After an eight-week trial followed avidly around Australia and the world, and a week’s jury deliberation, Australia’s answer to Lucrezia Borgia today has been found guilty of murdering three of her dinner party guests and attempting to murder the fourth.
The jury of five women and seven men decided, beyond reasonable doubt, that the presence of fatal death cap mushrooms in the beef wellington that Erin Patterson, 56, cooked for her parents-in-law, Don and Gail Patterson, her sister-in-law Heather Wilkinson, and Heather’s husband Ian, was no tragic accident. The jury was satisfied that, coolly and deliberately, Patterson’s toxic beef wellington killed three of them and almost killed Ian Wilkinson too.
The whole story has been devoured as a morbid human drama
Patterson’s defence, that it was a tragic accident, and that her desperate attempts to destroy evidence and cover her tracks were a panicked response to an unexpected calamity, was rejected by the jury. Yet the complexity of the case’s facts, the physical evidence, and the testimonies of material and expert witnesses took a week for jurors to untangle to ensure their verdict was unanimous. The judge’s summing-up alone took several days.
Patterson heard the verdict alone in the courtroom. She was unsupported by friends or family. When the jury foreman read the verdict, she stood without expression to learn her fate.
Neither her own family, nor those of the victims, were in court today to hear the verdict. Perhaps the timing of the jury finally returning took them by surprise, or the pain of hearing the verdict was too much to bear. Yet for the Patterson family, it is the end of an ordeal that started almost two years ago, when Gail, Don, Heather and Ian accepted Erin Patterson’s invitation to her house to enjoy her home cooking.
Why Patterson resented her in-laws so viscerally as to want to kill them we may never know. But, as the Crown argued in its case, Patterson lured her estranged in-laws to dinner with a tissue of elaborate lies to gain their sympathy, including faking a cancer diagnosis. But if they thought it was an attempt by Erin Patterson to reconcile after her separation from her own husband, how tragically fooled they were.
That Patterson, in her deluded state of mind, thought she could get away with poisoning four people sharing the same meal at her dinner table, while taking great care to serve herself an unpoisoned portion, would somehow not attract suspicion, indicates that there was something missing in that calculating mind. Humanity and forgiveness.
For the two years since the story broke, culminating in the two months of the trial, the ‘mushroom murders’ have obsessed Australia. Today, broadcasters interrupted their usual programmes to announce the news of the guilty verdict. Australians have become instant experts on species of mushrooms, and their toxic properties. True crime podcasts abound here and abroad. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation is even planning a television mini-series dramatising the story. Jokes about dinner parties and beef wellingtons have even become popular among primary school children, and children as young as five and six are aware of the basic facts of the case.
What this awful crime says about our prurient fascination with the dark side of human nature is disturbing. The whole story has been devoured as a morbid human drama, with victims mere characters in a macabre play. That three innocent people died, and another barely survived, simply added to the salaciousness.
Patterson has been returned to jail, pending the judge passing sentence at a later date. Her life in prison will not be an easy one: she almost certainly will be a marked inmate. But her impending suffering is nothing compared to the trail of destroyed lives she callously caused, and the pain of the victims and their families that will never heal while the rest of the world, having lapped up the sensational dinner drama, moves on.
It can only be hoped that today’s verdict will bring those people the closure and peace those unfortunate lifelong victims so desperately need.
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