Erin's defence team gets to work

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We are slowly crawling towards the finish line.

I'm the ABC's court reporter Christian Silver and I'm Stephen Stockwell.

It is Thursday the 29th of May and we have just finished the 21st day of Aaron Patterson's murder trial.

Welcome to Mushroom Case Daily.

The small town 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.

Christian, there was a long line of people standing outside of the courtroom today.

That was after the public had been let inside.

There's a group of people that couldn't get in.

The interest in this case only seems to be building.

I got an email from a lady last night who said she was prepared to drive three hours to come and watch proceedings today.

I'm not sure if she made it, but that shows you the level of interest.

Hopefully not in the line that was outside of the room.

Christian, can you take us through what happened inside the courtroom today?

There was only one witness in the box today, and that was the informant, Stephen Eppingstall.

He was being cross-examined by Erin's lawyer, Colin Mandy SC.

We saw more pictures from inside Erin Patterson's house as questions were raised about if police actually seized all the potential evidence.

We also revisited Erin Patterson's Facebook chats and saw messages between her and her father-in-law Don Patterson.

He was one of the lunch guests who died.

Thank you, Christian.

I appreciate the rundown that you've given us there.

And one of the things that has been rattling around my brain for a little while is the title of informant that Stephen Eppenstahl from the Victoria Police has through this.

It took me, I think, actually, probably two weeks through this trial to realise that this is not a man who is feeding information to the Victoria Police.

That is an informer.

I have my titles corrected.

The informant, the official title for a police officer leading an investigation.

And today we learn a little bit more about the informant.

And when it comes to policing, you can have an informant on the smallest of cases and on the biggest of cases.

So I guess we got an example of what it's like at the higher end of the spectrum.

And Mr.

Eppingstall today was cross-examined again by Colin Mandy about so many aspects of this investigation.

Yeah, he was.

Colin Mandy, as I like to say, really went to work.

Eppingstall was in the box all day.

And the thing I've kind of wondered about is whether or not it's common to have someone in his position or the last witness in a trial, I guess, which is always the informant, right?

Kind of being asked about so many different bits of a case as it gets to the end.

So this cross-examination started yesterday and when Eppingstall was in the witness box during the prosecution examination of him, we stepped through a lot of random topics and this theme has kind of continued when the defense has been questioning him.

So yesterday he was asked about some medical records that related to Aaron Patterson.

Today he was taken to

some of the mobile phone tower analysis, which was conducted by the expert Matthew Sorrell.

He was taken to the iNaturalist website where URLs and web pages have been pulled and been drawn into the evidence.

In this case, he was taken to bank records and pictures of the police search and even more Facebook messages.

So a lot of little, little topics throughout the day.

Yeah, we also kind of learned a little bit about

kind of how the police go around dealing with a situation like this lunch as well.

Like we heard Eppenstall talking about how the media team works, how they prepare a statement for it,

and

some of the press conferences they hold around it.

And then also

about how Eppenstall goes about getting money to do an investigation like this.

And also that, you know, his boss kind of doesn't like him spending lots of money on something like this, which I just never considered, right?

Yeah, the cost of living crisis also impacts the police.

But no, on a serious note, obviously police do have budgets as well, even the homicide squad.

And he was asked about Matthew Sorrell, who is this mobile phone expert that we've talked a lot about in this trial, and the various reports that Sorell and his private company can put together.

And this was reports around the location of phones and various devices and things like that, placing those devices in certain locations.

Yeah, because just quickly, the relevance of this is police say that Erin's phone pinged in locations where death cat mushrooms were growing before the lunch happened.

So anyway, he's taken to the various things that Sorrell says he's capable of doing in terms of generating reports.

And there's apparently a type of analysis called a line of sight analysis.

And my understanding of this is

Sorrell and his team can look at phone towers and basically draw a line to the location of a phone and say

was this actually in the line of sight of a phone tower?

Because

Dr.

Sorrell said that there's a basic principle that if your phone has sort of an unblocked view of a cell tower, the reception is good.

That's a very, very basic summary of it.

And Mr.

Eppingstall said that police didn't get a line of sight analysis done.

He sort of joked and said that Matthew Sorrell likes to upsell

his reports to police.

And police at that point were not sure if

the line of sight analysis was needed or whether it had been really proven as an accurate test.

It's interesting because

that was the moment when I realized how much police are thinking about what the challenges to evidence could be.

