July 27, 2025
A Recipe for Murder: New Book on Australia's Most Chilling Crime in a Generation
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Duncan McNabb, one of Australia's most eminent true crime writers, joins us to discuss his upcoming book on the Erin Patterson mushroom poisoning case that gripped the world. • The case attracted global media attention due to its unusual nature – poisoning by Beef Wellington in rural Australia • Duncan explains how his "spidey senses" as a former detective were immediately alerted by Patterson's behaviour • The two contrasting faces of Erin Patterson – quiet community member versus her spicy...
Duncan McNabb, one of Australia's most eminent true crime writers, joins us to discuss his upcoming book on the Erin Patterson mushroom poisoning case that gripped the world.
• The case attracted global media attention due to its unusual nature – poisoning by Beef Wellington in rural Australia
• Duncan explains how his "spidey senses" as a former detective were immediately alerted by Patterson's behaviour
• The two contrasting faces of Erin Patterson – quiet community member versus her spicy online personality
• Insights into the jury's definitive guilty verdict after an 11-week trial in Morwell
• Discussion of Patterson's possible motives, with Duncan noting that sometimes killers don't have complex reasons
• The logistics and challenges of conducting a major criminal trial in a small regional town
• The impact on the victims' families, especially the dignified presence of survivor Ian Wilkinson
• Details about Duncan's upcoming book "Recipe for Murder" releasing in mid-October 2024
Pre-order "Recipe for Murder" by Duncan McNabb, available through Hachette publishing from mid-October.
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Erin Patterson Mushrooms
Here it is in summary.
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Hello and welcome to the Mushroom Murder Trial Podcast.
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My name is Lisa and we have a big surprise for you.
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Today I have Duncan McNabb, who is one of the country's most eminent true crime writers, and he's doing a book on Erin Patterson.
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Hello, duncan, thank you so much.
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Good afternoon, Lisa, and thanks for the invite.
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We are very happy to have you here today, and I wanted to start off by asking you when did you first hear about the Erin Patterson case?
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I first saw some bizarre headlines in Melbourne and they were really strange, probably literally a couple of days after the first week of August where we started hearing about this strange, possibly mass poisoning event in a town called leon gatha, which I have to admit sorry, leon gatha, I'd never heard of it and I hadn't heard of either, which is about what 13, 14 clicks up the road.
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Neither town I'd heard of I knew about more well, it's a railgun in east gibsland, but never these two places.
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So I had a quick look up on dr google and I thought this is strange.
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You don't hear about these group poisonings in places like Australia.
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So it hooked me day one just to work out why.
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Then you hear the police are involved, as they should be in these cases.
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So I started watching the bits and pieces of the investigation unfold quite astounding stuff.
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And what struck me very early on was how much of the world media were also looking at it.
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And it might be be because I suppose the location one thing rural Australia towns we hadn't heard of here but also they were poisoned because of a beef wellington, and that's one of those bizarre hooks you get in crime.
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You think poisoned by a beef wellington.
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How the hell did that happen?
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My first thought goes back to Gordon Ramsay and his signature dish.
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He must be Rory Edmury.
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Yes, gordon Ramsay, he might be doing him any harm either.
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It's bizarre.
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I read a piece in I think it was Australian shortly afterwards, october, november, whatever it was 2023, which indicated there had been an upswing in Beef Wellington purchases.
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So the go figure.
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And that's how I got hooked on the case.
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Then I started looking at it and thinking to myself this has a very, very, very nasty smell about it.
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So accident, hmm, deliberate.
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And then I saw that bizarre doorstop interview with Erin Patterson and that made my fairly cynical mind race a bit harder.
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And that was the accident.
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She was doorstop, getting out of a car in Gibson Street, leongartha.
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I stepped out of the car and decided to talk to the journalist, and that was in itself quite unusual, followed, as I recall, by her statement, which was leaked to the ABC, as I recall.
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So you start to scratch your head.
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You know, I've been around a lot of years, I've investigated murders myself, I've defended quite a few people in another life as well and, god knows, I've written about them and make TV about them.
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So you start thinking to yourself this has a particularly interesting flavor to it.
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So let's watch it and see where it ends up.
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So your spidey senses were up, considering you'd been a former detective and been around a lot of high-profile cases.
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Yeah, it was ticking a lot of boxes.
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I'm starting to think, well, is it a horrible accident?
