From The Australian. Here's what's on the front. I'm Claire Harvey. It's Thursday, June nineteen, twenty twenty five. Ecstasy on prescription. That's the promise from a major health insurer funding access to a psychotherapy program for post traumatic stress disorder that includes the use of the psychedelic MDMA. That story is live now at the Australian dot com dot a U. Aaron Patterson told lies, but that doesn't make her a killer.
That's the core of her defense barrister's argument in the Victorian Supreme Court, where Patterson, a fifty year old mother of two, has pleaded not guilty to murdering three elderly relatives and attempting to murder a fourth. Today the lies of Aaron Patterson and why the defense says they point to her innocentes. Aaron Patterson told lies in the aftermath of a family lunch that left three dead and another gravely ill. She lied about owning a dehydrator. She lied
about foraging for mushrooms. She failed to tell the truth about her plans for the future. But the barrister representing her at trial in the Victorian Supreme Court says those lies and omissions point not to guilt, but to her innocence.
The lies in the days afterwards, everything she does in the days afterwards doesn't change what her intention was at the time of serving the meal. And a person, you might think, who accidentally made four people very unwell with all of the consequences of that, including the custody of her children on the line, that person has a motive to tell a lot of lies.
Those are the words of Colin Mandy sc read for you by a voice actor. Mandy said, despite her lies, Patterson is a person of good character with a strong relationship with her in laws.
She was close with the Patterson family and had been from the very earliest days of her relationship with Simon. Evidence is she always had a good relationship with Gail and Don, a close relationship. They treated her like a daughter.
The barrister pointed to the evidence of Simon Patterson and his brother Matthew, who both said their parents were active in their lives of Aaron Patterson's two kids, and he said Aaron and Simon were on good terms despite several years of separation until December of twenty twenty two, when there was some tension about child support. Payments.
Just pause and think about that, seven years since the official separation, dealing with two children in a respectful way. And if there were the occasional disagreements that you might have seen some evidence of, they were resolved really smoothly.
Mandy said. Any negative text messages Aaron sent about the Pattersons to the friends she'd made online were a natural expression of frustration.
She didn't mean those things. She regrets the language that she used now that the whole world scrutinizing them. She is ashamed of what she had written. She may well have regretted it two minutes after she'd sent it. And we suggest to you that these messages are a distraction from the real evidence in the case, the evidence that is relevant to these charges.
In the days after the launch, when police and the Victorian Department of Health were investigating what had made the Pattersons and the Wilkinsons so sick, Aaron Patterson told police they could find the leftovers in the bin outside her house. She gave them the pin code to the gate so they could get in.
Why tell people the leftovers existed at all? Why put the pastry and the mushrooms minus the meat into bin? As a deliberate ruse to somehow divert attention from the activities, and then having to tell the police where they were because she knew they contained death cap mushrooms.
The barrister also questioned evidence given by survivor Ian Wilkinson. He said the four lunch guests had been served on gray plates, while Patterson ate off a smaller, red colored plate. Mandy said it was more plausible that Aaron had used a combination of colored plates from different sets.
There's no evidence of gray plates. No one says that, apart from Ian, it would make perfect sense for the guests to take the two sets of matching plates for themselves to the table, especially when it wouldn't make any sense to use a different colored plate to identify the unpoisoned parcel when you can make it much clearer and easier by making a mark on the pastry itself.
The prosecution alleged Aaron Patterson used posts made on Our Naturalist to locate death caps growing near her home, but Mandy said computer records showed Patterson visited the relevant pages for less than a minute, so this was.
Not a person carefully studying this information doing research about it. This was not a deep and abiding interest in this subject matter. It was passing attention in exactly the same way as many of us would do on our own devices.
Coming up, What about the motive the Crown hasn't suggested to the jury a motive for Aaron Patterson's alleged murder and attempted murder. Prosecutor Nanette Rodgers did draw the jury's attention, however, to Patterson's distance from her husband Simon's family and her attempt to draw Don and Gail Patterson into her disagreement
with their son about child support. Colin Mandy, acting for Patterson, says, not only is there no motive to kill her children's grandparents and great aunt and uncle, but in fact Aaron Patterson had a motivation to keep them alive.
Our submission is there was no venom in their relationship and no difficulty in the relationship between Aaron and Don and Gail, and if there had been, there were plenty of witnesses who got called in this case by the prosecution who could have been asked to comment on it.
The Crown's case is that Patterson invented a cancer diagnosis to lure the relatives to a lunch when her real motivation was to poison them. The prosecution rubbished Patterson's claim that she didn't have cancer, but she was expecting surgery for a gastric bypass or libersuction. She said she was embarrassed to admit the real reason at the life lunch, where she was asking for their support in managing the kids while she was out of action.
She had a problem with binge eating. She was feeling embarrassed, guilty, depressed.
The jury heard evidence that the clinic she'd booked into, the Enrich Dermatology Clinic, didn't offer gastric bypass, although it did at the time offer liposuction.
Her understanding at the time she booked it was that they offered the full range of weight loss treatment options, including liposuction, gastric bypass, and other surgery. She was mistaken, honestly mistaken.
Patterson told Gail Patterson before the lunch that she had a lump on her elbow, and she told the jury that in the past she'd had unfounded worries about cancers, including of the ovaries and the brain.
It was not so much the lump on her elbow that was important, but the attention the love, the kindness that she was getting from her support network. Aron often thought she had issues with her health that ended up going nowhere that were never confirmed or diagnosed. That's not made up. That's not a lie. It's there for everyone to see in her medical records and the conversations that she had with other people, including Simon. She didn't have anyone else in the world. That's not a lie. That's
the truth. She still had a great relationship with Don and Gaale, that's the truth. And Simon might have been isolating her a bit from the wider Patterson family. Also probably true, and at the very least true that she felt that way about it. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, with the prosecution and a murder trial, criticizing your every misstep, your every lapse in judgment, your every mistake, focusing on every silly thing you did, the mean things you said
in text messages, this seems terrible. It's terrible lies exposed for the whole world. But if you put yourselves back there where Erin was in June of twenty twenty three, and if you look at it, we say with objectivity, not with the benefit of hindsight, it might be more understandable. She's not on trial for lying. This is not a court of moral judgment. You can't, you shouldn't take the leap from this lie about a lump on her elbow to finding her guilty of triple murder.
The trial continues and you can follow our coverage live at the Australian dot com dot au