Erin Patterson,pictured speaking to media outside her house last week,cooked the beef Wellington.Credit: Marta Pascual Juanola
About 50 parishioners packed Korumburra’s Baptist church on Sunday morning to pray for the town’s mushroom poisoning victims,after days of media attention and speculation about the deaths. In a statement on Sunday evening,the family of Ian Wilkinson said:“We would like to extend our heartfelt gratitude to the Austin Hospital for their unwavering care and support during this challenging time.”
Patterson claimed the media reporting on the incident had been wildly inaccurate and selective,which she said had intentionally but mistakenly portrayed her as a perpetrator,rather than an innocent party.
Patterson’s statement to police provides a detailed explanation of how she obtained the suspected poisonous mushrooms,how the beef Wellington dish was cooked,and what happened to the remnants of the meal,which is now considered evidence.
Patterson has told police she purchased a package of dried mushrooms from an Asian grocery store in Mount Waverley at least three months before the lunch. The package of mushrooms she bought was hand-labelled,she said.
For the meal,the rehydrated mushrooms were mixed with other mushrooms purchased from a supermarket and cooked into the beef Wellington dish.
Contrary to media reporting and information initially provided by homicide investigators,Patterson said her two young children were never at the lunch,but instead went to the movies.
Her son and daughter later ate part of the leftover beef Wellington,but the mushrooms had been scraped off the dish before it was served. Neither child became ill.
But Patterson says she fell ill with intestinal problems on July 31 – two days after eating the lunch herself – and was admitted to the hospital in Leongatha before an ambulance transferred her to a hospital in Melbourne. During her hospital stay,Patterson said she was given a treatment to protect her from liver damage.
Patterson’s lunch guests had been taken to the local hospital on July 30 after what they thought was a bad bout of gastro worsened overnight. They,too,were eventually taken to hospital in Dandenong before being transferred to the Austin Hospital,Victoria’s premier toxicology hospital.
The statement says that when her four guests were hospitalised,Patterson told the Department of Health where she had purchased the dried mushrooms and confirmed that samples recovered from the Asian grocery store in containers with handwritten labels were the same as the type she had purchased months before.
The department declined to comment on Patterson’s version of events as the matter was part of a police investigation.
In the statement,Patterson said the poisoning of her lunch guests and the intense speculation generated by the case had seriously affected her mental health and wellbeing.
WhenThe Agevisited Leongatha last week,residents expressed shock and disbelief at the news of the poisonings.
Most described Patterson,astay-at-home mother,as a reserved person who kept to herself and did not become closely involved in the community.
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Other parents said Patterson wasn’t one to get involved with school chatter and would often avoid talking to other parents when she picked up her children from school.
“I’ve never spoken to anyone who didn’t like her,she was just really reserved,” said an acquaintance of Patterson,who spoke toThe Age anonymously.
“She just didn’t go out of your way to talk to anyone or socialise with anyone or interact with anyone. She was just a very private person that kept to herself.”
Patterson took over the editorship of the local newsletter,The Burra Flyer,from her in-laws in 2018,but stepped down two years later.
Patterson and her estranged husband,Simon,had an acrimonious relationship,and had been living in separate homes for several years before formally separating in 2021.
The acquaintance said Patterson moved several times since the relationship started to deteriorate,after amassing a small portfolio of properties in town.
From a modest single-storey brick home down an unsealed country road to her dream weatherboard home surrounded by grazing paddocks in Leongatha,Patterson bought and sold at least six properties in Gippsland and Melbourne since 2014.
A spokeswoman for the family declined to comment.