Defence zeros in on lack of motive

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The question of motive.

I'm ABC Investigative Reporter Rachel Brown.

And I'm Stephen Stockwell.

It is Tuesday, the 17th of June, and we have just finished the 32nd day of this trial.

Welcome to Mushroom Case Daily.

The small town mystery mystery that's gripped the nation and made headlines around the world.

On the menu was Beef Wellington, a pastry filled with beef and a pate made of mushrooms.

At the heart of this case will be the jury's interpretation of Erin Patterson's intentions.

Erin Patterson has strongly maintained her innocence.

It's a tragedy what happened.

I love them.

We have just finished the second day of closing arguments today.

We're starting to get a much clearer picture of the stories that both the prosecution and the defence kind of want the jury to follow as they're making their decision.

Yeah, we've seen little seeds scattered throughout the trial and now both the prosecutor and defence are pulling them all together.

Yeah, there's a lot to chat through about what we've heard in the courtroom today, Rach.

But before we get to that, can you take us through kind of the key points, a rundown of the day?

The prosecutor, Dr.

Nanette Rogers, finished her closing today.

One of her big points was the disappearance of phone A and that that was deliberate, that was designed to frustrate the police investigation.

Dr.

Rogers put to the jury that if that phone had been found, we would have had further evidence of Erin Patterson's alleged trips to Lock and Outram to find death cat mushrooms.

Dr.

Rogers also told the jury, Erin Patterson has told numerous lies to witnesses and to you, the jury.

Ones she's admitted, ones she hasn't.

Dr.

Rogers says she's told so many, it's hard to keep track of them.

Then we moved on to the closing of the defence, Colin Mandy, SC.

He started with why the jury should have reasonable doubt about all this.

He says there's a reasonable possibility the death cat mushrooms were put in accidentally and that his client Erin Patterson did not intend to kill or seriously injure her lunch guests.

And Colin Mandy SC's themes were along the lines of an anti-motive.

an absence of a motive.

And then if she had been trying to kill the lunch guests, she would not have done a whole raft of things that she did do at the times that she did them.

Thank you, Rach.

Dr.

Nanette Rogers, SC, picked up this morning, as you were talking about where she finished yesterday.

She was going through, she set up these sort of four alleged deceptions at the start of the closing argument from the prosecution yesterday.

Ran through all of them.

I would recommend, if you haven't heard that episode, jumping back to episode from Monday to catch up on that.

There's a lot in there and it's worth kind of having a listen to.

But today, yeah, came back to that fourth alleged deception.

And this is, you know, the dumping or the behavior following the

lunch, one of which was the dumping of the dehydrator.

The other one was the

alleged concealment of Phone A, which the prosecution says was Aaron Patterson's primary phone in the lead-up to the lunch.

And actually, as well, we heard from Dr.

Annette Rogers SC today that this phone was the target of a second search of Aaron Patterson's house in November.

And then we moved on to motive,

or rather, I should say, kind of the lack thereof.

Yeah, Dr.

Rogers SC,

remember from her opening address, called it out early.

She's like, jury, you're not going to be hearing about a motive.

We're not going to propose one.

Motive is not an element of the crime of murder or attempted murder.

Today she told the jury, sometimes the reason might be obvious to others, but at times the internal motivations are only known by the person themselves.

And she said, we don't need to know why a person has done something to know that they did it.

Interesting.

So she put to the jury, what would you do?

What would you do if there was a horrible accident and a meal containing death cath mushrooms that you had cooked had made these people sick?

She said, would you go into self-preservation mode and just worry about protecting yourself from blame?

Would you race from hospital?

Would you lie about the source of the ingredients for days to the health department and medical professionals, even though the truth might help those who you claim to love?

Dr.

Rogers says, no, you do everything to help the people that you love.

You'd tell practitioners, you'd give them every skerrick of information so that your guests could get the right medical treatment, regardless of any risk of blame that might fall to you.