If there's a you know a slight weak point or something like that, you could have the defense kind of like trying to point that out to a jury, for example.

And even with the iNaturalist website, and this is the website where there were postings about death cap mushrooms growing in certain areas, and then police have found URLs on a computer in Aaron Patterson's house linking to that website.

Now, OpingStall said he just grabbed those URLs, slapped it into his browser, and then a whole bunch of things popped up.

But Colin Mandy took him to that process and said, well, do you agree that looking at a web page two years or whatever it is after it's gone up, that there's a possibility that the things on that page could have changed?

And he said, yes.

And on the kind of budgets of things as well, you know, it's interesting that this, you you know, we talked a bit about it, like the costs and the budgets that the Victorian Police have to work within, because some of this stuff can get pretty expensive.

Mr.

Eppingstall said that there was a particular type of phone report that could be generated.

And I think what he said was Victoria Police only did a couple of days of this report.

And Colin Mandy asked him, why didn't you do it?

for a period of months because some of their other reports span the course of months or even years.

And what the informant said was, well, this particular report, which I believe is called an EBM report, he said, if you were to do that for months, the price tag is six figures.

And that was too much.

Yeah, that is something that his boss is not going to be a fan of.

We also heard a bit about kind of how the search was executed at Aaron Patterson's home following the lunch, about a week after the lunch.

This is the Saturday following the lunch, so exactly, almost exactly a week later.

And we heard Eppenstall describe how he was basically kind of stationed with Erin Patterson that whole time, kind of keeping an eye on her.

Yes, so when Eppingstahl and his team are in Erin Patterson's house looking around, he said that she was basically always accompanied by an officer.

There were some exceptions to that, including a period when I think it is she spent some time with her daughter alone

and also when

she was allowed to call her lawyer.

There was a bit of debate about the length of time this went for,

whether it was 14 minutes or 20 minutes seemed to be a little bit in dispute.

But other than that, he said that Erin Patterson didn't have sort of unrestricted access to things like her phones.

She was always in the company of a police officer.

Not necessarily him, but someone from Vicpol.

That time alone is worth keeping in mind because yesterday we heard that the police are alleging that SIM cards were swapped between a device and a phone during the time of the search.

So that's, you know, it's interesting to hear kind of how they're keeping an eye on her and also, you know, how she's allowed to move around that house.

We also heard about that search, and this seemed to come as a surprise to the informant, Stephen Eppenstall, that there were some laptops and some other devices that weren't taken from the home.

There seemed to be an inference drawn by Colin Mandy that maybe the police missed some of the evidence because obviously they've gone through these computers and phones and then they've generated reports from them.

And now the prosecution's turned around and using that against Erin.

So Colin Mandy firstly showed Stephen Eppingstall

a picture of an Ottoman

which was kind of near a windowsill and there was a whole bunch of like cables and I think it was like a

tablet on the Ottoman.

But then on the windowsill just above it was what appeared to be some sort of black thing.

And Colin Mandy asked him if that item might have been a phone right and stephen stephen eppingstall said he didn't believe it was a phone and it you know didn't sound like that particular item was something that he had taken and there was a similar theme when we were brought into another room in aaron patterson's house um this was a very interesting looking room it was a a study by the looks of it with a computer and there's some shelving in the room.

But the thing that really stood out to me was when they showed a second photo, it was kind of like a zoomed-out one.

Yeah, and you can see the shelves were just stacked with all these completed Legos.

Wow.

Fancy Legos, too, not the sort of basic stuff.

So we heard a little bit about Lego earlier on in this trial.

Anyway, I digress.

The point of this is: Colin Mandy took Stephen Eppinstall to some items on a shelf in this room and Colin Mandy said to him, is that a laptop?

Is that a computer?

And Stephen Eppinstahl said, if they're laptops, then it's the first time I'm hearing about these items.

So making it quite clear that if it was a laptop, he didn't collect that one.

I think this was a moment, I think maybe the first moment of this trial that I have seen kind of genuine surprise.

from someone in the witness box as they've been shown something or asked a question.

Even a man who seemingly knows the police case inside out can be taken by surprise by things he hears in the court.

Why would Colin Mandy want to make a point about some devices or things that weren't collected by police?

Well, police have pulled items off

computers and phones and used them against Aaron Patterson.

So if there's a possibility that there could be other evidence,

and if you sort of play devil's advocate, what if there's items on

these other computers and phones which paint Erin in a positive light?

