@GaryandShannon - #TrueCrimeTuesday

of attention away from what's going on in Australia. This is a tiny little town, a tiny a few hours outside of Melbourne, the small town of Morewell is where this trial is taking place. But the crime that they're hearing about took place in the even smaller town of Leongatha in July of twenty twenty three. Aaron Patterson, a fifty year old mom of a couple of kids, is facing three counts of murder murder for serving toxic beef

Wellington to relatives at her house. Now, she was a strange from her husband Simon at the time, and he was invited to the lunch, but he didn't show up, so he and Aaron invited her in laws, Don and Gail Patterson Gail's sister, so this would have been her aunt and uncle in law, Heather Wilkinson, and Ian Wilkinson. Three of those four people died as a result of eating that beef. Wellington, Don and Gail the mother and father in law, and then Gail's sister Heather the aunt

in law, all died. Ian Ate but survived even though he spent several weeks in the hospital. And again the estranged husband, Simon, was supposed to be at the lunch, but he backed out. Now all of this has to do with poisonous mushrooms. Patterson had said that when COVID hit, she started foraging for mushrooms on her own, just kind of a hobby during lockdown of March of twenty twenty, and the question was, well, who knew you had this hobby,

and she said, only my kids, which is weird. Now, we've been told for a very long time don't just take mushrooms out of the wild and cook them and eat them. They can kill you, she says. When she would forage for these mushrooms, she would cut a little bit of one, fry it up with some butter and eat it. She said, they taste good. She said she didn't get sick. She also fed some of these foraged

mushrooms to her kids. She chopped them up very small so they wouldn't pick them out of the dishes that she was making, the curries, the pastas, and the soups, and developed a taste for exotic mushroom varieties. She even joined a mushroom lover's Facebook group. She even bought a dehydrator of food dehydrated to preserve these mushrooms. And when asked by her own attorney, did she accept that that beef Wellington she made in July of twenty three did

include death cap mushrooms? She said, yes, yes, she knows she did it, but it was entirely an accident, she said. So. She told her lawyer most of the mushrooms that she used that day in that beef Wellington came from local supermarkets, and she agreed she might have put them in the same container as some of the wild mushrooms that she had foraged. And there were even others that came from an Asian food store that she didn't necessarily know the

provenance of. Oh there's more, she did say like I said is she admitted that there were death cap mushrooms in there. She said it was completely accidental. But she was asked about a series of expletive filled messages that she had sent about those in laws a few months before they died. She said it was in a Facebook group she described as what she thought was a safe venting space for a group of women. And she's talking smack about her in laws who then six months later

end up completely dead. She said she tried to have her in laws mediate a dispute with their estranged husband, Simon their son about school fields school fees, and she was feeling hurt. She said, she was frustrated, She was a little bit desperate. The couple they separated a long time ago, ten years ago, So this is eight years later that she invites the in laws and the aunt and uncle in law over for this beautiful beef Wellington. This is a captivating trial in a country of Australia.

Everybody everywhere is talking about this. There are at least two documentaries that have been produced the delve into this. Newspapers there in Australia have devoted entire full pages to this trial. Websites have been live blogging everybody's testimony and each morning. Well, we've seen cold cases before, this is one of the oldest ones that we've seen in a long time. After decades of suspicion, police up in San Jose have confirmed they know the identity of the killer

of a high school teacher in San Jose. It was June sixteenth, nineteen seventy eight, just a day after Brandham High School in San Jose recess for the summer. A student found a teacher, Diane Peterson, lying on the floor of the hallway near her classroom, single stab wound to her chest, and the Santa Clara County DA's office said that Peterson was just one of a handful of teachers who were on campus that day. They were cleaning out their classrooms from the summer break for the summer break

when she was killed. And for years, authorities said they had one person in mind. A sixteen year old student at the school was considered a person of interest in the case, but they didn't get any information. The tips they had didn't lead anywhere, so the case remained unsolved

for forty seven years. Now, the reason this kid, the sixteen year old, became a person of interest was he was arrested in an unrelated crime, and detectives noticed that his booking photo looked a lot like the police sketch of the teacher's killer. We just don't see police sketches anymore because of the ubiquity of surveillance cameras that exist all over the place. But the sketch came from a student witness who said that they heard the teacher yelling

for help and saw the killer take off. That same student, however, the one who came up with the original image the sketch, later disclaimed his statement. Police had also been told by a witness that they had seen the sixteen year old carrying a knife that had the words teacher deer written on the side of it when he was questioned, and the sixteen year old said he didn't have a knife

at all, so they were unable to corroborate all of that. Now, prosecutors note that the retracted statement by the fellow student, as well as another one when she confronted him about drug dealing, neither story was corroborated. But they've said now that a relative disclosed that Nicki Nickerson his real name was Harry, that Nicki had admitted to stabbing the teacher

literally minutes after it happened. The Santa Clara County DA Jeff Rosen said Miss Peterson would have been a senior citizen today if she had not crossed paths with this violent teenager, so finally officially solved,