"I want nothing to do with them" - Erin’s messages about lunch guests

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Well, chances are, I have two.

Obviously, everybody poops, and depending on what depth it gets to, it could be sequestered away from the atmosphere for decades to millennia.

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After the fatal lunch, police seized Erin Patterson's phone.

Today, we'll tell you what they found.

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

It is Thursday the 22nd of May.

We've just finished the 16th day of this trial and a heads up.

There's some strong language in this episode.

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.

The tragedy will come.

I love them.

Okay, Christian.

So, before you start swearing at me, can you take us through what we heard in what was

actually a pretty full day of evidence in the Erin Patterson trial?

It was a busy, busy day, and we have a lot to get through.

Sharman Fox Henry, the Victoria Police digital analyst, returned to the stand.

And he took the court through some of the things police found when they looked through Erin Patterson's phones and a tablet.

They found messages where she was angry with the Patterson family.

They found pictures of mushrooms, supposed research done about cancer, and they also found evidence that factory resets were repeatedly performed on one of the phones seized from Erin Patterson's house.

We also heard from the man who was tasked with driving around Melbourne's southeast, visiting the Asian grocers as authorities scrambled to figure out if the deadly mushrooms had come from there.

And a nurse was called to the stand.

Some of her evidence about Erin Patterson was a little bit squeamish.

It was a packed day.

We covered a huge amount of ground.

As you've just taken us through, Christian, we take a tour of the suburbs.

We take a tour of a toilet pole.

But I want to start this conversation with Sharman Fox Henry, the digital forensics officer from Victoria Police.

He was back on the stand today.

And while we got kind of like some few, some small details about alleged searches that were done on computers in Aaron Patterson's house.

Today we got into some messages.

These are allegedly messages between Aaron Patterson and some of her Facebook friends, people we heard from earlier in the trial who were giving evidence a couple of weeks ago now.

And these messages were about seven months before the lunch.

And we really start to hear what Aaron really thinks, allegedly.

Yeah, yesterday with Mr.

Fox Henry, we were learning about what is a computer.

Today it was much more specific and totally related to this case.

It all starts to make sense now, his presentation from yesterday.

Anyway,

we go to some of the messages that Erin Patterson had sent to friends as part of a group chat.

And she's using the Facebook account, which is called Erin Aaron Aaron.

And we heard earlier in the trial that she has a few different Facebook accounts.

It's like Erin, Aaron Aaron, Erin, Aaron, Aaron.

This one was Erin.

Erin Aaron.

Right, the third of the ones.

Yep.

Got it.

Thank you.

So to put this sort of in context, this is a period when Erin Patterson is going through what is a messy time with her estranged husband, Simon.

The relationship is breaking down, tension also with the family.

These two are bickering at the time about things like child support payments, their kids' schooling, and things like that.

So she's talking to her girlfriends

on the Facebook chat.

And let's go through one of the messages which was sent in December 2022.

Also, just a quick reminder, Don and Gail Patterson, they are the parents of Simon Patterson, the estranged husband.

So I'll read out the message.

Simon's dad contacted me this morning to say that he and Gail had tried to talk to Simon about the matters I raised and to get, quote, his side.

But he refused to talk about it other than to signal he disagreed with what I said.

Beyond that, he won't talk about it.

So Don said they can't adjudicate it if they don't know both sides and Simon won't give his side.

And then there was an emoji.

There seemed to be some dispute about what this emoji was, so we'll just call it generic emoji and move on.

Carrying on, and I quote,

so he said, all he can ask is that Simon and I get together, pray for the children, emoji, emoji.

And just a warning, there is some strong language coming up.

Yep.

Then the message continues.

This family, I swear to fucking God.

These are the raw messages.

And this is strong language.

It is.

And it's a message that's sent to about five people.

Oh, wow.

It's probably a group chat.

A group chat, yep.

So then there are some other messages where Erin is referring to Simon, using words like gaslighting and abusive, and then also making references to his parents, saying they use things like weasel words.

And Erin Patterson is talking about her son,

which she shares with Simon.

And in one of the messages, she claims claims that the boy hates his own father, Simon.

And then there's another message again in the same chat.

And this goes to the topic of child support, which is a dispute that Erin is having with Simon.

And she writes, allegedly, his mum was horrified.

I had claimed child support.

Why isn't she horrified?

Her son is such a deadbeat that I had no choice but to claim.

This is, yeah, really interesting insight, I guess, into the relationship and a side of it that we, I think, probably haven't seen, you know, expressed in this way before.

I mean, there's also conversations in there about her frustrations with how religious the Patterson family is as well.

And this is something that we heard from the Facebook friends when they were giving evidence earlier in the trial.

These are the Facebook friends that are in this chat that we're talking through now as well.

