Tracking down the mushroom source

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It's the topic at the centre of this trial: the mushrooms.

Today, Erin Patterson, in her own words, in the days after the deadly lunch.

I'm the ABC's court reporter, Christian Silver.

And I'm Stephen Stockwell.

It is Monday, the 26th of May, and we've just started the fifth week of this 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's happening.

I love them.

Christian, we are back in Morewell.

I can't believe it's the fifth week.

It is the fifth week of this trial.

We're still here rolling through.

Can you give us a rundown of what we saw today?

Sure, Stocky.

Sally Ann Atkinson from the Victorian Department of Health was giving evidence today, taking the court through text messages between her and Erin Patterson as they tried to uncover the source of the mushrooms.

According to Ms.

Atkinson, there appeared to be inconsistencies with Erin Patterson's story.

Victoria Police digital forensic analyst Sharman Fox Henry was also cross-examined by the defence.

The topic of the factory reset phone from last week was a major discussion point.

We also saw more pictures of Erin Patterson's dehydrator and the tiny samples of food scraps that police pulled from it.

Thank you, Christian.

A great rundown of the day.

Actually moved through quite a few witnesses in the end, bouncing across quite a bit of ground sort of after the morning tea break.

I'd like to start with Sally and Atkinson.

She's the woman in charge of the enteric team at the Victorian Department of Health.

She works in

communicable diseases, I should say.

I want to clarify this woman is not the former Lord Mayor of Brisbane.

Correct.

I was wondering why she was being a witness for a long time, but no, very different person.

Basically, you know, the best way to think of this woman is she's the woman who's worried about a potential public health risk from these mushrooms, and she's trying to get to the bottom of where they may have come from and what the source of them is.

So that's why she's talking to Erin and she started by explaining what Erin told her about how she felt after the meal.

Effectively Miss Atkinson's job was to be in charge of

Effectively, the gastro squad within the Victorian Health Department.

So she was on the phone directly to Erin Patterson and Erin Patterson, according to Sally Ann Atkinson, described feeling explosive diarrhea

about 12 hours after the lunch.

And she said that she was feeling quite sick, frequently going to the toilet.

Then the following day, Erin Patterson allegedly told Sally Ann Atkinson that she started to feel a little bit better on the Sunday evening, but then felt worse again.

And it was the following day, the Monday, when Erin Patterson went to hospital.

Yeah.

And just so I'm clear in my mind, when are we hearing from Sally Ann or when's Sally Ann talking to Erin Patterson?

She's like, just she's trying to call her or text her while she's in hospital, right?

Correct.

Sally Ann Atkinson is one of the many people who get dragged into this story as part of the investigation into where the mushrooms have come from.

And she talked today a bit about when she was trying to work out the source of this.

I mean, she's spoken to Erin when Erin's been in the hospital.

She's also spoken to Erin's estranged husband, Simon Patterson.

And in the process of trying to figure out where these mushrooms might have come from, she's asked Simon Patterson quite directly if Erin Patterson's ever foraged.

And Simon says he'd never known her to do that.

And Sally Ann Atkinson also asked the same question of Erin Patterson and according to this evidence, asked her directly if Erin had foraged the mushrooms herself.

And according to the response, the answer was a clear-cut no.

Sally Ann said, I did ask her if she had foraged for mushrooms and she said no, she had bought them.

Yeah.

And we heard about the source of the mushrooms again.

And so this was buying some from Woolworths, pre-sliced mushrooms from a Woolworths in Lee and Gatha.

and then that she had bought the other ones from an Asian grocer around the suburbs of Oakley, Glen Waverly in Melbourne in April that year, April 2023, probably when she was, I think Erin was saying, well, Sally Ann was saying that Erin had told her it was likely she'd bought them when she'd been there dropping her kids off for some school holiday activities or something like that.

So what Sally Ann Atkinson said was that Erin Patterson told her it actually could have been Clayton or Oakley or Matt Waverly.

But then in a later conversation, Glenn Waverly was brought into it and the timing is correct.

Yes, it's around the time the two kids were doing some school holiday activities.

There was a property in Mount Waverly that Erin Patterson and her kids would sometimes stay in.

And according to this evidence, Erin Patterson told Sally Ann Atkinson that

when her kids were doing these school holiday activities, she would drive around the suburbs and that might have been when she picked up these mushrooms, but was not able to narrow down the shop that she went to.

Yeah.

