An Australian woman who was accused of deliberately serving poisonous mushrooms at a lunch that led to the deaths of three people has been found guilty of murdering them and attempting to murder a fourth person, ending a trial that had gripped the nation.
Erin Patterson, 50, faces a maximum sentence of life imprisonment for the murder charges. The 12 jurors deciding her fate had been sequestered to keep them sheltered from the overwhelming media attention focused on the case.
The charges against Ms. Patterson stemmed from a lunch party nearly two years ago in the rural town of Leongatha, at which she cooked and served beef Wellington.
She had invited her estranged husband, Simon Patterson, who declined to attend. But his parents, Gail and Don Patterson, were there, along with Gail’s sister, Heather Wilkinson, and her husband, Ian Wilkinson.
Three of them died within a week, with symptoms indicative of poisoning by death cap mushrooms. Mr. Wilkinson fell critically ill but survived, and he testified at her trial.
More than 50 witnesses took the stand in the two-month trial. The prosecutor, Nanette Rogers, never specified a motive for the alleged crimes, though she presented evidence of some brewing tension between Ms. Patterson and her husband over child support and other matters.
Even so, Ms. Rogers contended that Ms. Patterson’s guilt was apparent in the various layers of deception in which she’d engaged, like inventing a cancer diagnosis as a reason for hosting the lunch, faking symptoms to make it seem that she’d eaten the mushrooms, and covering her tracks later.
In the days following the lunch, Ms. Patterson discarded a dehydrator that she’d used to dry mushrooms, then lied to the police about having done so, according to testimony at trial. She also forced a factory reset on her phone multiple times, according to testimony.
“She, alone, chose what to cook, obtained the ingredients and prepared the meal,” Ms. Rogers told jurors in her closing arguments. “That choice to make individual portions allowed her complete control over the ingredients in each individual parcel.”
Ms. Patterson, who testified at length in her own defense, maintained that the deaths were the result of a tragic accident. She said she might have inadvertently mixed dried, foraged mushrooms that she had kept mixed in with store-bought ones, not realizing that the foraged ones were deadly.
She said she had consumed the same meal — individual parcels of beef Wellington — but then, after lunch, had binge-eaten cake and then vomited, which her attorneys said could explain why she’d fared better than her lunch guests. She said she’d disposed of and lied about the dehydrator in a panic after the relatives fell ill.
The surviving lunch guest, Mr. Wilkinson, told jurors that Ms. Patterson’s plate had been of a different size and color from the ones the others had used.
The contrast between the banality of the lunch — a quaint small town in dairy country, the familiar menu item, the seemingly typical mother of two — and its lethal outcome seemed to foment more public fascination with the case than with any other murder trial in recent memory.
News outlets described each and every development in detail — the beef Wellington recipe, the website where Ms. Patterson searched for information on the mushrooms, the messages between Ms. Patterson and her husband — and everyday conversations in Australia have been peppered with speculation about her guilt or innocence.
In May, more than three million people downloaded Mushroom Case Daily, a podcast recapping the trial that was produced by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the nation’s public broadcaster, according to the tracking service Triton Rankers. Two other major news outlets also had daily podcasts devoted to the trial, each of which had hundreds of thousands of listeners.
Victoria Kim is the Australia correspondent for The New York Times, based in Sydney, covering Australia, New Zealand and the broader Pacific region.
Livia Albeck-Ripka is a Times reporter based in Los Angeles, covering breaking news, California and other subjects.
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