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

[Dustyblue]

New thread! Cheers @echt for noticing!

The Aus media are being careful to not report much beyond the actual goings-on in the courtroom, in order to not cause prejudice given ongoing proceedings. I haven't seen the story you mentioned- but I'm sure they'll return to it in cross!

She wouldn’t be able to check from in prison though would she?
I don’t know much about how much the defence prepares her-would they be able to say, for example, ‘don’t mention the name of the clinic’ or something?

Cause prejudice meaning put information into the public sphere where it could conceivably reach and influence the jury, beyond what is already known and being presented in the trial :)

Eg we had another very big trial here to do with sexual assault in parliament, and during one of the proceedings a main player was charged with a separate charge of rape in a different state. There was a suppression order on naming him or discussing the newer charge until the first matter was resolved.

This is obviously not as clearly prejudicial- but during essentially the trial of the year if not the decade, the media are being very careful in their role too, so as not to be named and shamed by the judge.

There've already been a few reprimands - the ABC Mushroom Daily podcast, Crikey, and Mamamia - for breaching suppression orders, apparently. Mamamia seem to have completely removed their coverage/pieces on the case.

News outlets and 'mummy blogger' warned over mushroom trial coverage

Mushroom case daily has definitely named her son a couple of times presumably accidentally

The Australian media has to be really careful about only reporting what’s actually happened and not speculating about guilt or motives or anything like that. Identities of children must be protected.

100%. I’m a hcp lecturer and see a lot of students with this issue. Health anxiety, baggage from previous healthcare experience who use training as a hcp as some form of therapy. They are a nightmare as they know everything and can be very argumentative with staff on placement as well as lecturers

They are a nightmare as they know everything and can be very argumentative

That really hits the nail on the head, @MoominUnderWater - it’s one of the scariest features and makes it so very hard to deal with the person concerned because they’re fantastically stubborn and simply won’t engage - they always know best (well, they think they do) 🙁

This guardian coverage has the name, in the 02.44 post from two days ago (near the bottom). https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/live/2025/jun/06/erin-patterson-trial-live-update-australia-mushroom-case-day-28-latest-news-ntwnfb?filterKeyEvents=false#liveblog-navigation

Poor kids.

@echt

im thinking of how she reacted upon learning people were getting sick. Not bringing her children to the hospital, not staying at the hospital herself, dumping the dehydrator, wiping her phone, not explaining immediately that there were foraged mushrooms in the food.

that’s not what we think we would do if we had accidentally fed poisoned mushrooms to relatives.

but she sounds like kind of an awkward person, and she must have been panicking.

I mean, it’s such a wild situation to accidentally poison and kill a bunch of people- who is to say how anyone would act. I think I would lose my mind and could easily say and do a bunch of weird shit. Not because I meant to kill them but because I’m out of my mind with stress and feeling absolute horror at what I’d done.

I was thinking the same, plus she would obviously have been worried about being accused of a crime even if she’d said she had foraged them and it was an accident - as there is just no way of ever proving your innocence in that scenario.

Awkward and panicking or not, refusing to help her kids, who it was reasonably believed may have been poisoned by death caps after she said they'd eaten leftovers, is insane behaviour. Or guilty behaviour

yeah, that doesn’t add up at all.

I do think if she’d acted differently in the immediate aftermath she’d have had more chance of getting away with it/not been under so much suspicion. All she needed to do was be a bit more panic stricken, immediately say she’d been foraging and could this all be an awful accident, spend a bit more time on the toilet, take the kids to hospital demanding they be checked.

All the while saying her lesser symptoms were due to bulimia and she’d scraped the mushrooms off the kids portions so they weren’t as affected.

I agree that it's possible she could have fed her guests foraged mushrooms, seen them get ill as a result, panicked that she'd accidentally given them death caps, and then destroyed all evidence and lied to police about the source of the mushrooms. It would make her a terrible human being, for leaving the people she 'loved' to die instead of providing doctors with the information that could possibly save their lives, but it wouldn't make her a murderer.

