The Mushroom trial is over and the jury have found Aaron Patterson guilty of murder and attempted murder.

Laura, you were in court.

What did you see?

I was seated right in front of the dock, only a few meters away from Erin.

The jury came into the room and the judges associate asked them for their verdicts.

One by one.

The jury foreman said guilty.

I looked at Erin.

She sat expressionless, She didn't cry, There was no expression whatsoever.

There's a lot of media outside La Trovelli Law courts at the moment or waiting to speak to anyone who will come out.

We don't know the next time Erin will be in court, but soon she will have to face a plea hearing before she is sentenced.

But let's head back to the studio and discuss it in more depth.

I'm Brook Greybert.

Craig, I'm Laura Placella.

And this is the Mushroom Cook.

Hi, Laura, we're back in our podcast studio.

So Aaron Patterson has been found guilty.

What does this mean?

So she's been found guilty of three charges of murder relating to Don Patterson, Gail Patterson and Heather Wilkinson.

And she's also been found guilty of the attempted murder of Ian Wilkinson.

And it has been a long time in Victoria since we've had someone been found guilty of a triple murder, especially a female.

So this is quite a big moment.

And what this also means is that the jury have rejected her story that this was a tragic accident.

They didn't buy it.

They heard all of the evidence that we're about to go through, and they concluded that she deliberately put death caps in that meal with the intention of killing all of her.

Guests and Laura.

I guess for the last thirty episodes, we broke down the evidence for our listeners and we had to be quite careful in what we were saying.

I guess now we can be a bit more candid.

Yeah, for sure, when you're covering a trial, there are a lot of rules that you have to follow, and we're not going to go into all the law now, But in this point in time, since we have a verdict, we can speak a bit more freely about the evidence and what it means.

I know some of our listeners were really wanting us to talk more about the evidence.

They wanted to hear our analysis of it, and that makes sense.

You know, people who are really interested in the trial wanted all of those things really broken down and explained to them.

But now we're in a position where we really can start to analyze the evidence and see how the jury came to the verdict that they did.

Okay, Laura, Now let's talk about the seven most damning pieces of evidence that brought down Erin.

And these are the pieces of evidence that we think brought her down.

We're actually not sure what happened in that jury room.

We're not privy to the discussions the jurors had, but these are certainly the pieces of evidence that I think stuck out in both of our minds when we were listening to it, and probably in our listeners' minds when we were bringing it to them as well.

I think the first one would definitely have to be the different colored plates and the individual beef Wellington's that Aaron cooked for her guests.

I think the colored plates was almost like the smoking gun for some people.

They just couldn't wrap their head around why you would invite people over to your house for a lunch and then proceed to serve the meals on different plates.

Why wouldn't you just use a matching set of plates that you had.

So E Wilkinson, as we've touched on many times before, was the only guest that survived the meal, and he said that Aaron served their beef Wellingtons on stone gray plates, but served herself on an orange tanned plate.

He also said the morning after the lunch, Heather remarked, is Aaron short of crockery?

I was wondering why she served herself on a different plate to the rest of us.

So here's two people with the same account of Aaron serving her guests on different colored plates compared to herself.

And during the trial, Aaron's defense barrister Colin Mandy tried to argue that it would have been really dumb for her to use different colored plates if she was trying to commit a murder.

He said, it would have been so much smarter for her to just mark the pastry.

But it seems like the jury wasn't buying that argument and they've taken Ian Addy's word.

And another point is Aaron cooked individual beef Wellington's for her guests rather than cooking up a usual beef Wellington log.

We learned that Aaron used the best selling recipe Tin Eats cookbook called Dinner, and there were photos in that recipe of the log you've just described, So it didn't really make sense that someone would follow a recipe one that she's actually never made.

Before.

Aaron admitted she'd never made a beef Wellington, but makes such a massive change to the recipe, and I guess now we have our answer why she decided to do that.

