Ep. 113 | The HORRIFIC Mushroom Murders

Verustin pyöräilyvää teitä valmistavan ornotin vuonna 2013. Mielestäni parasta Shopify saan se, että voimme harjoittaa liiketoimintaa ilman teknistä osaamista, voimme hallinoida yrityksen taustajaristeelle mien ja front-endia sekä myydä verkossa, vaivatta, jos Shopify olisi pyöräilyvaruste, se olisi mielestäni itse polkupyörä. Sillä asiat hoidetaan ja meidän liiketoimintamme hoituu Shopify'sssä. Aloita ilmainen kokeilu, Shopify Piste.com sivustolla. Mielestäni kokeilu, kokeilut kokeilu. Mielestäni parasta, pappa, kokeilut kokeilu. Mielestäni parasta, kokeilut kokeilu. Mielestäni parasta, kokeilu. Mielestäni parasta, kokeilu, kokeilu. Pärustin pyöräilyvää teitä valmistavan ornotin vuonna 2013. even tempered and with a quirky sense of humor." An Ian had been the pastor of Quorum Burah Baptist Church for more than two decades, marking his 25th year in the role in February of 2024. Ever these families faith wasn't something they set aside after Sunday's service. It really just shaped the way they lived every single day. So when Aaron and Simon married on June 2nd, 2007, at the Quorum Burah Anglican Church, they chose that church deliberately. And Aaron said they wanted Ian and Heather "to be able to come and relax with guests," rather than working the ceremony at their own Baptist Church. And the reception was held under a marquee in Don and Gail's backyard in Quorum Burah, but Aaron's parents weren't able to be there. So the person who walked her down the aisle was David Wilkinson, which was Ian and Heather's son. But Faith hadn't always been part of Aaron's world, and she actually said she'd actively tried to convert him away from beliefs saying, "I was trying to convert him into being an atheist, but things happened in reverse," unquote. And then, around 2005, she walked into Quorum Burah Baptist Church for the first time, and something shifted. Ian Wilkinson stood behind the pulpit, and up to that point, Faith had been nothing more than an intellectual puzzle to her. But something hit her in that room. It, quote-unquote, "quite overwhelmed her," and it pulled her into the orbit of the very people sitting in those pews. The Patterson's, the Wilkinsons, and the small town faith community, they'd spent a lifetime building. And after the wedding, Aaron and Simon didn't settle down right away. And instead, they would use money from Aaron's inheritance and buy a Nissan petrol, petrol, sorry if I'm saying that wrong, and drove into Outback, Australia. Sorry, I couldn't help it. I had to do it once. Okay, I won't do it again. But Simon described those months as a, quote-unquote, "meander" through the country's vast interior. And from there, they flew to Africa, traveling through South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Namibia. And Botswana, as you may recall, was one of those places where Dawn and Gail had lived decades earlier as missionaries. And by September 2007, they'd settled in Perth, and their first child, a boy, arrived in January of 2009. And the Perth was pretty rough. Four steps failed during delivery, and the doctors had to perform an emergency c-section. And their newborn ended up in the intensive care unit. But even before the doctors cleared her, Aaron signed herself out. And she wanted to be at her baby's side. And Dawn and Gail came to help with the new baby. And Aaron said she felt, quote, "out of my depth," unquote, and was, quote, "really relieved that Gail was there," unquote. So she had that support system. And she described her mother-in-law as, quote, "really supportive and gentle and patient," unquote. And Gail told Aaron to, quote, "just relax and enjoy your baby." And those words landed deeply. And first stretch in 2011 and 2012, the family was living in Pemberton, a tiny timber milling town in the southwestern region of Western Australia. And Aaron opened a secondhand bookshop there, and it became kind of a hub for serious readers in a place where you wouldn't necessarily expect one. And eventually, after their first child, a daughter would follow in 2014. And as it turned out, Simon's sister Anna Tarrington was also expecting. So the two babies were born within three days of each other, so the family started affectionately calling them the twins. And that same year, Aaron and Simon bought a house in Korambura, so they could be closer to Simon's parents. And this was the town where Dawn talked, where Ian preached, and where Gail had spent decades quietly holding the community together. So the entire family was putting down their roots. But trouble arrived with their first child. And even with a baby, Simon wanted to keep road tripping. The family headed north along the Gib River Road, a remote track through Western Australia's Kimberly region. And somewhere around Queensland, the trip fell apart. And Aaron booked a flight to Perth and left. And Simon had no choice but to drive back with the baby. So it was a week on the road, just him and his infant. And when he finally got back, she'd already arranged a rental cottage for herself. And Simon wound up at a caravan park nearby. So this would be the first time Aaron would leave. And they were apart roughly two to three months before getting back together. And it kind of became a pattern. From 2009 to 2015, the couple separated and reconciled multiple times. And Simon felt that she was the one who always left, despite his desire to have a solid marriage. Quote, "What I understood from Aaron was that she was struggling inside herself." Now Aaron framed the problem differently, saying, "If we had a disagreement or any kind of conflict, we didn't seem to be able to talk about it in a way where either of us felt hurt or understood." And eventually, she told him the way they related to each other was toxic. And the marriage drifted through towns along the way. And they would try counseling and patch things up together and would actually move to York, which is in Western Australia. And then came the tiny timber settlement of Quinnip and they came back to Victoria in 