She Killed Three People with Poisonous Mushrooms. Did She Mean To?
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Basically, when, you know, she speaks to police, she's seemingly as baffled as they are about why these three lunch guests have died and another one's, you know, on death's door. And yet she's fine.
Today I'm talking with Nino Bucci. He's a justice and courts reporter at Guardian Australia. And last year, he covered a trial there that made international headlines. A case that involved poisonous mushrooms.
Back in July 2023, a woman called Erin Patterson hosted her parents-in-law and also their relatives. So her auntie and uncle of her husband at her house, which was on a piece of land in country Victoria, which is sort of one of the southernmost mainland state in Australia. And she invited them around for Saturday lunch, a lunch of beef Wellington. Erin said, didn't give a reason exactly for lunch, but basically wanted to talk to them about something. And she was in this quite new house. So, you know, they came around. Most of them hadn't been there before. It was quite an unusual thing for her to invite them all over. And she showed them around a beautiful house, did what people normally do when they have people over for lunch and fussed a little about plating up.
And then eventually they all sat around her dining room table and had a beef Wellington.
You said that her in-laws were there, but was her husband there?
No. So, her and Simon were estranged at that time. Simon didn't live there. He'd actually been invited to the lunch and cancelled late the night before. So, he wasn't there. And his absence was something that, as this sort of went on, became somewhat more interesting.
So you said they were having Beef Wellington. This seemed like a kind of a proper Saturday lunch. For people who don't know what Beef Wellington is, what is Beef Wellington?
Sure. So there's a few different ways around it. And, you know, effectively what it is, though, is a piece of beef wrapped in pastry. So this particular version that Erin was making was from quite a well-known Australian chef. Her version is not sort of one big log of beef, as is traditional. wrapped up in pastry, but Erin sort of made single bits of beef wrapped up in pastry. And there was, you know, quite importantly in this case, between the beef and the pastry, there was a mushroom... mix that was placed in there, sauteed down mushrooms that were sort of put on top of the meat before the whole thing was wrapped up in little individual parcels. So each of those lunch guests had in front of them effectively a little individually made parcel of beef, mushrooms on top, wrapped in pastry.
So they sat down, they had their beef wellington, and what happened next?
Well, the discussion continued. They were, at that point, Erin was sort of raising concerns she had about cancer. You know, they then realized that was why she invited them all around there to talk about her cancer diagnosis. But, you know, it ended the way most of these lunches ended. Everyone was sort of, you know, waxing lyrical about the meal, very glad to have been there, hopped off in their cars and went home.
So everyone leaves after lunch, goes on their own way. Um, And then what happens?
So later that night, the lunch guests start to fall ill and they fall ill with symptoms that are quite similar to acute food poisoning or gastroenteritis. There's vomiting, diarrhea, stomach cramps. They all think basically they've they've eaten something bad and when it becomes clear that it's all people who are at Erin's place for lunch they assume it's something they've eaten that day that it's that they've potentially all had a bad piece of meat for example but as it kind of went from you know the early hours into you know dawn
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