Woman accused of using poison mushrooms to murder in-laws opens up about broken marriage
The woman accused of killing three relatives with a poisoned beef wellington has taken to the stand to give evidence about her broken relationship with her husband and family.
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Erin Patterson, 50, is facing three counts of murder for allegedly feeding her former in-laws a meal laced with death cap mushrooms.
This week, Ms Patterson took to the stand to reveal the rift between her and her husband’s family.
She said she began to have “concerns” her estranged husband, Simon, no longer wanted her to be part of the family, claiming he would not invite her to gatherings.
“Perhaps I wasn’t being invited to so many things,” she said.
“Obviously our relationship was struggling to cause a separation, it was really important to both of us to cooperate about [our son] and make it as easy on him as possible,” she said.
“Primarily what we struggled with over the entire course of our relationship ... it was, we just couldn’t communicate well when we disagreed about something. We could never communicate in a way that would make each of us feel heard and understood.”
The pair met in 2004, a time when Ms Patterson described herself as a “fundamentalist atheist”.
But Simon’s religious beliefs would have an extreme effect on her, leading to a conversion to Christianity.
“I had what can be best described as like a spiritual experience,” she said.
“I had been approaching religion as an intellectual exercise up until that. Does it make sense? Is it rational? But I had what I would call a religious experience there and it quite overwhelmed me.”
She went on to talk about their home in Leongatha.
“I was involved right from the beginning of the design. Simon and I were involved through the whole design process. I drew a design first myself in Microsoft Paint,” she said.
“I saw it as the final house, meaning I wanted it to be a house where the children would grow up, where, when they moved away for university or work, they could come back and stay whenever they want, bring their children, and I’d grow old there. That’s what I hoped.”
Patterson has pleaded not guilty to all counts of murder.
Don and Gail Patterson, her former parents-in-law, both died after eating a meal she had cooked. Gail Patterson's sister, Heather Wilkinson, also died.
The trail has previously heard prosecutors say Ms Patterson deliberately poisoned her guests. Meanwhile, the defence told the jury the meal was a "tragedy, a terrible accident" and she did not mean to hurt anyone.
Police say the fatal meal contained death cap mushrooms.
These sprout freely across wet, warm parts of Australia and can be easily mistaken for edible strains.
Patterson has insisted she used button mushrooms and dried mushrooms bought from a supermarket and an Asian grocery shop and was unaware of their poisonous quality.
In her statement to police, she said she served the email and invited guests to choose their own plates. She took the last serving and ate the meal too.
Said she also ate the meal but has survived, later suffered stomach pains and diarrhoea, claiming her children ate the beef wellington the following day but without the mushrooms.“I now very much regret not answering some questions ... given the nightmare that this process has become,” the statement adds.
“I am now wanting to clear up the record because I have become extremely stressed and overwhelmed by the deaths of my loved ones.“I am hoping this statement might help in some way. I believe if people understood the background more, they would not be so quick to rush to judgement.
“I am now devastated to think that these mushrooms may have contributed to the illness suffered by my loved ones. I really want to repeat that I had absolutely no reason to hurt these people whom I loved.”