Mushroom Recap: The Murder Weapon

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A unique murder weapon sent to a true crime chat group.

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

And I'm Stephen Stockwell.

This is the third episode 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, how Erin Patterson prepared for the fatal lunch.

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 middle of 2023, there's this guy called Dr.

Tom May.

He's one of Australia's leading mycologists, so experts in mushrooms.

And he's going for a walk in southeastern Victoria, an area called Gippsland, specifically a place called Outram.

And he's walking along a kind of dead-end road that runs across the top of a ridge out on a farm near there.

And he sees some mushrooms that are sprouting on a pile of leaves beneath an oak tree.

Now, Dr.

Tom May, being the mushroom expert that he is, knows immediately what these are.

Again, he is one of our country's foremost experts in mushrooms.

He was actually in the area that day because he was giving a lecture on mushrooms when he decided to go for a walk.

And this is when he sees them.

These are yellowish.

They have a broad cap.

These really intricate gills, which are the little lines that you'll see underneath the top of a mushroom.

And they were growing under an oak tree.

So he knew right away that they were death caps, the most deadly mushrooms in the world.

Dr.

Tom May takes a photo of these mushrooms and he posts them on the citizen science website iNaturalist where people can share details and locations of various flora and fauna that they have spotted around.

Now Dr.

Tom May, being an expert in mushrooms, has already made over 70 posts on this platform about different mushrooms, but never death caps.

And he drops a pin near Outram with a photo of these mushrooms under his profile, Funky Tom.

and goes on his way.

Now, coincidentally, Stocky, this is not the first documented sighting of death cat mushrooms in Victoria that year.

So Funky Tom's post lands in May 2023 but a month earlier in April there's a woman called Christine Mackenzie.

Now she loves funky.

She says she finds them quite beautiful so she loves taking photos of them.

So she's out for a walk with her grandson and her dog on a footy oval in Loch, so also South Gippsland.

In very early in the morning, the oval is ringed by oak trees and underneath one she sees some mushrooms growing in the fallen leaves.

They're also yellowish with a wide cap.

Now Christine Mackenzie happens to be a former poisons information specialist so she's also uniquely equipped to know these are death cap mushrooms.

And if you're curious it had been raining a lot during this period which is why all these death caps started springing up.

So like Dr.

Tom May, Christine takes photos of these mushrooms and she posted a GPS pin to iNaturalist.

She got her grandson and dog out of the way to do this.

Very dangerous.

And unlike Funky Tom, she tries to remove as many as she can.

She takes a dog poo bag, she puts them in the bag.

She says, Look, Locke kindergarten sometimes has bush kinder on this reserve, so I was keen to remove all the samples I could find.

But she says, you know, she's aware that this time of the season, more could grow.

And it just so happens that these two posts are the only known sightings of death caps in the Gippsland area in the past 20 years.

Now it doesn't mean they're not growing elsewhere, but they're the only two sightings that have been posted to this citizen science website.

Yeah, and we know that Erin Patterson is familiar with iNaturalist, this website where both of these posts were made.

Just under a year earlier, we're talking late May 2022, just before Erin Patterson orders dinner for her family, she searches for death cat mushrooms on this site.

You know, she opens up her computer, goes to the website, and there's a big map that you can use.

So she types in death cat mushrooms and slowly zooms in from a world map to a map of Australia, to a map of Victoria, to see where these mushrooms are growing.

Now, there weren't any growing near her house in Gippsland, but there were some growing in Melbourne.

She has a look at that page for a little bit, not long, we're talking seconds, and then she goes to the local pub website to sort food for that night.

She orders a a family pack of garlic bread, two lots of chicken parmigiana, a kid's fish, and 1.25 litre bottle of no sugar coke.

Now, we don't know if Erin Patterson ever viewed the posts that Christine Mackenzie made and Dr.

Tom May made.

No, we don't, which is really interesting, Stocky, because her iNaturalist search was in May 2022.

And the two posts you just mentioned, they won't appear until the next April and May, just to set the timeline.