And Sally Ann went to some like, well, what for me I consider like a fair bit of effort for a public health official to try and track down the source of this.

There was, we saw a lot of text messages between her and Erin Patterson and also Sally Ann going to the lengths of like marking up little plastic bags in her own home.

to kind of send to Erin as an example being like, is this the packaging that you bought these in?

According to Sally Ann, Erin has told her that she purchased mushrooms in some sort of clear packaging with white labeling and all of this did not look very official, if I could put it that way.

Looked like something in a Ziploc bag with a handwritten label.

So yeah, Sally Ann has gone and kind of mocked this up in her own house to sort of create something that might look similar and then has sent the photos on to Erin saying, does it kind of look like this?

She's also sent Erin Patterson photos from inside some of these stores saying, does it look like this this store?

But the answer came back, no.

So Sally Ann Atkinson was working with another one of the witnesses that we heard from last week, Troy from the Monash City Council,

who was going and actually doing these store visits himself.

We heard about his very comprehensive spreadsheet that he'd done from visiting 14 stores.

But Aaron Patterson has allegedly told Sally Ann Atkinson, look, she doesn't have any of the packaging anymore.

But the reason why the dried mushrooms from the Asian store were purchased was that this beef wellington recipe required one kilogram of mushrooms.

She had bought some of the mushrooms from the local Woolworths but it sounded like she needed a bit of a top-up.

So that's where she's used these.

However, these mushrooms are a few months old by the time they end up in the Beef Wellington and Erin Patterson had said that after she purchased them initially to use in another dish,

she's opened them up.

The smell was quite strong.

She placed them in a Tupperware container.

And then it sounds like, yeah, three months later, she's pulled them out again, rehydrated them, chopped them up and put them in the beef Wellington as some sort of big paste that goes over the meat in that dish.

Yeah, and it was interesting to hear that, you know, Sally Ann was quite interested to, quite keen to find out

if all of the paste had been used or if, you know, some of the paste was made with the Woolworths mushrooms, other paste was made with the the mushrooms from the Asian grocer and Erin Patterson said no no it's all been used in one we put it all I put it all over them and then yeah wrapped them in puff pastry to to make those Wellingtons that's correct and another thing Sally Ann Atkinson was trying to get to the bottom of was purchase dates for all the ingredients in the beef Wellington.

So we can go through some of the text messages between the two

because it appeared that there was an inconsistency.

Oh, this is according to Sally Ann Atkinson where Erin Patterson said initially she'd bought all the ingredients on a Friday.

So this is the day before the lunch.

But then in further conversations

suggested that maybe some of the ingredients had been bought throughout the week.

And can you take us through some of those messages?

So one of the text messages sent on the 2nd of August, so this is about four days after the lunch, and Erin Patterson writes that she's not exactly sure when she went to the shops but she went a few times last week and she says I know I got some of the ingredients on maybe Wednesday or Thursday

and she writes I know I bought some discounted iFillet steaks one time and then I went back on Thursday or Friday and I bought a couple more but they weren't discounted it was just at the normal price and then Erin says I bought the rest of the ingredients at one of those shopping trips.

I often go daily or every second day to pick up a bag or or two and get what I need as I go so it's hard to pinpoint the exact day I bought this or that but I know I bought all of it at some stage last week on Wednesday, Thursday or Friday.

We saw a lot of messages between Sally Ann Atkinson and Erin Patterson over a period of a few days where Sally Ann's trying to get to the bottom of the source of these mushrooms and despite many text messages sent, she never really gets a clear answer about where they were purchased or what they looked like or even the date on which they've been obtained.

These are the dried mushrooms from the Asian grocer.

Yeah, and one of the things I noticed happening today is while Salane Atkinson was being questioned by Jane Warren from the prosecution,

Jane kind of like asked quite specifically a couple of times about inconsistencies in the story that Aaron had told to Salan Atkinson.

So the apparent inconsistency around the purchasing of the ingredients was one thing.

And also going back to the mushrooms,

the Asian grocer mushrooms themselves, Sally Ann Atkinson said initially Erin Patterson indicated that she'd actually used some of these mushrooms before,

but then changed the story to say actually she had not.

And Sally Ann said

she wasn't very clear.

Interesting.

And I suppose it's in the prosecution's interest to try and highlight where there's these inconsistencies and moments like this in a trial, right?

Yes, because let's be clear about the case the prosecution is trying to make.

And we go all the way back to the opening day of the trial when Nanette Rogers outlined to the jury what this case is from the prosecution's side.

