From The Australian. Here's what's on the front. I'm Claire Harvey. It's Wednesday, June eighteen, twenty twenty five. The sprawling Middle East crisis hits a new gear today after Donald Trump left the G seven meeting early and missed his meeting with Anthony Albanezi to focus on the Iran Israel war. This story's moving fast and you can read the latest from our correspondents on the ground, Jonnie Bashan and Leam Mendez, plus all the world's best reporting and analysis right now
at The Australian dot Com dot you. The Crown doesn't have a motive for Aaron Patterson's alleged murder of her family members, but the prosecutors say they have proved Aaron Patterson deliberately poisoned them. The defense says that lack of an alleged motive means she's not guilty. Today the closing arguments in the Mushroom trial, brought to you by Voice Actors. If Aaron Patterson deliberately poisoned her elderly relatives, what's the motive? And if it was all a terrible accident, how does
she explain her lies? That's the nub of this week's action in the mushroom trial in the Victorian Supreme Court, sitting in the Latrobe Valley, where this fifty year old mother of two is pleading not guilty to three counts of murder and one of attempted murder. Aaron Patterson doesn't
have to prove anything. The onus is all on the Crown to convince the jury that not only did her actions result in three deaths, Don and Gale Patterson and Heather Wilkinson, and one very serious illness Ian Wilkinson, but that this wasn't just reckless or foolish, it was deliberate. That's the essential component of murder. In a moment, will take you to the defense closing argument by Colin Man. But first, here's how the Crown has set out its closing to the jury in the past two days. Doctor
Nannette Roger's sc is the Crown prosecutor. We've used a voice actor to bring you her words and all the words spoken in court.
At the heart of this case are four calculated deceptions made by the accused. The first deception was the fabricated cancer claim she used as a pretense for the lunch invitation. The second deception was the lethal doses of poison the accused secreted in the home cooked beef Wellington's. The third deception was her attempts to make it seem that she also suffered death cap mushroom poisoning. And fourthly, the fourth deception the sustained cover up she embarked upon to conceal the truth.
The Crown hasn't come up with a motive for Patterson's alleged crimes, and it doesn't have to. The Crown only has to convince the jury beyond reasonable doubt that her actions were premeditated and intentional. If you've been following the trial, you'll remember the message exchanges Erin Patterson had with her mother in law Gail and her husband Simon in the days before the lunch.
Hi, Gail, I had a needle biopsy taken of the lump and I'm returning for an MIRI next week and we'll know more after the results of those two things.
Hi, Erin, how did you get on yesterday with your medical tests?
Love, Don and Gail.
There's a bit to digest with everything that's come out of it all. I might talk more about it with you both when I see you in person. Love Erin the Crown says Patterson was telling bald faced lies.
She didn't think her lunch guests would live to reveal it. Her lie would die with them.
But Ian Wilkinson, Erin's uncle by marriage and a pastor at the local Baptist church, live to tell his tale.
Ian Wilkinson told you after the lunch, Aaron announced she had cancer. She said she was very concerned because she believed it was very serious, life threatening. She was anxious about telling the kids. She was asking our advice about it. Should I tell the kids or not tell the kids about this threat to my life. She spoke about a diagnostic test that showed a spot on the scan that was a tumor. He led a prayer asking for God's blessing and that she'd have the wisdom in how she told the kids.
Rogers said Simon's father, Don, before he died, would reveal to his son.
What the accused had told them. That she'd had some tests on her elbow which had led to the discovery of ovarian cancer. A positive cancer diagnosis is what Don told Simon.
Aaron Patterson said in her time in the witness box, she never gave them a definite diagnosis, only that cancer was a possibility. She said she really did have plans for surgery, but it was a gastric bypass that she was too embarrassed to discuss.
This was an elaborate lie.
Nanett Rogers told the jury Aaron Patterson knowingly concealed enough deathcap mushrooms in the individual beef Wellington's to kill each of her lunch guests.
She made sure she would not suffer the same fate as her lunch guests by making herself an individual beef Wellington that did not contain any death cap mushrooms. The sinister deception was to use a nourishing meal as the vehicle to deliver the deadly poison.
