The Mushroom Murders: A family lunch. Three deaths. What really happened?

By Greg Haddrick

The shocking story of a weekend lunch laced with a highly toxic mushroom, and a triple murder trial that gripped the world, shattered a family and gave a mother a life sentence.

On 29 July 2023, Erin Patterson hosted a family lunch at her home in the small regional Victorian town of Leongatha. She had invited her parents-in-law, Don and Gail Patterson, and Gail's sister, Heather Wilkinson, and her husband Ian.


Erin made beef Wellington for her guests, individual beef eye fillets covered in mushroom paste, wrapped in pastry. The following day, all four guests were taken to hospital, and Heather, Gail and Don died. Ian Wilkinson barely survived. A toxicologist found traces of the highly poisonous death cap mushroom in the remains of the meal.


At first, it appeared to be a dreadful accident. As the police investigation continued, the evidence mounted, seeming to point one way. Yet Erin Patterson spun a web of lies, and steadfastly claimed she did not intend to harm her relatives.


Greg Haddrick tells the fascinating inside story of the dramatic murder trial, and the forensic evidence that convinced the jury to convict a suburban mother of a gruesome triple murder. With many details not previously revealed in the media, it is the compelling story of a troubled family, and the world's most poisonous mushroom, which is readily found in parks and gardens.

Praise for Greg Haddrick's In the Dead of Night:

'No one tells a true crime story better than Haddrick.' - John Silvester

'As addictive as the best crime thrillers.' - Matthew Condon

• Language: English
• Publisher: Allen & Unwin
• Release date: Sep 30, 2025
• ISBN: 9781923492332

Book preview

About the Author

Greg Haddrick is a Logie Award–winning screenwriter and film and television producer. His credits include the TV series Underbelly, Janet King, and Pine Gap, and he has also won seven AWGIE Awards as a writer, three AFI Awards as a producer, and an International Emmy Award nomination as a writer and producer. He is the author of In the Dead of Night about the Wonnangatta Valley murders, which was shortlisted for the 2025 Danger Awards.

First published in 2025

Copyright © Greg Haddrick 2025

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

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Allen & Unwin acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the Country on which we live and work. We pay our respects to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Elders, past and present.

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ISBN 978 1 76147 366 1

eISBN 978 19 2349 233 2

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Cover design: Luke Causby/Blue Cork

Cover photographs: Erin Patterson, James Ross/AAP Image; Amanita phalloides, Pixaterra/Adobe Stock

For Margaret

Preface

If crimes were measured by the number of words said about them in podcasts or written about them online and in print, the trial of Erin Patterson would probably be the crime of the century. Yet the sheer volume of evidence presented over the course of a nine-week trial meant there was still so much detail unreported. And so much context surrounding that detail was missing, mainly because the order in which it was reported was the order in which it emerged at trial, not the order in which it had happened in the lives of the participants.

Erin began her trial as a woman presumed to be innocent. Whatever the average punter thought over a beer, wine or cordial at the pub, the jurors at Erin’s trial were firmly instructed that the presumption of innocence was the opening position in the eyes of the law. They could only find her guilty through paying careful attention to the evidence presented to them in the courtroom. No other stories, articles, anecdotes or opinions counted. It was just the evidence.

Twenty-one days of pre-trial hearings had been held to decide what evidence would be admissible in a Supreme Court murder trial, and what evidence, for a whole host of reasons, would not. Based on only the admissible evidence, the jury had to be convinced that Erin had intended to kill, beyond reasonable doubt. It was far from easy.

This book imagines the journey one of those jurors might have taken to reach their verdict. The story here is told to us by a fictional juror. I wanted readers to feel they were on that journey with the jury.

I have not approached or spoken to any of the real jurors in the Erin Patterson trial. I have no idea who they are. None of this is based on any knowledge of the real jury room or their actual deliberations. But I know that the pressure those jurors were under—with the spotlight of global attention upon them—must have been immense.