The prosecution clearly says Erin Patterson lied.

about getting death cap mushrooms from an Asian grocer.

They're trying to point out that this Asian grocer story is a complete falsehood.

It's completely made up.

It's not a situation where there could be an element of truth to it.

Prosecution says it's complete nonsense and fabrication.

And the prosecution is also saying that they do not believe that Erin Patterson herself ate

poisonous beef wellington.

And they do not believe that Erin Patterson fed

contaminated beef wellington to her kids in the following day.

On the topic of leftovers, though, this is something that I know we've got lots of questions about.

You know, we've talked about it for the last four or five weeks about leftovers being chucked out and ending up in a bin.

And we've definitely had questions around where were the leftovers from and things like that.

So this was also something Sally Ann Atkinson was thinking about because a couple of days after the lunch, the police did go to Erin Patterson's house and found some leftovers in a bin.

and people have questioned were those the leftovers from the Saturday meal or were those the leftovers from the following night?

Yep.

And so when Sally Ann Atkinson asked that question to Aaron Patterson whether there were two sets of leftovers, it appeared that Erin agreed that there were and said, yes, it all went in the bin.

And it's interesting because the way that that question was asked was kind of like a, did this leftover go in the bin or did this leftover go in the bin?

And it was, Aaron's apply kind of lumps it all into one kind of kind of object right yep yep okay yep

today we also heard from a doctor who was involved in the autopsies of of the lunch guests and you might remember that while we have heard about amanitotoxin being found in Don Patterson it wasn't found in Gail Patterson or Heather Wilkinson when we heard from this man today he explained that he'd seen injuries consistent with death cat mushroom poisoning you know the you know scarring of the liver, the death of the liver, the death of the bowels in some parts as well.

So that was also something that was interesting to kind of like draw some of that evidence back around a bit.

It was a pathologist, Dr.

Brian Beer, and this did confirm what other witnesses have said in this trial, that even though those toxins weren't found in the ladies' bodies, all the other medical analysis clearly points to mushroom poisoning.

Yeah, yeah.

Christian, we also had somebody else from Victoria Police talking through the dehydrator that they found at the tip.

Ben Goodwin was his name, and he's involved in crime scene examinations.

So this is the dehydrator that, yeah, wound up at the tip a few days after the lunch.

Prosecutors alleged this was used to prepare the meal, and

we saw some photos of the dehydrator and some tiny breadcrumb-like

brown dots, basically

described as debris I think debris but it was veg pieces of vegetable pulled off the dehydrator they were really small in these tiny specimen jars he said that seven samples were collected from various points of the dehydrator and he'd actually used tweezers to to pluck them off this kind of goes back to some earlier witnesses that we heard from in the trial.

So clearly this guy, Mr.

Goodwin, was just involved in pulling the samples, But we've heard from other witnesses that when those samples were analysed, two out of the seven were found to be death cat mushrooms.

Yep, yep.

We also continued some of the evidence from forensics officer Sharman Fox Henry, also from Victoria Police.

This was his cross-examination.

So this was the defence's opportunity to ask him some questions, try to get kind of, you know, just clarify a few things that I guess he was talking about.

This was probably the most awkward I have felt in this trial, watching Colin Mandy just kind of pick apart the professional qualifications of a witness.

What's he trying to get at there?

It was a fox trap, so to speak, that the defense tried to set.

So yeah, his cross-examination, the first set of questions go right back to who he is.

How well qualified is he?

Had he undertaken the training for the various programs he was using, these types of of things.

And a lot of the time, the answer was actually no, he hadn't undertaken formal training.

And Mr.

Fox Henry said that

these programs, he used them after getting some guidance from his colleagues.

And on one of them, he said he basically just needed to press go on the program and then it would start its analysis.

And these are programs that Victoria Police use to look at phones, computers,

iPads, tablets, these kinds of things.

And they produce what are called artifacts, which are taken off those devices and then later used as evidence.

And there were a lot of artifacts.

Yeah, some 2.6 million digital artifacts just off the computer alone.

Wow.

However, we did hear from Mr.

Fox Henry that police did try to narrow down the search perimeters.

So there were some keywords that they were looking for to kind of hone in on relevant or potentially relevant

records.

So Mr.

Fox Henry said the program that he used, it's called Magnet Axiom,

love the name, can translate extremely detailed information on computer disk drives into material that's decipherable.