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That bottom line?
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There's four people, almost three people died.
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One person almost died and Erin Patterson, the chef who was dishing up the beef wellingtons, didn't have any demonstrable problems.
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She said she had a few issues, but certainly nothing of the perilous condition that before people found themselves in.
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So yeah, and you know, in the back of my mind, whenever you look at an incident like this and coppers particularly have this habit you look at it and think well, the most when you look at murder, for example, it's always someone close to you, or invariably someone close to you.
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So the stats suggest something or other.
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So, yeah, every sense is thinking this.
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Just, it doesn't work.
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So I was bloody intrigued, as was everybody else.
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I have to say this is the most extraordinarily high-profile case in, oh God, in a generation.
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Probably that's in Slendy Chamberlain, maybe.
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Yeah, it's been a big one.
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You know it grabbed global attention.
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I'm on the road a lot and I'm seeing it.
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Case mentions in the UK.
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I was in Canada at Christmas 2023 talking to my butcher and he was talking about it.
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Wow, it's troubled the world.
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Yeah, it's Butcher in Toronto, go figure.
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So the people who listen to this podcast, primarily Australia, but then the UK and the US, and I actually think Beef Wellington makes it a very English story.
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Yeah, it does, and it's in part, I find, a lot with crime.
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This may sound a bit bizarre, but a story with a picture that you can get in your mind always tends to hook people harder.
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So in Sydney, for example, we've got the disappearance of Juanita Nielsen, murdered 50 years ago.
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It's a case you'll never think.
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Once you see Juanita's hairstyle, you can't forget it.
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It's a simple visual cue and in the case of this we've got the Beef Wellington and you just can't dislodge that from your mind.
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It's just one of these strange, quirky things that hooks our memories.
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Do you think she had a motive?
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That's the burning question for everyone, I think, and not an ingredient, as we know, of the crime to prove it.
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But I actually don't know Some people, and this is a bizarre thing about crime.
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We'd like to think that everyone has a reason.
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They do something, particularly something as horrific as trying to murder four people, but sometimes it's just something they do, it's an inconvenience or something they look upon murder.
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I think I once made a comment which is I don't don't think it's too unreasonable that roger rogers then probably murdered or was involved in the murder up to 12 people or so.
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That roger for roger killing somebody was had a little bit more consideration than how do you want your steak cooked?
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It just doesn't interest them.
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For us it's horrific, but for people people like Erin Patterson it's just.
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You know there was a reason for it, but it's not this dark motive of just being brewing away for a while, it's just a decision she's made.
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I don't know.
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We may find out a little bit more when sentencing comes up, because it is highly likely there'll be a lot of psychiatric reports added or psychologist reports and we might get some more insight there.
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But at the present moment I just don't know and I can't see a reason for it.
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We know that in the Erin Patterson case that she and her husband had an amicable relationship, even though estranged.
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Now that soured in December 2022 or November December 2022.
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But you know, a soured domestic relationship and disputes over child support doesn't really come close to why you would then try to kill four people.
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Yes, that is very true.
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I think it's revenge.
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Yeah, it's quite possible she might be feeling disenfranchised.
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The family are not as warm as they were.
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Blah, blah, blah.
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And in her mind and this is where I go back to the Rogerson analogy well, it's you know, bugger them Because the jury had now come back and they're satisfied beyond a reasonable doubt that on the 29th of July, when she served four people beef wellingtons, that she intended to kill them.
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That's what the jury have found.
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That's what the jury have found.
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That's the charge.
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I can't even come to grips with how a person could think that, but there's a lot of people who argue about the rest of you.
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Yeah, but again, it didn't happen accidentally.
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The premise of her defense case was just a horrible accident, but that didn't convince the jury and in part that's probably because of the litany of lies she told and she was caught out.
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So for someone who's planned the case and she has done quite a bit of planning she's made some fundamental blunders in that planning as well and that's where she's come unstuck.
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Okay then, so do you.
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Sorry, I'm sorry, duncan, I just was going to say do you think her testifying helped or made it worse?
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Or she had no choice, she had to get up there?
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The choice is ultimately hers.
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There is and I've chatted to a couple of lawyer mates who tell me that it is becoming not common but it is becoming more frequent that the accused person will hop in the witness box and tell their story and his view is it's because the jurors actually like to see them assess them for themselves and hear from them, which I think that's compelling.
