She Killed Three People with Poisonous Mushrooms. Did She Mean To?

Criminal

Erin Patterson was charged with murdering her in-laws and their relatives after serving them beef Wellington laced with death cap mushrooms, which caused three deaths and left one survivor critically ill. Though she clai

Key takeaways

• Erin Patterson served beef Wellington with death cap mushrooms to four guests—her in-laws, auntie, uncle—on July 23, leading to three deaths and one survivor, Ian Wilkinson.

Transcript preview

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And last year, he covered a trial there that made international headlines. a case that involved poisonous mushrooms. Back in July 23, a woman called Erin Patterson hosted her parents-in-law and also their relatives. So the 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. It 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, and 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 effectively what it is, though, is a piece of beef wrapped in pastry. So this particular version that Aaron 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 Aaron 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, you know, 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. 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, you know, acute food poisoning or gastroenteritis, there's vomiting, diarrhea, stomach cramps. They all think basically, you know, they've eaten something bad. And when it becomes clear that it's all people who are at Aaron's Place for lunch, they assume it's something they've eaten that day 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, they realized that we really need to get ourselves to hospital here because we're, because of how violently unwell they were. They went there into the emergency department. They started receiving treatment, but it became pretty clear, pretty quickly, that things weren't getting any better and eventually they were sort of rushed off to bigger hospitals in Melbourne. How quickly did the doctors figure out that this wasn't, just regular food poisoning. Yeah, it took a while. There was some stuff about their presentation and about, I guess, their liver function and the function of other major organs that sort of suggested this was something far more significant than, you know, eating, you know, a bad piece of steak, as they thought early on. And eventually they sort of, you know, through a process of elimination, decided it was probably amnita Faloides or death cap mushroom poisoning. Now, they weren't necessarily in a position at that hospital at a time, diagnosed that really, you know, clearly from that point. So they started speaking to people in Melbourne who were experts on it. And they started sort of treating them as a presumptive case of that fairly early on, even before that was sort of, you know, actually evacuated to those bigger hospitals. And it became, you know, obviously once that was the presumptive diagnosis, they were really concerned that these people might not survive. What happens to the body when you eat death cap mushrooms? Yeah, it's quite horrific really, and it's effectively a, you know, it's quite a slow and painful process for which there's very little that can be done. And something really stuck in my mind that was particularly sort of frightening about the people that kind of eat death cap mushrooms is that you know you go through this process of really intense symptoms of you know vomiting diarrhea exactly as you would when you've got you know really bad food poisoning but then there's this kind of period where it eases off and