And seeing this kind of, you know, I guess, decline of this relationship in this way is really interesting because, you know, when we heard evidence from Simon earlier in the trial, it was, you know he said at one point like you know it seemed that Aaron Patterson loved his parents yes that is what he said during Simon Patterson's evidence which did go for a couple of days he was taken to sort of the ups and downs of his relationship with Aaron and obviously when they got together some 25 years ago things were good but he said that around 2015 there was a decline they separated and then things got worse around 2019 and it escalated to this point in late 2022 when they were yeah really going at each other but

he did also say that right up until the lunch they remained in contact and and we've seen messages between the two where they do text each other right up until the day before the lunch when Simon tells Erin that he's not going to come.

Yeah, yeah.

And, you know,

lots of these messages that we were seeing today, but it's not the only thing that the police were taking off of these devices.

And they found a number of devices in the home.

Once we got through these messages, we got into some some pictures

and I want to start with, I guess, probably what seems to be pretty important images, some pictures of some mushrooms being dried.

And these were images that were taken from, I believe it was a tablet.

And I'll try to describe it to you.

You can see a dehydrator and this is

the dehydrator we imagine that we've talked about earlier.

And you can see these dried yellowy mushrooms on

on some plastic shelving and these were now taken about two months before the lunch.

These pictures have actually come up in the trial before Stocky.

So these pictures that were shown to the court today were actually shown to the mushroom expert Dr.

Tom May last week.

The context wasn't given to Tom May, but now we understand maybe what it is.

So when he was shown these pictures, he was asked to identify these mushrooms and he said that the mushrooms in the picture had an appearance consistent with death cap mushrooms.

Now during the cross-examination by the defense, Dr.

Tom May was also asked, is it possible that these mushrooms also share characteristics consistent with other?

types of mushrooms and he did say yes.

So

there is kind of an acceptance that they do look like death caps but they could also be something else so anyway yeah back to today um we saw several pictures of these dried mushrooms on the dehydrator we also saw another picture of i think it was a bowl with some large um button mushrooms kind of like field flat mushrooms yeah

um

so there was that as well

and they were shown to the court yeah right and so it was there it was just like the dehydrator some laid out, some drying.

Were there scales as well?

Scales, yeah.

Yeah.

Okay, interesting.

And then we continued into the kind of the searches that were done as well.

We heard yesterday that the police found searches for iNaturalist, Death Cap, Corronborough Middle Pub on a...

on a device that was found in the Patterson home.

Today, we heard about some cancer searches.

And this is important because we heard earlier in the trial that when Erin Patterson held the lunch, she was talking to the guests that were there about the best way to break the news to her children that she had cancer.

And we also heard that that cancer diagnosis was fake.

So these

supposed cancer searches that we got to today were a little bit different to the ones from yesterday.

So what you mentioned were internet searches,

Bing searches.

These were different because what these were, these were screenshots of searches, not actually the searches themselves.

So a little bit different.

And there were screenshots that were allegedly retrieved from this device.

And some of the search terms included things like stage four cancer, ovarian cancer, brain lymphoma.

And you know in Google, when you do a search for a term like that, not only do you get a whole bunch of like web pages, sometimes you get a bit of a summary that the search engine provides for you.

And, you know, that can be about 100 words of text.

So there was that underneath those search search terms as well.

Interesting.

All right.

And I should also mention those screenshots of the searches come in the same period, about two months before the lunch.

Okay, great.

No, that's good context, helping us place this around the July 2023 lunch that is the focus of this trial.

Christian, catch me up.

How many devices have we heard from or sort of talked through now?

A couple of phones and a tablet?

We heard about a computer yesterday.

I think it's three phones that we heard about today and a tablet.

Right.

There may be more to go through.

Mr.

Fox Henry's evidence is actually not finished.

Okay, yeah, yeah.

I mean,

we haven't gone into the details of one of those phones, though.

Why is that?

Well, one of the phones that Mr.

Fox Henry looked at, he said they weren't really able to retrieve anything meaningful from it because it had actually been factory reset, and not just once, but four times.

So when he's used the Victoria Police software, they were able to

access, I guess you could call a record of the phone.

And

in a table, we were able to see when these factory resets allegedly happened.

So one of the resets took place about

six months before the lunch,

but then the final three actually took place in the week after the lunch.

Of those three, according to the records, two of them were made manually.

so it sounds like the person has gone into the settings menu and actually hit factory reset.

But the final one has actually been done remotely, according to these records.

And the interesting thing about the final alleged reset is that it happens on August 6th.

Now, the reason why I say that date is prosecutors allege that this phone was taken by police on August 5.

Oh,

so this isn't a phone that the person who owns the phone has physical access to at that point.

It has been taken by police and during that process has been reset.

