Erin Patterson will spend the rest of her life in prison after Victoria’s Court of Appeal threw out her challenge to her triple-murder convictions on Friday and, in the same sitting, stripped away her only prospect of release.
The 51-year-old had been serving a life term with a minimum of 33 years for poisoning three of her estranged husband’s relatives with death cap mushrooms at her Leongatha home in 2023. The Director of Public Prosecutions had argued that minimum was too lenient. Justices Peter Kidd, Stephen McLeish and Lesley Taylor agreed, scrapping the non-parole period altogether and declining to set a new one.
The result was a double defeat for Patterson, who has always maintained the poisonings were an accident.
Patterson’s legal team, led by barrister Richard Edney, had argued at a hearing in August that she suffered a substantial miscarriage of justice and deserved a fresh trial. The court worked through seven grounds and rejected each one.
The most unusual complaint concerned where the jury slept. Because accommodation in Gippsland was scarce during the trial, partly due to a national table tennis championship being held nearby, jurors deliberating on the verdict ended up in the same hotel as members of the prosecution team, a key police witness and journalists. The defence said this compromised the integrity of the verdicts. The court was not persuaded, noting the trial judge’s tipstaff had reported no contact between jurors and other guests.
The second ground targeted evidence the defence said should never have reached the jury: phone tower data placing Patterson near locations where death caps had been reported, and sightings logged on a citizen science website. The court granted leave to argue the point but ultimately dismissed it.
The remaining five grounds also failed. Among them were claims that photos of Patterson’s foraging hobby had been wrongly excluded, that Facebook messages in which she complained about her in-laws were prejudicial, that the prosecution had shifted its position on motive during the trial, and that her five days of cross-examination had been oppressive. Prosecutors had countered that the case against her was so strong that guilty verdicts were inevitable.
When Justice Christopher Beale sentenced Patterson last year, he accepted her crimes sat in the worst category of murder. He nonetheless allowed a 33-year minimum, citing the harsh conditions she faces in custody, where she has been held largely in isolation.
The appeal judges took a different view. They found the original sentence failed to capture the gravity of what Patterson did: planning the poisonings over at least three weeks, betraying relatives who trusted her, and keeping quiet while her guests deteriorated and died in hospital. The court described the offending as cold and deliberate, and concluded that fixing any non-parole period would be inappropriate given its seriousness.
The practical effect is that Patterson has no date on which she can ask to be released.
Patterson did not travel to Melbourne for the judgment. She followed the proceedings by video link from the Dame Phyllis Frost Centre, the maximum-security women’s prison west of the city, dressed in prison-issue blue with her hair pulled back. Those watching said she gave almost nothing away as both decisions were read, briefly lowering her eyes but otherwise staring ahead.
The hearing drew a crowded public gallery in the Supreme Court building, and thousands more followed a livestream that began at 10am.
Relatives of the victims, several of whom attended the original trial, were seen smiling as they left. The family has mostly avoided the media throughout the case. Director of Public Prosecutions Brendan Kissane KC offered reporters little beyond confirming that his application had succeeded, while the detective who led the investigation also declined to comment.
On Saturday 29 July 2023, Patterson served individual beef wellingtons to four guests: her former parents-in-law Don and Gail Patterson, both 70; Gail’s sister Heather Wilkinson, 66; and Heather’s husband Ian Wilkinson, a pastor in the nearby town of Korumburra. Her estranged husband Simon had also been invited but withdrew the day before, saying he felt uncomfortable given tensions between them.
Within days, all four guests were on life support with organ failure. Don, Gail and Heather died in early August. Ian survived after weeks in an induced coma and was discharged in late September, but still lives with health problems caused by the poisoning.
Over a nine-week trial in Morwell, jurors heard that Patterson had lured her guests with a false claim that she had cancer. They heard that she served herself on a different coloured plate, and that after leaving hospital she dumped the food dehydrator she used to dry mushrooms at a local tip, where police later found traces of death cap on it. Investigators also found she had been using several phones around the time of the lunch, one of which had been wiped repeatedly before she handed it over.
Patterson gave evidence in her own defence, attributing her lack of serious symptoms to bulimia and saying she had purged after eating. In July last year, the jury unanimously found her guilty of three murders and one attempted murder.