She said, if your kids were within KUE of being sick, she said you would move mountains to get them to hospital as soon as possible and you would gladly receive any treatment that was being offered to you as well.

Dr.

Rogers SC said Erin Patterson only acted the way she did because she knew what she'd done.

The only surprise Dr.

Rogers proposes was that the medical staff caught onto it a lot quicker than she expected.

And Dr.

Rogers has been saying throughout this process that,

you know, Erin Patterson, when she got to hospital, and we've heard this from people, is that

there were medical professionals at the Leon Gath Hospital that Erin Patterson presented to

who I think almost immediately sort of said, oh, look, you're from lunch.

Great.

Glad you're here.

We're treating people who've been poisoned by death cat mushrooms.

And the prosecution is saying, basically, this was, you know, this was the moment Erin Patterson realised that she had been found out.

And that's when she started acting in these ways.

That's Dr.

Rogers' view of why Erin Patterson acted in the way that she did.

Yeah, the prosecution's approach.

One of the things we saw in, I mean, we saw this yesterday as well in the way that Dr.

Nanette Rogers, SC, was kind of presenting the evidence and talking to the jury.

There's a lot of conversation about the kind of process that we're going to see from here.

There were moments where she would say, she would talk through a bit of evidence and then go, and, you know, Justice Christopher Beale will tell you how much weight to put on this in his judge's charge.

We'll talk a bit more about that later in the episode.

And then also

explaining that, you know, this is the prosecution's chance for their closings.

They're going to do their whole run and then it's going to be the defense's turn.

And they're not going to get it.

The prosecution won't get another.

go at it.

So she was almost in instances there covering off potential arguments that she was expecting from the defence.

And in a moment of unexpected self-awareness, for me, I would say, Dr.

Rogers SC said to the court, You know, this is the only chance.

Like, I only get to have one goal at this cherry, which I thought was interesting because the process we've seen is that there's examination, there's cross-examination, and then there's re-examination to tie up any loose ends or to correct things.

But she doesn't get that this time.

No, Dr.

Rogers can't go back and fix anything up.

So she almost has to preempt, she's blind, she's flying blind, preempt what the defence may or may not include in its closing.

So Dr.

Rogers tells this to the jury.

She says, I might be wrong, they might not come to fruition, but she basically has to lay out the things that she thinks that the defence might propose.

And Dr.

Rogers SC said, you know, the defence might say there are innocent explanations for what we say is incriminating conduct.

And things like discharging herself from hospital, you know, when allegedly she'd been told the day before that the other guests were in hospital.

Things like being reluctant to receive medical help.

You know, if so, why did she go to the hospital in the first place?

Then of course the things we've discussed a lot during this podcast, the disposal of the dehydrator.

Dr.

Rogers says this can't be described as a knee-jerk reaction.

This was calculated and planned.

And then other things like lies to police about this and factory research on Phone B.

Yeah.

As Dr.

Annette Rogers drew her closing to a close,

you know, we talked about these four alleged deceptions.

She revealed almost dramatically an alleged fifth deception, and that was the lies that she says Aaron Patterson had told the jury.

Dr.

Net Rogers' claim from the prosecution is that Aaron Patterson has made up a story to fit the evidence.

And there's moments where when Erin Patterson allegedly can't do that, it's where her memory starts to fade or she's not sure about certain details.

And then as Dr.

Nette Rogers was talking to the jury, asking them to consider the case, she took them to the idea of a jigsaw.

And this is something that, you know, I kind of was really related to because she was talking about how all of the evidence presented are like little pieces in a jigsaw.

And you put all of them together and you get this bigger picture.

And that bigger picture is what you need to beyond the reasonable doubt of when you're making your decision.

It's not around each little jigsaw piece, which might not reveal much of the picture.

It's about that whole

picture that is revealed when you put all that together.

That's what she wanted the jury to consider as she kind of worked into that kind of the final wrap-up of her closing.

