Erin Patterson - We the members of the MN jury find the defendant Guilty or Not Guilty?

[Dustyblue]

Well here we are, after 2 years of head-scratching speculation and many weeks of trial detail-thrashing. It looks like the Judge will give his directions to the jury on Tuesday, after which they'll be sequestered in a local motel (I do not envy them this) to reach a verdict.

Clearly we're not privy to every last piece of evidence shown at the trial, but those of us who've been following closely will surely have formed an opinion one war or the other.

So, I ask you- if you were on the jury- what would your verdict be?

I find it hard to wrap my head round the idea that nothing she did was beyond what other people do.

She read about deadly mushrooms online. I’ve searched some really batshit stuff and as yet, no one murdered.

Her being sick and struggling with food - it does make you a bit nuts about your own health and she might have planned to say one thing and then just got embarrassed and lied about a health thing to rationalise it to herself was fine - we’ve all lied and justified it to ourselves. I can see this happening.

The dehydrator - a woman panicking.

I don’t think she comes across as very nice or likeable - but that doesn’t mean she definitely meant to kill them. I’m not convinced.

Also would you fully cooperate with the police? Would you trust them? I can understand why someone was behaving like she did if she was worried she was going to be wrongly accused

I did read something interesting recently about how women who don’t act like women are expected to following something like this are more likely to be charged with offences and more likely to be found guilty. Lindy Chamberlin was mentioned as well as some other women who have since had their guilty verdicts quashed. It did make me think of Erin, is she just an oddball?

but saying that I still think she’s guilty. Far too much circumstantial evidence, going to places with deathcaps after reading they were in the area, lying about the mushroom origins, binning the dehydrator, wiping her phone. Lying about how sick she was after the meal when she was wearing white trousers!

if she had just said from the start that she’d got into foraging and must have made an awful mistake I’d have more doubt.

I can’t be the only one to go onto the inaturalist website. But I then spent a fun half an hour looking at what was in my neighbourhood. What is odd is just searching those mushrooms and not others. With an interest in foraging wouldn’t you look at other mushrooms as well?

Guilty as sin

I think she's guilty. I can't see any other way that the death cap mushrooms could have got into the Beef Wellington unless she put it there. She would have made a big mix and put some in each portion, which means there's no way she wouldn't have been poisoned. If she'd wanted to get away with it she should have poisoned herself a bit, too, but given it leads to organ failure I can see why she wouldn't want to take the risk.

For me I think it was the fact she didn't ask about the relatives after they were ill - if she was so close to them and might have made them ill, surely she'd be desperate to know how they were.

I didn't like her husband and the $40 per month child support he gave her, while expecting her to fund private education for the children. I didn't like his parents for not intervening on that, either.

But that’s it, isn’t it? If she had just said “I foraged for mushrooms” and had faked making herself sick, and done a few basic things her story would be so much more plausible.

Why isn’t it?

I didn’t find the prosecution that compelling, and I think she is like others have said, a bit of an oddball.

I think this is because she got away with it before when Simon was in intensive care. She got complacent.

Also she made out was big news and had searched ovarian cancer. So it all fits.

What if her husband made himself sick? His sickness isn’t part of the evidence and the jury can’t consider it.

If anything, she should have got better if this was her second crime.

There are too many lies. How did she accidentally forage mushrooms?
Agree the jury can't use that as evidence.

Motive: She had blown her 2 million dollar inheritance - gave lots to her in-laws…… when it looked like she would get less child support from ex hubby, she wanted “new inheritances”…

She told online friends she was "done" with her in-laws and shared photos of mushrooms that experts later identified as resembling deadly death caps. Around this time, she also changed her children’s school and arranged the lunch, inviting the grandparents and two who were surprised by the rare invitation. Also her ex husband, who declined to attend.
She sent the kids away despite also saying she wanted the kids to have a relationship with them.

But she had recently mentioned a cancer scare and expressed concern about how to break the news to her children to excuse this. At the lunch, she served individual beef Wellingtons, placing one on a different type of plate. She did not disclose that she had used foraged mushrooms in the meal. Toxicology later confirmed the presence of death cap poison in the food, a food dehydrator, and the mushroom duxelle. She resisted having herself or her children medically tested.
She then withheld one mobile phone from police, instead handing over a second device, which she had reset multiple times.
Plus loads more. Eating with the shitz etc.

