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The Mushroom Cook Aaron Patterson was back in the news last week as her pre sentencing hearing began.

Three people have now died and another is fighting for life after being poisoned by wild mushrooms at a lunch with friends in Gippsland.

She's facing a long lagging after being convicted of three counts of murder and one of attempted murder over that deadly lunch at her home and len gather.

In twenty twenty three.

Aaron Patterson waking up a convicted triple murderer.

Her beef Wellington's laced with death cap mushrooms killed her ex husband's parents, Don and Gale Patterson, along with Gail's sister, Heather Wilkinson.

Heather's husband, Pastor Ian Wilkinson, survived to tell the story of this most bizarre and seemingly egregious crime.

In Wilkinson told the court the greatest impact of Aaron's actions on me has been to deprive me of Heather's company.

The silence in our home is a daily reminder I only feel half alive without her.

In Victoria, the maximum jail sentence for murder is life imprisonment twenty five years with a minimum non parole period of thirty years, and I suspect Patterson will serve every day.

Of that and it will be hard time.

Indeed, it's only now after her conviction that we're seeing the extent of Patterson's conduct, the evidence of her long term premeditation of this ghastly act, which, according to her sentencing judge, puts her offending in the worst possible category.

Most of us have had to piece together our impressions of Patterson from court reporting.

I come fath them what has happened.

But the media covering the nine week trial, we're able to observe the killer up close and to compare and contrast their impressions of her with the evidence they were hearing and seeing, and also the evidence that the jury did not see.

My guest today, John Ferguson of the Australian newspaper has been on this from day one.

He broke the story that has now gone around the world.

It's my pleasure to welcome John, the Pride of Narrow Court, South Australia to the real crime stitio Gidey.

Fergh my mates in Aracle, I love that.

Thank you.

How are you going?

I'm very well mate.

Amazing story and you were there from day one.

How did it begin for you?

Well, I suppose it began in a sense for Aaron as well.

On August five, twenty twenty three, I was at home.

I was about to take my youngest child to football and I got a tip off that there'd been a mass poisoning at LeAnn Gatha.

There are potentially a large number of people dead.

And I've got to say, Adam, it was a Saturday.

We don't have a newspaper on Sunday, so really was should I file for the web?

And thankfully I did?

Rang police and very quickly.

It was a bit unusual.

Usually with Victoria Police things can move slowly, particularly on a decent story, and bang, almost immediately a detailed statement outlining how yes, they were investigating this mass poisoning at LeAnn Gatha.

Essentially, they sort of said they had an open mind from memory what the statement said, but there was nothing to go, oh, this is interesting.

So I quickly, and I'm not joking, rattled out, probably in about eleven minutes a story.

It went up and then it just went off like a forty four gallum drum of kerosene put on the barbecue.

It just the story exploded.

And I guess at the beginning, people are looking at this story, she's not a crim It doesn't seemed to be a strong motive.

We'll talk about motive later, but it doesn't seem to be a strong motive here.

So I guess you're prepared to give it the benefit of the doubt.

But this is a terrible accident perhaps, But what was your impression?

Well, from day one it was hard to say, but by the month, so that was a Saturday, so on August, and that actually happened to be when we published, police raided her house for the first time.

So they've worked out, well, the meet is on to it, so we're going to have to move and so they went in and took her down to thank you for that first record of interview on the Monday, the head of the homicide squad came out, Dean Thomas, and he basically named Aaron Pattison as a suspect.

Now that's when everyone started going, okay, well, we thought somebody might have just cooked up a really dun spaghetti marinara or something that had gone off, but no, this was actually the police were seriously looking at her, and as events started to unfold, it obvious while they were looking at her, because by that point, Simon Patterson had been telling people that, well, hang on, this is my ex wife I believe had been trying to poison me several times.

So that was the big underlying, I suppose, vibe of the story.

And this was the whole crux of the story, wasn't it that there was a long term premeditation of this crime that had begun with the breakdown of her marriage to Simon Patterson.

