Podbit · Crime, Conspiracy, Cults and Murder
After seven weeks of evidence and six and a half days of deliberations, all 12 jurors returned a unanimous guilty verdict on three counts of murder and one count of attempted murder. The trial had become an international story.
Where this was said
At 58:00 · chapter starts 56:25
The trial opened in the Supreme Court of Victoria at the Latrobe Valley Courts in Morwell — less than an hour from the Gibson Street house. Justice Christopher Beale presided. Before the first witness, the charges relating to Simon Patterson were dropped; what remained was three counts of murder and one of attempted murder for Ian Wilkinson. Prosecutor Nanette Rogers SC built her case around four calculated deceptions: a fabricated cancer diagnosis, death cap mushrooms deliberately placed in the Wellingtons in fatal quantities, a staged hospital appearance to simulate illness, and weeks of deliberate evidence destruction. Fungi specialist Tom May identified the mushrooms in Patterson's tablet photographs as Amanita phalloides with high confidence, and Rogers argued she had weighed them to calculate doses for five people. Erin testified for eight days and made key concessions — she had foraged for wild mushrooms since 2019, bought and dumped the dehydrator, fabricated the cancer story, and factory-reset her phone to hide mushroom photos — but maintained she had never deliberately sought death caps or intended to poison anyone. The defence framed her lies as panic, not premeditation. Prosecutor Rogers pressed: had she expected not to need an alibi because she had expected everyone at the table to die?
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