Crown Prosecutor Nannette Rodgers said to the jury that it was the prosecution case that she served individual beef Wellington so she could have complete control of all the ingredients in all the serves.

And what we can take away from the jury's verdict is that they agree that her serve of beef Wellington must either have had no mushrooms at all or just regular mushrooms.

Now, let's move on to the fabricated cancer claim.

And this is a little bit complex, right, Laura.

Yeah, it is a little bit.

When Erin gave evidence during the trial, she had a whole range of reasons why she was telling people she had medical issues and trying to explain away why she would announce at the table that she had cancer when she really didn't.

So Simon told the jury that when he was invited to the lunch two weeks earlier, Aaron did flag that she wanted to discuss some important medical news, but it was only until the day of the lunch.

Obviously Simon didn't attend, but it was at the end of the meal that Ian recalled Aaron making an announcement.

Yes, he said that Aaron said that she had cancer and she described it as life threatening.

And he said in court that that was the moment he realized why they had been invited to the lunch, because the four guests weren't told that Aaron wanted to discuss medical news.

She only told that to Simon.

The prosecution very much claimed that Aaron planted this seed of this lie far in advance when she told Don and Gale earlier in June that she was having medical tests on her elbow.

But this is where I felt like it became a bit confusing, because with Don and Gail, she was talking to them about this lump, and then all of a sudden at the lunch, she starts bringing up ovarian cancer.

Seems like she dialed things up to ten during that conversation, but she claimed that she'd only ever brought up cancer at the lunch because she was exploring gastric bypass surgery and she wanted to cover for that procedure when it came time for her to go under the knife.

Mister Mandy made a good point during his closing address that she didn't tell the lunch guests about the medical news, and they seemed to just come to the lunch with no reason at all provided.

And then she served them the beef Wellington and they ate it before she even told them about the cancer.

So I'm not quite sure myself if she really did manufacture this story about cancer to get them to the lunch.

It seems like they would have come regardless.

And you know, I've seen a lot of questions floating around as to why then Heather and Ian were invited to the lunch, and I think it's quite safe to say that they were really collateral damage in Aaron's plans.

Yeah, I would really agree with that.

It did appear that Aaron really wanted Simon at the lunch, and it also appeared that she thought the best chance of that happening would be to have both his parents there.

And also his aunt and uncle.

I think the term I'd used before with you Brook is safety in numbers.

If there are five people sitting around that table, plus erin, I think in everyone's minds, it would have been a lot less likely that something awful would have happened.

Now, let's chat about Aaron's lack of symptoms.

I think it's safe to say that she wasn't really sick at all, despite the jury hearing that she had diarrhea the day after the lunch.

Yet it almost seems now that some of the lies she told on the stand were for nothing, because they were actually pretty embarrassing lies she told the and I'd go one to say the world at large, considering how many people have been following this case, that she had to pull over on the side of the road the day after the lunch and essentially take a poo in the bush, and then she spoke about cleaning herself up, and then spoke about having to drive to a service station to get rid of those soil tissues.

So Noel would really want to be recounting any of this.

But it seems now that that was just a lie.

I know this wasn't really mentioned in court, a lot, but it's something we all as journalists spoke about in Corton in the overflow room.

Why did Aaron wear white pants the day after the lunch if she had explosive diarrhea?

And we really really wanted the prosecution to make this point in their closing address when they were touching on the trip to Taiab.

We were just waiting, like, mention the white pants, mention the white pants.

They didn't get mentioned.

But you never know, this could have been something that the jurors could have been discussing themselves when you are having one of those days, you're not wearing white pants just in case you do have an accident, which Arin was talking to people about.

She was talking about the fact she was scared over the night of the lunch and the next day that she could have an accident.

I think the word she used at one point was hoping sitting in the car would feel like a cork.

So this was something clearly on her mind, or so she said.

It appears the night of and the next day she wasn't really suffering from anything.