They've got two kids together, and this incredible story that she tried to poison him before.

What was the story about that?

Well, so basically she was actually charged with several attempt to murder charges which were later dropped, but basically he accused her.

He actually kept a spreadsheet of this he'd got really really ill a couple of times, quite seriously critically ill.

After what he said was Aaron Patterson had cooked him meals.

That was the link.

The link was he went through, did a spreadsheet AND's gone on, hang on, every time I've got sick, Aaron's cook food for me.

So that was the sandwich wraps, the chicken, corma curry, the stew, the pasta.

You know.

So there were four occasions.

She was only charged with three attempted murger.

But so that detail is swirling around the background, and so police clearly would have known about this by the time Dean Thomas came out, and it was a major factor in setting the perception of the story.

And he was really crooked and he had to go to hospital.

He had part of his intestine taken out.

I mean that having happened, surely there was some concern about accepting another invitation to lunch later on.

I don't want to make light of this, but it certainly should have sent alarm bells through the family.

Was there any evidence that people were on guard?

Well, Simon discussed it with his father, Don, who died beforehand, explained he wouldn't be going, and Simon Patterson told his father previously before the lunch that he suspected Aaron of trying to kill him, and his father had said, well, I don't know.

Paraphrasing, he said, well, I don't suggest you go around telling people that.

So this was a classic old school country response.

Reputation is everything, we don't I'm paraphrasing, and I'm thinking it through as to what might have been going through Don's head.

She's the mother of your kids and et cetera, et cetera.

But there also had been before then.

There'd been discussions with a doctor in a fifty seven minute consultation in the February of twenty twenty three, whereiggs I think she's trying to kill me, she told the doctor.

And there had also been a discussion with In fact, one of his cousins had suggested, well, is Aaron trying to do something to you?

This is beforehand, And there was also a discussion Simon had with a brother at a music concert or in Melbourne, all prior to the lunch, so it wasn't a secret.

Yeah, of course the family had attended another lunch prior to this, when nothing had happened.

How do you interpret that lunch.

Now, was it possibly a throwoff that she was now trying to re establish trust in terms of her long term plan to murder them?

Yeah, Look, it's really hard to One of the things about Aaron Patterson, she is a terminal liar.

Basically, if she opens her mouth, that's probably a lie.

And that was the thing that happened in court.

That's what the jury saw up close and personal over those six or eight days that she was in the stand.

That's what they saw.

So that the fact that she had there was another lunch is probably, frankly, not that unusual because the family, even though Simon and Aaron were estrange, they did still meet at times and do things together.

But because the media and I guess the broader public has spent a long time trying to understand motive for this crime, and that seems to be central to our understanding and why this happened.

Of course, the lawyers don't think that way.

It's simply all about criminal intent.

Once she puts the death cap mushrooms in the beef wellingtons, she has now decided to kill these people.

But motive is certainly important to us and the prosecution.

I guess he uses it to throw a bit more fuel on the fire to her offending.

But these are ordinary people, nice country folk.

This is a story that gets played out in thousands of breakdowns of marriages.

It doesn't seem to be any motive for murder.

How did you approach that question as you were trying to relate this to your readers in these times?

Well, I've always said that it was revenge, that basically she hated her husband, her estranged husband, to such an extent that she was prepared to potentially and some of these charges were thrown out, potentially killing, try to kill him, and certainly loathing enough that she would take on the four elderly guests.

I think it's very straightforward in my mind that it's complete and not a revenge.

You say that now, but let's look at the arc of this story as you've covered it and the first time you clapped eyes on there, and what are your impressions of her?

She's really, really bright, she's clearly intelligent, well read, she's got a nasty streak, she struggles to communicate with people, she makes things up.

All these things I've seen and it was a very consistent story, very consistent the whole way through.

And that's an interesting part about us being a journalist is that you get to test things out, and if you talk to enough people, you either get a consistent or an inconsistent picture of someone.

And it can happen either way, as you know, but there was a fairly consistent picture of her.