And hopefully helpful for them too, because they do have a hell of a lot to digest.

Oh, yeah, there's a huge amount.

You know, we're 32 days in at this point, so there's a lot for the jury to review.

How did Dr.

Annette Rogers kind of close out her closing?

She ended it on a list of kind of the big ticket evidence items that Dr.

Rogers says

If you consider it all, this picture that you speak of becomes very clear.

There were seven of them I'll run you through quite quickly that Erin prepared and allocated the individual serves, that she was the only one out of the five that didn't fall seriously ill, that she was familiar with iNaturalist, which is a way you can locate death cat mushrooms, the cell tower evidence putting her potentially in lock and outram in April and May 2023, photos of the mushrooms that the accused was dehydrating in April and May.

The lengths Dr.

Rogers says Erin Patterson went to to conceal her actions, including dumping the dehydrator and concealing her real phone.

And finally, the many lies Dr.

Rogers says that Erin told about the true source of the mushrooms.

And Dr.

Rogers finished by saying to the jury, when you consider all this evidence, you can be satisfied that she deliberately sourced death cat mushrooms and she deliberately served them up, intending to kill her guests.

This was the end of Dr.

Annette Rogers' closing.

I, you know, there was, you know, there's obviously a lot of impact in that kind of list and putting it in front of of the jury like that.

It didn't have the same kind of, I guess, drama as we saw at the end of Aaron Patterson's closing or Aaron Patterson's cross-examination, I should say, where Dr.

Nett Rogers really kind of put these big points to Aaron Patterson.

But yeah, she basically sat down at that point.

That was the end of her, I guess, almost work in the trial.

At this point, we're about half an hour before lunch when this finished.

And Justice Christopher Beale, you know, basically gave Colin Mandy the option of, look, do you want to jump up and start your closing now?

Or do you want to wait until after lunch?

Colin Mandy, you know, straight up, he's like, no, I'd like to start now.

Let's let's get into it.

And, yeah, really didn't waste any time.

Straight in, turned the left turn to his angle of liking, looked at the jury and said, the two issues you have to determine are: one, is there a reasonable possibility that death cat mushrooms were put in the meal accidentally?

And two, is there a reasonable possibility that Erin Patterson did not intend to kill or cause serious injury to her guests?

And Colin Mann DSC said, if you find that there is a reasonable possibility of these two things, you have to find her not guilty because you would have a reasonable doubt.

Yep.

I found it really interesting in the different styles we have from Colin Mann DSC to Dr.

Nanette Rogers SC.

You know, Dr.

Nanette Rogers, as you may have kind of gathered from the episode yesterday,

really just huge amount of information presenting

point after point that that she says demonstrates Aaron Patterson's guilt.

And then Colin Mandy today,

more of an exploration, I would say, much slower, kind of like, you know,

sort of letting these ideas flourish a bit more.

His cadence was slower and it was quite helpful because Nanette Rogers powered through the evidence.

And I just found myself, I couldn't type as fast as I needed to.

You know, that meme of Kermit the Frog on the typewriter?

That was me and I couldn't keep up.

But Colin Mandy, SC, he had a more of an

expository, as you say, let issues percolate a little bit more.

He took the jury to ideas about the human condition.

So I want to start with, you know, what he started with, he basically said

the prosecution is working from an assumption that Aaron Patterson is guilty and it's picking and choosing the facts that it wants and it's tying it all together in this coherent narrative.

But he said it's picking and choosing the evidence while ignoring the context context and cherry-picking while discarding inconvenient truths.

So he talked about things like the human

trait

of there being different answers for different people.

So something you'd say to a partner, you wouldn't say to a child, something you'd tell a doctor, you wouldn't tell a friend.

It might be the same story, but you would tell it differently.

