Speaker
Ian Wilkinson
Appearances over time
1 episodes
Episodes
1
Podcasts
Quotes & moments
Erin Patterson told her guests she had a life-threatening cancer diagnosis and needed their guidance on telling her children. Doctors later found her name entirely absent from the Victorian Cancer Registry. The cancer was invented to get them to the table.
Every guest at Erin's lunch was served on identical large gray plates. Erin carried her own plate — a different orange-tan color — separately to the table and plated every dish herself, turning away offers from Heather and Gail to help serve.
Forensic investigators found Erin had used iNaturalist — a citizen science app logging wildlife sightings — to track where death cap mushrooms had been spotted. Cell tower data then placed her phone near those exact locations months before the lunch.
Erin Patterson invited four close family members to a Beef Wellington lunch under the guise of seeking support for a cancer diagnosis. Three of them would be dead within a week.
Death cap mushrooms contain amatoxin, a heat-stable toxin that survives cooking, targets the liver, and can kill with just 0.1 mg per kilogram of body weight. One mushroom is enough to kill an adult.
Four days after the lunch, while her victims were fighting for their lives in Melbourne hospitals, Erin Patterson drove to the local tip and dumped a food dehydrator. Police recovered it two days later — with her fingerprints and death cap mushroom traces inside.
Erin Patterson's phone was factory-reset four separate times in 2023. Someone triggered a remote wipe while the device was already in a police evidence room. The original phone was never found.
Ian Wilkinson, who lost his wife of 44 years, survived 54 days in hospital, received a liver transplant, and lives with permanent health damage, publicly forgave Erin Patterson — but only for the harm done to him, not for the three lives she took.
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.
Long before the lunch, Erin Patterson had been caught faking work hours as an air traffic controller, convicted of traffic offenses, and earned the nickname 'Scudder the Nutter' among colleagues who called her a habitual, pathological liar.
A child support dispute assessed at $38 a month and the loss of $15,000 a year in government benefits drove Erin to fury, but prosecutors told jurors a motive was not required for a conviction. Justice Beale declined to speculate publicly.
Simon Patterson turned down Erin's lunch invitation the night before, saying he felt uncomfortable. After the verdict, a gag order lifted and he revealed he had turned it down because he believed she would poison him — and that he had fallen severely ill after eating her food on prior occasions.
Analysis
What they talk about
- True Crime 67%
- Society & Culture 33%
Connections
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