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In Erin's case she had a choice, but I suppose her not hopping into the witness box meant the jury would always be scratching their head because the story would be very incomplete.
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And I think the viewers of Erin thought and Erin was to give a point to make here I thought Erin was a very competent witness.
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She didn't get upset, she was very measured, she tried what was appropriate, all that sort of stuff.
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It was a very measured performance but she was a very good witness.
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The problem was she had to explain a whole shitload of lies and that was where the problem came in.
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But as a witness and I've okay, because to me I want to know why she wore the white pants when she had the bush poo.
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That's the one question that was never answered you are not the only one.
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I've had a lot of friends of mine of saying you know she was wearing the white pants.
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It's a bloody good observational point if, if you're in now, you've got some issues like I'll sit in the car because like sitting on the, I think, was one of her reasons as well.
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Another one it doesn't make sense.
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Well, the night that she first became ill, early in the evening, she had options.
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She could have got Simon to take the kids home.
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There are plenty of options.
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But you're right, this is where her story starts to fall apart, because when you test her story, when you look at it objectively, her story just doesn't really work.
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And that's where she, for someone as clever as she is and she's very bright and someone who'd done so much planning and someone who'd observed through her fascination for true crime, she hadn't learned the basics.
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She might have actually been a little bit better if she'd said, yeah, it was a horrible accident from the outset, but no, instead we had this tissue of wires and the cops.
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And the job the cops do and they did this from day one is they give her the option to tell her story and they know it's wrong.
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So the story of the de the dehydrator is a perfect example.
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When she sat down that afternoon and said I don't know anything about a dehydrator and passed off the manual they'd found as something from the past, she didn't know that the cops actually had her by that stage.
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They knew she was lying to her.
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So they gave her a shovel and said here off you go.
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And that's how cops work.
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So while she's very clever, I don't think she was had quite come to grips with how how to construct her case as solidly as she should have.
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She made lots of mistakes but your book?
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it is actually about more than the crime.
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It's about the community, isn't it?
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yeah, I think you've got a.
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There are a lot of characters.
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You do a crime story.
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There are a lot of characters.
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You just do the a to b thing.
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But I think you know you've got to look at erin patterson.
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You've got to look at her environment, her history, the town she was living in, or the town she was living in because very early on everyone was focusing on leon gather and that's certainly where people were poisoned, but every all the luncheon guests were from very different town.
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Yeah, Yep, and then we had this.
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The other thing that's always curious is she wanted to be tried by her locals and she was tried in Morwell, which is not really local.
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No, it's the closest court, big enough, sure, but it's a very different demographic.
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And you know, you've been to the down-and-out part of the world.
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You walk through Coromant and Leon Gafford, very different to poor, old, hardworking Morwell, which I think is a town that I actually quite like Morwell, friendly people but, you know, really hardworking, in a place that's had a lot of kicks in the guts over the years, whereas the other two places are a little bit more upmarket.
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You know, wineries are close to town and all that sort of jazz and dairy towns.
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Yeah, dairy towns are very, quite affluent.
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You just look at the prices in the pub for a stoke make your eyes water.
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But whereas Morwell is just a really salt-of-the-earth hard-working town, you know, we dig coal, we generate electricity, so it's not the pretty rolling countryside that you have when you go to, for example, Coram Borough, which is quite a beautiful part of the world, Brands backing new wineries popping up everywhere and weekend tourists and quite a few blokes walking around the main street with man buns, which is something you didn't always find in regional Australia.
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So it's a very different town.
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So they're part of the story.
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And I suppose don't forget either that she didn't grow up out there.
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She's not a country girl.
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She grew up in Melbourne's nice leafy southeastern suburbs.
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That's where she lived all her childhood, that's where she grew up and she in fact had a villa home I think they called it in Melbourne, sort of like a little townhouse type thing which she only sold, I think from memory, in December of last year or the year before last, I'm sorry.
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So she'd owned that for a while as well.
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She bought it with part of her inheritances as a sort of city pad.
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So she's not a country girl.
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And that was the alleged site of where she originally had the Tupperware and the stinky mushrooms.
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According to Erin, was it Mount Waverley or Glen Waverley?
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Yeah, I always get the two horribly confused and I do get lost driving around there a few times.
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Yes, Mount Waverley, Glen Waverley they're not terribly far apart, and Clayton all pretty close to where she grew up too, by the way.