But I think you've mentioned to me before Brook that you felt like maybe she started to get stressed by the Monday.

Yeah, I definitely think that would have been the case.

And you know, we heard that she went to the hospital and she had tests done of her bower movements, and personally, I do think you know, when you're under so much pressure and anxiety, it can really force your body to do things that you're not really used to.

Well, yeah, I mean essentially, in those days after the lunch, things were unraveling for Erin.

I think she was starting to realize that there was a chance she was going to get found out, and I can imagine that would have been in credibly stress inducing and anxiety inducing.

So she gets to the hospital on July thirty one, the Monday, she gets taken to Monash Medical Center.

Pretty quickly they realize that she's not suffering from death cap mushroom poisoning.

But another thing here that we haven't touched on yet was the fact that Aaron told the jury that she vomited after the lunch.

But very interestingly, and it makes sense now, she didn't tell anyone else that she vomited after the lunch.

It appears that it was a story she concocted to explain to the jury why she wasn't as sick as everyone else.

And I think this is a difficulty issue to actually speak upon in any other case.

Obviously, when someone is suffering body image and bolimia, you would want to believe them.

But I think in Aaron's case, she has proven that she is a liar.

So really, did she suffer from bolimia?

Did she vomit on that day?

Who knows?

We don't know.

And the jury didn't believe her.

I must admit it was a very convenient lie, and one it appears that no one really saw coming.

But I think they did a very good job of proving to the jury that it was nothing but a baseless lie.

Now let's move on to the citizen website I Naturalists, which we have spoken a lot in detail, and Aaron's phone pings to Outram and Locke.

And this is probably one of my favorite parts of the evidence because it really sets out a very compelling timeline.

And when I heard about this timeline for the first time, I just couldn't ignore it.

I just kept coming back to it and how and how incriminating I.

Thought it was.

So we have spoken a lot about these dates before, but I really try and do it now in a way that I think will really make sense.

So April eighteen is the day that Christine McKenzie posts on Our Naturalists and says she's found death caps in Locke.

Ten days later, we now know that Aaron traveled to the area and foraged for death caps.

Only a few hours after she in lock, she is at better home living in Lea and Gatha buying.

A dehydrator crazy.

Only a few hours she'd found what she was looking for.

And then she's thought, I need to preserve these because we heard from my collegist, doctor Tom May that death caps, after they've been picked, they only have a certain shelf life before they will start to decompose.

So she thought to herself, I need to buy something to help me preserve my eventual murder weapon.

So she goes, she gets the dehydrator, then she comes home.

Then two days later she takes some photos of her dehydrata, including some photos of some button mushrooms on one of the trays.

And this was a really smart argument I thought.

From the prosecution, they said that Erin was doing a test run.

She was practicing with just some regular woolies mushrooms to try to figure out the best way to dehydrate a mushroom because she wouldn't want to stuff it up.

You know, we heard evidence in the trial that death caps had never before been posted to our naturalists in the Gippsland region, So I think she was probably thinking, this is really rare.

I want to make sure I don't waste these.

Then a few days later she takes some more photos, and this time it appears that those photos were of the death caps sitting on her dehydrator tray.

So she had done her test run with the button mushrooms and she was ready to dehydrate the real thing.

But it's really crazy to me that she would take photos of this.

Yeah, and this was something mister Mandy did point out.

He goes, if my client has been planning this murder, why on earth is she taking photos of again the murder weapon, not only the mushrooms, but the dehydrader itself.

So that was a little bit strange, I will say.

But someone did actually tell me that they thought she had taken the photos as trophy photos.

She may not have thought she'd get caught, and they'd actually offer almost a little keepsake of what she was able to find and what she was able to do with those mushrooms.

So it seems like Erin a few weeks and perhaps she thinks, I want more death caps, I don't have enough.

So she then travels to Locke, where she first went to see if any more death caps were growing, before she travels to Outram after seeing doctor May's post that he had posted only one day beforehand.

