The mushroom poisoning in Vic.... I am gripped

[Dustyblue]

This has been all over the news. I live one town over from Leongatha and believe me, it's the talk of the towns.

We have loads of mushrooms around our place but wouldn't dream of eating them. About 90% of foraged mushrooms in Australia are poisonous.

Then again, you do get groups of people who think they know what they're doing, and perhaps they do.

Meanwhile this is suss-as.

Three people died from suspected mushroom poisoning after sharing a meal. Here's what we know - ABC News

They’re not tiny, but equally not enormous. You can get a fairly cheap one like this https://www.kmart.com.au/product/food-dehydrator-42974871/

In the paper today it says she also felt ill and went to hospital. If this is true, how come she fed her kids the same food the next day? Way too many confusing explanations coming from her. Very strange.

It would be impossible for the DCs to eat the same meal and not be ill, wouldn't it? You'd never be able to scrape all the mushroom away. So it really points to the DCs not eating the dish that caused the fatalities. Maybe there was a starter or as PP have suggested, a gravy or topping that the DCs didn't have.

Has anyone suggested a motive?

The suggested motive was she wanted back with her ex, he didn't, the family (his) were coming to lunch to persuade her to divorce.

How did she both take the leftovers into the hospital/to investigators and also feed them to her kids? Fed it to them after investigation? Why, if you were so concerned about food that you took it for investigating (so it was out of the fridge all that time growing bacteria etc too), would you then feed it to your kids? Bizarre. Police definitely sitting back, watching, thinking give her enough rope and she'll hang herself. She's not coming across well at all.

I guess, playing devils advocate, if she's perhaps intellectually challenged she wouldn't come across well, especially when panicking. We can't all be the sharpest knife in the drawer and some people don't make a lot of sense at the best of times. When they tell a story in ordinary conversation, about something that happened, it can be hard to decipher what went on. I don't mean there's anything wrong with her in a medical sense necessarily, just that perhaps she wasn't at the front of the queue when God was handing out the brains.

Or two Beef Wellingtons. One for the guests, and the other for her and for the children the night after and to give a sample of to the hospital.

I think if you used your dehydrator on death cap mushrooms as you wanted to murder 4 , maybe 5, people. Then no matter how much it cost you’d likely be taking it to a tip far away after rhe murders, and you’d not really want to use it again In case any toxins remained.

I agree with the poster who said she’s possibly not particularly intelligent. And she’s clearly going against her legal advice to shut the fuck up, either due to panic, arrogance, or lack of intellectual ability to see the damage she’s doing to her own case. Maybe all 3.

I keep dried mushrooms in as a stock item, use them in soups and risotto. I do buy them at the Asian supermarket because they are cheaper. So if I had a recipe that needed mushrooms, I'd rehydrate some and use them. So that part I don't find odd (just not true) except that for beef Wellington I'd use fresh mushrooms.

Also, if the kids don't like mushrooms, ignoring the fact they would be impossible to scrape off, why give them the beef Wellington at all, why waste it? Give them chicken nuggets!

And how big was this dish that it served five adults with leftovers for three kids?

I think this is the most logical suggestion. Though logic seems to be sadly lacking from this woman's make-up.
This has reminded me of my French, mushroom-hunting, father's favourite opening scene from a film, as described here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_a_Cheat

Hydrators and mushroom gravy are all new to me (I obviously have an unsophisticated palate and rudimentary cooking skills!) Do they feature in Australian Womens’ Weekly?

Beef Wellington is “fine” dining, suitable for a dinner-party (not that I cook for many of them), accompanied by a nice wine and light-hearted chat, not something I would serve for lunch to a Baptist Pastor all while having a serious discussion about marital issues.

5 guests all members of your ex’s family and no guests on your side to back you up, what a bizarre situation.

Beef Wellington is “fine” dining

But it was reported it was pie, which to me is cheaper chunks of meat not actually a Wellington but a mushroom and beef pie.

I think if you used your dehydrator on death cap mushrooms as you wanted to murder 4 , maybe 5, people. Then no matter how much it cost you’d likely be taking it to a tip

But surely if you planned to murder them you would do that immediately and then have a new one ready to show the cops?

Seems she did it soon as the husband asked her if she’d used it to poison them. As said, she might not be the smartest tool in the box. His comment prompted her to bin it off.

If that’s what she did, then planning to do them all in at once with death cap mushrooms, isn’t normal behaviour, it’s sociopath/psychopath territory. Appears all the planning she did was make sure no other folks at the meal she didn’t wish harmed, then possibly pretended to have symptoms.

and to be fair, it’s possible she did it before with another poison and got away with it, her husband, last year. Who, from the comment she says he made, clearly believed immediately she’d poisoned them, so thinks she does a bit of that.

Ok so it was a pie.

But how would she have 'scraped the mushrooms off' a pie made of cheaper chunks / cuts of meat? She'd have had to pick them out of a filling?

Mind you, how do you 'scrape the mushrooms off' beef wellington encased in a pastry wrap?

Make it make sense.

If it is murder I'm finding it difficult to square the level of sophisticated planning required for this and the apparent failure to avoid detection/dispose of evidence.
If she had sourced deathcap mushrooms (which assumes she has the knowledge or expertise to forage them), dehydrated them months in advance and added them either by
-sprinkling on the plates the victims were going to eat or

• incorporating them in one of two beef wellingtons or

-adding them to gravy only her guests would have, surely the first thing she'd do would be to dispose of the dehydrator. Make up some excuse it was broken if anyone asked.

Not keep it until 3 of your guests have died and your estranged husband who recently suffered a mysteriously similar near fatal complaint suggests it's basically the murder weapon.

Beef Wellington isn't a pie, and it's not made of cheaper cuts of meat. It's fillet steak coated in a mushroom paste, layered with prosciutto (my mum didn't do that bit), filled with fois gras and encased in puff pastry.

I think the use of the word 'pie' is a red herring, and it's just got tacked on as a description for a dish being encased in pastry.

Yes maybe, I have since fou d a recipe for beef Wellington pie, I'm actually going to try it out on the family. It is much cheaper than actually making a Wellington.

Yes I know, I’m responding to the comments of other posters about the ‘pie’ mention.

@MrsRobinsonsHandprints do you like you family?

I can see how you could just about unroll a beef wellington, scrape out the mushroom pate and patch it back up again. Serving it to your kids as leftovers you wouldn't be too worried if it looked a bit tatty. But you wouldn't risk it if there was any possibility it was contaminated. Which points to any toxic mushrooms/mushroom powder being added to individual plates, a separate beef wellington or gravy.

If she's innocent then it's a random deathcap in the bag of dried mushrooms she bought months ago from a store she can't remember. But then she would have hydrated them and minced them up along with the button mushrooms. And possibly used some of the soaking water. So everyone including the kids would be very ill/dead.

Unless there were two Beef Wellingtons, one with the button mushrooms and one with the dried mushrooms. Maybe she ran out of button mushrooms and made a second batch with the dried mushrooms she had in the cupboard. The guests all had the dried mushroom one.The one with the button mushrooms was only partially eaten (and maybe the one the survivor and she mostly ate) which then got given to the kids as leftovers.

I agree with you. I'm surprised they haven't made her do a press conference yet. Can think of many prior cases where they do that, to really put the pressure on & let them slip up hardcore.

It will certainly be interesting to see how the story changes. I wonder how many more versions she's going to put out.

Beef wellington was a staple for me growing up. My mother just made individual ones made with rounds of fillet. With our names picked out in puff pastry on the top.

The first time I ever came across one large beef wellington sliced was when I came to the UK.

This has made the BBC 6 o'clock News!