2013. A short stop in Benna, then a house in Korambura. And the final split came in November of 2015. And she picked up a place of her own in Korambura and the family home was behind her. Quote, "I didn't want to be separated, but I felt there was no choice." But still, through it all, they never divorced. And what made this split unusual was how little seemed to change on the surface. Custody was split, but they continued texting regularly and they still sat in the same pews on Sunday, and they even traveled together as a family. And Aaron noted that Don and Gale never changed after the separation. Quote, "They just continued to love me," unquote, she would say. And they treated her quote like their own daughter, unquote. And Simon confirmed Aaron, saying, "Got along very well with his parents, especially with Dad," unquote. So in February of 2022, Don reached out to offer video call tutoring for Aaron's eldest child, telling her he was happy to help with any subject he had some confidence in. And both Aaron and Don had what Simon described as inquiring minds and the two of them bonded over shared curiosity. Financially, Aaron was pretty well off because a grandmother's death in 2006 had left behind a substantial estate. And Aaron's share was evaluated at around $2 million Australian dollars, parceled out over 8 years. And her father had died of cancer in 2011, and when her mother died of cancer some years later, another inheritance followed. And Simon called her very generous with his family and to the numbers backed that up. She lent hundreds of thousands of dollars to each of his three siblings, and his brother Matt alone received $300 to $400,000 Australian dollars to help build a home. And she would buy property of her own, a unit in Mount Waverly, and a place on Gibson Street in Liangatha, still being finished when she moved in. So pretty generous, I'd say. And she called Gibson Street her final house, the place where her children would grow up and she'd grow old. But they lived with her only part time under the shared custody agreement. And she wasn't working at that time, and she had actually deferred a place in a nursing and midwifery course. Because she was pretty comfortable from her assets, saying quote, "I could afford to go to university and I didn't need to work a job at the same time," unquote. Teased around. If you got it, why not? So on Mother's Day of 2023, Gail sent Aaron a text, saying quote, "Happy Mother's Day, Aaron, may God bless you, love Dawn, and Gail," unquote. And Aaron wrote back quote, "Thanks Gail, happy Mother's Day, to the best mom-in-law anyone could ask for. XXOO." So regardless of Simon and Aaron's separation, the family was still really close knit. But something awful was about to take place. So on Saturday, July 29, 2023, Aaron invited five people to lunch at her home on Gibson Street. Simon, his parents, Dawn, and Gail, and Gail's sister, Heather, along with Heather's husband, Ian, so just that whole close knit family. And it was to be an adult-only gathering. And Aaron's kids were spending a day with a friend, so it was really just all the adults getting together for a nice lunch. But Aaron had some news for the family, and the purpose of this gathering was medical. Because Aaron told the family she was dealing with a health scare and needed help figuring out what to say to her children. And when I before, Simon texted to say he wouldn't be coming. And he would tell her he felt too uncomfortable to attend. But he offered to have the conversation over the phone if she still wanted his input. Now Aaron wrote back at length, because she had spent the entire week getting prepared mentally and getting the house ready in the meal and just everything. And she would say to him, quote, "The work had been exhausting in light of the issue I'm facing," unquote. And she even said she'd put, quote, "a small fortune toward beef-eye filet to make beef Wellington's because she wanted it to be a special meal. I may not be able to host a lunch like this again for some time," she would add, quote, "It's important to me that you're all there tomorrow. I hope you change your mind," unquote. But Simon would never reply. And he would stay home. And his chair at the table would sit empty. But the remaining four guests arrived that Saturday, dawn, and gale, Heather, and Ian. And for the Wilkinsons, especially, the invitation had carried real weight. They were very happy to be invited, and Ian had taken it as a hopeful signal, a sense that maybe our relationship with Aaron was going to "improve". Because the family was still close, but the separation had caused, you know, some friction in the family, so everybody was just happy to be getting together. So before they sat down to eat, Aaron took her guests on a tour of the house, and then once lunch was ready, Heather and Gale offered to bring the food out, so Aaron would plate the portions, and all the women would bring out the food together. Then they would bow their heads and say grace before the first bite. And the conversation over the meal was light. Family talk, easy laughter, no one was in any sort of rush. The Wilkinsons ate their meal, and Gale got through about half her portion before pushing the plate over to Don to finish, and between his own plate and hers, Don ate close to a serving and a half. And there was the teasing around the table about, quote, "husbands helping their wives out by eating extra food", unquote. So the lunch was going really well. And then dessert was already waiting, and it was a cake Gale had baked, and a fruit platter, Heather had prepared. And the group managed a little of each, but after the Wilkinsons, there wasn't much appetite to go around. But once the plates were cleared, the mood of the afternoon changed, and Aaron told the group she discovered a lump on her elbow. And she'd said it had been diagnosed as "cancer", quote, "very serious life-threatening," unquote. And Ian said she'd "appeared", quote, "very concerned", unquote, about what the diagnosis meant. And she asked for