The other two things, I would say, she had a sense of humor, and this is what people told me, a caustic sense of humor.

She was a cynical woman.

But also she was a good mother.

And I don't think anyone I haven't found, although the question is if you kill someone's grandparents, are your good mum?

Well, clearly not.

But in the sort of observation of her, everyone I've spoken to say she was a good mum.

Yeah.

I guess most of us formed our opinion of her from the early appearances before the cameras, where she was tearfully saying this is all a terrible tragedy and accident.

And I guess we're looking at and saying, well, this would have to be the dumbest murder plot of all time because the finger would only be pointed at Aaron, and you make the point about her own children, she's murdered their grandparents.

And I think a lot of people were sort of saying, there must be more to this story, there must be some piece that we're not seeing.

But you were, I guess, behind the scenes of this story early on, talking to police, talking to people in the area.

And how long before you formed the view that she was a killer.

I hate to say it, but fairly reasonably quickly.

I had my doubts.

I just have my doubts about her, and I'd sort of tapped into some people who knew her well, and I had a lot of doubts about her.

I certainly thought that she had the capacity to do something like this, But look, this is hindsight, and you always have an open mind until the pre trial, which was all suppressed.

When the detail around the allegations against Simon came out, then things started.

I suppose in everyone's mind, you're going, well, there's a lot going on here.

So I suppose I was sixty forty YEA, she could have done it.

I suppose it's probably I'm being very loose here.

I'm not.

This is not a scientific debriefing, psycholostic briefing.

It's your personal impressions.

Yeah, look, she's not a very nice person, Adam, and that we know that because she's killed three people, but she's actually just not very nice.

And the other thing that I did do is I really tried to drill down into Simon Patterson's family and the Wilkinson's and got the same thing, very very consistent picture that they're all really good people, particularly Don Patterson, you know, fantastic bloke.

Now, it wasn't as strong around Simon because the defense, obviously in pre trial, were testing him, and there was a lot of text messages and Facebook messages that were well leaked behind the scenes of Aaron talking about things.

So you read those and that informs your view of where it's at.

But none of the criticisms I've seen of Simon Patterson, none of them add up to anything other than, you know, it's really low level stuff and that he's a decent bloke.

That's why it's so perplexing, I think, to people to understand what had Simon done?

Aaron just break up, you know, it happens every day, But where was the motivation?

Where was the hurt for this outsized, disproportionate act of revenge.

So Aaron Patterson had received quite inherited quite a lot of money.

Let's say it's around three million, it could actually be more than that, and she was very generous with it.

With Simon's family.

She gave away, not gave away.

She got the money back eventually, but hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars to her in or so they could buy houses now she got the money back or they got the money back.

Everywhere through the narrative of her she was generous with the money to the point where I would have gone, I wouldn't manage my money the way she did.

So the moment where the evidence was that things really blew up was in around November twenty twenty two, when Simon Patterson's accountant, according to his evidence, changed his business affairs, stating that he tax affairs single.

Now that had an impact on basically family payments that Aaron Patterson may or may have been eligible for.

And then really up and that's where the evidence would say Aaron went into killer mode.

But of course, you know, if you think it through, she was up to no good before that as well.

But that's when their relationship really soured.

It comes back to a simple lack of gratitude.

Maybe yeah, I think she's Aaron Patterson's an incredibly arrogant woman, incredibly arrogant, and yes, well she's gone, well, hang on, what are you doing to me?

And then this there's a blow up in the family about it.

She tried to get help from Don and Gale Patterson to try and mediate but that didn't get very far.

And I suspect too if you think it through logically, if Simon Patterson's starting to think around this point that Aaron had tried to kill him up to four times, then he wouldn't be very happy with her either.

So you can be absolutely sure that the relationship that's around the point of the relationship.

Now.

I think the sixty four million dollar question in all this is, given the overwhelming evidence that you've just laid out there, why there wasn't a consideration of pleading guilty or even pleading up to a lesser charge of manslaughter.

