterson.

So many of you have told us how this podcast has opened a window for you into the justice system.

And we want to keep being that window.

So I'm excited to say that we're here to stay.

Twice a week, we'll be bringing you recaps from some of the most fascinating trials that are happening around Australia.

And our first new trial will be kicking off very, very soon, within a week.

So to find out what that is, make sure you are following this podcast.

Very soon it will be called The Case of, as we've been teasing, and it will look a little bit different.

The Case of the Mushroom Lunch is produced by ABC Audio Studios and ABC News.

It's presented by me, the ABC's true crime investigative reporter, Rachel Brown, and Stephen Stockwell.

Our executive producer is Claire Rawrenson, and supervising producer and researcher for this recap series has been Yasmin Parry.

Many thanks to Audio Studios manager Eric George and our commissioning executive producer Tim Roxborough for helping make this show a reality.

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

If you like your true crime podcasts with real investigative journalism, you'll love Unravel.

Unravel is the ABC podcast that investigates a new case each season.

It's won podcast awards, journalism awards, and it's had millions of downloads.

Unravel will have your headphones glued to your ears.

Search for the Unravel podcast now for award-winning true crime.

You can find it on the ABC Listen app.