New suspicions revealed about Australian mushroom triple murderer Erin Patterson

Melbourne, Australia — The estranged husband of a woman convicted of killing three people with a meal laced with deadly mushrooms suspected his wife had been poisoning him more than a year before the fatal meal, an Australian court has heard.

A judge on Friday lifted a gag order on pretrial evidence that triple murderer Erin Patterson, 50, had wanted kept secret while she attempts to overturn her convictions.

The evidence included the suspicions of Simon Patterson that she had previously attempted to kill him.

Simon Patterson testified at a pre-trial hearing that he had declined the lunch invitation out of fear.

“I thought there’d be a risk that she’d poison me if I attended,” the estranged husband told the court months before the trial in testimony that wasn’t presented to jurors.

Simon said while he had stopped eating food prepared by his wife, from whom he had been estranged since 2015, he never thought others would be at risk.

Erin Patterson was convicted by a Victoria state Supreme Court last month of murdering her parents-in-law Don and Gail Patterson, and Gail’s sister Heather Wilkinson at her home in Leongatha with a lunch of beef Wellington pastries that contained toxic death cap mushrooms.

She was also found guilty of attempting to murder Ian Wilkinson, Heather’s husband, who survived the meal but spent weeks in hospital.

Erin Patterson was initially charged with attempting to murder her husband by inviting him to the lunch in July 2023. He had accepted the invitation, then cancelled.

She was also initially charged with three counts of attempting to murder him on three occasions around Victoria between November 2021 and September 2022.

Prosecutors dropped all charges relating to him before her trial began in April.

Simon Patterson testified before the trial that he suspected his wife had deliberately made him seriously ill with dishes including penne bolognese pasta, chicken korma curry and a vegetable curry wrap. No poisons were ever found.

The three alleged poisonings occurred during family camping trips. Simon shared his poisoning suspicions with his doctor, who encouraged him to create a spreadsheet listing what he had eaten around the time he became sick.

In one instance, Simon Patterson testified, he felt ill after eating a mild chicken korma Erin Patterson made on a camping trip in 2022.

“At first I felt hot, especially in my head, and that led to feeling nauseous and then that led to me quite suddenly needing to vomit,” he said.

Simon Patterson eventually fell into a coma before receiving life-saving surgery to remove a section of his bowel, French news agency AFP reported.

Justice Christopher Beale ruled for lawyers representing media who sought to overturn the gag order, ordering that the evidence jurors hadn’t seen be made public.

Erin Patterson’s lawyers wanted all the evidence that wasn’t deemed admissible at her trial to be kept secret until an appeals court decided whether to overturn her convictions.

Among their arguments was that media interest in the case was unprecedented. Defense lawyer Colin Mandy asserted that reporting of the suppressed evidence as well as references to it in books, podcasts and a planned television mini-series would “leave an indelible impression on the minds of potential jurors in the event that there is a retrial.”

A hearing will begin on Aug. 25 to determine what sentence she will get. She faces a potential life sentence for each of the murders and 25 years for attempted murder.

Prosecutor Jane Warren told Beale on Friday “a lot” of victim impact statements would be presented at that two-day sentencing hearing.

Once Erin Patterson is sentenced, she’ll have 28 days to lodge an appeal against the sentence, the convictions, or both.