Maybe he's drawing the inference that, well, the prosecution's missed those.

As we know, the prosecution has to make the case against the defendant.

We also heard today about messages between Erin Patterson and her Facebook friends.

Now, we talked about these messages end of last week.

These are ones that Erin sent at the end of 2022

with some quite strong words about her estranged husband's family, expressing frustrations with them,

using language I'm not going to use now because, again, we know we've got some younger ears listening to this podcast.

And at the time, we were wondering whether or not there were any replies to those messages because there wasn't stuff that was immediately obvious

in that chain that we were shown.

Today we saw more messages and we saw some of those replies.

This was the chat where the account

Aaron Aaron replied to a whole bunch of Facebook friends.

friends and when we saw this today I was kind of thinking

we've already gone through this why are we coming back to it and last week when we saw this exchange it appeared like this account Erin Aaron Aaron was making these long-winded posts and there didn't really seem to be much interaction from the others when we saw the version that the defense put forward today we saw that there were replies actually and

some of them were rather sympathetic to what the poster was going through.

Given this account was complaining about a lack of family support, there were people saying they identified with that and they felt sympathy.

And I guess it gave a broader context as to the comments that have allegedly been made there by Aaron Patterson.

One of the things that this made me

kind of realize this conversation or seeing these messages made me realize is there is so much information in the police brief.

There's a lot that isn't being presented or wasn't presented during the prosecution case because it's not necessarily kind of relevant to the things that they're getting to, but there's a huge amount of information that kind of sits there in that folder that the defense can use.

Both sides can use it, but we got a bit of an

insight into how voluminous this is because as Stephen Nappingstall was being taken through one of the pages in this police brief, you could see a number in the top right-hand corner and it was like 25,000, something, something, something.

Wow.

And Colin Mandy even, you know, made a remark about that.

So that is an indication of the amount of material that like the prosecution can draw from.

And for all of our sakes, I think it's good that we've tried to keep things somewhat condensed and relevant.

But there's a lot of information.

Thank God they haven't gone through every single bit of it.

Just from a personal point of view, we'd be here for years and years.

Christian, the other day we saw some CCTV footage of Aaron Patterson apparently pulling up outside a subway at someone going into that subway.

At the time we were told that was Aaron Patterson and Aaron Patterson's son.

And this came back today and it just seemed kind of odd.

I was wondering why this was coming back.

I'll let you explain kind of what we saw in that video.

We were told by the prosecution that Aaron Patterson attended a subway restaurant on the evening after the lunch and that her son had gone to the restaurant and bought something.

This is just part of the timeline, right?

Anyway, Colin Mandy flashes up a picture of Erin Patterson's son and his granddad, Don

Patterson.

And if people remember back to our early episodes, we talked about the rocket car.

And this was a nice bonding moment between a grandson and a grandfather.

We're taken to a picture that's from around that period, and it shows the boy and his granddad smiling in what appeared to be a sort of a shed, a nice family photo.

Anyway, Colin Mandy cuts from that to a still of the CCTV from the subway

and you can see there is a young man in the footage

and Colin Mandy says that's not the same boy.

Was it the same boy?

This was put to Stephen Eppingstall and he said, yeah, it looks like the same guy.

That's a matter for the jury to decide.

And then Colin Mandy then flashed up another picture of

Aaron Patterson's son in his police interview sitting in a chair

to, again, raise that question of whether it's the same person.

So this kind of comes back, I think, to the defense.

questioning the accuracy of bits and pieces in the prosecution case.

How sure

can you be that everything in this is correct?

And Colin Mandy did say that maybe this visit to the subway did happen.

They're not

disputing that, but it would appear that they are contesting the picture that was put up by the police and saying that wasn't Aaron's son.

Yeah, right.

And yeah, we do have a bank record that puts Aaron's son at a subway on that day.

Yep.

Christian, before we wrap up today,

one of the podcast's favourite people, Dr.

Tom May,

made a short cameo in today's evidence.

We heard a bit about how Stephen Eppenstahl was talking to him, obviously exploring, talking to him about mushrooms.

Obviously, that's what Tom May does.

And in the course of that conversation, realised that he might have had a closer connection to this case than he might have realised at that time.

What it sounded like was Stephen Eppingstall initially got in touch with Dr.

Tom May to seek out his expertise because he's one of the leaders in this field.

And Stephen Eppingstall said that, unprompted, Dr.