And there was a nice exchange in court when Mr.

Mandy asked if all that raw information is gobbledygook.

And Mr.

Fox Henry said he preferred the term data.

Oh, that's very sweet.

One of the lines that

Colin Mandy was going down today was really questioning

Sharman Fox Henry on like checking on metadata, finding out where things came from, being really kind of pedantic, I guess, it felt like around like time and date stuff and things like that.

Where's this going?

What are they trying to kind of uncover or make the jury aware of here?

I think what it goes to is questioning the accuracy of these reports and also looking at whether these reports are producing results that give answers that are contextually correct if that makes sense

so for instance we were looking at the accuracy of times on a particular report about a phone called phone b

this is a phone that was factory reset three times in the week after the lunch.

And it was a phone that police took from Erin Patterson's house.

Now, according to this report from police, it was factory reset

on the 2nd of August, the 5th of August, and the 6th of August.

But because it's been reset so many times, Mr.

Mandy was questioning the accuracy of some of these time stamps and even the time zones that the phone is displaying in these records.

You know, is it, do we know for sure that it's Australian time or is it the UTC time, which is another time zone?

And Mr.

Fox Henry said it's simply not possible to say which time zone this phone was in according to the results that it sort of spat out in the report.

I hope that makes sense.

No, no.

Struggling to explain it.

Well, it's, you know, Sharman Fox Henry did a good job actually.

I'm not going to say that he struggled to explain it, but certainly faced some, you know, some pretty...

Pretty hard line of questioning from Colin Mandy today.

The other thing as well around the factory resetting is prosecutors allege that this phone was factory reset while it was actually in the police custody remotely.

And Mr.

Fox Henry said he confirmed that there's no evidence that the phone contained any data on this phone when it was factory reset for the final time.

Yeah.

I think something I'd like to just pick up as well, because we got the cross-examination of Sharman Fox Henry today.

And what sometimes happens following across is you'll have the prosecution come back and ask a couple of quick questions.

Jane Warren from the prosecution did follow up very briefly with Sharman Fox Henry just to get him to clarify

what exactly is carried across on a phone after something's deleted because he was questioned a lot about missing bits of data attached to some things.

But Jane Warren was quite specific in asking, if something's been deleted and you've recovered this data, is it likely to be missing bits of information?

This was a general question just around when something gets deleted, can you get it back?

Basically was the question.

Can it impact whether you can find the original file?

And Mr.

Fox Henry said, yes,

things can be overwritten.

You may not be able to find

all of the information that relates to this artefact because of the deletion.

Yeah.

And when we're talking about these phones and these computers and all these bits and pieces, I mean, is this, are we talking about data that has been deleted at some point?

or is it not clear if it's been deleted or if it was just always accessible on those computers?

From my understanding of the evidence,

and I'm just trying to follow it along as just as best as everyone else is.

Yeah, as the jury would be.

Yeah.

My understanding is it sounds like a bit of a mix.

There are some devices, i.e.

Phone B, where there's no data that police have been able to recover.

Then there's the tablet where they've been able to pull some thumbnail images

from a cache file, I believe.

And with the computer, they've looked through some search history and got some results.

That's my understanding of it.

But yeah, I'm not a tech expert and I'm trying to follow this along as best as everyone else is.

Yep, yeah, yeah.

Christian, before we wrap up and jump into some questions today,

we mentioned a beetle disturbing proceedings in the courthouse in the court last week.

Today,

you know, an actual human being.

A genuine pest.

Genuine.

Genuine pest.

What happened?

So the jury was coming back after their mid-morning break and just sort of resuming their seats when this man stood up in the courtroom and started yelling all sorts of weird conspiracy theories.

I think some of them were targeted at the judge, Christopher Beale.

And

this man was swiftly removed from the courtroom.

Do we know what happens to him after this?

Is this something you can face charges for?

Is he just sort of ejected and sent on his way?

Yeah, in theory.

I mean, this is contempt of court

in the most obvious way, like some guy getting up and disrupting court proceedings.

I mean, this is completely irrelevant to the Patterson case.

And I think everyone in the room, quite maturely, moved on very, very quickly.

He was wearing some sort of yellow t-shirt which said, All we are saying is give truth a chance.

I wonder whether that is a play on a song by John Lennon and Yoko Ono.

I think the lyric is all we are saying is give peace a chance.

We go full circle with our Beatles disturbing the courtroom.

