Deadly mushroom lunch cook tells court she threw up toxic meal
An Australian woman on trial for murder says she threw up the toxic mushroom meal which killed her relatives, after binge eating dessert.
Erin Patterson has pleaded not guilty to four charges – three of murder and one of attempted murder – over the beef Wellington lunch at her regional Victorian house in July 2023.
Prosecutors allege Ms Patterson deliberately served toxic death cap mushrooms, but only to her guests. Her defence team say the contaminated meal was a tragic accident, and argue it had made their client sick too.
Ms Patterson told the court she had only eaten a small part of lunch but later consumed two-thirds of a cake, before becoming “over-full” and vomiting.
Doctors have previously told the trial Ms Patterson did not have the same intense symptoms as the other people who’d eaten at her house.
On her third day of wide-ranging testimony, Ms Patterson also admitted she had lied about a cancer diagnosis – which prosecutors say she used to coax the guests to her house – instead of revealing she was actually planning to undergo weight-loss surgery.
She said she had dumped a food dehydrator and wiped her phone in the days after the incident out of fear of being blamed for her relative’s deaths, telling the court her estranged husband had accused her of poisoning them.
Three people died in hospital in the days after the meal, including Ms Patterson’s former in-laws, Don Patterson, 70, and Gail Patterson, 70, as well as Gail’s sister, Heather Wilkinson, 66.
A single lunch guest survived, 71-year-old local pastor Ian Wilkinson, after weeks of treatment in hospital.
The Victorian Supreme Court trial – which started almost six weeks ago – has heard from more than 50 witnesses, and attracted huge global attention.
In the Morwell courthouse, Ms Patterson gave a detailed account of the fatal lunch, saying she had invited her guests under the premise she wanted to talk about health issues.
The 14-member jury heard that Ms Patterson went through “quite a long process of trying to decide what to cook” for the lunch before choosing to make beef Wellington. —BBC