Tom May volunteered the fact that he'd spotted death caps in Outram.

And like whipped up iNaturalist and

he showed him a site.

Yeah, and it sounds like when police have taken note of that and then looked at phone tower records,

they have made a connection between

the post going going up mentioning Outram and then claiming that Erin Patterson's phone pinged in a very similar area after that post.

Interesting to see the process of a police investigation kind of coming a bit clearer through some of these conversations today.

A lot of conversations with a lot of people.

Yep.

Thank you, Christian.

As we get to the end of the prosecution case, I'd like to bring back the ABC's true crime investigative reporter, Rachel Brown, just to talk through kind of where this is up to at the moment.

Like I feel like we're we're being teased with the idea of the prosecution case ending.

We're not quite there yet.

But as we get closer, my feeling is kind of one of relief.

Rachel, how does it kind of feel to you?

Where are we up to at the moment?

It's been interesting the last couple of days watching things play out that I've suspected might be seeded, if you know what I mean.

So there was an exhibit cue, cue for Quizzical, that popped up in Luke Farrell's evidence earlier this week, and it seemed pretty inconspicuous at the time.

He said it was put to him there was a black item sitting on a windowsill that wasn't seized.

He said I don't recall having seen it.

Colin Mandy in cross-examination said there was an electronic item on the Ottoman to the left of the iPad that wasn't seized.

And Mr.

Farrell said no it wasn't.

So I've just been wondering how many of these seeds that have been peppered through the cross-examination of different witnesses that we'll be hearing about again.

Yeah, interesting.

And I mean, when you've got these things that have been kind of seeded in cross-examination, you know, we're kind of like hanging out for the end of the prosecution's evidence.

Does that mean that we might see that kind of continue on or move for a little bit longer now?

Well, I wonder how many, how many of these seeds we're going to see as we crawl, as Christian said, towards the finish line.

You know, maybe it won't be tomorrow.

Like we're all, it's a mystery to all of us right now.

And how does this stage kind of feel compared to other trials that you've covered?

I think we're at the suspense point where everyone's wondering whether the questions in our mind will be answered, whether, you know, neat bows can or will be tied around things.

And other big trials that Kristen and I have covered, it's interestingly has come down to intent.

You know, a lot of the facts are agreed on, but intent is that one big crucial hanging question.

Yeah.

Okay, great.

Thank you, Rach.

We're going to dive deeper into the prosecution case tomorrow.

We're going to wrap up the week in that episode and also run through a heap of the witnesses that we've heard as well.

So we've heard from 50 plus witnesses in this trial.

We'll go through some of the key ones that we've heard from so far and also answer a lot of your questions as we get into what may be the final week of this trial next week.

Speaking of questions, Christian, we've got a bunch here that have been sent to mushroomcase daily at abc.net.au.

I want to start with one from Robin in Melbourne.

Robin says, hi, Christian and Stephen.

Thanks for your work on the case.

Thank you for listening.

Thank you, Robin.

She says we're doing a great job of explaining things.

That's very kind.

She looks forward to the pod every evening

and may have missed something because she has a question about the relevance of the pub meal that was delivered to Erin's house in Corranborough.

Was it the date of the meal?

Was the date of the meal the same day as they supposedly at the leftovers, or was the pub located somewhere near the death cap sightings?

Were they trying to say something about Erin's thought process when looking at death cap locations?

It's been mentioned a couple of times now, and I have clearly missed why.

Thanks, Robin.

Well, this visit to the Corranborough Pub website was in May 2022 so some 14 months before the lunch took place but it occurred allegedly almost a couple of minutes

from the time when this same computer has accessed the iNaturalist website and has visited some pages with some death cat mushroom material.

on it.

And like with a lot of the evidence in this case,

prosecutors have sought to provide provide some level of context.

For instance, if we look at like certain phone records and things like that, they show us some of the things before and some of the things after.

And this is one of those things.

Now, like the prosecution may come back in its closing arguments and make some points to the jury about how they should consider this evidence.

They did not spell it out in that fashion this week.

So for the time being, I think it's safe to say we just put that in the context of what the person on the computer may have been looking at around the time as also visiting a website which has got information apparently about death caps on it.

Right.

Thank you, Christian.

Thank you for the great question, Robin.

Another question here from Karush.

He says, hi guys, love the pod.

Thank you, Karush.

My partner and I are listening every day from the Austrian Alps.