He also went to the fallibility of memory, you know, and how he says

the scrutiny of the world he says has been on Erin Patterson and on this 24-hour period where she was in hospital where she spoke to at least 21 medical professionals and I say at least because these are 21 witnesses he says there were more that you haven't heard from

and you know one after the other asked her questions about the meal prep and where she got the mushrooms and what suburb and how was she and what she knew and he said he believes that she's given consistent accounts albeit different versions of that consistent account, to these professionals.

But he wanted to make the point that sometimes, you know, the human fallibility of memory

can happen honestly.

You can make honest mistakes.

And he actually took the jury to two incidents where medical professionals...

made what he says were honest mistakes about the evidence, that they contradicted each other.

And these are smart.

And he wasn't having a go at them.

He's like, these people make, we all make mistakes.

Yeah, I think he pointed to Dr.

Chris Webster, the man with a very loud voice, where he asked him a question in the cross-examination

in the trial that we're in at the moment.

And then, you know, he gave one answer.

And then during the closing today,

Colin Mandy, S.C.

refers to the fact that, you know, he refers back to the fact that in that cross-examination, he said, oh, look, you gave a different answer another time.

And, you know, he had.

You know, previous piece of evidence, he'd said something different.

And, you know, Colin Mandy made the point that both of those things are true he's given an honest account both times but just in his mind there were different times I suppose that was one example I think the other one was who exactly handed Aaron Patterson the phone to talk to police about where to find the leftovers yeah and each of these three people think that they were the person that handed the phone over and that they're not lying he says they just made an honest mistake yeah it was interesting as well hearing Colin Mandy kind of discuss motive.

You know, we'd heard so much about that earlier in the day, the prosecution talking about intent and that they don't, you know, they don't have a motive, still presenting evidence around the, you know, this, the relationship between Erin Patterson and her in-laws and her estranged husband and all of that.

But Colin Mandy coming at this from a different angle.

Yeah, I want to call this the anti-motive.

So he asked the jury, you know, why would Erin Patterson do this because of a brief period of tension in 2022 that had nothing to do with Ian and Heather?

You know, we speak about motive and motive isn't an element of murder, but it does help inform intent, which we've spoken about before, Stocky.

The jury does have that important

bar to clear of whether there was intent.

So Colin Mandy put some questions to the jury.

He says, you know, is there significant animosity?

Did the accused say anything that suggests animosity?

Were there threats?

Was there anything to gain?

by these deaths?

Did she get angry in the heat of the moment?

And Colin Mandy said, you know, you're left guessing about the most important element of this offence.

And he said, so much time has been spent scratching around by the prosecution to try to find some suggestion of animosity in the family dynamics.

And he raised the point of Simon's evidence about the tax return and him declaring himself single and child support payments, you know, that these problems that fled but dissipated, he argues, pretty quickly and that things were back on an even keel by December 2022.

So Colin Mandy says to the jury, would she really murder Simon's parents and aunt and uncle seven months later because because of this.

He said, even just saying it out loud demonstrates how unpersuasive that theory is.

Yeah.

You know, over a brief spat that lasted essentially a few days.

Yeah, he was talking as well about a lot of the evidence that kind of presented such a strong relationship between Aaron Patterson and her in-laws, you know, making the point that, you know, these are the people that were a big part of her life.

They were an important support network for her and her children.

Kind of saying, look, look, if there's a motive anywhere, it is a motive that she, you know, she wouldn't want to kill these people.

Precisely.

He says, you know,

she put Simon on the Mount Waverly and Gibson Street titles property titles long after they were separated.

She was treating their assets as joint assets.

She gave him half of everything.

Money wasn't a strong motivating factor, according to Simon himself in his evidence to the court.

That the Pattersons were a strong and significant support to her.

They'd been nothing but kind and understanding to Erin Patterson.

He says that there was absolutely no reason for her to hurt them.

He brought up some examples that we've heard during the trial of this relationship closeness between Erin and Don Patterson.

He reminded everyone that Don Patterson was tutoring Erin's son.