All the evidence our narrator discusses in the book comes directly from, and only from, the evidence those jurors heard and saw during the trial. Like all of us, our narrator has her own strengths, flaws and opinions, and she does speculate. But where she does engage in speculation, it is clearly identified as separate from the evidence that leads to her verdict—and it reveals some surprising insights into police methodology along the way.

For a jury to return a unanimous guilty verdict, all twelve jurors must believe the accused is guilty. But they do not have to agree on why they believe that person is guilty. The presiding judge will tell the jury this at the commencement of every jury trial. Each juror can reach their conclusion via a different path.

This narrative uses a fictional juror to tell the story of just one of those paths.

1

The poor woman.

On the evening news of 7 August 2023, Erin Patterson was standing in front of her red SUV. Nine days after the fateful lunch that had killed three of her in-­laws, a grey knit jumper and the black strap of a shoulder bag were the only armour she had against a pride of Victoria’s hungriest journos.

She had been cornered in her own driveway coming home from shopping at Woolworths and had chosen, momentarily, to face the cameras.

‘I’m so devastated by what’s happened,’ she declared, choking with tears. She could not fathom what had happened. These people meant so much to her. She loved them. She could not believe this had happened and she was so sorry. She couldn’t believe Ian and Heather and Gail had lost their lives. Gail was like a mother to her. Because her own mum had died four years earlier.

It was already known that the three victims had been poisoned with a meal of beef Wellington that had included death cap mushrooms, and the suited reporter solemnly enquired where the mushrooms had come from. Erin, however, stoically ignored that question and walked to her front door, with the camera crew scuttling after her. In the background there was a trim, recently mulched garden bed with artfully landscaped seedlings. Quite a nice house and garden, really.

Next, the reporter told Erin that the police already con­sidered her a suspect. Did she have anything to say about that? Yes. She hadn’t done anything. She loved Gail and Ian and Heather, and she was devastated they were gone and she hoped with every fibre of her being that Don pulled through.

She unlocked her front door and quickly stepped through to the safety of her living room.

In those last few frames, however, a viewer such as—well, me—could glimpse her full outfit. She had teamed the grey jumper with white pants and what looked like brown Birkenstocks or some sort of sandal. Worn with socks.

Interesting choice.

But no judgement.

‘Did you eat the same meal?’ was Mr Suit’s last grab as Erin closed the front door. Again, no answer—and that was the end of the doorstop interview. Cut.

At the time, I didn’t appreciate the staying power of that final, deceptively simple query. Had she eaten the same meal? It would remain a fiercely debated question, mostly by people whose opinions were based on nothing more than opinion, for at least two years.

I did, however, notice that Erin had mixed up her names. I had been curious enough to read the very early reports of this weird event and knew that it wasn’t Ian who had died. It was Don who had died, and it was Ian who was fighting for his life. But to me, all that did was speak to how rattled she was.

Australian criminal history was hardly short of other women famously thrown under the bus in similar circumstances. Lindy Chamberlain. Joanne Lees. Kathleen Folbigg. They had all claimed they were innocent, only to have a rabid public toss those claims into the bin. Before their trials, all three of them had been widely assumed to be complicit or guilty in some way, and two of them had initially been convicted—before their convictions were later quashed.

Over the next eighteen months, therefore, whenever I tumbled beyond the event horizon and into the mushroom case, I found myself passionately advocating for an open mind. Particularly after Erin had been arrested and charged with three counts of murder and four counts of attempted murder. That had happened in early November of 2023, around three months after that first doorstop interview.

Since then, it seemed a second glass of anything—at any gathering, anywhere—became a licence to damn Erin Patterson. By then, the police had also revealed how they had recovered the food dehydrator Erin had secretly thrown out just a few days after the lunch. That was now common knowledge: hence, she was obviously a murderer.

We had been given two dots on a page and most of us had connected those dots by immediately drawing a witch. In the Middle Ages she would have been dragged out and burned at the stake—no more questions asked. Thousands of conversations all around the country—indeed, the world—needed little more than a dried porcini to become lost in the addictive fascination with cunning female killers.