But here's what we do know, and here's the curious thing.

10 days after Christine Mackenzie posted pictures of death caps in Loch on the iNaturalist site, Erin Patterson goes for a little drive.

So from her mobile data, here's what we know for sure.

She leaves her home in Leengatha and she drives to somewhere near Loch, which is about 20-25 minutes away from where she lives.

Two and a half hours after that, she stops in at the shops back at Lean Gatha and buys a dehydrator.

Now a month later, later when Tom May drops a pin of his death cap sighting in Outram, Erin Patterson goes for a drive again but this time just one day after this Tom May post.

Her mobile data shows she drives to somewhere near Outram, which is 15 minutes from her house, and then also that morning she'd also visited Lock

again, too.

So we don't know exactly where she went or far more importantly, what she did, but on those drives we know for sure that the posts went up on iNaturalist and pretty soon after those posts, Erin Patterson was somewhere nearby.

This is all around April and May of 2023.

And the reason that this timing is important and these dates are important is because the season for mushrooms doesn't last very long.

You know, it needs to be wet, it needs to be cold but not too cool, which is why you get it in this kind of transitional month of autumn as the weather's starting to cool down, things are a bit damp.

And that's really the only time you'll actually be able to find mushrooms in any significant quantity, certainly if you're out foraging and the like.

And Erin Patterson buys a dehydrator rach, as you've mentioned, at around the same time that these posts are appearing.

And that's something you can use to preserve mushrooms.

If you're only foraging for a short period of time during the year, being able to preserve and dry mushrooms like that means that you can keep them for a much longer period.

You know, they don't last that long.

There's bugs and dirt and grime that means that, you know, these will actually deteriorate pretty quickly.

And not long after buying this dehydrator rate, she starts sharing the pictures of that and the pictures of mushrooms in that chat that she's got.

Yeah, Stocky on that Facebook chat group that started as a true crime chat group.

She talks to them about dehydrating mushrooms, blitzing them into a powder.

She says she was hiding them in her kids' meals.

She says it's a really good way to get them to eat veggies.

She talks about

hiding powdered mushrooms in everything.

she mentions brownies.

She also hides them in muffins.

She says on one post, fun fact, dehydrating reduces mushroom mass by 90%.

Do you think Woolly's would mind if I bring it into the veggie section and dry things before I buy them?

I just have a feeling that the poor produce workers would not be particularly amenable to such an idea.

No.

Later on, one of her Facebook friends says, she seems to really love mushrooms.

Now,

Erin is posting photos of mushrooms on the dehydrator and Stocky in one of the true ironies of this case, the very man whose post was said to have spurred Erin to visit Outram was the very same expert for the court case who's asked to look at photos of mushrooms.

And in studying one of those photos, he says, yeah, they look consistent with Amanita folloides at a high level of confidence.

As a caveat, he says, look, potentially others look the same when presented in this way, but high level of confidence, they're death caps.

Now, Stocky, similar photos reappear later in the trial, photos Erin had shared with her Facebook chat group of mushrooms sitting on the trays of her dehydrator.

So essentially now we know this is a photo of the murder weapon sent to a true crime Facebook chat group.

So the question that lots of people have been asking you and I is why would you send this photo?

Would you only send it if you honestly didn't know there were death caps?

Or was it a ruse?

Like would you send it as insurance so you could later argue you didn't know there were death caps?

What we do know is that she makes a beef wellington that is full of death cap mushrooms.

She uses that.

to murder three people.

You know, Erin's story, which we didn't hear until years after this meal, was that she got into foraging during COVID.

At some point she must have accidentally picked some death cat mushrooms thinking they were other mushrooms.

She has dehydrated them as a way of storing them outside of the mushroom season and put them in a container that also had some other dried mushrooms that she'd bought from an Asian grocer in them.

And then when it comes time to prepare this meal she has accidentally put them in there to add more flavour.

But there's a far more sinister version of events, which was essentially the prosecution's case.

That Erin sees the posts on iNaturalist.

