Truman Capote’s seminal “nonfiction novel” opens with the words, “The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call ‘out there.’” Holcomb is the location, and “In Cold Blood” is Capote’s account of the pointless killing of four members of the Clutter family in 1959. Almost as “out there” for Australians living in the state of Victoria is the “lonesome” township of Leongatha, where three members of yet another tragic family were senselessly murdered in 2023, and another victim was left for dead. In the case of the Clutters, the perpetrators, Perry Smith and Richard Hickock, were drifters, and their execution-style killings the outcome of a random burglary gone wrong. When they were arrested, it became apparent that Smith and Hickock had escaped the Holcomb homestead with less than $50 in cash, a portable radio and a pair of binoculars. The pair pleaded guilty. It was an open-and-shut case.
The Leongatha murders, however, were far from haphazard and were committed, if the jury is to be believed, by 50-year-old Erin Patterson, a woman closely related to all four of her victims. The Clutters were killed by shotgun blasts and a knife, and the Leongatha murders were carried out with a meal of Beef Wellington laced with death cap mushrooms. These cases are very different, yet they share two things that make them, at the same time, shocking and iconically memorable. They occurred in what Arthur Conan Doyle described as “the smiling and beautiful countryside” — a rural interspace of wilderness and pleasing paddocks dotted with the occasional township — where the bonds of family and community are stronger, where people can trust each other more and expect to be safe. And the victims were killed in the context of our most revered institution — the family — and more precisely in the home, a domestic setting where, in the public imagination, people should be sheltered and secure. The Clutters were killed in cold blood in what today we would call a home invasion. The Leongatha deaths occurred as a consequence of a dinner invitation, a meal served in the home at a family gathering.
Capote’s book helped make the Clutter deaths legendary, but they already had those two powerful ingredients to make them memorable. The Leongatha killings share these same aspects of rural homicide of multiple members of the same family, but the story brings three more powerful ingredients to the table — a woman protagonist, death by poison, and doubt. The vast majority of homicides worldwide are committed by men, so a woman killer is already unusual. Then, there is the murder weapon. While more women choose poison than men, it is still a rare method of killing. And finally, Smith and Hickock confessed to their murders, but at no point since her arrest in November 2024 has Patterson admitted guilt. She was simply cooking a meal and mistakenly added the fatal death caps that poisoned her family. Poisoning adds a subtle dash of doubt to the mix, which increases public fascination exponentially. Did Patterson deliberately add the death caps to kill her family, or was this, as she claims, “a terrible accident?”
The resulting debate and discussion around the murders have propelled this simple act of a shared meal in rural Australia onto the world stage. Patterson’s trial has been followed by media outlets around the world, and it will continue to resound even after the July 7 verdict, which saw Patterson convicted of the murders. It is one of those killings that will stay with us. A woman protagonist, a poisoning and the lingering doubt will keep this case alive. Debate will flare up again and again. Everyone will have an opinion. So here are the facts of the case as revealed in the trial. Decide for yourself.
The backstory to the Leongatha killings begins in 2007, when Erin Scutter met Simon Patterson and married him, and together they settled in the furthest corner of southwest Australia, in Pemberton. Erin was already an heiress with a private income from her grandmother’s estate. Her inheritance of $2 million was to be paid out in installments over eight years, between 2007 and 2015. This allowed her the freedom to follow her own interests. She had worked as an air traffic controller and in animal management with the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. In Pemberton, she reinvented herself, running a secondhand bookstore that was a hub for serious readers in the tiny timber-milling town. Here, Erin cemented her own interest in literature, and especially in true crime stories.
In time, Erin’s true crime interest moved online. In 2019, she became a “super sleuth,” one of four regular contributors to a Facebook group captivated by the story of Keli Lane, a woman in Australia found guilty in 2009 of killing her 2-day-old daughter. The baby’s body was never found, and Lane has maintained her innocence. She remains adamant to the point where her refusal to cooperate with authorities about the whereabouts of her baby’s remains made her ineligible for early parole in 2024.
