The mushroom poisoning in Vic...... we are gripped!.....Part 3

[Dustyblue]

New thread! Cheers @echt for noticing!

Thank you @Wrenjeni

her dc are denying any knowledge about her foraging

I had the impression at the time that she was an experienced forager, country person, used to that lifestyle etc etc. but now apparently they’re saying she wasn’t?

you would have thought, but presumably not, they could tell what mushrooms they were on the scales?

I’ve been following closely (websleuths has a very detailed thread as mentioned by a pp) and there’s no evidence that she was a forager. She had 400+ books, but none on foraging, and there was no evidence of an interest in it online or from friends or family. I think the only thing they found was the activity in relation to DCM specifically. One of my grandparents foraged mushrooms every now and again, and although he rarely mentioned it, the whole family knew about it.

If you are trying to make people a bit ill then you pick something like laxatives. Not something that is literally called death.

Also re the getting better then worse again, accidentally picked death cap mushrooms was a storyline in neighbours a few years ago. One of the characters ate it and followed that trajectory, so very easy to know or find out about it.

She shared it with her true crime Facebook group - that's how the prosecution got the photo, as Erin has disappeared her main phone.

Did she tell her FB group that they were death cap mushrooms? Why would anyone knowingly have death cap mushrooms, take a photo and then share the photo and tell people?! That’s so dumb.

did the person in the neighbours story line die?

No, she was hospitalised (at Erinsborough Hospital!) but recovered.

the judge's summing up will be interesting

but it doesnt make sense as to why she would put the mushrooms in the meal

The defence argument that DeathCap mushroom are rare so unlikely she picked them deliberately seems odd - if they are rare surely that lowers the chance of accidental collection. Unless he is still hoping some of the blame will go on the “Asian shop”?

I did like the line “she is on trial for murder -not for being a liar”.

That line doesn’t really work though, when the lies are almost all about the matters to do with the victims’ deaths!

She took that photo and even posted it to a true crime group site?! How incriminating. One poster says it was taken on a family tablet, others on Erin’s missing phone

She seems delusional.

She didn’t post the death cap on scales photo.
That was found on the tablet.
She posted a photo of button mushrooms in the dehydrator and said that she was hiding them in her kids’ food.

(sorry to be pedantic! You can probably tell I’m obsessed with this case!)

I'm going by what her exfriend who was in that group said on WS.

What is WS?

Websleuths forum.

By NOT being an experienced forager doesn't that count in her favour - that she had somehow got them mixed up and accidentally poisoned the victims?

Surely if you were NOT an experienced forager, you wouldn't ever DREAM of feeding guests some random mushrooms! But then that's a common sense view, which she doesn't seem to have much of...

There was no evidence of her being even an amateur forager - so why did she head to those spots after sightings of DCM and forage? If I foraged for fun even rarely, my DC and family would know about it. If I did forage, I would be picking in locations where DCM hadn’t been spotted!

And if she was interested in the health benefits of mushrooms (which she hasn’t mentioned) - she posted about hiding them in her DC’s brownies - why post only in a true crime group, and not a food related group?

Because the true crime group were her online friends, and she was (I believe) setting up the story of how she was a keen forager who (worst case scenario, in her mind, if the authorities ever suspected her) had accidentally foraged death cap mushrooms and accidentally killed her relatives.

But she wasn't going to admit that off the bat, she was (I believe) waiting for them all to die so they could not contradict her story... The lie about the health problem she needed to discuss with the kids absent, the ovarian cancer diagnosis, all of that needed to die with them.

Then to her horror, the doctors were onto her mushrooms being the cause way too early, and she had to ad lib, and meanwhile hoped they all died before they could contradict her story...

She would have been better of trying to fake some of her invisible tears and breaking down at that point, and saying, Oh my god, maybe it was the mushrooms I foraged, but she was all in on the Asian grocer by then...

Velvet, it’s hard to tell but you seem to think maybe she might have done it…?

I think it's preeeeetty obvious she did it 😂