By Joseph Dunstan, ABC
A handout sketch received from the Supreme Court of Victoria shows Erin Patterson, an Australian woman accused of murdering three people with a toxic mushroom-laced beef Wellington. Photo: AFP / PAUL TYQUIN
Accused killer Erin Patterson asked police officers "who died?" as they searched her regional Victorian home a week after she hosted a deadly mushroom lunch, a court has heard.
The Supreme Court trial of Patterson, who has pleaded not guilty to murdering three relatives with a beef Wellington lunch containing death cap mushrooms, is now in its fifth week.
On Tuesday, Detective Sergeant Luke Farrell from Victoria Police's homicide squad told the court he led a search of Patterson's Leongatha home on 5 August, 2023, a week after the 29 July lunch.
The day before the police search, lunch guests Gail Patterson and Heather Wilkinson had died after suffering significant organ failure following suspected death cap mushroom poisoning.
Sergeant Farrell told the court he did not know what Erin Patterson was aware of at the time, but she had "expressed surprise" when informed of Heather Wilkinson's death.
The court heard a video taken that day captured police explaining to Patterson they were there to execute a search warrant, to which she replied "sure".
When told it was in relation to the deaths, the court heard she responded: "Who died?"
The court was also played a video of Patterson speaking with Sergeant Farrell and handing over a mobile phone as they sat at the dining table of her home.
Food spatter on beef Wellington recipe page, court hears
Sergeant Farrell told the court police officers had worked to run the search in a sensitive manner that morning, because Patterson's two children were still at the home.
Photos were shown to the court of the various items seized, including the manual for a Sunbeam food dehydrator and a copy of the RecipeTin Eats "Dinner" cookbook by Nagi Maehashi.
Sergeant Farrell told the court the page for a beef Wellington recipe in the cookbook had food spatter on it.
Leftovers of beef, pastry and mushroom paste found in Erin Patterson's bin were tested extensively by several experts. Photo: ABC News / File photo
The jury was also shown photos of several plates filmed during the search.
The trial has previously heard different accounts of the colour of the plates the lunch guests ate from.
The sole surviving guest of the lunch, Ian Wilkinson, told the court Patterson had served her guests on four grey plates, but had eaten off an orange-tan coloured plate herself.
Under defence cross-examination, Sergeant Farrell conceded all the plates in Patterson's home had not been filmed or photographed in detail during the search, despite police being aware by that stage the plates may be matters of interest in the investigation.
Patterson's account not '100 percent clear', health official says
Earlier, Patterson's defence barrister, Colin Mandy SC, asked health official Sally Ann Atkinson whether she could have been mistaken when she told the court on Monday that Patterson kept providing "different" details about the ingredients in the meal.
In the wake of the lunch, Atkinson - who led a public health team that responded to gastro illness outbreaks - had set up a team to urgently investigate whether death cap mushrooms were circulating in the Victorian food supply chain.
On Monday, Atkinson told the court Patterson's accounts of when she bought fresh ingredients for the lunch, whether she had used the dried mushrooms in a meal on a previous occasion and the suburb where she may have bought the dried mushrooms had changed during several conversations and texts that week.
During at-times tense questioning, Mandy took Atkinson to contemporaneous notes she had made of her chat with Patterson that did not specify the time the fresh mushrooms were reportedly purchased from the shops in Leongatha.
But Atkinson told the court at the time of the notes, her understanding from the conversation with Patterson "was that she had purchased the majority of the ingredients on the Friday" - but that Patterson later told her it was between Wednesday and Friday.
She also said her notes supported her recollection that there was conflicting information being provided by Patterson, who had not been "100 percent clear" about whether or not she had previously used the dried mushrooms she had told them she had bought from an Asian grocer.
The court heard at times, there had been some delays in Patterson responding to Atkinson's requests for more information, due to Patterson being in appointments related to her children.
Mandy put to Atkinson that her messages to Patterson had not carried an explicit sense of urgency.
Atkinson responded that when working with people in a public health response, "you want them to be on your side".
"You want to work with them, so you're not trying to get them offside and be rude and aggressive with them," she said.
The court heard a report titled "The Patterson family outbreak" produced by the public health response team, later concluded the risk to public health was deemed "very low".
The report stated that "although initial information suggested amatoxin-containing mushrooms may have been purchased from an Asian grocer and used in the meal … [investigations] have concluded it was highly unlikely" the commercial supply chain was contaminated with death caps.
- ABC