Money was another ongoing feature of Erin’s life. Along with the regular parcels of income from her grandmother’s estate, Erin and her sister were the beneficiaries of their parents’ will in 2019. The Scutter estate, according to ABC News, Australia’s national broadcaster, included assets such as a 900,000 Australian dollar ($588,000) retirement home in Eden, along the New South Wales coast. From early in their marriage, Erin bankrolled Simon’s siblings, providing hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of interest-free loans to assist them with their own home ownership. In the case of Simon’s sister, Anna Terrington, Erin loaned her an eye-watering AU$400,000 toward her mortgage, according to The Guardian. Erin was more than just a wife and sister-in-law to the Pattersons; she was a cash register.
With Erin’s finances intimately intertwined with the Patterson family, it must have been deeply disturbing when her marriage to Simon began to disintegrate after the birth of their first child. Between 2007 and 2015, Erin asked Simon on multiple occasions to move out of the family home. She found his lifestyle problematic — what she described as his lack of financial contribution toward the household, his predilections for lethargy and ill temper, especially around their children — and she mentioned this at numerous times in correspondence to family and friends, as revealed during her trial. There were reconciliations, but in 2015 they decided to try a permanent separation. According to the local weekly Sentinel-Times, even after separating, Erin continued to loan money to the Patterson family. In Simon’s case, she put his “name on the title for the homes she had purchased in Mt Waverley and Leongatha,” according to the paper.
Over the next few years, Erin and Simon shared custody, working largely amicably to co-parent their two children. On the surface, things went well, with the divided family even holidaying together to maintain continuity for the children. Arguments still arose between the parents, but overall, things worked until December 2022.
In that year’s tax return, Simon declared his marital status as “separated.” This seemingly insignificant change on a tax form had a huge impact. Erin was now ineligible to receive government child support. Australia’s Family Tax Benefit is a government payment that assists families with the costs of raising children. The payment system works in two parts. Part A is an allowance made per child, and Part B is a bulk payment to assist families. When Simon’s accountant declared he was “separated” to the tax department, it meant Erin was only eligible for individual child support, which, unlike the family contribution for which everyone qualifies, depends on the recipient’s financial means. Erin was automatically disqualified given her personal wealth. The consequence was that she was left to pay almost all of the children’s costs. In this new scenario, The Guardian reported, Erin would lose an estimated AU$15,000 per year from the government.
Conversely, and to add to Erin’s ire, Simon’s contribution to their upkeep was newly assessed at an insignificant AU$38 a month, or approximately AU$500 a year, according to the Sentinel-Times. With their children, a boy and a girl aged 16 and 11, now at an expensive stage of life, Erin was furious. There were private school fees, extracurricular activities such as flying lessons, medical bills to pay that included the son’s knee operation, as well as the extra cost of taxiing children to events around the district — and Simon was on the hook for none of it. One might wonder why such a relatively insignificant amount of money (compared to all the rest that Erin had spent on her in-laws) might have been the straw that broke the camel’s back. But therein lie the mysteries of interpersonal power dynamics and individual frailties, especially within the multiple layers of an intimate relationship. And this will remain a point of conjecture in the public eye, with everyone weighing in with their own theories. That includes me, drawing from my experience as a true crime historian.
What we do know is that Erin fumed. There were many increasingly heated arguments between the couple over Simon’s minimal contribution to his children’s maintenance and well-being. After gifting so generously to Simon’s siblings, Erin believed his parents — Donald and Gail Patterson — might intervene and encourage their son to meet his responsibilities. But Don and Gail steadfastly refused to get involved in the fiery arguments or take Erin’s side against their son. Given the delicate overall family dynamics, however, Don and Gail couldn’t afford to alienate Erin. There was her past unwavering generosity to Simon’s siblings and their children to consider, as well as their shared involvement in the local Baptist church.
When the couple first met, Erin was a declared atheist. It was through Simon that she became involved in the Christian church. Initially, it was in Western Australia. Then, when the couple moved to Koonwarra and, subsequently, Leongatha (both in the state of Victoria), they attended the Korumburra Baptist church. Ian Wilkinson, the husband of Gail’s sister Heather, was the pastor there. Erin found in Ian a kindred reader who shared her love of both science and literature.
So the relationship between Erin and her in-laws became increasingly entangled in a volatile mix of faith and finances. When Erin called on her in-laws, including the Wilkinsons, for support in her situation with Simon, they simply encouraged her to pray about it and forgive him.
