Source : Perth Now news
Jurors in the trial of alleged poisoner Erin Patterson have heard about the wild journey leftovers of the fatal lunch took as authorities probed the incident.
Ms Patterson, 50, is accused of deliberately poisoning four of her husband Simon Patterson’s relatives by spiking the lunch with death cap mushrooms on July 29, 2023.
Mr Patterson’s parents, Don and Gail Patterson, and his aunt Heather Wilkinson died in the week after eating at Ms Patterson’s home, while Ms Wilkinson’s husband, Ian, recovered.
She has pleaded not guilty to three counts of murder and one count of attempted murder, with her defence arguing the poisonings were unintentional and a tragic accident.
Details of what happened to leftovers of the lunch have been aired in the trial as witnesses told the jury of the efforts authorities undertook to probe the incident.
Leongatha Hospital’s Dr Chris Webster told the jury that he first began to wonder whether there were any leftovers on July 31 while Ms Patterson was being assessed.
He said he had earlier called police to report a welfare concern after Ms Patterson checked herself out of the hospital against medical advice.
“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.
She returned about an hour and a half later and was admitted.
Dr Webster said he received a call from a police officer who attended Ms Patterson’s home for the welfare check, and his mind quickly turned to leftovers.
“I had no idea but I figured there was a chance. Strike while the iron is hot; the police are there,” he said.
Ms Patterson was placed on the phone with Senior Constable Adrian Martinez-Villalobis and gave permission for the officer to enter her property.
Constable Martinez-Villalobis said Ms Patterson was “co-operative throughout the exchange” and instructed him that leftovers would either be in her indoor or outdoor bin.
The leftover food was located at the bottom of her outdoor red-lidded bin in an “seeping” brown paper Woolworths bag, the officer said.
“It was primarily maybe one-and-a-bit beef wellingtons,” he said.
“I used another one of the bags that were in the bin … because it was seeping a bit from the bottom and I didn’t want to get dirty.”
Constable Martinez-Villalobis then took the bag to Leongatha Hospital where he handed it over to a nurse about 10.19am.
Leongatha Hospital’s Dr Veronica Foote told the jury that she was in contact with a toxicological registrar at Monash Hospital for guidance on how to treat Ms Patterson’s suspected death cap mushroom poisoning.
She said Dr Laura Muldoon requested to be sent a photo of the leftovers to see if they could identify the mushrooms in the meal.
“So I, with gloves on, I took the samples out of the bag, put them on a clean A4 sheet of copy paper and took the photos,” Dr Foote said.
The jury were shown an image of the text exchange, with an image of pastry and some brown organic material separated out.
In the message, Dr Foote noted there was “finely chopped and cooked mushrooms”.
She told the jury that she placed the leftovers into two specimen bags tagged with Ms Patterson’s name and handed them over to Ambulance Victoria that afternoon.
Paramedic Eleyne Spencer gave evidence that she was tasked with transporting Ms Patterson the hour and 40 minute trip to Monash Medical Centre in Melbourne.
She said she was given the leftovers to take as well in a green Woolworths bag.
“It was handed over to a female doctor in the resus bay who I believe was the female toxicologist at Monash,” she said.
Dr Muldoon told the jury that she was tasked by Monash’s toxicology team to send the food sample to Melbourne’s Royal Botanic Gardens.
“I was tasked to send the remains … to the mycologist at the Royal Botanic Gardens to have them looked at to ascertain what mushroom might have been in the meal,” she said.
Dr Muldoon handed the sample to an emergency department administration staff member and organised an “urgent taxi” across town.
But mycologist Camille Truong told the jury that there had been a “misunderstanding” with Dr Muldoon and she had already left work by the time the sample arrived at 5pm on July 31.
Dr Truong said the pair had already exchanged messages earlier in the day when she was sent Dr Foote’s photograph.
“I told her that, based on the photographs, I was not able to give an identification of the mushrooms,” she said.
“I did indicate to her that if the mushrooms were coming from a shop or a supermarket, it was extremely unlikely and probably impossible to be death cap mushrooms because those mushrooms only grow in the wild.”
The fungi expert told the jury that she left the Botanic Gardens about 4pm that day and was informed an hour later that there was a package for her delivered to the visitors centre.
She called a colleague, who had to enlist a warden to get into the locked visitors centre who then drove the leftover meal to Dr Truong’s home.
Dr Truong said she examined pieces of mushroom with her home microscope but could not find any evidence of death cap mushrooms.
“I carefully picked out the little pieces of mushroom on the tray and then I studied them under the microscope,” she said.
The mycologist then stored the leftovers in her fridge for two nights because she was doing field work the following day.
On August 2, she told the jury, she took the meal back to the Royal Botanic Gardens where she again examined the leftovers under a microscope.
“I conducted exactly the same investigation that I had done but as a matter of being thorough I wanted to do it a second time,” she said.
“So the mushroom that I identified is called a field mushroom … this is the typical mushrooms that you find in a supermarket.
“That is the only mushroom that I found in this food item.”
Dr Truong said she placed the samples in the laboratory’s fridge and they were collected by the Department of Health later the same day.
The jury was told the samples were delivered the same day to Agriculture Victoria research scientist David Lovelock, who gave evidence he was tasked with conducting DNA analysis.
He told the court that he received the leftover beef wellington on August 2, a fruit platter and jug of gravy on August 8 and seven vials of “material” from Ms Patterson’s dehydrator on August 11.
Dr Lovelock said DNA analysis of two samples taken from the lunch did not detect death camp mushrooms.
“The only thing we found was the white button mushroom and bovine material,” he said.
Dr Lovelock said analysis of the seven vials found two contained material genetically identified as death cap mushroom.
“We were able to detect amanita phalloides in two of the seven test tubes,” he said.
“The genetic code we got out of those two samples was more than 99 per cent similar to a reference sample of amanita phalloides.”
Days later, on August 29, the food sample was delivered to the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine alongside the fruit platter and jug of brown liquid – a month after Ms Patterson’s lunch.
Victoria’s chief toxicologist Dimitri Gerostamoulos gave evidence that no testing was conducted on the fruit platter, and no amanitins – the toxins found in death cap mushrooms – were detected in the brown liquid.
Dr Gerostamoulos said death cap mushrooms primarily contained three toxins – alpha-amanitin, beta-amanitin and gamma-amanitin.
He told the court that nine samples were taken from the beef wellington, attempting to separate out meat, pastry and mushroom paste.
The samples were left for three hours in vials containing 5ml of methanol before being concentrated in a centrifuge and dried, Dr Gerostamoulos said.
A mass spectrometer machine was then used to detect specific molecules in the sample, with the toxicologist outlining the results.
In three of four mushroom paste samples no alpha-amanitin or beta-amanitin toxins were found, but in one sample they detected beta-amanitin.
Beta-amanitin toxins were also detected in one meat sample, he said.
Questioned by Justice Christopher Beale if those toxins were “exclusively” found in death cap mushrooms, Dr Gerostamoulos responded “yes”.
Asked to explain how the institute’s testing differed from Dr Truong, who did not identify any death caps, he said “we don’t rely on visual detection of compounds”.
“We rely on sensitive instruments to be able to detect very low quantities that are not visible,” he said.
The trial continues.
