Erin Patterson was arrested and charged with murder on 2 November 2023. Photo: Screenshot / ABC
Erin Patterson "seemed to really like mushrooms", her friends say, and shared pictures of a food dehydrator in the lead-up to a deadly lunch hosted at her home.
She is charged with deliberately cooking a beef Wellington with poisonous death cap mushrooms and serving it to her relatives in July 2023.
Don and Gail Patterson, along with Heather Wilkinson, died after eating the meal. Wilkinson's husband Ian survived after a long stint in hospital.
On Monday, several women Patterson befriended online were called to give evidence in the Supreme Court of Victoria about their interactions with the Leongatha mother.
In one message shown to the court, before the deadly lunch, Patterson wrote: "I've been hiding powdered mushrooms in everything. Mixed it into chocolate brownies yesterday, the kids had no idea."
Patterson also posted photos of the Sunbeam food lab electronic dehydrator to the Facebook chat group with her friends.
One black-and-white photo shown on the court screen showed mushrooms on the dehydrator's shelves. Another image showed chopped up button mushrooms.
"She seemed to really like mushrooms," friend Jenny Hay told the court.
Hay said she and Patterson spoke over the phone two days after the fatal lunch, and Patterson told her the mushrooms used in the beef Wellington were purchased from an Asian grocer.
"She said she was sick and in hospital," Hay said.
Another friend, Daniela Barkley, said the chat group members initially bonded through a shared interest in discussing the Keli Lane murder case.
Their chats evolved to politics, current affairs, their personal lives and cooking, with Barkley saying a number of the friends owned a RecipeTin Eats cookbook.
Barkley said Patterson asked the group for advice on cooking beef Wellington and was out looking for appropriate cuts of meat in the fortnight leading up to the deadly lunch on 29 July, 2023.
Patterson told online friends her religious husband was 'coercive'
Barkley and another online friend, Christine Hunt, said Patterson complained on several occasions about her estranged husband Simon.
Hunt said Patterson had painted her husband, a devoted Baptist, as being "coercive" and "abusive". Hunt said Patterson was an atheist who held herself out as a church-going Christian.
"She was saying to us publicly in that group that she didn't necessarily believe in God," Hunt said.
Under cross-examination, Barkley said Patterson's life revolved around her children.
"I thought she was a wonderful mother," she said.
Earlier on Monday, Patterson's estranged husband Simon denied asking his wife if she used the dehydrator to prepare the poisonous meal, before she dumped it at the local tip.
Under cross examination, he was asked by defence barrister, Colin Mandy SC, about a conversation in hospital on 31 July, 2023, two days after the fatal lunch.
The court heard the discussion between the pair turned to the dehydrator.
Mandy asked him if he said, "Is that what you used to poison them?"
"I did not say that to Erin," he replied.
Last week, prosecutors alleged Patterson lied to police about purchasing the dehydrator and using it to prepare mushrooms for the beef Wellington.
Six days after the meal, the dehydrator was found by police at a local tip.
Patterson's lawyers conceded she dumped the dehydrator, but argued she panicked about the lunch guests falling sick and was not trying to cover up a crime.
Lawyers for Patterson - who has pleaded not guilty - say she does not dispute that the guests suffered from toxic mushroom poisoning.
However, they argue she did not deliberately poison them and had no intent to cause them harm.
Estranged husband 'puzzled' by wife's claim of health issue
The trial previously heard Patterson had told her husband and the lunch guests a fortnight earlier that she had important medical news to share. At the lunch, Patterson falsely claimed she had cancer.
Simon - who was a late withdrawal from the lunch - said he was "puzzled" that his wife would flag the serious "news" two weeks in advance.
"I didn't feel fully confident that there was a serious medical issue to discuss," he said.
On Monday, the up-and-down relationship between the Pattersons was again a topic of questions directed at Simon.
The court was shown messages Patterson sent a family group chat in December 2022, where she complained about her husband formally declaring himself as separated on his tax return.
Patterson believed the change meant she could no longer claim about $15,000 a year in tax benefits, and that she had been short-changed a further $90,000 in child support payments that would have been received if the government knew the couple had not been together for several years.
"I foolishly trusted him to do right by me and the kids when it came to the crunch," she wrote in the group chat.
Tensions between the pair were also strained when Patterson moved their children to a different school without telling her husband.
Simon appeared emotional and tilted his head back when describing another "extremely inflammatory" message that his wife had allegedly sent the family group chat.
The message was not shown to the court, and he did not explicitly say what it was about.
"It was having a crack at me," he said.
The trial resumes on Tuesday.
- ABC