Yeah, but I don't know for sure whether that is a link to the Beatles and I certainly wasn't keen to ask him.

No, not at all.

We are getting so many of your questions sent to mushroomcasedaily at abc.net.au.

They are really insightful, they're really interesting, they're things that often I haven't thought about.

So it's great to kind of get them to think through.

The one I want to start with today, Christian, is a question from Barbara in Brisbane.

She says, thanks so much for your addictive podcast.

You're welcome, Barbara.

Thank you.

And her question relates to the relationships Erin had with her in-laws and her ex-partner, Simon, just before the mushroom meal.

She understands from the messages we heard yesterday, Erin was unhappy with Simon and his family eight months before the lunch.

However, has any evidence been presented to suggest the relationship remained difficult closer to the lunch?

Well, certainly with Simon,

there was tension and there was a series of messages between the two the night before the lunch when Simon bailed via text and Erin sent him this message saying something along the lines of, I'm very disappointed and I hope you change your mind.

But evidently he didn't and he didn't show up.

But his two parents did and obviously Ian and Heather Wilkinson showed up.

Yeah, and we did hear as well that Heather Wilkinson was very excited by the idea of going to this lunch as well, earlier in the trial.

Ian Wilkinson, I mean, this is a fairly distant relationship Ian and Heather have with Erin.

Like, she is, for Ian,

she is the

daughter-in-law of his sister-in-law.

So it's a pretty long bow.

And Ian Wilkinson, anyway, said that to him, Erin was practically an acquaintance, someone he didn't know too well.

Obviously, the Patterson parents, that's a a different story.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Another question here from Steph, age 11.

Hi, Christian.

Love the pod.

Thanks, Steph.

I'm here as well.

You're welcome.

She listens each night with her dad.

And her question is, does Ian Wilkinson have a perspective on Erin's innocent?

Has he publicly shared his thoughts?

Thanks, Steph.

Thank you as well for listening.

Ian Wilkinson was not asked questions like that on the stand and sort of goes back to what this case has to do in terms of focusing on cold hard facts.

What did you hear?

What did someone say to you?

What did you see?

It's not really what did you think

this meant.

It has to be a lot more

specific than that.

Yeah.

Steph, it is a great question.

It's actually one that I've wondered about as well.

I did wonder why we didn't get to that.

And then I think might have even had this conversation with Christian and you gave me the same answer you've just given to Steph there as well.

So Steph, great question.

And just to clarify, that was sent from Steph's dad's email.

So she's listening with supervision, at least we know.

So that's good.

Finally, Christian, we've got one here from Katie.

Dear Christian and Stephen, I'm glued to your pod.

Katie, as I mentioned, there is a solvent for that.

Katie is wondering if you can comment on Erin's demeanor during the presentation of the evidence.

Hi, Katie.

I think Erin has ridden the ups and downs of this trial in front of the jury.

It must be be said.

I can think of times when she's become quite emotional, when she was watching the video of her kids giving evidence.

It was obvious that she was crying and visibly quite upset.

There's been other times when she's focused really intently on witnesses

in the box and has been, you know, listening very, very closely.

Other times she wears quite a neutral, calm expression.

And occasionally, when the odd joke is cracked in the courtroom, about once a day, there's a joke and everyone laughs quite loudly.

Erin, at best, sort of offers a bit of a wry smile.

But this is what the jury has all seen over the last four weeks.

Yep.

Yeah, yeah.

Thank you, Katie.

Thank you, Christian.

Do we know what is coming up tomorrow, Christian?

Tomorrow, Sally Ann Atkinson returns to the witness stand.

And Stocky, I hope you'll be in good condition as well.

We are going out to celebrate your birthday tonight.

I will, uh, I'll be very responsible.

We'll be in fine form for tomorrow.

Um, before we finish up for the day, I would remind you all to make sure: if you'd like to get me a birthday present, you should download the ABC Listen app and listen through there.

You get the episodes of Mushroom Case Daily slightly earlier than you will get in any other spot as well.

And if, look, you're not willing to do that, please just leave me a birthday rating or review on one of the other podcast platforms.

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.

Our executive producer is Claire Rawlinson, and many thanks to the Victorian Newsroom and Audio Studios manager Eric George.

Also, to our true crime colleagues Tim Roxborough, Rachel Brown, and Yasmin Parry.

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

An hour.

One hour.

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The sound wave travels into the ear canal and it hits the eardrum.

Unforgettable stories.

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And the answer to these really is always yes.

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