the guidance on whether to tell her children, and if so, how. So the news would settle over the room, that a cancer diagnosis in this circle wasn't something anyone would carry alone, and Don was the first to respond. And he told her, quote, "that the best approach was to be honest," unquote. And then they prayed, asking for God's blessing on Aaron, and they held her in that prayer the way they'd held each other through every hard chapter for nearly 20 years. And the afternoon wound down quietly after that, and the guest left sometime in the late afternoon, and Heather said that the food had been delicious and beautiful. So by every measure available to the people sitting at that table, it had been a warm Saturday. Olen Shannon Maldonado, the doctor and physician of Arthesan, said that he had had a "very serious life-threatening experience," quote, "that he had a very serious life-threatening experience," quote, "that he had a very serious life-threatening experience," quote, "that he had a very serious life-threatening experience," quote, "that he had a very serious life-threatening experience," quote, "that he had a very serious life-threatening experience," quote, "that he had a very serious life-threatening experience." quote, "that he had a very serious life-threatening experience," quote, " that he had a very serious life-threatening experience." All four of them were sick. Don and Gale actually called the ambulance. And they arrived at Korambura Hospital at 1010 AM on July 30. And between the two of them, Don had taken the harder hit. And Simon drove the Wilkinsons to Lee and Gotha Hospital at 1057 AM. A different hospital roughly 20 minutes away because Korambura didn't have the capacity for all four patients. But at both hospitals, the initial assessment was the same. Suspected food poisoning or gastroenteritis. Which essentially is an inflamed stomach and intestine often from infection. But all four patients were conscious and alert and able to talk. And from his hospital bed, Don walked the doctors through everything that happened at Saturday's lunch. But as he went on, he kept going downhill. And his lactate levels climbed dangerously high. And his liver began failing. And signs of sepsis started to set in. And doctors realized that gastroenteritis alone couldn't explain what they were seeing. So toxicologists were consulted and the symptoms pointed toward a specific culprit. Ammonita falloids. Deathcap mushrooms. Now, death caps are behind more than 90% of fatal mushroom poisonings worldwide. And they contain amatoxins which are heat stable. Or, in other words, cooking does nothing to neutralize them. So the poison makes its way to the liver after ingestion. And it locks onto the cells there and kills their ability to produce proteins. So the cells literally die and the organ follows. And the poisoning follows a very cruel pattern. First, violent stomach symptoms hit within six to 24 hours of eating. Then the patient seems surrally for roughly a day. And then three to five days after ingestion, the liver collapses along with other major organs afterwards. In other words, sepsis. And it takes remarkably little to have a devastating effect. Just 0.1 milligrams per kilogram of body weight can be fatal. And one mushroom can take down a grown person. And the light of this discovery, the decision was made to move all four patients to major hospitals in Melbourne. Because the rural facilities could not manage what was coming. Now Erin had told Simon she'd also been sick since Saturday night. And she arrived at Lee and Gotha Hospital on Monday morning at 805. And then was transferred to Monash Clayton later that day. But she would be discharged the next day. And six days after the lunch on August 4th, Gale and Heather would pass away. Gale was 70 years old at the time and Heather was 66 years old. And she had still been teaching that week, working with her English students right up until the end. And doctors listed the cause as liver dysfunction and cascading organ failure, all traced to Ammonita mushroom toxicity. And by the time they died, their medical teams had already accepted that there was nothing more that they could do. And Don would receive a liver transplant in a last-ditch effort to help save him. But unfortunately, it wouldn't be enough. And Simon would say, quote, "Sadly, the rest of his body was already too sick to go on past that point." Unquote, and Ian nearly suffered the same fate. And he had spent weeks in an induced coma. And he would also receive a liver transplant of his own. And he was taken off the ventilator on August 14th. So 54 days passed between his admission and his release on September 23rd. And when news came of his release, his family spoke publicly for the first time, calling it "a moment of immense relief and gratitude." In the following Sunday, the Baptist Church congregation gathered to support each other and pray for Ian's recovery. And local mayor Nathan Hersey spoke for the town. And the three who died, he said, were, quote, "exceptional people who had given generously to the local community." Unquote. And counselor Jenny Curie said, quote, "We've lost a great store of kindness in Quarambura this weekend." So on August 31st, the memorial service for Dawn and Gale was held at Quarambura Memorial Hall. And hundreds of mourners filled the space. And tribute letters arrived from China, Botswana, and the United Kingdom. All saying Dawn and Gale were the most capable, kindness, and generous people they had ever met. And Simon stood before the crowd in Red Gale's final words. And she had typed them from her bed at Dandignung Hospital, one last message to the family group chat. Quote, "Lots of love to you all." And on October 4th, Heather had her own memorial service. And more than 400 people came to say goodbye. And Ian stood among those mourners, frail, and still deep in recovery. And it was his first public appearance since that lunch. Now, Victoria Police assigned its homicide squad to the case on August 4th, 2023. The same day, Gale and Heather