From the Australian. Here's what's on the front. I'm Claire Harvey. It's Thursday May fifteen, twenty twenty five. A whistleblower tried to warm the ndis a disability care provider was sending untrained staff out on the job a year before it was investigated for possible fraud. Cocoon SDA says it's done nothing wrong. That's an exclusive live now at the Australian dot com dot a U. A mushroom expert asked to analyze the remains of a fatal beef Wellington lunch kept
the leftovers in her fridge at home. That's part of the expert evidence as the Aaron Patterson murder trial digs into exactly how three people died after a family meal. Aaron Patterson is pleading not guilty. Today. Where Aaron Patterson's defense lawyers are going with detailed evidence about mushrooms, the
infinite variety of mushrooms. That's where the erin Patterson murder trial is going deep with expert evidence about exactly what deadly mushrooms look like and how they might be similar or different in appearance to perfectly innocuous ones.
There are millions of mushrooms in regional Victoria. Who knew. Some are poisonous, some are not poisonous. Some have bumps on their caps, some don't have bumps on their caps. Some are white, some are brown, some are yellow, some are green. There are lots of mushrooms in Victoria.
Ellie Dudley is The Australian's Legal affairs correspondent and she's covering the trial in more Well, in Victoria's Latrobe Valley. The crown case is that Aaron Patterson deliberately cooked deaf cap mushrooms in a beef Wellington she served to four elderly relatives on July twenty nine, twenty twenty three. She's pleaded not guilty, and her defense says it was a
terrible accident. Ellie, I believe you now called for a degree in micology after sitting through several days of this evidence about mushrooms.
Yeah, I think I'm considering a career change. Goodbye journalism, hello micology. But yeah, look, I know all about the buttery collybr the springfield cap, the shaggy parasol honey mushrooms and of course, most importantly, deaf cat mushrooms.
Ellie, We won't know until the defense's closing statement exactly where they're going to take this, but we do know that Aaron Patterson's lead defense counsel, Colin Mandy is c told the jury on day one the deaths were a terrible tragedy. He's a voice actor reading Colin Mandy's words.
The starting point for you is that Aaron Patterson is innocent of this charge. So as you listen to the evidence, you should consider when it comes to that fundamental issue of Eron's intention. Did she have a motive to kill?
So where has the mushroom evidence taken us so far? And what do the defense lawyers want to know from these expert witnesses.
So what defense counsel Sophie Stafford was doing today with mycologist Tom May was showing him photos of death cat mushroom look alikes and asking for him to identify similarities I guess with deathcat mushrooms, So things like them having a smooth top, them having a cup at the bottom of the stem, things like that, and identifying the fact that he couldn't definitively say based off a photo whether these were deathcat mushrooms or if they were other mushrooms entirely.
Tom May gave some evidence about the smell of deathcat mushrooms. What's the significance of that. Well, at some.
Point Aaron Patterson told one of her doctors that the mushrooms had an extremely strong smell, and Tom May today gave evidence that he has dried out deathcat mushrooms before. He said they've got quite a bitter sweet smell when they're first picked, but once they're right out, he said, they've got an extremely unpleasant smell.
We heard from another mycologist, Camille Trong, who told the jury she was asked to analyze some leftovers that had been obtained from Aaron Patterson's home. That was happening as doctors were trying to work out what was wrong with Aaron Patterson's lunch guests, her elderly relatives Don Gale Patterson
and Ian and Heather Wilkinson. It's a real contrast, isn't it, Between the urgency and sort of rising panic of the doctors back at the hospital and Camille Trong's quite painstaking and careful examination of the leftovers she'd been given.
Yeah, the jury is being painted a very interesting image of all these doctors running around various hospitals with four people who are dying in front of them. And then you've got Camille Trong in her home where the beef Wellington leftovers ended up with Tweeze's gloves a microscope sort of painstakingly examining these very finely chopped mushrooms that had been sent to her in an urgent taxi from the
Modash Medical Center. Part of that evidence, which was quite interesting, is that Camille Trong said that she didn't find any deathcat mushrooms in the sample that she had been sent. She said the only mushrooms that she found were mushrooms you'd typically find in a grocery store.
She also said she told authorities when they were asking about what potentially could have poisoned these people, that she didn't think it was likely to have been deathcat mushrooms. Why not She.
Said that it was unlikely because deathcat mushrooms hadn't been
spotted in the area. The other part of that is she was told by Laura Muldoon, who's the emergency registrate at the Monish Medical Center, that she had been told by Aaron Patterson that the mushrooms had been brought from a supermarket and also from a Chinese grocery store, and Camille Trong told the court that it was probably impossible that deathcap mushrooms could have been bought from a store because they are growing the wild and they can't be cultivated.