“I’m sick of this s- – – I want nothing to do with them,” Erin vented to her online friends in 2022, according to trial records published by Al Jazeera. “I thought his parents would want him to do the right thing but it seems their concern about not wanting to feel uncomfortable and not wanting to get involved in their sons personal matters are overriding that so f- – – em.”
And in follow-up messages of pure frustration: “This family I swear to f- – – – – – god,” “they have never asked him what’s going on with us, why I keep kicking him out. Why his son hates him etc.”
Her online friends became Erin’s sounding board. Christine Hunt, Daniela Barkley and Jenny Hay, who appeared as witnesses in court, were all members, with Erin, of the Keli Lane true crime Facebook group. In the months after Simon changed his marital status and the child support payments were discontinued, Erin’s online group listened down the wire to her woes about her husband and in-laws. Simon was not popular with his children, either. According to The Guardian, his son would later tell police that “he and his sister were closer to their mother than their father, saying that his father ‘does a lot of things to try and hurt Mum.’” In court, Katrina Cripps, a child protection practitioner, would testify that the Patterson children disliked visiting their father because he yelled at them and slept most of the weekend. To her friends, Erin presented Simon as “controlling” and “coercive,” and his family as spineless.
Erin’s interest in true crime had been fostered in chat groups with her screen friends. At its best, true crime is cautionary. It traditionally follows a similar pattern to crime novels. The narrative opens with a murder, the arc follows the investigations of police departments and individual sleuths, and then there is a resolution, which involves an arrest of the perpetrator, trial, sentencing and punishment. Justice is served. The criminals are behind bars, and normality is restored. It reinforces society’s values by showing that the machinery of the state will catch a criminal and make them accountable for their transgressions.
True crime is a deterrent, not a blueprint for murder. But it must have been tempting for Erin, in her relative isolation, to see it as just that. She was, according to Simon’s testimony in court, “witty,” “very intelligent,” but also lacking in self-esteem and prone to depression. In this new phase of conflict and estrangement with Simon, Erin felt especially invisible and ignored by her husband and in-laws. And perhaps the plotting and the hatching of some form of retribution became a comforting distraction, at least in her imagination.
Who knows why Erin started researching and foraging for mushrooms in 2019? In spite of the apparent mismatch in dates, Erin blamed this on the pandemic lockdown — which did not start until the spring of 2020 — when it was easier to comb the countryside for the fungus than go to shops under COVID-19 protocols. This is her explanation, but the facts suggest other possibilities. The context of her foraging was that she was also searching for information online about death caps (Amanita phalloides), which are globally responsible for 9 in 10 mushroom deaths. It takes just one frail little white and yellow-tinged death cap to kill an adult. They are the deadliest mushrooms for humans to consume on the planet. Chemically, the mushroom produces toxins that damage the liver and kidneys, resulting in massive organ failure and death over a period of days. Death by death cap is an excruciating end.
Trial testimony from digital forensic expert Matthew Sorell states that between Jan. 1, 2019, and Aug. 3, 2023, Erin searched the iNaturalist site numerous times for the latest updates on where to find death cap mushrooms. The site is an open-access platform for scientists to upload information about sightings of significant flora and fauna around Australia. When Erin searched it in April 2023, there were notifications of death caps in the Loch and Outtrim districts from one of the site’s users, mycologist Thomas May, who was named in the court filings. ABC News reported that Erin would later travel by car to these destinations on May 22, 2023, spending 43 minutes at Loch and 25 minutes at Outtrim.
To preserve her foraged mushrooms, Erin bought a Sunbeam Food Lab electronic dehydrator on April 28, 2023. Her purchases that year also included dried mushrooms from an Asian retailer, button mushrooms from a supermarket and a burner phone. Police believe that in February 2023, Erin bought an additional phone and SIM card to use in conjunction with her primary mobile. At trial, they were referred to as Phone A and Phone B. This was a strategy, police argued, to cover her movements.
The fated luncheon on July 29, 2023, was initially a church function that ended up as a private gathering. Erin, who would host the event, made much of her Beef Wellington menu. She messaged her true crime buddies asking advice about recipes, outlining the difficulty of finding a suitable tenderloin cut, and ultimately settling on a version in Nagi Maehashi’s “RecipeTin Eats Dinner” cookbook, admitting to the court later that she made some “deviations.”
