Five people had lunch in a small Australian town. Three are dead – and one is accused of their murder

Ian Wilkinson sat in the witness box, a crucifix within an ichthys pinned over his heart, and told the supreme court about four people he shared lunch with on 29 July 2023.

Three of those people are dead, and the other is accused of killing them.

Wilkinson gave evidence this week in Erin Patterson’s triple murder trial. She has pleaded not guilty to the murder charges, and to the attempted murder of Wilkinson.

A cheerful man, who laughed freely and a little nervously throughout his evidence, Wilkinson is a pastor at the Korumburra Baptist church, about 70km away from the Latrobe Valley law courts in the south-eastern Australian state of Victoria.

Wilkinson had just finished a sermon on 16 July 2023 when Patterson approached Heather Wilkinson, his wife, and Gail Patterson, Erin’s mother-in-law, in church.

“Just the two I was looking for,” Patterson said to them, the court heard.

Patterson went on to invite the sisters and their husbands to lunch. Wilkinson told the court he was happy and excited, if not somewhat puzzled, to be invited.

He said Patterson was an acquaintance but there was little depth to their relationship. Heather spoke to her more, though neither considered themselves close to Patterson. They had never dined at her house before.

‘I suggested that we pray’

A fortnight later, the group sat down in Patterson’s open-plan dining area to a meal of beef wellington with mashed potato and green beans. The Wilkinsons brought fruit for dessert, and the Pattersons an orange cake.

After they ate, Wilkinson finally understood why they had been invited: Patterson, he told the court, informed her guests she had cancer.

Wilkinson said Patterson wanted advice on how to tell the two children she shared with Simon Patterson, her estranged husband.

Illustration: Guardian Design

The group were in agreement that she should be honest with the children, Wilkinson said. The conversation occurred around the dining table, Wilkinson sitting at the head of the table, with Don Patterson next to Gail, to his right, and Erin opposite Don to his left.

Simon had also planned to attend, but told Patterson the night before he would not be coming.

One of the group noticed, during the conversation about cancer, that Patterson’s son was returning home with a friend, Wilkinson told the court.

Ian Wilkinson, the sole surviving guest of the lunch, testified in court this week. Photograph: Joel Carrett/AAP

“I realised we weren’t going to be able to continue [the conversation], that we hadn’t prayed about it, so I suggested that we pray,” Wilkinson said.

“I prayed a prayer asking God’s blessing on Erin, that she would get the treatment that she needed, that the kids would be OK, that she’d have wisdom in how she told the kids and then the prayer concluded as the boys arrived in the room.”

But a written statement read to the court this week from Danielle Romane, of the Victorian Department of Health, said a search of the state’s cancer registry found no record of Patterson having received a cancer diagnosis.

Wilkinson left soon after the cancer conversation so he could meet the church secretary and treasurer at his home, ahead of a congregation meeting scheduled for the following day.

Later that night, Ian heard Heather leave bed and vomit in the laundry sink. He felt alright at that point, he told the court, but soon after had to vomit too.

The Wilkinsons were admitted to Leongatha hospital within hours. Heather never made it home.

Ian told the court this week that he had no memory of his treatment after being given a charcoal substance to drink in a bid to overcome death cap mushroom poisoning. He was placed in a coma soon after.

He was eventually discharged from hospital almost two months after the lunch, in September 2023.

Self-discharge from hospital

Patterson’s time in hospital was far shorter, the court heard. She discharged herself after only five minutes on her first visit to hospital on 31 July 2023, two days after the lunch.

Two doctors and a nurse spoke with her during these five minutes to implore her to stay, saying that her heart rate and blood pressure readings indicated she could also have been poisoned, and that the effectiveness of her treatment relied on it starting as soon as possible.

Patterson said she was not prepared to be admitted, but would come back in 20 minutes.

Dr Christopher Webster told the court he was surprised when a nurse told him that Patterson had left. “I had just informed her that she’d been exposed to a potential deadly death cap mushroom poisoning and I thought that being in hospital would be a better place for her to be,” he said.

He tried to call her three times, and when she didn’t answer he phoned the hospital’s CEO and director of medical services to get clearance to phone the police.

“When you have to consider treating a patient against their will, it becomes quite a serious situation and I wanted … them to be informed before I did that,” Webster said.

Patterson returned to hospital about 90 minutes later, before police arrived at her house.

Cindy Munro, a nurse who treated the Wilkinsons earlier that day, noted the difference between them and Patterson after she was admitted: she was sitting up and “didn’t look unwell”, whereas Ian “could barely lift his head off the pillow”.

Patterson was transferred to the Monash hospital later that day, and discharged home on 1 August.

“The prosecution says that Erin Patterson was pretending to be sick and that’s an issue in this trial,” Colin Mandy SC, Patterson’s defence barrister, told the court in his opening statement.

“The defence case is that she was not feigning illness, she wasn’t pretending to be sick … she was sick too, just not as sick.

“And the defence case is that she was unwell because she’d eaten some of the meal.”

The prosecution says that the day after Patterson returned home, she drove to a local tip and dumped a food dehydrator that a forensic examination revealed contained her fingerprints, and traces of death cap mushrooms. They allege she also conducted a factory reset on one of her mobile phones.

Evidence from Simon and Erin Patterson’s children was also heard in court this week. Both children were separately interviewed by police on 16 August 2023, and footage of these interviews was played to the jury.

Patterson’s son and daughter were fed leftovers of the meal for dinner on 30 July, despite Patterson telling them she felt unwell earlier.

At the start of their evidence, both of the children were asked to define what was the truth and what was a lie.

A lie, the Pattersons’ son said, was “something that is wrong, something that you know didn’t happen, something that you know is wrong”.

Mandy says that Patterson, in a panic that she had accidentally poisoned her lunch guests, lied to police after the lunch by telling them she had never before foraged for mushrooms, nor owned a food dehydrator.

‘Very negative’ relationship

The relationship between Simon and Erin Patterson was again unpicked in detail during the trial this week.

Their son described it as “very negative”, and said his father “does a lot of things to try and hurt mum”. He said Simon contacted his school to be included on billing records, so that he could be informed of his children’s activities and school reports, but did this without contacting Patterson.

Three Facebook friends outlined Patterson’s concerns about Simon and his family’s faith, with one saying Patterson described his behaviour as controlling and coercive.

More messages exchanged between the estranged couple, including in a group chat involving Don and Gail, were also shown to the court.

It painted a clearer picture of the animosity that developed in late 2022 amid a dispute about child support payments.

“I foolishly trusted him to do right by me and the kids when it came to the crunch,” Patterson wrote in one long message posted in a group chat between her, Simon and Don and Gail.

There have now been 27 witnesses called in the case, and Justice Christopher Beale told the jury this week that the trial could finish sooner than expected.

But there has been no shifting from the message he gave them before any witness had been heard – the two key questions being: did Patterson intend to poison her guests with death cap mushrooms, and did she mean to kill or cause serious injury to them when she did so?

The trial continues.