Dr Tom May, who's alter ego, of course is Funky Tom. He's one of the people who posted these images of deathcap mushrooms on the Eye Naturalist website. When he was in the witness box, Ellie did he seem to indicate that it was easy to tell a deathcat mushroom from any other kind of mushroom.
He wasn't very definitive when he was identifying death cat mushrooms. So he works for effectively the poisons hotline in Victoria, and so when he is sent an image, he isn't definitive when describing it as a deathcat mushroom or not. He says that some of its features can be highly consistent with death cat mushrooms, things like that smooth top, the yellowish cap, the lump on the bottom of the stem.
So he drew comparisons between deathcat mushrooms and deathcat mushroom look alikes, and he said that when looking at an image, he would be hesitant to say that that mushroom is a deathcat mushroom. But that would be a different scenario. Say if he was out in the field, when he was with a bunch of field workers or students, and he saw a deathcat mushroom, he said that he would be much more likely to be definitive in that instance.
Here's what prosecutor Nanette Rogers told the jury in her opening Right at the beginning of this trial, Aaron Patterson's browsing history showed she had looked at a website I Naturalist, where experts and amateurs can share the location of wildlife they've spotted in the bush. And that's where the phone records come in. Patterson's phone was pinging cell towers, Rogers told the court in areas where I Naturalist uses had
earlier reported death caps. In April twenty twenty three, a retired pharmacist named Christine Mackenzie observed deathcap mushrooms on a walk with her husband and grand in the township of Locke, about twenty eight kilometers from Lean Gather, where Patterson lived. We've used a voice actor to bring you Nannett Rodger's words spoken in court.
She collected and disposed of every example of death cap mushrooms that she could find. She did this because she knew how dangerous they were. She posted four photographs of this sighting to the I Naturalist website page using her username Chris mc k, which GEO tagged the discovery location.
Rogers said on twenty eight April, Patterson bought a Sunbeam dehydrator on.
That morning, two and a half hours before she bought the dehydrator. The accused mobile service starter from her phone suggests that she traveled to and remained in the Loch area before returning to Corumborough.
Three weeks later, my cologist Tom May posted on Our Naturalist that he'd found deathcap mushrooms at Nielsen Street outrom pinpointing the location to with it twenty meters of where he found the mushrooms. May use the handle Funky Tom.
The very next day, the accused mobile service darter suggests that she traveled to and remained in the Lock area at around ten am before returning to Lean Gathera Later that same day. Her mobile service stater suggests that having traveled to Locke between nine and ten am, she traveled from Lean gathera to the Outram area at around at eleven am before returning to lian Gatha.
Coming up another mushroom death and why authorities fear more people are at risk, The trial has heard Victorian authorities were worried about people cooking and eating deadly mushrooms after a death last year. In twenty twenty four, according to Aaron Patterson's defense counsel Sophie Stafford, sc a woman died after consuming Amanita Falloides death cap mushrooms she found in her garden. So this is a.
Story about a woman who in April twenty twenty four found mushrooms in the front of her home and she cooked them into a meal that she served to her and her son.
Now when they ate them.
In April twenty twenty four, they went to bed that night completely fine, woke up the next morning no issues. Off they went. A month or so later, she found mushrooms again and again showed them to her son, again made them into a meal that both she and her son ate, but this time at about two am that night, she woke up unwell. She was going to the bathroom. Her son came and checked on her, and she was very unwell. He fell unwell as well at about six am.
They both ended up in hospital the next day. She died and he survived. And it was later found by the coroner that it was due to death capt mushroom poisoning that both of these people fell ill, and how the mother ended up eventually dying.
Sophie Staffords see who is Aaron Patterson's barrister, told the court that both those mushrooms, the innocuous ones that didn't make the mother and son sick, and then the ones that apparently killed the mother, were growing in the same
spot in that front yard. Now, the mycologist, doctor May, said he'd been asked by the Victorian Department of Health to advise on how to respond to coronial recommendations that arose from that case, including that there should be more public health messaging about the dangers of consuming wild mushrooms. Did we hear whether that had happened, that there had been more public health messaging.
Doctor May indicated that the Victorian Department of Health was very concerned about what to do after this mother died after eating wild mushrooms that she had found on her property. And other evidence that doctor May has given is that He advises on people effectively undergoing an apprenticeship before they forage for wild mushrooms, that they get proper training under their belt before they undertake that sort of a task. Because there appears to be a rise in people foraging
for wild mushrooms in Victoria. So look with this rising popularity of foraging, which he says is partly to do with the COVID nineteen pandemic, clearly there is more that has been done or more that is being done about people looking for wild mushrooms in this state.
Ellie Dudley is The Australian's Legal affairs reporter. You can follow her live coverage and read our colleague John Ferguson's analysis and reporting every day at The Australian dot com dot au