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But yeah, that's where she first experimented with a pasta dish, back allegedly in April 2023, and didn't like the smell of them, so she put them in the tuckware container and took it back to Leon Gatha with her, Fair enough, and that's where a lot of the investigation, a lot of money's been spent on investigating some of the lies she told.
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I think for men, I think they visited about 14 separate Asian grocers, he said off the top of his head, in that local area to see if they could find something.
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It was just all fake.
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Yeah, and they probably had a team of Department of Health people behind that as well, and then you had all the people in the hospital trying to find out what the cause was.
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Yeah, it's logistics involved in making sure that this wasn't a public health risk Day one.
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You know what's happened Four people are desperately ill.
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Obviously it's mushroom poison.
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I know that from fairly early on.
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They've got a whole team of people, they've got council people and they've got all the public health officials, as you said, all out there desperately trying to make sure as fast as possible that there isn't a greater public risk.
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Massive amount of money and time spent are completely wasted.
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So yeah, it's an interesting pun to this case.
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The officials reacted quickly and very diligently to eliminate that risk.
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I may have this wrong.
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I think they kicked off pretty much day one and they delivered their report, I think on the 11th of August, saying that there is no public health risk.
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But that's a truckload of time, money and energy and a lot of people working long hours because they just want to make sure that they can get on top of a problem if there is one.
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But, as we found in this case, there wasn't a problem at all.
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And yeah, she said initially she got them from Woolworths.
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Yeah, you can see.
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When you look through the evidence you can see how she's decided her story very early on and just keeps repeating and repeating and repeating.
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So by the time the cops get around to interview, that story is looking a bit wobbly.
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And there's the notion that death cap mushrooms, for example, might have grown commercially somewhere.
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You've got to eliminate that horrible possibility.
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You do.
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Now I want to ask your opinion on this.
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When Erin left hospital after five minutes, what do you think she was doing for that two hours or so?
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I've had a look through the evidence and whilst there is some cell tower evidence I think in the trial because there's a lot of very technical evidence it's hard to pin exactly what she was doing.
00:16:16.278 --> 00:16:17.613
I just don't know at this point.
00:16:17.613 --> 00:16:20.201
But I think we may get a bit more clarity later on.
00:16:20.201 --> 00:16:27.053
I think the cell tower evidence from memory at one stage connected to Outram, which is about 15 k's away.
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I suppose I might have that wrong from where I'm gathering, but it's not completely clear that she had to have been there for it to happen.
00:16:34.134 --> 00:16:40.479
But it's not completely clear that she had to have been there for it to happen, since this cell tire evidence is incredibly complicated and it's not definitive, unfortunately.
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So I don't know.
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She said she had a bit to do, you know, get to look after the dogs, make sure her kids were looked after, all that sort of stuff.
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So I don't know.
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Like in a lot of these cases, the only person we know, the only person who actually has the story and knows it inside out, is Erin, and like with a lot of people charged and convicted of these horrible crimes, they get to write their own version of the story because there's no one else left to tell it.
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Well, she thought so.
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I'd love to know.
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Yes, well, except Ian, he's so dignified in the fact that he survived.
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She was not betting on that.
00:17:17.492 --> 00:17:18.457
No, you just can't.
00:17:18.457 --> 00:17:20.458
I've looked at some of those You'd no doubt have.
00:17:20.458 --> 00:17:28.840
You look at some of the literature on these things and there are a lot of variables that come into play for the experts you know dosage, age or condition, that sort of stuff.
00:17:28.840 --> 00:17:30.596
So much coming into it.
00:17:30.596 --> 00:17:39.760
I just think on the day she put those beef wellingtons down she intended to kill everybody, and the fact that Ian was just fortunate to survive.
00:17:39.760 --> 00:17:43.061
Nothing you could anticipate.
00:17:44.150 --> 00:17:49.298
They were so unwell, those poor people, and it was a terrible, terrible death.
00:17:49.298 --> 00:17:52.619
It's just something you couldn't have ever anticipated.
00:17:53.250 --> 00:18:10.517
No, and what strikes me with this case is that the jury had found that she knew what she was doing and she intended to do it, and she sat there, fed them the stuff, knowing full well what the outcome will be If they survive and they don't survive.
00:18:10.517 --> 00:18:14.757
It is a slow and lingering death and it is utterly horrible.
