By Joseph Dunstan, Madi Chwasta and Gabrielle Flood
Erin Patterson is alleged to have laced a meal with death cap mushrooms resulting in the deaths of three people. Photo: Screenshot / ABC
As they retire to consider their verdicts, the jurors in Erin Patterson's triple-murder trial have no shortage of evidence to reflect upon.
More than 50 witnesses have given testimony and the hearings have stretched for nine weeks.
Here are the people and places at the heart of the trial.
The lunch guests
The trial centres on a lunch hosted by Erin at her Leongatha home in Victoria's South Gippsland region on 29 July, 2023.
Erin hosted four people that day: her parents-in-law Don and Gail Patterson, along with Gail's sister Heather Wilkinson and her husband Ian.
Erin's estranged husband Simon Patterson was also invited, but turned down the offer.
Don, Gail and Heather all died from death cap mushroom poisoning after the beef Wellington lunch, while Ian survived after weeks in hospital.
How Erin Patterson is related to her lunch guests. Photo: ABC News
Prosecutors have alleged that Erin deliberately laced the meal with death caps.
But the 50-year-old has maintained her innocence, telling the court that foraged mushrooms made their way into the meal by mistake.
Family tensions in months leading up to lunch
Prosecutors did not allege a specific motive for Erin Patterson to murder three relatives and attempt to murder a fourth.
But they did take the jury through what they alleged was growing anger and resentment the accused felt towards the Pattersons.
The court heard that by late 2022, there was a disagreement between Erin Patterson and her estranged husband over finances, including school and doctor's fees for their children.
At one point, the court heard Erin had tried to bring in her in-laws - Don and Gail Patterson - to help mediate the situation.
The prosecution highlighted to the jury Facebook messages in which Erin Patterson used strong language to express frustration with her parents-in-law about their reluctance to get involved in their financial dispute.
Patterson told the court while she was feeling hurt, frustrated and "a little bit desperate", her relationship with her in-laws had remained positive and she was ashamed of the disrespectful language she had used while venting to her Facebook friends.
Her defence lawyer Colin Mandy SC accused the prosecution of highlighting a handful of messages from a brief episode of tension, producing a distorted impression.
"It was such a polite, kind and good relationship that these messages stand out, but they're not consistent with the whole of the relationship," Mandy said.
Patterson said a desire to build a stronger relationship had motivated her to invite her in-laws to lunch.
The evidence on foraged mushrooms
In the years leading up to the lunch, Erin's life was largely based in the towns of Leongatha and Korumburra.
The two South Gippsland communities sit pretty close to one another, each with populations of a few thousand people.
It was in this region that Erin Patterson told the court she began foraging mushrooms during Victoria's Covid-19 lockdowns in 2020 and 2021.
Eventually, she said she felt she had gathered enough knowledge to taste some of the mushrooms she had foraged during walks near the two towns.
"They tasted good and I didn't get sick," she said.
Her defence lawyer said this "burgeoning" interest in foraging had led Erin to investigate whether the notorious death cap mushroom species grew in her area in May 2022.
The court heard she turned to a website called iNaturalist, where users share observations from nature to a community map. When Erin visited the site in 2022, no death caps were flagged in the South Gippsland area.
But in the months before her lunch, two sightings were posted to iNaturalist at Loch and Outtrim.
The prosecution alleged mobile phone data supported the claim that Erin travelled to Loch and Outtrim shortly after death caps were identified there to deliberately forage the deadly species.
But her defence team raised questions over the accuracy of the mobile phone tower data being used by the prosecution to reach those conclusions.
They told the jury Erin had been foraging at places like the Korumburra Botanic Gardens in the lead-up to the lunch, but not at Loch and Outtrim.
The search for Asian grocer mushrooms
As well as foraging mushrooms before the lunch, Erin said she had bought dried mushrooms from an Asian grocer in Melbourne's south-east.
Erin told the court the grocer-bought mushrooms were ultimately mixed up with foraged mushrooms in a plastic container in her Leongatha pantry.