But Erin kept claiming it was a tragic accident. And, to my mind at least, there were some good reasons to believe this might be true. First, see the examples above: why don’t we start from a position of at least believing a person might be telling the truth when they say they are innocent? Do we have to leap to condemnation on little more than how they look, or how they react or don’t react to an incredibly traumatic situation in which they suddenly find themselves?

How would you react? And don’t say you know—because I don’t think you do. Until you are in that sort of a situation, no one does.

Second, was there any motive? And by ‘any’, I mean literally anything? Any reason at all to kill her children’s grandparents? There didn’t appear to be.

And third, if it was murder, then it had to be a pre­meditated act and must have taken some planning. Given that, wouldn’t you think Erin would have taken a moment to ask herself a couple of pertinent questions, such as, oh, I don’t know, Can I get away with this?

It was very hard to believe that Erin had not asked herself that question. She must have had plenty of time. Cooking a beef Wellington lunch had not been a violent act done in a split second. Nor had there been a rage of passion in which rational thinking had been drowned in a sea of fury.

If it was murder, it must have been calculated. And a person who can calculate like that can also surely calculate past the event and have a plan to deflect suspicion away from themselves? And if Erin could have developed such a plan, why had she so conspicuously not?

Given those three reservations, didn’t the ‘tragic accident’ scenario, on the face of it, make as much sense as ‘intentional murder’? And shouldn’t we have waited until we had all the facts before going any further?

By August 2024, we were thrilled to hear the trial was actually going to be held here in Morwell, with a scheduled start date of 28 April 2025. Erin’s guilt or innocence had become an even hotter topic. I argued the ‘tragic accident’ scenario so many times that I began to believe it really was more likely and I gained a small reputation among my own circle of friends as the only ‘Erin defender’ they knew. Which I didn’t mind. Someone in the grandstand had to wear her colours.

But in February 2025, I lost my spot in the grandstand.

I received a letter—on paper, in the mail, a real old-­fashioned letter—saying I had been selected for jury duty in the Latrobe Valley District, covering five circuit sittings of the Supreme and County courts, between 28 April and 1 August.

Twenty-­eighth of April. Good heavens. That was the start date of the Patterson trial.

I was probably one of thousands, but still … I had been selected to be in the pool from which the jury in the Erin Patterson trial would be chosen. Stay calm, I told myself. I knew Tony could cover my shifts. He had someone he called in when I went on holidays or whatever. He’d be fine. I had that issue covered. And as for the other eligibility requirements: well, I wasn’t sick, I didn’t have to travel far, I spoke English, and I didn’t work in the administration of justice. I am a picture framer.

Although hopefully, for a few weeks at least—if I made it through—I’d also be a juror. In one of the most famous Australian trials ever. That’d be something for the grandkids.

2

I had served on a jury once before, so I wasn’t entirely new to the whole process. Nonetheless, that had been more than ten years ago—maybe thirteen, fourteen, I couldn’t remember exactly—and it only ran for four days. In the County Court, too. Whereas the Erin Patterson trial would be in the Supreme Court and, obviously, it was going to be a different kettle of fish altogether.

But the basic process hadn’t changed—it was simply that everything would be so much bigger. Which meant my chances of making it through to the final twelve were correspondingly smaller. But all I could do was hope I kept making the cut. At every stage there were excuses that could be invoked by those who wanted out, or eligibility requirements that Juries Victoria might deem we had failed to meet. Beyond that, it was largely random luck.

I was one of about 15,000 people in the Latrobe Valley District who received a letter that February, and of those 15,000 nearly 7000 were excused, deferred to a later time or ruled unfit before we even got anywhere. You know the ones. I’d bet London to a brick on that at least half of you have done it yourselves. Jury duty? you say. Ugh—how can I get out of that?

By late March, 1400 of us had been randomly selected from the remaining 8000 and we had been sent a second summons to attend court on 28 April.

I was one of the lucky 1400. This was a far greater number than would normally receive a follow-­up summons, but the whole Latrobe Valley well knew what Juries Victoria also knew: this would be for the Patterson trial, which was going to be long and complex. Again, there was an option to be excused or seek a deferral, and by just sitting tight and saying nothing, I became one of 597 people who remained in contention.