had passed away. And Detective Sergeant Luke Farrell led the search of Patterson's Lee and Gotha Home the following morning. And over the next three months, investigators pulled at every single thread. And what they found dismantled the picture. Peace by peace. Now, the first alarm had sounded at the hospital. When Dr. Chris Webster told Erin that death cap mushrooms may have been involved in her guests' poisoning. And he asked what kind of mushrooms she'd used in the meal. And she said, "Wallworths, the supermarket chain." And death cap mushrooms are not sold in supermarkets, obviously. And those kind of contradictions kept coming. Erin's medical results showed no clinical or biochemical evidence of aminita poisoning. And she had claimed to have eaten the same meal as her guests and to have become ill. But her blood work didn't reflect anything close to what the others were showing. And even her presence at the hospital began to look strange and retrospect. And Nurse Cindy Monroe had treated the other lunch guests and was now treating Erin. Saying, quote, "She didn't look unwell like Ian and Heather. I recall Ian being. being so unwell, he could barely lift his head off the pillow. Aaron was sitting up in bed in the trolley, unquote. Aaron had stayed about five minutes that Monday morning, despite her doctor's objections. She had gotten up and just walked out, saying she needed to feed the dogs and pack her daughter's ballet bag. And when she failed to return in an agreed 20 minute window, a concerned doctor at the hospital contacted police. And that was the first time anyone in a position of authority had treated the lunch as something other than a medical event. A new investigators began to suspect that her brief hospital appearance had never been about getting treatment. It had been about being seen as sick in her behavior the day before, only reinforced the suspicion. So in Sunday, while Don and Gale were on their way to corumber a hospital, while the Wilkinsons were arriving at Lee and Gatha, Aaron had told Simon she'd had diarrhea since Saturday night. Not same afternoon, she had loaded her son into the car and driven him to a flying lesson in TIAB. And the drive was more than an hour each way. So after her transfer to Manash Clayton, Simon's sister-in-law, Tanya, came to visit. And Tanya told Aaron the others were going downhill quickly. And Aaron pivoted. And she asked about taking her children on a boat cruise. And Simon would later say that through all of it, Aaron "never actually asked about how his relatives were doing." And then there was the question of the children. The hospital, she had told staff, her kids had eaten leftover wellingtons, but she said she'd scraped off all the mushroom before giving it to them. And Nurse Monroe warned that toxins could have seat straight through the mushroom and into the beat. And Aaron resisted bringing the children in saying, "They did not eat the mushrooms. I just don't want them to be panicked and stressed." She eventually agreed and the children were kept overnight and found not to be ill luckily. So the implication landed quietly. Aaron, by her own account, had already known which part of the food was dangerous. And she had scraped it away from her children's portions. And she went public with a story. And Aaron told the media that beef wellingtons had contained store-bought mushrooms along with dried ones from in Asian grocery shops somewhere around Mount Waverly. Quote, "I am now devastated to think that these mushrooms may have contributed to the illness suffered by my loved ones," unquote. She told the media. And she also addressed reporters in a doorstep interview at the Lee and Gotha home after police described her as a suspect, saying, "I didn't do anything," she said. I loved them. And health authorities moved quickly. And over the course of a couple days, a city of Manash public health officer named Troy Shonkinecht hit every Asian and Indian grocery store he could find in Oakley and Clayton and Mount Waverly. And not one sold anything matching her description. And she had no name for a shop and no address and no way to send investigators anywhere near it. So it looked like the shop didn't really exist. And then the footage surfaced. And CCTV showed Aaron pulling into the Coonwara transfer station on August 2nd, four days after the lunch. So her guests were fighting for their lives in intensive care units across Melbourne. And she was at the local tip carrying a sunbeam food dehydrator into the electronics waste shed. And police would recover it from the dump two days later, and her fingerprints were on the device. And forensic testing found traces of death cat mushroom inside. And her first response to detectives was flat denial. She said she didn't own a food dehydrator, never had. But her own friend had already given police screenshots from a Facebook group conversation. And the photos showed mushrooms arranged across the trays of a dehydrator. Maybe if you're doing something bad, don't post it on Facebook or do. It's good that she did. That's crazy. And she would eventually have to admit the truth. Saying, quote, "I knew that there were photos in there of mushrooms in the dehydrator, and I just panicked," unquote. And detectives identified two phones in Patterson's possession. The first was the device she'd been carrying in the weeks leading up to the lunch. And the last time it appeared on any footage was a hospital security camera on July 31. And by the time investigators got inside the Gibson Street House on August 5th, the SIM card had already been pulled from that phone and dropped into a Nokia. And the movement log put the swap at 145 PM, which was while detectives were still working their way through the rooms. And the physical phone was never actually found. And the phone she did hand over had been factory reset four separate times during 2023. A little bit suspicious, I'd say. Sorry, that's the last time I'm going to do it, I swear. And once on August 2nd, the same day she drove to the tip with the