Her invitation list included her in-laws the Pattersons, the Wilkinsons and her husband Simon, who messaged her back that he felt too “uncomfortable” to attend. Erin put a huge amount of pressure on Simon to put his misgivings aside and come. In a message published by ABC, Erin states: “I’ve spent many hours this week preparing lunch for tomorrow which has been exhausting in light of the issues I’m facing and spent a small fortune on beef eye fillet to make beef Wellingtons because I wanted it to be a special meal … It’s important to me that you’re all there tomorrow.”
The “issue” Erin claimed she was facing was a cancer diagnosis that she wanted to talk through with family members. She left the invitation to lunch open, hoping Simon would be there, but he never came. On the day of the luncheon, according to Ian Wilkinson’s testimony, Erin served her Beef Wellingtons, four meals on a gray-colored dinner set, and her own meal on an orange plate. Gail and Heather offered to help her dish up the food, but she refused any assistance.
Only hours after leaving Erin’s homestead at Leongatha, the Pattersons and Wilkinsons began suffering from an illness not unlike gastroenteritis. The symptoms eased briefly before becoming so acute that all four were admitted to Monash Medical Centre. Erin, who claimed to have diarrhea and vomiting, also visited the Leongatha Hospital, but discharged herself before a proper examination could be made. The prosecution would say that Erin was faking her symptoms. It would not be long before a diagnosis of death cap mushroom poisoning was made. Tragically, Gail and Heather would die on Aug. 4 and Donald on Aug. 6. Donald and Ian were both given liver transplants, but only Ian would survive the ordeal after seven weeks of rehabilitation in hospital. He was discharged on Sept. 11, 2023.
The deaths of Erin’s in-laws triggered an immediate police investigation. Much of Erin’s behavior around this time would later be submitted by the prosecution as evidence of evasiveness and obstruction of justice. Erin factory reset her mobile phone three times immediately following lunch on July 29, 2023, then again on Aug. 2 and Aug. 5, and once more remotely on Aug. 6 after the phone had been confiscated during a search of her property and was in police custody. Police found evidence in Erin’s phone call and cell tower records of the second phone, Phone B, with a different phone number. Phone A, with its separate SIM card, was never recovered. This phone activity made Erin look incredibly guilty.
Her responses to police questioning about the death cap mushrooms were equally incriminating. When asked whether the mushrooms served in the Beef Wellingtons had been foraged, Erin said, “No.” She had bought dried mushrooms from an Asian-style grocery in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne, and to these, she added button mushrooms bought from a supermarket chain. According to her, all the mushrooms she used were sourced from retail outlets. She also denied owning a dehydrator, which she had surreptitiously removed from her home and disposed of in an e-waste bin at the Koonwarra Transfer Station and Landfill. Erin discharged herself from hospital after being admitted for tests on July 30 to dump the dehydrator, and this was caught on CCTV. When she returned to hospital after discarding the dehydrator to undergo tests for toxins, the results were negative. When her children, who were in the house at Leongatha but not present at the meal, were tested after eating the remains of the Beef Wellingtons (minus the pastry and mushroom paste), their results were also negative.
Erin’s children had not been present at the meal because the supposed principal reason for getting together with family for lunch was to discuss how she was going to tell them about her cancer diagnosis, she explained during her testimony. As detectives investigated the claim further and looked more closely at her text messages, it became apparent that this was a subterfuge, and the result of her ovarian cancer test had been negative. When Erin tried to suggest that it was a bypass operation that she was having (not cancer treatment), and that she was embarrassed and wanted to talk to her guests in person about it, this again proved to be a lie. In fact, the Enrich Clinic she identified as doing the surgery didn’t even have that procedure on its books. Erin admitted that she had told many lies during police questioning.
As evidence mounted, suspicions rose. On Nov. 2, 2023, Erin was formally charged with three counts of murder and four counts of attempted murder. Originally, before her trial started, there were charges pending related to previous attempts on Simon’s life, the details of which are not in the public domain, but in the meantime, these would be dropped until a later date. Justice Christopher Beale ruled that these charges would potentially prejudice Erin’s case and the luncheon trial. All information regarding any additional attempts on Simon’s life was therefore suppressed for the duration of the trial.