Mister Manny almost mocked the prosecution case during his closing address, saying that it was extraordinary to suggest that Erin would have been sitting there refreshing our naturalist every day.

But it appears with this verdict that the jury has ruled that that's exactly what she did.

And we touched upon the dehydrader a bit before, but Aaron did dump it on August two, so this was four days after the lunch and in her evidence, Aaron said that she dumped it because she panicked, but I think it's safe to say that it wasn't so much panic, but more that Aaron was getting rid of the evidence, getting rid of her murder weapon.

She knew that she had used the dehydrator to dry death caps, and she's really into true crime.

She was probably thinking to herself, if they find this dehydrator in my home.

They're gonna run tests on it and they might find traces of death caps in there.

So I'm just gonna distance myself from this appliance, dump it and hope no one finds it.

But police were onto it very quickly.

I think they found it within only two days of her dumping it.

Now let's move on to the Asian grocer and the lies that Aaron told about this.

So we heard during the trial that she told almost a dozen witnesses that mushrooms in the beef Wellington came from a local wooworths and an Asian grocer in Melbourne Southeast, and she was throwing around different suburbs like Clayton, Oakley Mount Waverley.

But really she did this to send the Department of Health on a wild goose chase, because she in fact did not buy any mushrooms from any Asian grocer in Melbourne Southeast.

Yeah, these poor Asian grocers became scapegoats.

Almost in the days after the lunch, she was starting to realize that she needed to deflect blame.

She needed to come up with a story to explain why death caps were in the meal she cooked.

I think she cottoned on pretty fast that no one would believe her if she said she just bought the mushrooms from Woolworths, so she needed another element.

And we do know that she did shop at these sorts of Asian grocers before, so they probably popped into her mind and she's like, great, I'm going to throw them under the bus.

But during the trial things kind of took a turn, and when Erin was giving evidence, she then all of a sudden revealed that when she was cooking the mushroom duckt cells for the beef Wellington, she had gone to her pantry to grab a container of the dried mushrooms from the Asian grocer.

She explained that she threw them in, but then she said that after a few days she realized that maybe that container also had foraged mushrooms in there.

So by this stage, Erin's story had evolved from only Woolworths mushrooms being in the meal, to Wolworth's mushrooms plus dried mushrooms from an Asian groser, to finally, in its final evolution, Woolworth's mushrooms plus dried mushrooms from an Asian groser plus forage mushrooms that she had accidentally put into this container after one of her foraging trips.

And you know, I think she really had to add in that element of the forage mushrooms because she knew that she would be caught out for lying about Asian grosers.

I think we have to consider if there were death cap mushrooms at Asian grocers, why didn't anyone else get sick in Victoria.

It really did seem like Erin was hedging her bets because she was trying to leave open the possibility that maybe the death caps did come from the Asian groser, or maybe she had accidentally foraged death caps when it came to her trying to spin this story about it being an accident.

I don't think she wanted to just lock herself into one source of mushrooms.

She wanted to give herself as many options as possible.

And really create that doubt within the jury.

But again they really didn't.

Now let's finish off with something that we've dubbed the game of phones.

Our producer was really happy with that phrase, and it's a really good one and it really describes what was going on here.

So we have phone a phone, b and Phone C.

We won't crap on about them too much more.

But essentially what this verdict really shows was that Phone A, which was Erin's usual phone, was disposed of by Erin at some stage.

We don't know where she put it.

She wanted to get rid of that evidence.

Yeah, she really did.

The prosecution had always argued that that was probably the phone she used to search our naturalist.

It was the phone she took to lock an outrum, considering that there were those phone pings, so it was very likely that she is looking on her phone at I Naturalist trying to figure out what tree did.

Doctor may say the death caps are under it's almost like her guide.

So she's gotten rid of Phone A.

But then she's thought to herself when the police come knocking, which I think she realized they would, she needed a dumb phone, so she had a lot of devices, it seemed, laying around her house.