Patterson told a Child Protective Services officer she'd never made beef wellington before, but used a recipe from Nagi Mayhashi's recipe Tin Eats cookbook because she wanted to do something fancy. Rogers said that recipe called for a single beef Wellington meat encased in layers of mushroom paste and pastry to be sliced up, not individual Wellington's, as Patterson made.
Why deviate so significantly from an unfamiliar recipe for a special lunch. The prosecution says this was a deliberate choice. It enabled the accused to control what ingredients went into each individual parcel, and it was the only way to be sure that she herself would not accidentally consume any death cap mushroom.
Rogers suggested Aaron Patterson may have made two batches of mushroom paste, one poisoned, one knot. In her evidence, Patterson said she'd added dried mushrooms from a tubbleware box to improve the flavor.
The recipe book called for seven hundred grams of sliced mushrooms to serve six or eight people, so she had one point seventy five kilos of mushrooms for a dish that called for less than half. Why then would she resort to dried or forage mushrooms she had more than enough.
Pattison said she thought these were dried mushrooms she'd boord from an Asian grosser, but later realized they must have also contained dried death cap mushrooms she'd accidentally foraged. Patterson's evidence was that she had saved the mushrooms because there were two strong for a meal she'd made previously. She said they'd smelt pungent, and the jury heard from expert witness Tom May that dried deathcap mushrooms had a very strong, unpleasant smell.
Why then, would you add mushrooms that smell funny and you're worried might be too overpowering to a special lunch you were preparing for guests. The evidence in this trial shows that the accused knew how to dehydrate and blitz mushrooms into a powder to hide inside food.
That's a reference to a message sent to the friends she made in a true crime Facebook group in which she said she'd been hiding dehydrated mushrooms in her children's food in order to increase their intake of veggies. Rogers then turned to a website called eye Naturalist, where users can post their observations about fungi growing in the wild, including their specific geographic location.
There is no direct evidence as to where the accused sourced deathcap mushrooms. However, what the evidence does demonstrate is that she was aware of a website that could be used to locate deathcap mushrooms, and that she had the opportunity to source those mushrooms at a time proximate or near to the lunch.
Rogers said analysis of the devices seized from Aaron Patterson's home showed she used the map feature on I Naturalist in twenty twenty two to view the location of deathcap mushrooms in Victoria. Rogers said she didn't seek out information about other types of mushrooms.
The only other people living with the accused in the house at the time was her son and her daughter. You will therefore have no trouble, I suggest, being satisfied that it was the accused using the computer to look up death cap mushrooms on I Naturalist.
In April twenty twenty three, a post on Our Naturalist recorded a sighting of death cap mushrooms in the Locke area, about twenty eight k's from Patterson's town of land Gatha. Rogers took the jury to sell tower information that tracked Patterson's phone on that day and photos found on her device.
From all this evidence, you can safely infer that the accused firstly was out at the lock reserve on the twenty eighth of April twenty three. Secondly that she found and collected death cat mushrooms from that reserve. Thirdly that then she went to leem Gatha and bought the dehydrator within two hours of returning from Locke for the very
purpose of dehydrating and preserving those death cap mushrooms. And fourthly, these photos on the Samsung tablet show the very death cap mushroom she collected at the lock Reserve.
Rogers said Patterson was not seriously unwell after the lunch, and she knew that was a problem. She ran the jury through evidence that even though Patterson said she was suffering diarrhea on the Sunday after the lunch, she didn't present at hospital until Monday morning after taking her kids to the school bus, and then Roger says she didn't tell the doctors and nurses what she now says, which is that she'd taken emodium medication on her first visit
to hospital. On the Monday morning, Patterson left, promising to return, even as a doctor called her three times, then called Triple O to express his concern.
There is only one logical or reasonable explanation for why the accused left hospital, and after being told she might have consumed a lethal toxin from death cap mushrooms, she realized that what she had done was going to be uncovered. She fled back to her house to try and work out how she was going to manage the situation and how she might explain why she wasn't sick like the lunch guests. She knew very well that she had not eaten death cap mushrooms.
