MELBOURNE (The Thursday Times) — An Australian appeals court on Friday rejected Erin Patterson’s bid to overturn her convictions for the death cap mushroom murders and ruled that she should spend the rest of her life in prison with no chance of parole.
A three-judge panel of Victoria’s Court of Appeal dismissed all of her grounds of appeal and scrapped the 33-year non-parole period she was given at sentencing, one of the longest ever imposed on a woman in Australia.
“This offending was extraordinarily cold and calculated, and stands to be denounced in the strongest terms,” Justice Stephen McLeish told the court in Melbourne on behalf of the panel, adding that the case involved “such shocking criminality” that no non-parole period should be fixed.
The beef Wellington lunch
Patterson was convicted last year of murdering her estranged husband’s parents, Don and Gail Patterson, and Gail’s sister Heather Wilkinson by serving them beef Wellington laced with death cap mushrooms at her home in Leongatha, Victoria, in July 2023. She was also convicted of the attempted murder of Heather’s husband, Ian Wilkinson, who survived the meal.
The judges pointed to an “elaborate series of deceptions”, including a false claim that she had cancer, which she used to gather her guests and explain why her two children were not at the lunch. Patterson has always maintained the deaths were a terrible accident.
Her lawyers had argued that some evidence should have been excluded, that her cross-examination was unfair and that housing the jury in the same hotel as other parties had compromised the trial. The court found none of the grounds sufficient.
Patterson becomes only the second woman in Australia to be jailed for life without the possibility of parole, after Katherine Knight in New South Wales in 2001. Her last remaining option is an appeal to the High Court of Australia.