dehydrator. And once again, August 5th, while police were conducting the search. And then, once more, after investigators already had it in their possession. Someone triggered a remote wipe while it was sitting in an evidence room. The detectives also seized her desktop computer. A forensic officer ran keyword searches, including deathcap, deathcap mushroom, and poison. And the cache data turned up, I, naturalist, a citizen science site. And people log where they've spotted different species of plants and fungi in the wild, including deathcaps. And the trail stretched back more than a year before the lunch. And someone using that machine had gone looking for deathcap mushroom sightings around Mirabin back in 2022. And when confronted, Patterson said she couldn't recall visiting the site. And then added, quote, while somebody did. And that somebody could have been me, unquote. Why are you even saying, just say you did it. What do you put? The phone records pointed in that same direction. And cell tower data placed her device near the town of Outrim on May 22nd, 2023. And the day before, a mushroom specialist had flagged a deathcap sighting on Nielsen Street through I, naturalist. The puzzle pieces are puzzling together. And her phone also connected to towers near the town of Locke on April 28th, around the same time she purchased the dehydrator. Photographs were pulled from her tablet with photos of deathcaps sitting right there on her kitchen scale. And it was photographed like someone was measuring out portions. And as a cherry on top, or should I say mushroom, the cancer she disclosed to her guests, that Saturday afternoon, was also fabricated. Doctors went through her medical records and an intensive care specialist couldn't find a single thing pointing to cancer. No diagnosis, nothing. Aaron's name was absent from the Victorian Cancer Registry, a database that captures every cancer diagnosis in the state. On the lump on her elbow, the very serious life threatening condition, the request for her family's guidance, the prayer they had said over her, all of it, built on a story that had zero foundation. So the lunch itself began to look pretty different, too. And Simon told investigators that Aaron almost never posted. He called guests at the Gibson Street property very rare. And Heather and Ian had never set foot there before that Saturday, hence why she gave them a tour of the house. And if the family ever got together, it was at somebody else's place. So the effort, she had poured into the meal, a week of preparation, beef-eye fillet, individual Wellington's, now stood out against the backdrop of someone who never had people over. And Ian's account of that house tour came back, too. Heather had been particularly eager to see the pantry, and she had a pantry project of her own at home and wanted to see Aaron's layout. But according to Ian, Aaron had been very reluctant about the visit to the pantry, and then there was the plating. Heather and Gail had both volunteered to help serve, and Aaron had turned them away, and she plated every dish herself, but let them take it out after she was done. And the plates became evidence in their own right. Because the four guests had been served on large gray plates, and Aaron had carried her own plate separately to the table, and hers was a different color. It was like an orange tan color. And Heather actually made note of it in the car on the way to the hospital that that was kind of odd. So as the investigation widened, the woman behind those clues began to come into focus. And almost nothing about her matched what the Patterson family had thought they knew. And investigators recovered private Facebook messages she'd sent to a circle of online friends. And the childhood she had presented as quietly middle class. She had described very differently in those messages, saying, quote, "Mom was essentially a cold robot," unquote, she had written. And, quote, "It was like being brought up in a Russian orphanage where they don't touch babies," unquote. And she described her father as a man who, quote, "wanted to be warm and loving to us, but mom wouldn't let him because it would spoil us so he did as he was told. And she would shout at him if he did the wrong thing, so he became very weak and compliant. And my sister and I would hide in our room most of the time so we couldn't do anything wrong," unquote. In a neighbor who had known Heather Schutter for years described her differently, saying, quote, "a lovely woman." as was her husband, unquote. So there's those two portraits, the public one and the private one, they didn't match. An old details took on a new weight. Because remember, Aaron's parents hadn't attended her wedding to Simon in 2007. And when asked at the time, she had said they were on a train in Russia. And there was no other explanation other than that, so we could safely assume she was not remotely close with her parents. And then there was also a documented history of deception that almost no one close to her had heard about. Because in 2002, during her brief career as an air traffic controller at air services, Australia, management had grown suspicious of her hours. And they had reviewed security cameras in the employee car park. And she had actually been clocking full shifts on paper while routinely walking out early, which is horrifying to think about because she's an air traffic controller in charge of hundreds of lives. And when confronted, she just flat out denied it. And then management ran her through the timestamps from the footage one by one. And like, she couldn't really say anything otherwise. And by November 2002, she no longer worked there. And in 2004, she had been convicted of property damage and multiple traffic offenses, using an unregistered vehicle on a highway, failing to stop after an accident and driving 35 kilometers per hour over the speed limit. And her former co-workers from the air traffic control tower, who had been guarded in their earlier statements, began to speak more openly now. The woman they described was