And we interviewed Philip Dunkc for the show.

You can find that in the archive, and he didn't say this directly, but I got the idea from talking to him that maybe he could have introduced the idea of pleading up.

And that was the reason she didn't go ahead with him as her barrister in the trial.

Yes, and you and I both talked to lawyers and it was definitely chatter around that as to why if she had been convicted of manslaughter, she might have been out in ten years rather than thirty.

And you can only speculate on that.

I don't have the inside word on it, but I can say that everything that I've seen Patterson court, she didn't look like a person who was going to admit to having killed those people.

And so maybe it's just a simple case of I didn't do it.

And look, maybe she even thinks that, you know, she may be in that space where she's convinced herself she didn't do it, or certainly literally I.

Mean you had a chance to look at her both in the box but also while listening to all the damning evidence.

Yes, and I think that's the way this went around the world.

There was a feeling that this person, she must be deranged, delusional, completely crazy.

But when you look at her life to that point is cohesive.

She's had a.

Career, worked as an air traffic controller, meet Simon Pattison, has the kids, raises her family, and gets to this point where this mad act of revenge suddenly becomes a viable plan for her.

What would you say about her state of mind as you could observe it, both through the evidence and observing her.

That's a really good question.

I think that she's extremely odd and there could be a whole heap of things going on in the background with her mind that she doesn't understand and others don't understand.

There was discussion around her having Aspergers in pre sentence and the judge said, well, it's basically there's not the evidence for her.

But there was a lot of chatter around that she claimed to her online friends that Chad Asperg's.

Now.

That doesn't make it kill three people, of course, but it might explain some of her oddness though, And she is strange.

Like towards the end of the pre sentencing hearing a week ago, she was meditating in the dock and look, you know, she would have been completely distressed about what she was looking at, and people can do odd things.

But there she was, eyes closed, you know, breathing, which she had done Danny Morwle during the Supreme Court trial.

So I just I look at her and go, is she completely bad?

And that's the question.

Quite possibly, Is she a little bit mad?

Quite possibly, that would be my I think there's a mix of bad and a little bit mad, would be my take on it.

Adam, Yeah, I think we're still trying to work out mad or bad.

I think if Asperger's was I voted for murder, half our journal mates would be in jail now for murdering people.

So that doesn't necessarily provide an answer.

One of the reasons we were talking today is that once you listened to Phil Done and you heard him talk about the media portrayal of Patterson, and he related it to other famous female defendants in Australia where there has arguably blend a rush to judge them based on their demeanor, based on what they do or don't say.

Do you think that's fair?

Do you think that?

And Phil Done the barrister said that there was an archetype portrayed.

She was the witch, the evil, the fat, evil, murdering witch.

How fair do you think that was in terms of the way she was portrayed?

And I guess your impressions of her before the trial began.

No deepest respect for Philip's fantastic Bloken is a tremendous lawyer.

I don't think her appearance had anything to do with any perceptions at all.

I think, as we discussed privately, I think had she been you know, like, it's sort of the suggestion to me was that the story got a life of its own because of the way Aaron Patterson looked.

Well, no, I mean an amazing story, but it would have been even more amazing if she had been a six foot Scandinavian model like that.

Now, wat's the story really go off?

If that happened.

So I don't think the looks really had much to do it.

I think though she defined herself in that first media interview she did at her house where you know, she said I loved on and she confused who was dead and who was alive.

That's devastated by what's happened, but the loss of Don is still in hospital.

Boughsome Ian and Heather and Gail.

To me, I'm maybe I'm a bit naive, but I thought she looked distressed to me, but other people set afterwards that's really odden.

And the police, I know when they saw that interview that they really they really clicked into that.

They sort of thought, oh, that's really strange response.

And the suggestion is she didn't actually have any tears when that happened.

I had really had an open mind, and because grief is a weird thing, and you know that the Linda Chamberlain thing about whether or not she was grieving when it all started.