Remember that video of the son doing a science experiment with Don?

Little rocket car.

Yeah, in the backyard.

We heard about that again.

Colin Mandiasi says, this is all an absence of motive, you know.

And they were the only grandparents that her kids had, you know, and she was no doubt very devoted to her children.

So why would she take active, loving grandparents away from her children?

The other thing that Colin Mandy got to today

that, you know, was one of the moments that kind of like stood out, I guess, from his closing was the way that he talked about the pictures that Aaron Patterson had shared of the dehydrator with her Facebook friends, you know, kind of saying, why would you share a picture of what the prosecution was alleging is, you know, one of the instruments of this alleged murder?

And then, yeah, also, you know, if she had planned it in the way that the prosecution has says that Aaron Patterson has planned this, that it would have attracted, you know, a huge amount of suspicion.

Yeah, four people falling ill from her lunch.

Colin Mandy says that it definitely, the suspicion she would have known would have immediately fallen on her.

They all would have got sick at the same time.

The suspicion would have fallen on the meal and therefore the chef.

So I used the word anti-motive before.

He went through a list of basically how she's an anti-planner.

He said, if she had have been thinking that way and planning, as the prosecution alleges, since April to

cook this fatal meal, he says,

why would you buy a dehydrator in your own name?

with your own credit card from your local store.

Why would you take photos of that dehydrator?

Why would you take photos of mushrooms in their dehydrator?

And this is the big one.

Why would you share these photos online with a chat group that originated as a like true crime chat group with people that fancy themselves as investigators of true crime.

Yep.

Yep.

And who've, you know, several of appeared as witnesses in this, in this trial as well.

I mean, that's essentially the murder weapon and the method on social media.

He says.

So if you're planning a murder, he says, what's the one thing that you plan?

The disposal of the murder weapon.

And you don't tell anyone about it.

And with the dehydrator, he says that, you know, she didn't dump it after the mushrooms were dehydrated or well before the lunch.

And when she did dump it, he says she used her own car and her own credit card.

And he talked about the leftovers and how Erin Patterson pointed to police where to find them without hesitation, he says.

And he says the other things she could have done is put them in a neighbour's bin.

or a public bin, or she could have buried them in the yard, but she didn't do that.

So Colin Mandy said she genuinely believed there were not death cat mushrooms in that bin and that the dumping of the dehydrator could only have been panic and not because she's guilty, but because she's panicked that that's what people might think.

Yep.

Rach, we got an insight this afternoon into how much longer we're expecting this trial to run for.

Just after, I think it was the afternoon break, the jury came back in and Justice Christopher Beale kind of, you know, gave them the update.

We heard today that the judge's charge won't start until Monday.

So that's when he gives his advice to the jury about how to interpret certain facts and he gives them a steer on law and how to apply it, principles of evidence, etc.

And

what did he say about two days?

I think if the wind is at his back, it would take him two days.

Yeah, so it was, I think it was,

you know, could be finishing Wednesday morning, might wrap up by Tuesday afternoon if the wind's at my back.

I think we're his words.

Don't quote me exactly on that.

I haven't reviewed the trials.

I'm not sure if it's poetry from Justice Beer, which means that tomorrow will be the baby, the finale of Colin Mandy SC's evidence, but we won't know until tomorrow.

The closing, we'll see where that wraps up.

And I think as well, you know, as you're listening to this, as we're talking through the closing arguments from both the prosecution and the defence, you know, these both of these barristers are going to be explaining this in their version of events.

So the prosecution is accusing Erin Patterson of murder and attempted murder.

They are trying to present, they're presenting evidence that they say demonstrates that she committed these acts, that she's guilty.

The defence is presenting the evidence and framing the evidence in a way that says that she is not guilty.

It is up for the jury to decide this.

And so, you know, if it feels like we are leaning one way or another as we're going through this, we're just taking you through what the prosecution and the defence are explaining to the jury as they make their final arguments.

