Australian mushroom murderer loses appeal to overturn convictions and gets harsher sentence
Erin Patterson argued her trial was unfair due to seven grounds but three appeal judges dismissed them all.
Australian mushroom murderer loses appeal to overturn convictions and receives tougher sentence
Erin Patterson will spend the rest of her life in prison after a court ruled she will not be eligible for parole in 2056.
Australia’s mushroom killer has failed in her bid to overturn her murder convictions on appeal, with the court also deciding that she should never be freed from prison.
Erin Patterson, 51, was convicted of murdering three relatives and trying to kill another after serving them a poisonous mushroom-laced meal in 2023. Her life sentence carried a non-parole period of 33 years.
At Victoria’s Court of Appeal on Friday, three judges rejected her challenge to the convictions and sided with prosecutors that the sentence was too lenient because it left open the possibility of release.
Patterson’s crimes were “extraordinarily cold and calculated” and had to be “denounced in the strongest terms,” they said.
“We have concluded that the case involved such shocking criminality that it is inappropriate to fix a non-parole period,” Justice Peter Kidd told the court on the panel’s behalf.
Following a high-profile trial last year, a jury found Patterson guilty of murdering her in-laws, Don and Gail Patterson, and Gail’s sister Heather Wilkinson by serving them individual portions of beef Wellington containing death cap mushrooms.
Patterson was also found guilty of attempting to murder Heather’s husband Ian Wilkinson, a local pastor, who also ate the toxic lunch at Patterson’s home in rural Victoria.
He survived after weeks in hospital and continues to suffer health problems from the poisoning.
Patterson’s estranged husband, Simon Patterson, had been due to attend the lunch but pulled out at the last minute, partly because he believed his wife had repeatedly tried to poison him over several years.
Patterson was sentenced last September, with the trial judge setting a non-parole period of 33 years because of the “harsh prison conditions” she was likely to face.
She quickly appealed her convictions, and in August her legal team put forward seven grounds for appeal.
They argued that a hotel booking error, which placed the jury in the same accommodation as the prosecution, a key police witness and the media, was “catastrophic” and damaged the fairness of her trial.
They also said some evidence shown to the jury was irrelevant and prejudicial, including cell tower data suggesting Patterson had visited areas where death cap mushrooms could be found and Facebook posts in which she complained about her in-laws.
The defence further argued that the judge wrongly excluded other evidence that would have shown the mother-of-two’s long-standing hobby of foraging for mushrooms.
They also said the prosecution’s five-day cross-examination of Patterson was “unfair and oppressive,” and that the Crown had been inconsistent in its claims about motive.
On Friday, the appeal judges rejected all seven grounds.
Patterson has 28 days to decide whether she will seek to persuade the High Court of Australia to hear another appeal in the case.