Now, just a friend of mine actually got the first interview with Lindy Chamberlain Michael and the photograph of Zarah on the It was like a bassinette, remember lying back on the so and I spoke to him probably about six years after Lindy was child I think it was in eighty two.

So do you think Lindy did it?

And his response was I'm not sure, which is really interesting because sometimes we just get overloaded with information and it makes it hard.

You know, it just can swamp your mind.

One thing I would say for your listeners is that a lot of the evidence that we talked about before wasn't heard by the jury.

So none of the allegations in relation to Simon's alleged attempts to kill him, for instance, was heard by the jury.

So the jury didn't have the totality of the information the jury had basically, and the defense had worked really cleverly.

Colin Mandy s C.

I think did a really he was very very good.

He got quite a lot of stuff struck out, so the jury didn't hear it.

So what the jury heard was a watered down version of the totality of the evidence.

So that made it pretty interesting in a way down anymore, because those of us that sat through a pre trial knew a whole lot more than the jury did.

But you know, after seven days was the jury going to convict?

And I wasn't necessarily convinced all of the jurors would fall that way.

We'll get to that.

It's interesting these defense barristers, they often bring up this thing about, oh, my client can't get a fair trial because of perceptions and so forth.

But of course when they get up in jury trials, they say, there we go the strength of the jury system once more.

They get it.

And I think juries do get it right.

And you had a chance to view the jury.

And particularly as the courts dealing with the post offense conduct the lies, which I think was the most stunning evidence and also will probably ultimately weigh against her as she tries to get some sort of lenient sentence which she won't because she had an opportunity to correct things, to tell the police, tell the hospital, while her loved ones you could call them, were gravely ill what she'd done, but she chose not to.

How important do you think those lies were in her final.

I think utterly central.

I think, you know, because having listened to what everything that the jury did, some things that I sort of thought, well, it's heavily circumstantial, For example, the phone tower evidence, where I basically said she might have been in these places like lock an outrum searching for deathcap rushians.

But I can tell you, Adam, she might not have been too She could easily to me that stuff like that sort of jarred with me a little bit, I have to say.

But the lies were so breathtaking that you know, she got up before the jury and said on the morning after the lunch she drove to our return trip and at one point went off the side of the road and had explosive diarrhea while she was wearing white pants.

Right now, I camp a lot.

I could tell you that that that you white pant.

No, I can if you want, but no, and I've just got oh my god, and I know feel done.

Thinks what does that mean, but those sorts of things when you've got country people.

Now this this is another another point.

So it was Patterson chose to have the trial in Marble.

The thing about country people's lot liars.

Liars get nowhere because everyone knows the liar the like once someone tells one lie, they will always be known in the community as a liar.

This is in country areas.

Now that's your reputation, because if you're the sort of person that would say, commit a fraud or whatever, that's your reputation.

If you're steal twenty sheep, you could go and help mother Teresa for twenty years, you still always be the blokeer stole the marinos.

So and I think the jury, having been just exposed to all these that were admitted to the outset, that just would have smashed her credibility in their eyes.

And there was a pretty dramatic moment when she was giving evidence where it was introduced that she may have had bulimia or something like that and suffered that over the long term, and that after the lunch guests left, she ate a whole stack of Gail Patterson's orange cake and then purged afterwards.

Now it didn't seem at all real again and another sort of in my mind anyway, a fake medical diagnosis that she just made up.

And I think the more the jury looked at that, the worse it got for her, you know, the benefit of the doubt.

Well, that's right, And I thought one of the dramatic moments I wasn't in the court at all, I have to say, but one of the dramatic moments for me was when Colin Mandy chose to put her on the stand.

In these cases, it's up to the crown to prove their case, not for the defense to disprove it, so there was a calculated risk there, and I think she did reasonably well.

I think there were some people thinking she would just break down and it'd be so obvious.

But how did you rate her performance in the box?

I just didn't think they would put her up and from everything that I knew, and I think she performed eight out of ten compared with what I expected.

I thought she would fall apart pretty quickly and that didn't happen.