00:18:14.757 --> 00:18:22.863
And there's plenty of literature and there are also plenty of other Australian and overseas cases that I've read about that are in the papers about the effect.
00:18:22.863 --> 00:18:27.037
I mean, there's a chap back in Tampa, I think back in the Christmas of 2012,.
00:18:27.037 --> 00:18:31.285
A forage served it up to his mates for a special dinner.
00:18:31.285 --> 00:18:36.317
He was a Chinese chef in one of the clubs down there and he and one of his mates died.
00:18:38.039 --> 00:18:38.888
Oh, you can't predict it.
00:18:38.888 --> 00:18:43.662
There was a case last year sorry, 2024 in Melbourne.
00:18:43.662 --> 00:18:53.334
An elderly woman, an elderly Italian woman, had been foraging mushrooms in her frat yard for a while and she'd eaten a couple and thought they were okay, so it's fine, and then she found a few more.
00:18:53.334 --> 00:18:56.512
So she knocks up dinner for she and her son who was living with her.
00:18:56.512 --> 00:18:59.991
She died and he survived, and that's last year.
00:18:59.991 --> 00:19:10.845
So there was this, yeah, so there's plenty of evidence around and you have a look at Google to see what news reports of these things, and there are plenty of them around.
00:19:10.845 --> 00:19:13.615
So there are no great surprises.
00:19:13.615 --> 00:19:15.701
No, we never get mushroom.
00:19:16.711 --> 00:19:18.798
Okay, so what were you surprised by?
00:19:19.670 --> 00:19:21.590
Nothing was actually quite well.
00:19:21.590 --> 00:19:25.693
The thing that always surprises me is the two faces of Erin, or maybe more than two, the two faces of Erin, or maybe more than two.
00:19:25.693 --> 00:19:30.758
And what fascinates me is the public facade that she had.
00:19:30.758 --> 00:19:41.484
You know the caring mother, very quiet, just goes about her business, not intrusive and then we see her online life with some of the Facebook messages, which are quite spicy, I have to say.
00:19:41.484 --> 00:19:48.869
So there are obviously two different Erin Pattersons operating Now.
00:19:48.869 --> 00:19:49.413
There have been about her.
00:19:49.432 --> 00:19:52.226
Former people that she was working with when she was an air traffic controller are now coming forward with stories.
00:19:52.226 --> 00:19:55.557
Some of those might be legit, some of those might be a bit stirred up.
00:19:55.557 --> 00:19:58.298
A lot of people will have Erin's stories.
00:19:58.298 --> 00:20:05.150
Some of them may not be as accurate as they could be, but we're definitely seeing a person, two different people, in Erin Patterson.
00:20:05.150 --> 00:20:13.377
The other thing that always gets me about this is her comments about her parents, and I just find that really strange.
00:20:13.377 --> 00:20:34.560
It's nothing that's really shocked me about this story, aside from the horrible crime, but as I go through it, there's nothing really startling about it apart from the sheer awominess of their life and this extraordinary thing that happened, which is just so damaging, so brutal, so devastating.
00:20:34.560 --> 00:20:41.498
So it's that juxtaposition I find really just horrific for the family.
00:20:41.498 --> 00:20:43.222
It's just like you can't get past it.
00:20:43.910 --> 00:20:48.537
Oh yeah, Well, hopefully they'll have a little bit of peace from the conviction.
00:20:49.181 --> 00:20:53.559
Yeah, I think the conviction I mean and I don't know, I can't.
00:20:53.559 --> 00:20:57.096
I don't know what they were thinking, but I remember I was down in Morwell on the.
00:20:57.096 --> 00:21:06.347
I was down there a couple of times, down there day one, a couple of days, and I went back down on the day before the jury came back.
00:21:06.347 --> 00:21:07.914
And I'm thinking it must it's.
00:21:07.914 --> 00:21:09.722
The jury will be out six days.
00:21:09.722 --> 00:21:12.112
It's a trial that was supposed to run four to six weeks.
00:21:12.112 --> 00:21:13.316
It's gone just on the 11th.
00:21:14.137 --> 00:21:20.974
The stress on everyone involved is massive, but more so on that poor family that has to endure it day in, day out.
00:21:20.974 --> 00:21:30.215
And the result when you get to the Monday morning and I think you and I spoke about this a while ago I'm scratching my head, thinking the judge has got to possibly bring them out just to see how they're going.
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