If people I supposedly loved had all got very ill after visiting me, I would be at their bedsides, trying to figure out what on earth had happened - I would not be at home destroying evidence (especially evidence related to death cap mushrooms, rather than any other possible reason they may have become ill)

Oh dear. I loathe how women are so often found 'guilty' by the public in high profile cases like this, but I just cannot see any way in which she is not guilty. Let's see what the jury think - god help them stuck in a motel!

It’s really hard. I don’t envy the jury at all - and they’re locals, right? I think that makes it even harder.

I’m expecting a guilty verdict. It’s dreadfully sad. Those poor people. Lives ruined.

I agree with you.

i think the probably did it on purpose.

but the standard is beyond reasonable doubt. I think the prosecution have failed to prove that.

there is a reasonable possibility that she is an oddball who panicked when she accidentally poisoned a bunch of people. Who is to say how anyone would react in such a shocking and emotionally charged situation?

Her ex husband said in the witness box that money wasn’t something that motivated her. I think if money was the driver then he of all people would have pressed that.

Also she wasn’t going to inherit from her ex in laws. Especially not the ex husbands aunt and uncle by marriage.

Guilty and exactly like a toddler with chocolate all round its mouth denying it ate the chocolate

But (and I do think she’s as guilty as sin), why was she so stupid to search on her own computer for the mushrooms? To take her phone with her when she went to forage for them? To go to the tip (which she must have known would have CCTV) and pay with her own card? And take pictures of mushrooms with her phone? She met her Facebook buddies through a true crime forum, did she learn nothing?!

Accidentally adding death caps to a meal would be incredibly unlucky. Managing to poison everyone to death/brink of death except yourself, and your children? Extraordinary. All of the above plus her attempts at a cover up with the hospital/phone/dehydrator. Guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

Guilty for all the reasons already mentioned but I think my main issue is that she said when she initially made the mushroom duxelle it was ‘a bit bland’ so she added the dehydrated mushroom for extra flavour. Surely you’d then taste it again if you’d thought it was originally bland? She should actually have been really ill herself even before the meal if she’d accidentally foraged the death cap mushrooms but she wasn’t.

She’s tried to claim she wasn’t as ill as the others who ate the meal because she’s got bulimia and had vomited after the meal after stuffing her face with cake. The prosecution witness said if true it would have made little difference to her symptoms as the poison would already have gone into her blood stream. However that excuse has not been made to her meal preparation when surely she was tasting the food whilst she was preparing it. She’s certainly admitted tasting it to know it tasted bland and adding extra dried mushrooms.

Must admit my only question mark is the motive although part of me wonders if she just thought they’d be very ill rather than die?

Also another thing that stuck with was that she wasn’t a known ‘forager’. Even her kids didn’t know that she liked to ‘forage’ and no one had ever heard her mention it. I thought a genuine forager would probably have taken her children and done it as an educational fun outdoor activity? Looks like she only finally admitted to foraging, after initially denying it, sometime after she was arrested.

Also her claim is that she rehydrated and chopped up the dried Asian mushrooms (that may have got mixed up with the deathcaps) but their was no evidence of any mushrooms apart from field (supermarket) mushrooms in the waste samples - no choped up asian mushrooms or death caps. Just the death cap toxins. So the chopped up asian mushrooms claim doesn't stack up - the death caps most have been added as a powder which is hard to pass off as accidental.

Would you factory reset your phone once it was in police custody after they searched your home just to see if the police were, as she said, "silly" enough to leave it open to that? Having already factory reset it twice in the week prior?

I think she's as guilty as a toddler with chocolate smeared all over their face and hands, saying it was their brother who stole the chocolates.

Her motive to my mind seems driven by hatred, entitlement, rage, and resentment, and revenge, over petty things - which if you have encountered someone of a similar personality type, makes sense. Most of us aren't like that, thankfully, so it doesn't make proper sense to us.

Poisoning by Death Caps in particular is an act of evil. It is a horribly painful and drawn out way to die, and she sat in front of them as they happily ate their BWs, knowing this, and let them pray for her fake cancer. Heinous.