far sharper edge than the earlier impressions had let on. And one former colleague called her a ritual habitual and pathological liar. Who would just say anything just to get away with anything and others were less measured? Saying, quote, a bit strange or a loner, someone who didn't engage with anyone very secretive about her family. And multiple men in the tower had once been smitten with her. And she managed to get guys wrapped around her little finger, as one of them would put it. And during her time at Air Services, Australia, she had earned a nickname among staff, which was, quote unquote, "scutter the nutter" after her maiden name. And the manager, who once called her smart-- very smart, as we talked about before-- had added something to his fuller statement-- almost too smart. And then there was the bookshop. Because for a stretch in 2011 and 2012, Aaron had run a secondhand bookshop in Pemperton, a tiny timber milling town in Western Australia. And the shop had fed a long-running personal fascination of hers, True Crime. And she had been deeply interested in the genre for years, reading widely, immersing herself in cases long before she ever found herself at the center of one. And finally, there was the relationship she had told everyone was loving and warm. And investigators recovered another cluster of Facebook messages, and these ones were about dawn and gale. And in late 2022, a dispute over child support had cracked the surface of the family. And Simon's tax return had listed him as separated, something he blamed on a mistake from his accountant. And Aaron, quote unquote, took great exception. And the change triggered a formal process that upended the formal arrangements they had kept for years around school fees and family expenses. So the numbers made the sting feel worse. And Simon's child support was assessed at $38 a month. And meanwhile, the change in status cost Aaron her eligibility for government family tax benefit payments, roughly $15,000 a year, because her inheritance put her above the threshold once the formal process kicked in. And even Simon recognized the gap. And he acknowledged that the low assessment was likely why Aaron had become so upset. And there had also been the matter of gale's 70th birthday lunch at the top pub in Korambura. And Aaron said the invitations he received had felt like it came as an afterthought. So Dawn had picked up the phone afterward and called her to talk it over. And he called it an oversight and said he genuinely wanted her at the table. And when the school fees fight intensified, Aaron had gone over Simon's head. And she'd actually taken it directly to Dawn and Gale, asking them to help the two of them talk it out. Quote, I thought that if Simon knew that Dawn and Gale knew how he was behaving, he might change his behavior, unquote. And Dawn has suggested she pray with Simon and withdraw the child support claim. And Aaron's reaction, as she told her Facebook friends, quote, "My head nearly exploded and I was like, what?" And Dawn and Gale had eventually told her they, quote, "I didn't want to get involved in financial matters," unquote. And by December 2022, the friction had escalated to what Simon called an extremely aggressive exchange, and to the point that he considered bringing in a mediator. And in private messages to friends on Facebook, her frustration was unfiltered, saying, quote, "This family I swear to fucking God, I thought his parents would want him to do the right thing, but it seemed so concerned about not wanting to feel uncomfortable and not wanting to get involved in their son's personal matters are overriding that so fucking, unquote." And she would later insist the messages were nothing more than venting, quote, "I had a good relationship with Dawn and Gale," unquote. And Simon's brother, Matthew, had also noticed something. And Aaron had stopped coming to some family events entirely, and at others, she would barely stay. And the warm Mother's Day text from May 2023 sent three months before that devastating lunch had been delivered against a backdrop. The Patterson's never-new existed. She was starting to try to build up that relationship again to make them want to come to a lunch that she was eventually going to host. So it was just a long game for Aaron. So on the morning, November 2nd, 2023, police arrived at Aaron's door with technology to texture dogs, trained to locate hidden electronics like USB drives. I didn't know these existed. That's awesome. And Aaron was placed under arrest. And Homicide Squad Detective Inspector Dean Thomas acknowledged the case had been subjected to incredibly intense levels of public scrutiny. And she was charged with three counts of murder for the deaths of Dawn Patterson, Gale Patterson, and Heather Wilkinson. And five counts of attempted murder were filed alongside them. Two, related to that July lunch. One, for Ian Wilkinson, who had survived and one for Simon, who had been invited, but stayed home. And now we realize why he stayed home because they were not getting along at all. And the other three alleged she had attempted to murder Simon on separate occasions across 2021 and 2022. So the trial opened on April 29th, 2025, inside the Supreme Court of Victoria, sitting at the La Trove Valley Courts in Morewell, and the courtroom sat in a small town. The home where the lunch had taken place was less than an hour's drive away. And Justice Christopher Beale, and before the first witness was called, the charges had already shifted. And prosecutors dropped every count connected to Simon Patterson. And the three attempted murder charges alleging she had poisoned him on separate occasions in 2021 and 2022 were now gone. And so was the charge that she had tried to kill him at the July lunch. But what were made was the three counts of murder for Don Patterson, Gail Patterson, and Heather Wilkinson, and one count of attempted murder for Ian Wilkinson. And Aaron pleaded not guilty to all charges, because she's an evil piece of shit. As we know, no. And the evidence phase alone