Now it became exciting. We were asked to confirm that we would be available for a minimum of eight weeks. A minimum of eight? Sheesh. I imagine many of us who had previously said they had time for a ‘lengthy’ trial began to hesitate. If it was a minimum of eight, what were the odds of it becoming nine, ten or longer? Who in their right mind was genuinely happy to say they were willing to sacrifice three months of their life to jury duty?

Clearly, to stay in the hunt, I needed to have another conversation with my business partner. Tony and I had known each other since art school in our early twenties and had fallen into starting a little framing business about seven or eight years before, when we both—separately—abandoned Melbourne for a cheaper life in the Latrobe Valley. Unfortunately, as much as our little company could do with some free promotion, if I named my business here, everyone would be able to identify me, so apologies for being a little mysterious. All I’ll say is that we own a little shopfront in Morwell with a factory out the back, and we have established enough of a client base to keep food on the table. At present, I wouldn’t claim to be any richer than that. And Tony did know a retired woman in Outtrim who could look after the shop for a week or two while he kept the factory going. She’d done that for us before.

But that wouldn’t work for ten to twelve weeks. Our locum from Outtrim wouldn’t give us that much time. If I wanted to stay in line for this jury, therefore, we needed another solution. Luckily, from previous experience I knew that until being sequestered to decide a verdict, jurors simply went home after court finished each evening. So I cut a deal. If I did make it all the way to the jury, and Tony looked after the shop each day while I was in court, I would spend four or five hours every evening cutting all the mounts and glass to size and then fitting up the frames in the factory. Then we could keep the business going while I applied myself responsibly to the call of civic duty.

Deal done.

I wasted no time confirming my availability to Juries Victoria. And I didn’t disguise my enthusiasm. I threw my hand, metaphorically, in the air: pick me, pick me.

It transpired that 234 of us had thrown our hands in the air.

But, apparently, despite its massive profile, the Patterson trial wasn’t the only long-­ish trial due to start in the Latrobe District this winter. So that group of 234 had to be split in three. Not equal thirds—but in three batches.

There was nothing I could do to influence the outcome of the next decision. It was totally beyond my control, which—to put it mildly—sucked. But whatever. Okay. That’s life. Roll with it. Juries Victoria gave each of us a number, from 1 to 234. Then they split us into 112 possible jurors for the Patterson trial, and 122 into a separate pool for the other two matters. Completely random. Numbers were just picked out of a barrel. You were either in one or the other.

Bam. My luck held.

Now we were down to 112.

*

So that was the initial pool for the Erin Patterson trial. There were 112 of us who were instructed to attend the Morwell court on 29 April, and I was given the number 78—which, considering I was born in 1978, was pretty easy to remember.

From here, I sort of knew what to expect. It was the process I had been through all those years before, but this time on steroids. All 112 of us would turn up, and we’d get a lengthy, learned dissertation from the judge on all the other excuses that might exclude us from being part of the final draw, and then however many were left would have their numbers put into a box—yes, literally, a wooden box—and in a completely random order those numbers would be drawn out. Anyone chosen would then walk past the accused and the prosecution to the jury box.

Okay. So, it was still unlikely. The odds had shortened, for sure, but I was only one of 112 possible jurors.

The night of 28 April, I checked the weather forecast for the next day. Twenty degrees and cloudy. So … temperate. What should I wear in those conditions? It was hardly an easy decision knowing that, if I were lucky enough to get my number called, I would have to walk past the accused without being challenged. In the Victorian legal system, the accused has the right to object to at least three people being on the jury with no reason needed.

But what would Erin find objectionable? Considering she had once made a choice to appear on national television wearing socks with Birkenstocks, answering what Erin Patterson might find objectionable was beyond me.

To make progress, I decided to reverse the question: instead of wondering what she might object to, perhaps I should ask myself what might appeal?

I was, after all, on her side. I was going to present as a totally neutral, unbiased member of the community who privately happened to think—shhh—she was probably innocent.