She said it was this container of mixed mushrooms she later drew upon to remedy a "bland" mushroom paste for the beef Wellington lunch - with disastrous consequences.
The court heard that after the lunch guests fell fatally ill, Erin was unable to identify the store to health officials, who were urgently chasing up information about potential death caps in circulation.
Instead she offered a number of suburbs to those questioning her, variously identifying Oakleigh, Clayton, Mount Waverley or Glen Waverley.
A council worker began visiting Asian-style grocery stores in the area.
However, their efforts failed to find any product matching Erin's description and the health department concluded its investigation.
Erin rejected the prosecution claim that the story about an Asian grocer was a lie created by her as part of her cover-up after the lunch.
Conflicting evidence on plates at lunch
The day of the lunch, Erin finalised the special meal of individually parcelled beef Wellingtons for her guests.
She rejected a prosecution claim that deviations to the recipe were made to ensure only her guests were served meals laced with deadly mushrooms.
Erin told the court she and her guests ate from plates that may have been black, white, and red on top and black underneath and nobody was given any one particular plate.
That account given to the court differs from that of surviving lunch guest Ian Wilkinson, who told the trial the guests had eaten from grey plates, while Erin had eaten from a smaller, orange-coloured plate.
Ian also told the court that Erin had informed her guests she had been diagnosed with cancer and was worried about how to tell her children.
Erin disputed that she had told her relatives a cancer diagnosis had been made, but agreed she had lied about possibly needing cancer treatment in the future.
She told the court she did not have cancer and had told the lie to conceal private plans to have gastric-bypass surgery.
"I was really embarrassed, I was ashamed of the fact that I didn't have control over my body or what I ate, I was ashamed of that … I didn't want to tell anybody, but I shouldn't have lied to them," she said.
Guests revealed to have suffered from death cap poisoning
In the days after the lunch, the guests began falling ill.
Erin told the court this included her, but also that she had binge eaten some cake and vomited shortly after her guests had left.
Erin Patterson's Leongatha home, where she hosted the lunch. Photo: ABC News
Ultimately, Erin and the four guests were transferred to hospitals in Melbourne, where Gail, Don and Heather later died. Ian survived after a weeks-long stay in intensive care.
Doctors have told the court the medical tests which revealed signs of death cap poisoning in the four lunch guests did not show the same markers for Erin.
The prosecution alleged Erin had faked her illness as part of her cover-up - a claim rejected by her lawyer, who said there were many valid reasons why she may not have fallen as ill as her guests.
On Wednesday, having already been discharged from hospital in Melbourne, Erin made a trip to the local tip.
This is where she dumped a food dehydrator.
Erin told the court she'd taken the dehydrator to the tip because she was aware by that point that death cap mushrooms were the suspected source of poisoning in the meal, and she had been using the appliance to dehydrate foraged mushrooms.
But she refuted the prosecution's suggestion that she had knowingly dehydrated toxic mushrooms.
Police begin investigating
A week after the lunch, homicide detectives visited Erin at her Leongatha home and told her they were investigating the deadly lunch.
In the 5 August search, they seized a number of devices, including a mobile phone which the court heard Erin had performed three factory resets on.
One of these was carried out on the day of the search, which came days after Erin said Simon had accused her of poisoning his parents with mushrooms prepared in her dehydrator.
"I knew that there were photos in there of mushrooms and the dehydrator and I just panicked and didn't want them [police] to see them," Erin told the court.
Hours after the police search, Erin ran the third factory reset remotely, as the phone sat in a police station in Melbourne.
"It was really stupid, but I thought I wonder if they've been silly enough to leave it connected to the internet and so I hit factory reset to see what happened, and it did," she said.
Detectives returned months later, when they ran a second search of her home, and ultimately laid murder and attempted murder charges against Erin Patterson in November.
More than 18 months later, after jurors had heard weeks of evidence in a Gippsland court, Justice Christopher Beale gave his final directions before they retired to consider the verdicts.
"You are the only ones in this court who can make a decision about these facts," he told the jury.
The jury continues to deliberate.
- ABC