Erin would spend the time until her trial, which began on April 29, 2023, in the Dame Phyllis Frost Centre. Her four-person defense team, fronted by Colin Mandy, would argue that the death cap-laced Beef Wellingtons were served as the consequence of a “terrible” pantry mix-up. She had indeed foraged and dehydrated wild mushrooms. But then, inadvertently, she mixed her foraged hoard (unknowingly including death caps) with store-bought mushrooms. They were all kept in separate but similar Tupperware containers in her pantry, and it was there that the tragic mistake was made. Erin had dumped the dehydrator because she panicked, believing that she might look guilty if she admitted anything relating to the deaths.
The prosecution, led by Nanette Rogers, had a mound of evidence that, when put together, made a compelling case. From the outset, the prosecution announced that it would not be looking to prove a motive. “You do not have to be satisfied what the motive was or even that there was one,” the Sentinel-Times reports Rogers saying in court. “The prosecution will not be suggesting that there was a particular motive to do what she did.” Establishing a motive was not a necessary precondition for conviction, so the prosecution forfeited its right to do so. This may well have seemed unusual in view of all that the prosecution knew about Erin’s anger toward Simon and the Patterson family. Conversely, it can also be argued that it was both a strategic choice and a clever one.
The trial of Erin Patterson, which was not televised, was protracted. Held in the diminutive 40-seat courtroom at the Latrobe Valley Magistrates’ Court in the tiny mining town of Morwell, Victoria, it lasted an unexpected 10 weeks, or 40 working days. Fifty witnesses — detectives, doctors, computer specialists and mushroom experts — were called one by one to testify at the stand. The witnesses included Simon, who opened proceedings, and Erin, who closed them. Beale’s summing up was lengthy, lasting an unusual six days, and the jury took six-and-a-half days to convict Erin of the crimes.
The majority of the public had already convicted her in their minds. There were mutterings on social media and even in the press about why it took so long to conclude things. For many, Erin was a disconcerting combination of the vanilla lady next door and the archetypal femme fatale. The complexities and multiple layers of the trial were to be found in the enormous amount of intricate evidence presented, which only a very small group of people were in court to hear every day. When the jury retired to consider the verdict, they were handed an 86-page document listing exhibits and evidence, and providing a chronology of events to assist them with their deliberations — which were not easy. The verdict had to be beyond all reasonable doubt. The prosecution had not provided a motive, and the evidence against Erin was entirely circumstantial. But if the prosecution had argued a motive, it would probably have made the jury’s deliberation even more difficult because it would have added an extra dimension to the proceedings by exploring the reasons why Erin acted as she did.
The question that this might have helped answer is why the paltry sum of AU$15,000 triggered the mayhem it did, when it seemed more a matter of principle than of need. One possibility is that Erin is a cold, calculating sociopath who has long planned vengeance on her ex-husband. Another is that this was a trigger point for her frustrations — a moment that turned Erin from seeing amber to seeing red. It might also be argued that Erin was deeply emotionally invested in her relationship with Simon. And along these lines, Robin Norwood’s 1985 book “Women Who Love Too Much” comes to mind. Erin had sunk hundreds of thousands of dollars into Simon and his family. She put his name on her property deeds. She begged her in-laws to intercede on her behalf, to make Simon review his behavior and see what he was doing to their family. The changed Family Tax Benefit status of December 2022 meant much more to Erin than just money. It was an official end to their marriage and, in her eyes, a betrayal. She had invested so much in the Pattersons, and now she felt they had abandoned her.
There are many possible versions of events, and that is exactly why the case is so intriguing. Undoubtedly, the “mushroom murders” will be one of the global crimes of the decade. The familiarity of a shared meal at home, of a mother preparing a domestic repast, the way women have prepared food for their families across epochs and cultures, makes this story compelling. The weaponizing of a Beef Wellington is not just a crime; it is a desecration of normality. The tension between the “doubt” of those who support Erin and the many more who want to see her punished will keep this case alive. There will be subsequent episodes like the recent hearing that dismissed Simon’s claims of Erin’s previous attempts on his life as “dubious.” There is the presentencing hearing that began last week, and there will almost certainly be an appeal from Erin’s defence team on her behalf, claiming innocence. Unlike the Clutter killings in Kansas, this is far from an open-and-shut case.
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