OPINION
Mushroom Lady is back in the news. Australia’s latest gripping possibly-true-crime drama got a fresh boost this week when Erin Patterson was arrested for questioning in Victoria.
Although Patterson was, at the time of writing, not charged with a crime, Australian legal precedent has established that “arrested for questioning” means that an officer must already have the intention to charge them after a period of questioning.
Homicide detectives have arrested Erin Patterson, the woman at the centre of the investigation into the poisonous mushroom meal that resulted in the death of three people in Gippsland in eastern Victoria.
A source with knowledge of the case confirmed Patterson had been arrested and taken to Wonthaggi police station for questioning on Thursday morning.
Investigators are currently searching Patterson’s Leongatha home, where the deadly family lunch took place on July 29.
As readers will no doubt remember, Patterson soon became the object of fascinated suspicion after four people were hospitalised, three later dying, after attending a weekend lunch at Patterson’s home in rural Leongatha. Police believe that mushrooms used in a beef Wellington included poisonous death cap mushrooms.
Police had previously named Patterson – the estranged wife of the Pattersons’ son, Simon – as a suspect because she cooked the meals. Patterson has strenuously denied wrongdoing and said she could not explain how the meal caused the group’s illnesses and deaths.
It should be noticed that Patterson also fell ill with stomach pains and diarrhoea, and was later transferred to Monash Medical Centre in Melbourne and treated with a liver drug. She has claimed that the mushrooms used were a mix of supermarket button mushrooms and mushrooms bought at an undisclosed Asian grocer.
The reason her children did not fall ill, she says, is that they were at the movies. They only ate leftovers the next day and scraped off the mushrooms, because they didn’t like them.
Heather Wilkinson, 66, Gail Patterson, 70, and Don Patterson, 70, all died days later in hospital. Ian Wilkinson, 68, was released from Austin Hospital after seven weeks of treatment. Police said investigators believe the group had eaten death cap mushrooms.
In a statement, Victoria Police said homicide detectives had arrested a woman on Thursday as part of their investigation into the deaths of three people following an incident in Leongatha earlier this year.
“A search warrant has been executed at the Gibson Street address, with assistance from the AFP’s [Australian Federal Police] technology detector dogs,” police said.
“The woman will now be interviewed by police and the investigation remains ongoing.”
The Age
So far, police have recovered Erin Patterson’s food dehydrator, believed to be used to prepare the meal, at the local tip, and searched Patterson’s home.
Police today searched the property with “technology sniffer” dogs on loan from the Australian Federal Police. The technology detector dogs are used to find devices such as mobile phones, SIM cards, USB drives and memory cards.
Update:
Police were later photographed leaving the property with several bags of evidence, including wi-fi equipment, computer hard drives marked “photographs”, and a memory stick.
In late breaking news, Patterson was charged last night with three counts of murder and five counts of attempted murder. Patterson has also been charged with three counts of attempted murder relating to three incidents in 2021 and 2022. These are believed to relate to her former husband, Simon Patterson, who became ill following meals he ate during this period.