Rogers said leaving the hospital against medical advice was incriminating conduct. When she did return to the hospital, Rogers says Patterson was resistant to medications the nurses wanted to give her.
Her reluctance to receive medical treatment is inexplicable unless she knew she had not eaten what her lunch guests had done. This resistance to receiving medical treatment is another example of what we say is incriminating conduct.
On August three, when her lunch guests were critically ill in hospital, Aaron Patterson drove to the kunwaraor transfer station, the local tip and dumped her dehydrator.
She wanted to hide the evidence. This is another example of incriminating conduct. The defense may argue that this was part of a wild panic. The accused did this because she was worried she would be falsely accused of deliberately poisoning her lunch guests. You should completely reject that position.
In the witness box, Patterson said that in the hospital, Simon Patterson had asked her if she'd use the dehydrator to poison his parents, and that statement upset and worried her.
Her story about Simon accusing her in the hospital of using the dehydrator and this sending her into a panic is nonsense. Simon Patterson categorically denied to you ever saying such a thing to the accused. She knew it would incriminate her. She knew that she had dehydrated deathcap mushrooms in that appliance, and that she had deliberately done so, and she knew that keeping it was going to be far too risky.
Police were onto this almost immediately because they were analyzing her bank records, but when they interviewed Patterson on August five, she said she didn't own a dehydrator. Rogers said during the police search of her home on August five, Patterson deliberately concealed her primary phone, phone A, and handed them another device, Phone B.
We say is a dummy phone set up deliberately by the accused to trick the police and to conceal the existence and most importantly, the contents of her usual mobile phone. When police took phone b away after the search warrant and tried to analyze it, they found nothing. Why, Because this phone was factory resent multiple times after the lunch, its contents were wiped.
Rogers said, despite Patterson's claim to be a keen recreational mushroom forager, she was the only one who remembered any behavior like this, not her husband, her kids, or any of her online friends.
The suggestion now that these mushrooms may have been accidentally foraged, we suggest, is a very late change to the accused story. You might think that at some point it dawned on her that the Asian grocery story didn't add up, particularly when faced with the evidence about the remnants of the death cat mushrooms having been found in her dehydrator, she had to come up with something new.
Roger said. The breakdown of Erin and Simon Patterson's marriage and the fact Patterson had dragged Donngale Patterson into a disagreement about money was significant.
The evidence shows you might think that the divide between the accused and her in laws was deeper than they ever knew. We say that the accused was leading a duplicitous life. When it came to the Pattersons, she presented one side while expressing contrary beliefs to others. When Don and Gale sent the accused messages about her ongoing financial issues with Simon and meant and praying, she replied with an eye roll emoji. She was mocking them and their
religious beliefs despite attending church with them. If she did love them as she claimed, one would expect her to inquire after their welfare immediately in those circumstances. But what did she do? When Simon told her that Don and Gale were in hospital, she immediately went on to talk about her own symptoms, never asked a question about Don and Gale.
Rogers ended with an appeal to the jury's life experience.
Think about what you would do in this situation. If this was really just a horrible accident. If you were told that the meal you'd cooked and served to your family was thought to have possibly contained death cat mushrooms, what would you do. Would you go into self preservation mode, just worrying about protecting yourself from blame. Would you race away from the hospital and do who knows what for
an hour and a half. Would you be reluctant to receive treatment, Would you take two and a half hours to eventually agree to get your kids to hospital? Would you lie about the source of the ingredients to medical practitioners and the Health Department of officials for days, even though the truth might help those you claim to love. No, that's not what you would do. You would do everything
you could to help the people you love. You would tell the treating medical practitioners every scheric of information that might help to identify the cause of the illness, so that they could get the right treatment to your loved ones, regardless of any risk of blame that might fall on you. If your children had come within cooy of the same meal, you would move mountains to get them to hospital as
quickly as possible. And if you yourself had truly consumed the same meal, you would gladly receive all of the medical treatment you could get your hands on. Aaron Patterson acted the way she did because she knew what she had done.