So she's grabbed Phone B and she started to set it up to appear like it's her phone.

She's done that around August two, August three.

By August five they do come knocking, and she's probably thinking, great, I'm prepared.

Now she has to pull a little bit of a sneaky and take out her SIM card from Phone A, her usual phone.

I don't think she wanted to lose her number, so she's taken out her SIMP card, hid in Phone A somewhere in the house at least for now, and then she's just handed over Phone B to police and said, yep, this is my phone here, you can have it.

But maybe panic took over in that moment, because she's then gone and factory reset Phone B two times.

It may have been panic and she's just thought maybe I'll just, you know, wipe my dummy phone for the sake of it.

Or maybe she thought wiping the dummy phone would delay police a little bit.

Maybe they wouldn't actually realize that that her phone until later when they got back to police HQ.

So again we go back to this game of phones idea.

I think this really speaks to Aaron's level of sophistication.

Really, she was really thinking ahead and planning out her moves.

Yeah, that's right.

And when she was giving evidence, she actually had some explanations to the switching of the phones that I must admit at some points did seem to make a bit of sense.

She said that police didn't touch one of the phones in her house and left it on a window sill, and she claimed that was Phone A.

Clearly no one was buying that.

And then she also argued that she was simply setting up Phone B because fon A was for some reason damaged despite being six months old, and she also wanted to get a new phone number.

But I think you know, if you've served up a lunch that is about to claim the lives of almost all of your guests.

I don't think that is the time you're setting up a new phone.

It would be the last thing on your mind, really, But in this case, Aaron was spending those days trying to figure out a way to get away with murder.

So now that Erin has been found guilty of murder, she will be taken back to a woman's maximum security prison, Dame Phyllis Frost.

But Laura, what's next?

Can she appeal?

So she can appeal, But before that can happen, there are a few final stages that she needs to undergo in the trial process.

So here in Victoria, someone is found guilty of a serious crime, they will face what's called a plea.

Hearing the word please sometimes confuses people.

Sometimes people think that means they've pleaded guilty, but it's just what the hearing is called.

But effectively, it's when the prosecution will present their arguments to the judge about how long they think she should spend in jail.

They'll put forward some aggravating factors as well, things they say that makes this crime really bad and really heinous.

But then on the flip side, the defense will get a chance to argue why she should spend a little bit less time in jail.

They're likely to commission many psychiatric reports about Erin and they'll go into her past.

And then after that, after those arguments are had, the judge will go away and think about the sentence he will hand down.

This is justice Christopher Biale, and then she'll be back to court for sentencing.

And when do you reckon, we'll get a sentence.

This whole process could take a number of months.

Like I mentioned before, there are are psychiatric reports that might need to be completed, so it could be potentially six months until she is sentenced.

But in Victoria, murder carries a maximum penalty of life imprisonment, and Erin isn't just facing one count of murder.

She's facing three plus the attempted murder of Ian.

So I don't have a crystal ball.

I can't sit here and say exactly what she will be sentenced to.

But it is very likely that Erin will die in prison.

Yes, but that's unless she wins her appeal.

Yeah, so you did ask me that before Brook about the appeals process that can take even longer.

So after Erin is sentenced, she does have that opportunity to appeal.

You can appeal on two grounds, so she can appeal her conviction, and she can also appeal her sentence.

If she goes down the first route, that's her essentially arguing that something has happened in the trial that hasn't been fair.

It's not so much her having a goal at the jury, but more so them arguing that the trial wasn't run properly.

And if that appeal is successful, we could actually potentially have a retrial.

The Court of appeal might rule that this all needs to happen again because Erin didn't get a fair trial the first time, or she can go down a second route of appealing her sentence to try and get a few years or months shaved off in the hope that she can potentially see the light of day again.

So that's Erin's future.

But as for us, we'll be back with a couple more episodes, but in the meantime for more, go to the mushroomcook dot com dot au