Attitude, I decided, was more important. Just wear comfortable ‘me’ clothes but appear warm and empathetic. Don’t try and second-­guess or overthink anything. What will be, will be.

On the morning of 29 April, I took the train three stops to the Morwell courthouse, which is a two-­storey chocolate-­box piece of public architecture whose ambition was to project a modest level of regional authority rather than seek the spotlight of world attention. The matters heard inside its walls were usually drink-­driving charges from last year’s Christmas parties and domestic violence AVOs.

While I do not in any way wish to belittle the broader social issues these matters highlight, they were somewhat overshadowed now by a chilling triple murder trial. It was hard to escape the feeling that it all looked out of place. Australia was world famous for the Melbourne Cricket Ground, the Sydney Opera House, Uluru—and now, soon to be tacked onto that impressive list would be the Latrobe Valley Law Courts in Morwell.

I flashed my summons letter and was ushered through. But because this jury pool was so much larger than normal, about half of us crowded into the trial courtroom, which was courtroom 4, and the rest were bundled into courtroom 5 next door with a separate supervisor and an audio and video link. Someone had opened a can of people and shaken them out onto the floor. That’s what we looked like.

Up on the bench, however, draped in his antiquated robes of office but sans wig, Justice Christopher Beale made his first appearance. His initial concern was making sure the supervisor in courtroom 5 could hear him and the tech was all working properly, and while he embarked on this quick minute of housekeeping I wondered how judges secured these appointments. Was there a roster? Did the attorney-­general merely decide who she wanted? A coin toss, maybe?

‘All right,’ Justice Beale concluded. ‘If there are any problems with the livestream during the course of the empanelment, please bring that to my attention as soon as possible.’

Ironically, the most experienced person in the courtroom when it came to sorting out problems with livestream technology was actually Erin Patterson herself, a fact we would soon discover. Erin had been in the dock from the beginning, trying, it appeared to me, to disguise her mild feeling of irritation at having to put up with this whole exercise.

‘Mr Associate, please arraign the accused,’ continued Justice Beale, pivoting to the case at hand.

In front of the entire jury pool, the charges against Erin were read out: one charge of attempted murder, and three charges of murder. Predictably, she pleaded not guilty to each.

But—hang on. One charge of attempted murder? Over the last couple of days, during which the beginning of this case had attracted blanket publicity, all the prelim stories had said she was facing four charges of attempted murder; three against her husband, Simon, and one against the surviving lunch guest, Ian Wilkinson.

Now it was only one. What had happened? Had Erin got out of three charges already? That wasn’t a bad start.

‘Good morning, members of the jury panel,’ said His Honour, rudely interrupting my train of thought. ‘You are here so we can select a jury to sit in a criminal trial where the accused, Erin Patterson, is charged with three counts of murder and one count of attempted murder.’

Yes, we knew that.

‘It will be the task of the jury that is selected in this trial to decide whether the accused is guilty or not guilty of those charges.’

Duh.

But okay—some formalities must be gone through. Fair enough. He went on to explain that fifteen jurors would be empanelled initially, which meant that, if three fell sick or were unable to continue for some reason, the trial would still have the twelve jurors required to deliver a legally binding verdict. If there were more than twelve of us still left when the trial finished, the excess one, two or three jurors would be randomly balloted off to leave twelve to reach a verdict.

Great. Got it. Now—come on—pick the jury.

But no. Not yet.

First, five minutes of Covid protocols were read to us. Covid protocols? Is that still a thing? Apparently so.

After that, things got a little more serious.

Every juror had to be completely open-­minded about the case, warned Justice Beale. Which was exactly what I had been saying to everyone else for months. Go me, I thought.

‘Sometimes, especially in country areas, a potential juror knows one of the people involved in the trial or knows something about them and so may not be able to be open-­minded. Even if the juror feels capable of treating the people involved in the case fairly, to the outside world it may seem likely that they will favour one side or the other, which would under­mine the interests of justice.’

We were handed the list of witnesses and while we could all read, Justice Beale announced he was nonetheless going to say all their names out loud himself.

‘And if you know any of these people or think you