Now, we know she visited that website once

in 2022 from computer data.

We don't know whether she ever saw those posts, but we also know that there's a phone missing that police never found.

So perhaps she made those searches on that phone, phone A, it was called in the trial.

So this sinister version is that she sees the posts on naturalist, she drives to Loch and Outram to pick death cat mushrooms, or maybe she saw them somewhere else and picks them somewhere else.

Corramborough Botanical Gardens, for example, who knows?

We might never know.

But she sees them, she brings them home, she dehydrates them, and she puts them in her cupboard, planning to serve them to her family.

So these deadly mushrooms are now sitting in her cupboard like a ticking time bomb as the date of the lunch grows closer.

But she still needs to get the lunch guests to her house at this point.

She has the means sitting in a cupboard ticking away, but she has to find a reason to have

all these people come to her house and sit down for a meal because it's not something that she would normally be doing.

No, I mean Don and Gail had been over for lunch earlier in June, but that was a rare occurrence.

So she invites them to this lunch a fortnight earlier at church.

She asks Heather and Gail to come.

And at the earlier lunch, you know, Gail had mentioned about Erin's garden, saying it was really nice.

Heather would love to see it.

So Erin says she wanted to invite Heather as well.

Heather seemed really excited.

Heather told Ian, or maybe Erin's trying to get closer to us.

A lot has been made of the kind of invitation that was made to Don and Gail Patterson and Heather and Ian Wilkinson.

I mean, the case against Darren Patterson was that she basically invented a serious medical issue.

You know, she laid these breadcrumbs over the months prior to the lunch, making the guests worry or think that there was something going on, making references to biopsies and scans and the like, kind of mapping out this story that would make the guests worry that she had something really serious, like cancer, you know, that this was just some kind of big ploy to lure them all to a deadly lunch.

Yeah, but Erin's version is I didn't need a lure.

I didn't need to make up anything.

I just needed to invite them and they'd come because they loved me.

She did mention, however, a medical problem to Simon.

So she goes over to invite him to Simon Patterson, her estranged husband.

He's doing the online streaming for that church service.

She says, oh, I'd like you to come to this lunch.

There's a medical problem that I'd like to discuss.

But he never goes to the lunch.

The night before, he sends a text, and it's just before before 7pm,

and he says, look, I don't want to attend the lunch, I feel too uncomfortable, but I'm happy to talk about your health at another time over the phone.

Erin is not happy about this.

She texts Simon back saying, that's really disappointing.

I've spent many hours this week preparing lunch for tomorrow, which has been exhausting in light of the issues I'm facing, and spent a small fortune on beef I fill it to make beef Wellingtons because I wanted it to be a special meal as I may not be able to host a lunch like this again for some time.

It's important to me that you're all there tomorrow and that I can have the conversations that I need to have.

I hope you'll change your mind.

Your parents and Heather and Ian are coming at 12.30.

Hope to see you there.

Obviously, you know, she's trying to draw him in.

She's trying to drag Simon Patterson to this lunch, give him a reason to attend, but he really can't be swayed.

She's putting him, it's a guilt trip.

Yeah, absolutely.

And it doesn't work.

It doesn't.

And Simon never shows.

And that Saturday morning, Ian and Heather Wilkinson are having coffee with their neighbours at the Borough Cafe.

And this is a few hours before they're due to be picked up by Don and Gail Patterson and driven to Erin's house for Saturday lunch.

So while Ian and Heather are sitting in the Borough Cafe having coffee, Erin Patterson is putting death cat mushrooms in their Beef Wellingtons.

That meal causes so much pain, both physically to the guests and emotionally to their families after it causes the deaths of Don and Gail Patterson and Heather Wilkinson.

In our next episode, we're going to follow the fallout from the lunch, tracing how sick the guests got and how sick Erin wasn't.

Everything you've heard in this episode are all things that were presented as evidence during Aaron Patterson's murder trial.

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 Rawlinson, and supervising producer for this series is Yasmin Parry.

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

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

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