Factory reset while in the custody of police.

And we have more evidence from Mr.

Fox Henry to come.

Mr.

Fox Henry's time on the stand hasn't concluded.

I think we've still got more questions to come from the prosecution.

It didn't sound like they wrapped up their questioning.

And then, of course, the defence will get their chance to cross-examine him.

Right.

Okay.

So, I mean, that's a lot that we've gone through already.

That's, you know, maybe a half, a third of what we got through today.

It was a huge amount today.

It was a very hectic afternoon.

And something that we had a lot of emails about is,

you know, asking questions about where these mushrooms that were used in the meal came from.

Erin Patterson had said that she got some of them from an Asian grocer in a couple of suburbs around Melbourne.

Today we heard from a man from the council of that area who basically went on what seemed like, well, not basically, he was going on like a literal wild mushroom hunt.

He was.

His name was Troy Shonknecht.

And apologies to Troy if I've mispronounced his surname.

He works for the Monash City Council, which is in the southeast of Melbourne.

It covers suburbs like Mount Waverly, Clayton and Oakley.

And these are the suburbs that Erin Patterson said that she may have purchased some of the mushrooms in the meal from, from an Asian grocer, but she didn't remember the name of the shop.

So Troy has been tasked with going around all of these suburbs on the wild mushroom hunt.

And

he produced a very detailed report because he went to 14 shops and what he found was there's a lot of shiitake.

There's a lot of shiitake being sold.

This was a personal heart of mine.

I'm a big fan of a spreadsheet.

Troy made what I thought was a wonderful spreadsheet talking through the different grocers in those areas, dividing them by suburb, having the address.

And then he was going through taking photos of the different types of mushrooms, detailing little comments and things like that.

He was taking photos of all the dried mushrooms that were being sold.

So in total, he took like 300 photos in two days.

Because the seriousness of this at the time, anyway, was that health authorities were concerned that toxic mushrooms had potentially been sold by an Asian grocer,

which raised the possibility of a serious health emergency.

So this was no laughing matter.

He looked at 14 shops in the three suburbs I mentioned.

He didn't go to another suburb, Glen Waverly.

So we've talked about Mount Waverly.

Mount Waverly, yeah.

Glen Waverly is another big suburb in the city of Monash, my hometown.

Also an area with a lot of Asian grocers.

But Troy said he didn't go to Glen Waverly.

He queried with the health department whether he should,

but they said you don't need to.

So he didn't focus his investigation on Glen Waverly.

Yeah.

It was interesting hearing Troy talking through this kind of search and the levels he was going to to try and basically find this source.

He was tasked with finding mushrooms in a kind of like a clear plastic bag that were broadly unlabeled, maybe a sort of sticker on the front.

And in one shop, it sounds like he gets really close.

Like he goes to this shop, they've got this bag there, it's clear, there's a little sticker on it.

And he's like, Where do you get these from?

They've got a bigger bag at the back.

They're just sort of putting them into smaller bags.

And he sends this photo through to the people who've tasked him with this job.

And the reply comes back, which is like, Look, this is close, but they're actually, they were sliced, they weren't whole.

You know, this isn't, this isn't the place, it doesn't look like this is the place.

And so he keeps going.

And we heard from Camille Trouan, who's a mycologist last week, and she just

gave evidence that she didn't think you'd be able to actually gather a commercial quantity of death cat mushrooms because of how they grow.

And the the ultimate conclusion that this man came to after his investigation was that all the dried mushrooms being sold in these stores were imported.

They weren't even from Australia.

That feels like a bit of an unsatisfying end to Troy.

Is there a clearer like, no, it didn't come from him, come from here or anything like that?

Well, look, I mean, it wasn't his job to find the source of the mushrooms.

It sounds like he did what he was asked to do.

And what we know from the prosecution is that they don't believe poisonous mushrooms came from these Asian grocers.

And what the prosecution has taken the jury to, especially this week, are potential trips that Erin Patterson made to areas called Loch and Outram about two months before the lunch.

And they're using phone signal data to say that Erin's phone connected to towers in Loch and Outram about two months before the lunch and Loch and Outram are also places where people have posted online that death cap mushrooms grow.

Yeah, yeah.

If you want to hear a bit more about that, jump into our episodes from Monday and Tuesday of this week.

We go through all the evidence that was given by Dr.

Matthew Sorrell, who's a phone location expert.

I went through that.

Christian, as part of the cast of characters we had giving evidence today, we also heard from a nurse who was looking after Erin when she was at the Leon Gatha Hospital.

We heard a story earlier in the trial of Erin presenting to hospital, going to the bathroom,

being asked to give a stool sample when she said she was reporting diarrhea and some gastrointestinal issues.