And interestingly, both of them had the same direction in a way to the jury that you've got to take a step back and look at the big picture.

And it reminded me of, you know those impressionist paintings you've really got to stand back to be able to see what's going on yeah absolutely uh rach before we wrap up a couple of quick questions i think uh if you have a question there's something you're wondering that is burning a hole in your mind as you consider uh this trial send us an email mushroomcasedaily at abc.net.au we love getting your emails we love reading them love answering them on the pod just like you're going to answer erica from new south wales's question uh sorry from newcastle's question uh erica says uh hi guys i can't thank you you enough for all the hard work you continue to put into this fascinatingly informative podcast.

So sad that it has to be off the back of such a tragedy.

Erica's question relates to Erin's alleged cake binge and the subsequent vomit in the afternoon post-lunch.

Couldn't an explanation for her comparative lack of illness be explained by the fact that she probably brought up most of the meal at that time?

Could it have been early enough to avoid sufficient absorption of the mushroom toxin?

We just don't know, Erica, because that question wasn't put to experts.

You know, it wasn't put whether vomiting and at what stage could affect absorption or lack of.

We did hear Dr.

Rogers put to Erin Patterson, when did this vomiting happen?

Erin couldn't remember whether it was at what point between the lunch and the dinner.

And then, interestingly, today, Dr.

Rogers said to the jury, some of these things,

you know, some of these accounts come only from Erin herself.

And the vomiting of the lunch was one of those examples that she used.

Yeah.

Thank you, Rach.

Thank you, Erica.

Wonderful question.

I've got another one here from Ella in Port Macquarie, working our way along the New South Wales coast, it seems.

Ella says, Hi, Stephen Rachel.

I thoroughly enjoy the daily episodes the whole team is putting together.

Hope you continue to cover more upcoming cases in a podcast format.

Got good news for you, Ella.

We will.

Ella's question is, what is the demeanor/slash speaking manner of the prosecution and defence in court?

Is it more of a grilling the way they're speaking to witnesses or more of a kind of nice, caring approach?

I wouldn't say grilling.

I would say probative approach, you know, trying to get to the bottom of things.

Yeah, there were some witnesses that, you know, kind of, you know, very casual.

It's quite, you know, impersonal, I think, is probably a good way to describe it.

Really, just sort of exploration of the facts to tease things out of them.

And there was no real hostile witnesses, in a sense.

A lot of the witnesses we've seen have been medical or scientific experts.

And some are the best in their field.

So,

yeah, we didn't see much.

I wouldn't put it as grilling.

Yeah, no, I wouldn't frame it in that way either.

Thank you, Rach.

Thank you, Ella.

And finally, Rach, question from Ben, very timely question from Ben, given the stage we are at in this trial.

Ben says, hi guys, loving the pod.

Thank you, Ben.

He looks forward to listening either on his evening walk with the dog or on my hour commute to work the next morning.

His question is, as we near the end of the evidence, the closings, et cetera, do we expect a verdict to be reached by the end of this week or is there still lots more work to do?

Well, the judge's charge is on Monday and probably Tuesday as well.

And then the jury will retire for deliberations after that.

So definitely not this week.

And keep in mind that this week is, what, week eight

of a possible six-week trial, so anything can happen.

Yeah, it's a wonderful question, Ben.

If you're wondering how long it will take the jury to come back with a verdict, the best comparison for that is however long a piece of string around your house would be.

So find that, attribute a number of days to it, and that's probably what you can consider for now.

And then it will change next week as we get close to that period.

We will keep you up to date, though, as all that is happening.

We've got a heap of stuff planned for you as we get close to the judge's charge, as we work through the jury deliberations and a verdict in Aaron Patterson's triple murder trial.

Rach, continuation of

Colin Mandy SC's closing statements tomorrow.

Correct.

And hopefully the wind will also be at his back.

Thank you, Rach.

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