Coming up. Aaron Patterson's lawyer has he say.
Use your heads, not your hearts.
On Tuesday, Erin Patterson's barrister, Colin Mandarc got his chance to set out in detail exactly why he says Patterson didn't mean to poison for elderly relatives and why she should be acquitted.
You have to consider the issues rationally and logically, without emotion, without prejudice towards anyone, without sympathy towards anyone, and you have to assess the evidence dispassionately with your common sense.
The barrister acknowledged the deaths of Don Gale and Heather Wilkinson and the suffering of Ian Wilkinson was a terrible tragedy. He said he understood that the family members who'd attended court over the course of the trial were still mourning their loss.
These were good, innocent people, and whoever caused their deaths must be held to account. That instinctive design to punish the person responsible, to seek retribution, to think that they must pay for what they've done, but a jury has to fiercely guard against that kind of reason.
Mandy reiterated the burden of proof rested with the crown, not the defense. Basically, Aaron Patterson doesn't have to prove anything.
Members of the jury, your consideration of the evidence in this trial comes down to two simple issues. First, is there a reasonable possibility that death cap mushrooms were put into this meal by accident. Second, is it a reasonable possibility Aaron Patterson did not intend to kill or cause serious injury to her guests. And in the end, after you've considered all of the evidence, if either of those is a reasonable possibility on all of the evidence, then you'd find her not guilty.
Mandy said. Patterson's accounts of when she became unwell and where she purchased them ushrooms were mostly consistent.
She was giving the same account over and over again, but to lots of different people in many different contexts, and in the end, when you analyze the evidence carefully, there's very little meaningful variation in the accounts that she gave.
He also pointed to the fallibility of memory.
People have imperfect and honestly mistaken memories. You may recall playing games like the telephone game, where messages are whispered from one person to another all the way along, and then you compare the message that was relayed at the beginning to the one that came out at the end. It's completely completely different.
Colin Mandy acknowledged that the Crown doesn't have to prove a motive, but he said without one, they can't get to murder.
Without a motive, You're left guessing about the most important element of the offense in this trial, and that's intention.
He said. Pattison didn't have any reason to harm or murder her in laws.
They loved her. She loved them. That's relevant. Don and Gale had never been anything but kind and understanding to Aaron Patterson. There was absolutely no reason at all for her to hurt them in any way at all. Not only is there no motive, there are very good reasons not to harm these people. And if you do embark on this plan to harm them in this way, inevitably, whatever happens, you will lose the only people in the world who were any support to you and your children.
You will lose your children, and you'll lose everything that's important to you.
Mandy said she didn't dump the dehydrated because she was guilty, rather because she was rattled.
If you're planning a murder, what's the one thing you really should plan to dispose of. That's the murder weapon. She would have disposed of it months before and never told anyone she had one. She drives to the tip in her own car, pays for the disposal of the dehydrator with her own bank card, doesn't attempt to disguise those actions in anyone. It can only have been panic, not because she was guilty, but because that's what people might think. It was a deep shock to her how
these four people became so seriously unwell. It was a deep shock because she never intended for it to happen. And if that's a reasonable possibility, then she must be found not guilty, Mandy said.
When police asked if she had any leftovers from the meal, she gave them her gate access code and said they were probably in her bin.
A guilty person, you would think would have already thrown them out. You might think get rid of them, put them in a neighbor's bin or a public bin, bury them in the backyard, or do something else. There'd been two days to do all of that, instead of directing the police where to find the evidence that there were death cat mushrooms in the meal. So the prosecution theories, we say, make no sense. The alternative is far more
sensible and logical. She didn't know they were poisoned. She fed the children of the meat with the mushrooms scraped off she threw the leftovers in the bin. She told the police where to find them because she didn't know they had poison in them. It's straightforward, it's not convoluted, it's non elaborate, it's not tortured. An innocent person would say go grab them, help yourselves. That's what she did say.
Colin Mandy sc will resume his closing submissions on Wednesday. For all the latest from the Victorian Supreme Court in Morewell, and for all the nation's best news, sport, politics and business, visit the Australian dot com dot au