But her credibility was eroded by her lies they you see, So yeah, I was surprised how well she did invert a commas clearly not that well because she's in Dane Field's frost.

But yeah, I think she did better than I thought she would, is my Yeah, I suppose my answer right.

So you're sitting there, you had the pre trial proceedings, you got the nine week trial.

What's it like covering that sort of a case?

And over the journey did your impressions change at all?

With there were moments where you doubt any earlier impressions or was it tended to be a situation where they were being reinforced as it went along.

No, I think because a lot of key evidence was excluded from the trial.

To me, that changed the way I looked at it because you have to look at it what the jury's hearing, not what you know or you think you know.

Journal as we think we know everything.

We don't know everything, but we often think we do.

So you're listening to what the jury's hearing my take on it, and I said, this is done recentably well known in the dying sort of moments before the jury came back, I thought it would be hung because I just thought there would be an overwhelming majority would go it's guilty, But then there'd be a smaller smallish rump of people would go, ah, well, I think there's enough doubt there for me.

So that was where my head was at.

Yeah, because often in these long term trials, the media forms are kind of relationship with the jury.

You're looking at their reactions to things as you go, they're looking at you, and there's a kind of relationship going on.

Describe what that's like in this trip.

Yeah, Well, you obviously try not to.

You just want to know, I suppose very carefully, because you're just sitting there wanting to know, well, getting a feel for where you think the jury is at.

It's impossible not to do that, and to listen how to the way they speak, and you get a feel for where you think people are going by their responses, like if, for instance, there's looks on faces and all that sort of stuff.

I mean, it's very precise, like you've got absolutely no idea.

It's like the old saying about you don't know what's going on inside someone's head or behind their bedroom door.

And it's the same thing with the jury.

People.

I remember during the Pell case, people were coming back with these detailed analysis are where the jury was at and well no, so I think, yeah, it's a bit fraud.

But yeah, you're sort of interested because you get bored as well at him.

It's a long time to be sitting listening to the same evidence.

A lot of the evis you've heard before, so you get bored.

You look around, you want to know what everyone's You sort of get a view of almost everyone in the court, including Aaron Patterson, who had to put up with people gawking at her the whole time.

It's brutal the legal system.

It's brutal, and I get it why defense lawyers get protective of their clients, because it is just brutal what the defendants go through.

And I know quite a bit, quite a lot about the Victorian prison system.

It always you know, you just want the jury gets it right because prisoner's prison.

There's no fun to be had.

Oh no, she's going to do it very tough in their first offender.

She's very arrogant in titled.

People will sort her out.

I think she will have to spend a lot of time in seclusion there.

It'll be tough for her.

And she's she's not going to see the lot of the least until she's eighty.

So this is the what a disaster, blown up everything, up everything.

I mean, you have sat through these long term trials, and you've also you also feel the gravity of what's happened.

As a journal you're hearing the evidence, you're hearing the technical evidence, the forensic evidence of what was done to these people, and you start to naturally your view hardens against the defendant.

But were there any moments in this proceeding where you felt some sympathy for her, or some empathy at least.

Oh?

Look, I have to say there was a couple of things.

One was that really graphic photo of her in the back of the prison van that was the defining picture of the trial that the AFP photographer took, very very unflattering.

Photographer sort of thought, aren't that's that's brutal.

I have to say last Monday in hearing, what we saw on Monday was a completely destroyed person and in my mind just looks totally destroyed.

And she's clearly in what the judge described as what seemed to be unsatisfactory conditions at Dane Phillips Frost that she's basically not seeing the light of the day or maybe an hour a day out.

I mean that just destroys people, So I feel sorry for anyone who's in that predicament.

Sure she inflicted terrible pain on the people before they died, but I don't know.

Yeah, I feel compassion.

I've spent a lot of time in the prisons several to know that as the resident mind you, No, no, not yet, but I'm sure he'll catch me at some point.

On your Facebook it does say often excessive, I.

Think, doesn't it.

So that's that's the thing.

You know.