consumed seven weeks, followed by six days of closing arguments and six and a half days behind the Cherry Room door. And over those weeks, the courtroom heard two entirely different versions of the same woman. And prosecutor Nanette Rogers as C built her case around what she called four calculated deceptions. First, a fabricated cancer diagnosis invented to lure the victims to a table. Second, death-cap mushrooms placed into the beep Wellington's in quantities meant to kill. And Rogers pointed to the photographs recovered from Patterson's tablet, which were death caps on a set of kitchen scales. It doesn't get much more guilty, Nanette. And fungi specialist Tom May had examined them and identified the mushrooms as aminita fatloids, quote, unquote, with a high level of confidence. And Rogers argued Patterson had weighed the mushrooms to calculate the weight required for the administration of Fatal Dose for one person. And the weight required for five Fatal Doses for five people, unquote. And third, a staged hospital visit meant to mimic poisoning symptoms she never had. And fourth, weeks of deliberate evidence destruction designed to keep anyone from finding out what she had done, the definition of pre-meditation and post-tampering. And then, Erin took the stand. And she testified for eight days. And she gave ground where she had to. Death-cap mushrooms must have been in the meal, 'cause she had forage for wild mushrooms since 2019. And she had bought that a hydrator then dumped it while her guests fought for it. further lives, and the cancer announcement was a fabrication, and she had factory reset her phone to hide photos of mushrooms and the dehydrator, and the hostile Facebook messages about Dawn and Gail were hers, though she dismissed them as simply venting. But on everything else, she held firm. She had never deliberately sought out death cat mushrooms, and she had never traveled to lock to collect them, and she had never used eye naturalists to track where they grew, and she never weighed them to calculate a fatal dose. And on the cancer claim, she offered an alternative. She had led the group to believe she might be needing some treatment, she said, but to the real issue had been an embarrassment over a gastric bypass consultation, and prosecutor Rogers pressed her, and she suggested Aaron had never planned to account for the cancer story because she had never expected to need to. "Because you thought that the lunch guests would die," that's not true, Aaron would answer, but it is. "You felt like you didn't have to account for any of this because you thought all of your victims would die, but luckily one did not, and thank goodness he didn't." The prosecution also called Simon Patterson to the stand, and he walked the jury through the crumbling marriage, the private hostility, and the night he had turned down the lunch invitation, and then Ian Wilkinson testified as well. The only person who had eaten the mushrooms at that table and survived. And he recounted the great plates, the odd-colored plate Aaron had carried to her own seat, and the offer to help serve that she had turned away. And he described Aaron as someone who, quote, "just seemed like a normal person," unquote. And the relationship had been, quote unquote, "friendly and amicable," but without, quote, much depth, more like acquaintances, unquote. And he told the court what he had told the police. He had been happy about the lunch invitation, hopeful it might improve the relationship with Aaron. Defense counsel Colin Mandy S.C. offered a simpler story. What happened was at tragedy, at terrible accident. Aaron's lies, he argued, had been born from shock, not planning. She panicked because she was overwhelmed by the fact that these four people had become so ill because of the food that she'd served them, not buying it, but keep going. And on motive, he pointed to its absence. She had no money issues, lived in a big house, and had almost full-time custody of her two young children. But in the closing, Rogers, the prosecutor, told the jury they did not need to know why. Quote, "You do not have to be satisfied what the motive was, or even that there was one," unquote. And why was it necessary to convict? Because guilty, beyond a reasonable doubt, doesn't necessarily mean that they have to have a motive. There just needs to be evidence as to if they did it, right? Motive helps, but it is not necessary. So on July 7th, 2025, the jury came back, and all 12 members were in agreement. Guilty on every count. Just a round of applause for that jury. Three murders, one attempted murder, and media crews flooded the courthouse within minutes. And by then, the trial had become an international story. And sentencing came on September 8th, and Justice Beale handed down three concurrent life sentences for murder and 25 years for attempted murder. And the non-parole period was 33 years. And Erin, at this point, was 50 years old. She won't be eligible for parole until 2056 when she'll be in her 80s. And Beale called her crimes, quote, "an enormous betrayal of trust. I have no hesitation in finding that you're offending falls into the worst category." And he identified five aggravating factors, substantial premeditation, and elaborate cover-up, a lack of pity, and the suffering of her victims and the betrayal of trust. And she had said nothing to the doctors of fighting to save her guests. And never once she revealed what she had put in their food. Quote, "Not only did you cut short three lives," Beale would say, "you inflicted untold suffering on your own children whom you robbed of their beloved grandparents," unquote. And her complete absence of remorse, he added, quote, "pores salt into all the victim's wounds," unquote. And the hearing ran almost 50 minutes and was broadcast live. And the court received 28 victim impact statements. Seven were read aloud, and Simon was absent from the hearing, and a relative read his words to the court, quote, "his children have been roved of hope for the kind of relationship with their mother that