And she came out of the bathroom and said, look, I know it looks like a wee, but it's actually a poo.

The woman on the stand today was the woman who this was told to, and I learnt far more about Erin Patterson's bowel movements than I'd ever intended to.

Why did I learn this?

Well, it might be a bit unpalatable, but given what this case is about, the ingestion of toxic substances and the impacts on people's bodies, you've got to follow that through.

And so here we are.

Mariam Sesspon was her name.

She was one of the nurses who was tasked with looking after Erin Patterson a couple of days after the lunch.

According to Nurse Sesspon,

when Erin Patterson was checked into the Lee and Gather hospital, she was told we want a record of every time you go to the toilet and when you do go we're going to mark down the results on a chart

so this is the 31st of July two days after the lunch and we actually saw the chart Thankfully we didn't see the contents of the toilet but we saw the chart and what it said was on five occasions over about a two-hour period Erin Patterson went to the toilet to do a bowel movement.

On all of those occasions Nurse Sespon noted that what was collected was liquidy.

Sometimes it was a medium volume, sometimes it was a small volume.

And she said one of the samples contained some brown bits in it.

She said that it did look like a wee and not a poo.

But under cross-examination by Colin Mandy, the defense barrister, she also conceded that sometimes when people have diarrhea, it is very watery and

can sometimes look like what she collected.

It was a reminder that nurses aren't paid enough, I think, is the takeaway from that evidence.

It is not an easy job.

Christian, before we wrap up the pod for today, I'd love to just get to a couple of questions.

We have one here from Lydia.

Lydia says, hi, loving the pod.

I've been glued to it.

Thank you, Lydia.

I do believe there are solvents for that.

She has been wondering about the leftovers.

Whose were they?

And how did they end up being thrown away?

From what we've heard, all four lunch guests finished their individual beef Wellingtons, even finishing each other's meals.

Hi, Lydia.

Thanks for your question.

It is a good one, and I think this is an area of dispute in this trial.

Whose leftovers were they?

This appears to be something that's in a contest.

So let's try and step through it.

Erin Patterson has said that the leftovers were from a meal that she and her kids ate the day after this big family lunch.

And that's what ended up in the trash.

And that's what the police ended up seizing.

And that's what ended up being tested.

Now, the prosecution will dispute the fact that this is the leftovers from what Erin ate with her kids.

And the reason for that is that there's been some toxicology analysis that's been done of the items found in the bin.

One expert said there were traces

of Amanita phaloides toxins, that's death cat mushrooms,

found in some of the leftovers, according to his chemical analysis.

Both those things can't be true, and it seems like it is a point of contention between the parties, because prosecutors say that what they pulled out of the bin had death cat mushroom toxins in it.

However, their testing of Aaron Patterson's kids seems to show that these children did not

ingest death cat mushroom toxins.

So they're at odds here.

Right, okay.

Wonderful question, Lydia.

Thank you so much for sending it in.

And we hope we explained it.

It's complicated.

Yeah, yeah.

And there's a lot of things like this throughout this case.

So we appreciate your patience as we're taking you through it.

And just try and remember that as we're talking through individual bits here and here and there.

That there's disputes between the parties.

It's very hard to give that clear, conclusive answer.

Yeah.

On the disputes between the parties, this actually could be a really timely question.

It's from Daisy in Campsey.

They say, hey, Christian and Stocky, really enjoying the pod.

Thanks very much.

Several emojis, in fact.

Daisy is wondering why the jury is excluded from hearing some of the evidence.

I'm confused about why they have to leave the room at times, given they'll be making the final decision.

Shouldn't they be in the room at all times?

Thanks, Daisy.

To clarify, the jury isn't missing out on any evidence as such.

What they're missing out on, and they're not missing out, trust me,

is the legal argument between the parties about

that evidence.

They can only hear things that are admissible in this trial.

And sometimes between the parties, things need to be worked out before they're put in front of the jury.

It is important that all the evidence that the jury hears is material that the judge, Christopher Beale, has approved and greenlighted for use in this trial.

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, you know, while the jury's missing it, I wish I could miss some of that stuff as well.

So, Daisy, great question.

Thank you, Christian.

Thank you so much for listening to Mushroom Case Daily.

If you can rate and review us on whatever podcast platform you're listening to us on, that is much appreciated.

And I would highly recommend you jump on the ABC Listener and hit follow on Mushroom Case Daily there because you get it a little bit before everybody else gets it.

It's our little treat.

We'll be back tomorrow.

It's only a half day in court, but it's not a half-length episode.

We'll wrap up the whole week's events.

We'll wrap up the whole week for you.

We'll see you then.

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, shout out to our true crime colleagues Tim Roxborough, Rachel Brown and Yasmin Parry for helping us make this show each day.

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