I'm very old school, so I'm probably probably one of the last of the old school.

Well you're me, you're me both really five?

I was one year later.

I think you must have become you're about twelve, you know, child labor in the rippet Medley.

But you're still going.

Well it was fantastic.

Five am to five pm mate.

Yeah.

The moment for me in the pre sentence hearing was when Ian Wilkinson got up there and he was doing his victim impact statement and he talked about giving her the offer of forgiveness if she makes a confession, and his quote was, my prayer for her is if you will use her time in jail wisely to become a better person.

Now I'm no longer Aaron Patterson's victim, and she's become a victim of my kindness.

Wow.

Heavy, yeah, really heavy.

It was at another moment during the moral trial for me, was when Nan Wilkinson walked in to give evidence.

He turned over, turned around and looked straight at Aaron Patterson on the way in.

It was it was a very it was understandably a look of disdain.

He's a man who's been who's had his life beyond upended.

And I thought I thought his choice of words were really interesting because he was basically saying, I forgive you, but I really makes it harder for you, not easier.

And there was a really interesting peace on seventh Spotlight the other night with the bloke from Western Sydney who killed those four kids several years ago as a driver, and the father came in and has pledged total forgiveness.

What Ian Wilkinson did wasn't as nearly as strong as that.

He was a man who's clearly just devastated by what's happened, loved his wife, loved Don and Gale Patterson.

And you know, you'd have to give him eleven out of ten for his victim impact statement.

And you'd give him twenty out of ten for his resilience for turning up every day and marble to court.

He was pretty astonishing really.

Anyway.

You're a sporting gentleman.

But I don't think you're going to get odds, decent odds that she's going to get anything less than the full whack.

What's your prediction for the sentence.

I think my prediction is she will get a non parole period.

I think the judge is really unhappy with the conditions that Aaron Patterson has been kept in and I think there'll be a little bit of a discount.

I think he'll give her a little bit of glimmer of something, but she'll she'll do the minimum thirty.

She's not going to walk quickly.

And the problem she has, Adam, and you'd know this that with poisoning intent is writ large because you've got to go out and source the mushrooms.

You've got to put them in the dehydrated, you've got to cut them up, you've got to going by the steak, you've got to go and get the pastry.

You've got to at so many points, as Ruth Dubois, who is Aman Wilkinson's daughter said at so many points she had months where she could have called this ridiculous plot off, but she didn't, and it was interesting.

There was another interesting moment when Ruth Duboire said that she had months to call this off.

Aaron Patterson just shook her head slightly, you know, And that to me suggests that Aaron Patterson doesn't think either she doesn't think she did it deliberately, or it was an accident, or I think that's probably where Aaron Patterson's head is at.

John Ferguson, thank you so much for your time today.

It's been fascinating to get that inside view of this extraordinary proceeding.

And I think you're right.

The lack of contrition, the lack of taking those opportunities to turn away from this plot.

I mean, we've all had moments of thinking about revenge against people who wronged us.

But in the light of day, you say, oh goodness, the consequences, and you look at the consequences in this person's life and you say, wow, unbelievable.

And this very quickly.

And what makes it this story so compelling, is that she is very well educated, came from a very well educated family, She was a multi millionaire.

She had a you know, not a house I'd built, but it was a really nice house in Gaffa.

She had two kids living with She had more than ninety nine percent of the world on her side, and then here you were talking about how she kills three people.

Yeah, unbelievable.

Thanks your time, John, Thank you.

That's John Ferguson of The Australian there on Aaron Patterson and her disastrous decision to murder her in laws.

What did you think as you watch this thing go through?

Do you think she got a fair trial?

A lot to hear from you, but your thoughts on this you can send me an email at Adam Shanned writer at gmail dot com.

You also send me stories send him there before John Ferguson gets them.

By the way, he's a snoop master, this fella.

But thanks for joining us today.

If you have any information about a crime, make sure you call crime Stoppers one.

It had a triple three, triple zero.

This has been real crime with Adam Shann Thank you for listening.