What was the mushroom murderer’s endgame?

[vincettenoir]

I don’t find it hard to believe EP wanted her ex dead and at a stretch I can see she might have wanted to kill her in-laws. But Ian and Heather? Why?

And my impression is that she was not expecting the police to be onto the mushrooms. Certainly not initially and perhaps not at any point. But how was she expecting to kill 5 people from food poisoning (her ex was originally supposed to be there) and survive herself without a huge investigation that would lead to the outcome it has?

Does this lend to the theory that she is innocent? Or was she not expecting to kill the victims? It’s difficult to make sense of.

Largely agree with this and as an ex Police Officer the worst tend to be apparently intelligent people who have never come to Police attention previously and are not from the type of family who has Police involvement. I think there is a huge amount of arrogance in these people and a general belief that they’re cleverer than anyone else particularly the Police who they assume to be stupid. Harold Shipman was a case in point. He was finally caught by some pretty reckless arrogant behaviour (amateur attempt to forge a will of a prominent patient of his).

I am still not 100% convinced she intended to kill everyone. I felt she may have just wanted to make than all very ill to ‘punish’ them. She seems to have done a lot of planning prior to the offence but pretty much none after the offence other than getting rid of the plates. Going back to her arrogance, as someone previously said, I don’t think it even entered her head that they’d pin point mushrooms as being the potential issue so quickly or even at all. The Dr was really on the ball as apparently as soon as they said they’d had beef Wellington he immediately asked the source of the mushrooms as he knew Beef Wellington contains mushroom paste. Not sure many random doctors would know that off the top of their head. I also think if she’d thought about it she would have made more of a show of being really ill herself. Her attempt at that in the end up was a bit half hearted. Even get rid of the dehydrator was very last minute and after they’d identified mushroom poisoning and she’d lied about getting them from an Asian grocery.

@CalamityGanon agree with your first paragraph entirely

I can’t believe she sat on the idea for an entire year without a decent plan for what she’d do if she got caught! Hindsight-bias I know - but if she’d just have admitted picking the mushrooms (maybe developed a fake interest in mushroom foraging in the year she was planning the murder, bought a couple of books and a basket, done a couple of basic internet searches) then feigned devastation (although she did do that and her acting was atrocious) and a couple of teary breakdowns saying how guilty she felt and it was all her fault, “how could I have been so stupid!” Etc. then I reckon she might have got away with people believing she was just a newbie mushroom forager who accidentally picked the wrong mushroom 🍄 (apparently the ones she used are often mistaken for edible ones). That story would’ve been much easier to stick to and far more believable. And maybe left her phone at home when she drove to the exact locations that online forum said they were growing! And not bloody driven her son to a flying lesson the day after. How hard would it have been to spend the day in bed pretending to throw up every half an hour?! She really fucked it! Bet she’s kicking herself now for her pure arrogance

From a (purely amateur) perspective of being interested in true crime, on and off for decades, what strikes me is murderers often murder people for astonishingly trivial reasons. And plenty think they are more intelligent than anyone else, way beyond Dunning-Kruger effect. They actually are intelligent people. And so think they have the ability to escape detection, can outsmart police and forensics. Then it seems to be a common theme that some enjoy telling the story in their way, to attempt to control the police process, and demonstrate that their cleverness. Even though they've been caught.

Also I think people can be very intelligent but have blind spots that stop them from getting away with it.

She did it because she enjoyed it and she didn't think she'd be caught. Thinking like this is completely alien to most of us.

The bit that stuck with me most was that she tried to blame the mushrooms on Woolworths (it's a huge grocery chain in WA) as if that could possibly be true and as if they would take the fall?

Bit daft to have a different plate for herself. Didn’t she also eat something different too?

I thought she made individual wellingtons. Having a different plate was to make sure she didn't get a poisoned one and I think she thought no one would survive. So they'd be no one to say she had a different plate.

She thought she could explain it all away on the very unlikely off chance she was questioned about it.

Meh, probably thought the veneer of respectability would provide a shield. No nondescript middle aged woman would ever be expected to have done that sort of thing, blah, blah, blah.

Only surprised she didn't claim menopause brain as a defence.

Did she think the deaths would occur at different times and not be linked back to the lunch because they were pensioners? That seems very unlikely. And then once they link it back to the lunch how would they not realise the guests had been poisoned? And how could they possibly have believed that Woolworths or even a Chinese grocer were selling death selling mushrooms? I just can’t understand the scenario that she imagined playing out.

I thought she tried to kill all that side of the family for inheritance.

She didn't murder them for inheritance. She was a multi-millionaire in her own right, even after splitting her money with Simon after their separation. It seems clear to me she has a double whammy of a personality disorder as well as autism. NPD, perhaps, or BPD. Narcissistic injury more than explains why she turned on the people who were in her eyes no longer supporting her.

What Erin didn't anticipate was that the only reason the doctor at the hospital realised so early what was going on was because Simon's GP called him the morning after the lunch to say these people were on their way to the emergency room, and he believed they had been deliberately poisoned. Without that, she would probably have got away with it. She went ahead with the lunch even after Simon decided not to come because she probably realised he wasn't going to eat her food again, and the only way she could hurt him was through the people he loved. If she'd known he had already reported her previous poisonings to his doctor, she may have thought twice about that. But as far as she knew, no one was aware of what she'd been doing to him with the rat poison and anti-freeze.

If Simon hadn't (finally!) realised she had been repeatedly trying to kill him for the past year, his GP wouldn't have known to alert the hospital, and his father wouldn't have taken a sample of his vomit in for testing. Simon had told his parents about Erin trying to kill him, but they didn't think she would attack them too, so they decided to accept her lunch invitation because she told them she had cancer and needed support telling their grandchildren about it.

I agree with you about the motive. But I don’t think I follow why the GP’s early action would have been crucial. If 3/4 pensioners who attended the same lunch died of similar gastro issues, then surely an investigation into the cause of their deaths was inevitable?

Apologies I missed some questions. I think she thought either the mushrooms would just make them very unwell (and then she could also say how unwell she was) or they would all die and no one would look any further at it.

No one would believe Woolworths or the Chinese grocery would sell poisonous mushrooms. At this point I think she must panicked and tried to blame someone else.

It's difficult because we are looking through a lens of being reasonable. I think she thought whatever happened she'd be fine. Because she was special.

She’s probably just a bit thick. You would have to think of lots of different moving parts to pull off a seamless murder. Eg:

• not googling about fatal mushrooms and their location from your own computer
• drying them in an oven rather than in your own desiccator (before dumping it)

she’s a vicious woman who probably didn’t care who she injured along the way.

No, she was a wealthy woman herself, wasn't she? She'd given her in laws a lot of money over the years but they wouldn't side with her over wanting financial support from her husband for the children after divorce.

Ive come to this story really late after watching a documentary.
was there anything said about her MH at the trial?

PP makes a really good point about the NPD and autism possibility.

I think it was part of her plan that he would be just one of a group of people who were very sick and died, along with herself being unwell.

there’s been quite a few murder mystery books /tv series where the murderer hid one murder they did have a motive for in a group of deaths they didn’t have any motive for. Perhaps she just thought she was more likely to get away with it if there was a whole load of people dead from an accidental poisoning and she had no reason to kill the majority of them.