And when you say that the prosecutor needs to prove that Erin intended to cause death or very, very serious harm, if the prosecutor can prove she intentionally used death cap mushrooms in the meal, does the act of using death cap mushrooms itself prove intent?

Or does the prosecutor need to prove that she meant to seriously harm the guests as opposed to perhaps making them a little bit sick or uncomfortable?

Thanks, Karish.

Well, the defence is saying that the act of using death cap mushrooms does not prove intent.

I think that's a fair inference to draw because the defence says that this was a tragic accident.

The defence is not disputing that death cap mushrooms were in the meal, but they absolutely dispute that Erin ever intended to pick death cap mushrooms and they dispute that she ever intended to harm them at all.

Now, as to the seriousness of harm that may be caused, with the murder charge, it does say you have to prove that the defendant intended to kill someone or cause them very serious injury to prove a murder charge.

So if Aaron Patterson intended to make them a little bit sick or uncomfortable, if that's what the jury believes,

that is not far enough to prove that element of the murder charge.

Yep.

Thank you, Christian.

Thank you, Karush.

And finally, we have a question here from Molly, listening from Sydney.

Absolutely love the pod.

Thank you, Molly.

Molly says, a couple of weeks ago, the court was closed to everyone due to legal talks in inverted commas.

What does that involve and why does everyone have to clear out?

Great question.

Molly, we actually had some legal talks in inverted commas this morning as well.

They go for a while and we do have to be careful with what we say, but the jury is shifted out of the room and

the judge and the lawyers discuss various legal issues.

I'm sorry we can't be more specific about that.

The public or the media do not have to leave the room, but obviously it would be very ill-advised for us or the public to talk about those legal discussions which have taken place not in the presence of the jury.

And Molly, if you're talking about a day where we had a day off from court completely, that's because there was some planning that needed to be done by the parties.

And that was discussed with the jury.

That was when the jury asked if they got every Monday off.

And as we've known, nope, they've been back for all of the other ones.

So thank you for the great question, Molly.

Christian, there's another one here, actually.

Molly's asked what we in the business like to call a double-barreled question

and has followed up with how long do you guys think the defence case will go for?

That's up to the defence.

Thanks, Christian.

Thanks, Molly.

And Christian, as we move to the end of this episode, yesterday I promised some exciting news in the pod and we have some exciting news.

Yeah, how am I going to say this?

I'm having a baby.

Well, I'm not going to be able to do that.

Exciting news.

Yeah, well, exciting for me and exciting for you because you won't have to deal with me every day.

I am stepping away from the pod for family reasons, but it's exciting family reasons.

There is a new arrival on the way very soon.

And

unfortunately, the timing couldn't have been better.

Smack bang in the middle of a trial.

But yeah, obviously I have to prioritise family.

So tomorrow might be the last time I'm on the pod.

hosting, but I still really am keen to be involved and you haven't gotten rid of me.

I'm very excited for the new addition to the silver household.

I'm not sure how the father-child-daughter works in podcasting, but we will stake an early claim.

And if you'd like to send any messages of love and support to Christian, please do so, along with any of your questions, to mushroomcase daily at abc.net.au.

Also be taking baby name suggestions at this point, I assume, Christian.

Happy to consider names.

My wife and I haven't made the final call on what the baby's name will be, so we can be persuaded.

There we go.

That's very exciting.

Mushroom Case Daily at ABC.net.au.

I am very excited to say that the ABC's true crime investigative reporter Rachel Brown, you've heard from on the pod the entire time we've been here in Morwell covering Aaron Patterson's murder trial, will be stepping into Christian's shoes.

Rach, any baby name Rex while we're on the topic?

Colin?

Nanette.

Oh, I like that.

Sophie, I like the name Sophie.

Christian, I can be convinced your child will go to work if you name them Colin.

Thank you for joining us for the pod today.

We'll be back tomorrow with more, as I mentioned earlier, wrapping up the week with Christian,

maybe the prosecution case with Rach and going over the 50 plus witnesses we've heard from so far.

So make sure you track down Mushroom Case Daily on the ABC Listen app and hit follow.

That way you won't miss an update.

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

It's presented by me, court reporter Christian Silver and producer Stephen Stockwell.

And soon, Rachel Brown.

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 Roxborough, supervising producer Yasmin Parry and investigative reporter Rachel Brown.

This episode was produced on the land of the Gunai Kunai people.

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