Erin Patterson accepts there should have been dying cap mushrooms inside a lunch she cooked for her former husband’s household, after admitting to foraging throughout proof.
“By way of the meal you cooked for the lunch, which is the topic of this trial, do you settle for there should have been dying cap mushrooms in that meal?” defence barrister Colin Mandy SC requested Patterson as we speak.
“Sure I do,” she replied, shaking her head.
The 50-year-old, charged with three counts of homicide and one tried homicide, has accomplished a second day of proof on the court docket in Morwell, Victoria’s Gippsland area.
She wore a navy and white noticed high, black sandals and black pants, and spoke to a full court docket room about her expertise in wild mushroom foraging.
Patterson has pleaded not responsible to all expenses and claims the poisonings weren’t deliberate, and the July 2023 lunch was a horrible accident.
The meal she served at her residence led to the deaths of Don and Gail Patterson, 70, and Gail’s sister Heather Wilkinson, 66, whose husband Ian was the only real surviving visitor.
Wilkinson sat together with his arms crossed as he watched Patterson give proof as we speak about what went into the lunch.
Patterson instructed a jury of 14 she had begun wild mushroom selecting when the COVID-19 pandemic threw Victorians into lockdown in 2020.
She had all the time loved consuming mushrooms as a result of “they style good they usually’re very wholesome”, she mentioned.
However she mentioned it was arduous to determine “what a mushroom is” when she started selecting them, and he or she had used Fb teams for mushroom lovers to determine differing kinds.
“So far as I might see, there have been ones that had been probably edible,” Patterson mentioned, concerning the mushrooms on her Korumburra property.
Requested by her barrister about consuming wild mushrooms, she mentioned it was a course of over a number of months and he or she bought to some extent the place she “was assured about what I believed they had been”.
“I reduce a bit off one of many mushrooms, fried it up with some butter, ate it after which noticed what occurred,” Patterson mentioned.
“They tasted good and I did not get sick.”
She and her youngsters ate the wild mushrooms she picked and Patterson mentioned she “chopped them up very, very small”.
Mandy later requested particularly about the place she bought the mushrooms that had been contained in the lunch.
She mentioned the “overwhelming majority” got here from Woolworths and a few had been from “the grocery store in Melbourne”.
Patterson mentioned she purchased a dehydrator as a result of she “appreciated consuming wild mushrooms however it’s a really small season”.
Requested the place she had foraged for wild mushrooms, Patterson listed the Botanic Gardens in Korumburra, her Leongatha and Korumburra properties and a rail path.
“I took them residence, cleaned them, sliced them, if I did not assume I wished to make use of them that day I dried them and put them within the pantry, simply in a Tupperware container on one of many cabinets,” she mentioned.
Patterson mentioned she had additionally bought mushrooms from an Asian grocer in Mount Waverley in April 2023 and he or she was going to make use of them the day she purchased them however “they had been very pungent”.
She mentioned she would additionally put Woolworths mushrooms she had dehydrated right into a container in her pantry.
Requested whether or not she put the wild mushrooms in a container with different dried mushrooms, Patterson replied: “Sure I did.”
Earlier, Patterson grabbed a tissue and wiped her eyes as she apologised for sending messages to her on-line pals about her estranged husband’s household.
A type of messages, which Patterson despatched in December 2022, mentioned “this household, I swear to f—ing god”.
“I want I would by no means mentioned it, I really feel ashamed for saying that and I want the household didn’t have to listen to that I mentioned that. They did not deserve it,” she mentioned.
Patterson will return to the witness field on Wednesday because the trial continues.