What doesn't make sense is that she still maintains she was unaware any of the mushrooms in the beef wellington were foraged. She genuinely thought the mushrooms came from Woolworths and the Asian grocer (which she was unable to name). If you think all the ingredients came from supermarkets and if your guests then become seriously ill from some unknown cause, why would you immediately dispose of your food dehydrator at the tip? It makes no sense. Why assume it was the mushrooms that made them ill rather than the beef or something else they'd eaten? She's tried to explain it by saying that Simon had accused her of deliberately poisoning the family with dehydrated mushrooms, but he denies ever saying this (and I'm more inclined to believe his evidence over the woman who lied about having ovarian cancer).

Also, in this scenario, if you're going to panic about anything, surely you're going to panic that you and your children are going to die or get seriously ill. Yet she seemed curiously relaxed about that possibility, and more concerned at getting her kids to their activities the next day. She claims to have fallen ill after the meal (which there is absolutely no medical evidence for), yet she discharged herself five minutes after a doctor warned her that she might have death cap mushroom poisoning. Then she tries to explain this away by saying she discharged herself against medical advice soon after giving birth to her son. Well, 1) I doubt she was in serious danger of dying that time and 2) If she hates hospitals so much, why has she booked herself in to get gastric bypass surgery?

There's also the photo of what look like death cap mushrooms on the kitchen scales. The iNaturalist searches on her computer showing the locations of death cap mushrooms nearby. Her phone records being consistent with having visited both of those areas soon after. Remotely wiping her phone while it was in the possession of the police because she's curious to see if it's still connected to the internet. She didn't get ill despite eating the same meal. Her kids didn't get ill despite eating the leftovers with the mushrooms scraped off...

If she's found guilty then we're going to hear all the details of her alleged previous attempts on Simon's life, and any doubts over her guilt will be gone.

Originally she was charged with counts of attempting to murder her exh Simon on several previous occasions where a mysterious gut illness put him into an induced coma for several weeks. These counts were dropped in the end - we don't know why but possibly tests etc hadn't been carried out at the time as it was regarded as a "mystery illness" rather than a poisoning back in 2022 when it occurred.

However I wondered that if she was responsible for what happened to Simon back in 2022, whether it possibly led to feelings of complacency that she wouldn't be suspected after the Beef Wellington dinner leading her to trip herself up because she couldn't keep track of the lies she'd told when the mass poisoning was taken much more seriously with the police homing in on her.

I've just had a thought. On the podcast they mentioned how her daughter had an ovarian mass when she was baby. And that she was ill again later in life but they can't talk about that. And there was another reference to something do with her sons health. Again they said they couldn't talk about it. Now it's making me think maybe she has done something to the kids like she did with Simon but not as serious. And her constant thoughts about her own poor health. Whether she has munchausen about her own health, and munchausen by proxy for the kids?? And maybe she wanted make Simon ill to get his attention and be the one to look after him etc.

I think the ovarian mass her daughter had was the only real illness and everything else is probably her doing.

It's creepy that she was accepted into Uni on a nursing an midwifery degree - I cannot imagine her with access to the drugs cupboard

That's an interesting thought. I think it's called factitious illness disorder or something like that now. One issue though is that these people actively seek out attention from medics and hospitals, not shy away from it. As in, they get off on manipulating and fooling doctors and the attention they get from the induced illnesses, in themselves or their kids. EP doesn't really fit that part.

Just been reading up on WS. Someone has posted that they have found out that Woollies only sell their eye fillets in packs of two. So the five she bought were in fact ten eye fillets. This explains the available extra meat for the children, and probably a few practice runs with the enormous amounts of filo and pastry.

For someone who is said to be a good cook, she is very disorganised, I think.

Ok, wow. No wonder she said it cost a fortune. She would've been better off going to Aldi as someone said upthread, or the local butcher. This is farming country, some butchers farm themselves! She could've shown them the recipe in advance & they'd provide exactly what was required. Plus the bizarre quantity of pastry. Practise runs make sense I suppose.

It does seem disorganised. And yet she has a room full of lego!? I can cook well but to me, lego takes way more attention to detail, repetition & precision. Every time my son gets a lego set as a gift I think "HOLY fuck, don't you realise who is going to be sitting on the floor building this thing?'

I can see the Lego thing. We have a room full of Lego, between the DC and my DH. My DH is incredibly disorganised, but Lego is one of his things. Adult Lego is a big thing now, there are lots of 18+ sets. I’m organised but don’t enjoy building Lego sets (I don’t mind a bit of occasional freestyle building with the DC).

I agree. I’m disorganised but Lego is organised for me. I just follow the instructions.