every child naturally yearns for," unquote. And Ruth Du Bois, one of the Wilkinson's daughters, named the broader victims. Several staff, investigators, shop owners, mushroom growers, the health department, and taxpayers all pulled into the aftermath, quote, "I am horrified that our family is even associated through no choice of our own with such destructive behavior towards the community," unquote. And Erin gave almost nothing away, and for most of the hearing, her eyes were closed. And when they were open, she looked at nothing because she is nothing. She's just an evil shit stain in this world, who I hope is having a terrible time rotting in jail. And Erin Wilkinson may have survived the lunch, but his body never came back to the way it had been before. And his liver function remains diminished, and respiratory problems followed him out of the hospital and never left. And he lives in Victoria, supported by the same church community that had held him up for decades. And he lost his wife of 44 years, and he lost the couple he had described as "the closest people to him after his wife and family," unquote. My life is greatly impoverished without them, and he told the court, quote, "It's a truly horrible thought to live with that somebody could decide to take her life. I only feel half alive without her," unquote. Oh, that's, oh my god. It's just so heartbreaking, I just, I don't understand how someone could take somebody away like that. It's just, it's so devastating. And when given the chance to speak about the woman who poisoned him, he chose an unexpected path, and that path was forgiveness. And he offered it publicly and carefully, but only what was his to give, because he could forgive the harm that was done to him, but what had been done to the others, he said, was beyond his power to absolve, and he had one prayer for Aaron, and that was, quote, "that she will use her time in jail wisely to become a better person," unquote. And outside the courthouse, after it was done, he spoke to the press. And he thanked the police and the hospital workers for their efforts, and then he said what mattered to him most. Quote, "I'd like to encourage all those involved to keep turning up and serving others. Our lives and the life of our community depends on the kindness of others," unquote. Aaron and Simon's two children live under a legal suppression order, and their identities are sealed from public view, but they're believed to be in their father's care. And court records noted that they had, quote, "settled into a new school better than expected," unquote. And Simon's victim impact statement noted that his children live in an irreparably broken home with only a solo parent, when almost everyone else knows their mother murdered their grandparents. And the media hasn't let them breathe. And the Patterson and Wilkinson family still carry the lasting damage of what happened. And one of the victim impact statements came from Don Patterson's mother, and she was 100 years old. She outlived her own son. So Aaron is serving her sentence at the Dame Phyllis Frost Center, a Maximum Security Women's Prison in Melbourne, and she spends at least 22 hours of every day inside herself. But the case isn't over, and two appeals sit before the Victorian Court of Appeal. And Aaron filed them on November 3, 2025, seeking to have the guilty verdicts quashed and a retrial ordered. The point at the center of her case is, during deliberations, the jury panel was booked into the same accommodation where police and members of the prosecution team were also staying. And she argues that arrangement alone constituted a "fundamental irregularity" that "fatally undermined the integrity of the verdicts." And she raised multiple grounds, challenges to the phone tower evidence and eye-naturalist data linking her to death cat mushroom locations, a claim that Facebook messages from her private group should have been excluded from the trial, and her argument just to spiel aired by refusing to admit images and videos from an SD card found at her home, and an allegation of unfair and oppressive cross-examination by the prosecutor, and a charge that the prosecution shifted its position on motive between its opening and closing addresses, having opened with no motive and then implied one. The prosecution filed its own appeal earlier on October 6, 2025, arguing the sentence was "manifestantly inadequate." And prosecutors contend that Justice Beale aired in finding a substantial chance Aaron would remain in solitary confinement for years, and that this finding infected his assessment of the non-parole period, both sides must first seek leave to appeal, and three court of appeal judges will hear both if leave is granted. And if Aaron's appeal succeeds, the court may acquit her or send the case back for retrial, which is "insane" to think. And if the prosecution's appeal succeeds, the court can impose a longer non-parole period or order a re-sentencing, which. would probably be good, because I feel like her sentencing wasn't adequate enough, but as of early 2026, no date has been set, and after the verdict, a gag order was lifted, and testimony Simon had given at pretrial hearing became public. And he said he had turned down the lunch invitation, because he believed she would poison him. In described, falling severely ill after eating food, she had prepared on prior occasions, a penne, bolognese pasta, a chicken, korma curry, and a vegetable curry wrap. But the jury never heard any of it. And then there's the question that sits at the center of everything and has no answer, which is why? Prosecutors never offered a motive, and they told the jury they didn't need one, which they don't. And Justice Beale wouldn't speculate, but there were frustrations. There were financial disputes, the slow erosion of a marriage, and the sharper edges that followed. But none of it explains the leap from resentment to poisoning an entire family. But she planned for months, as we saw, tracked where death caps grew online, drove to the locations, bought a dehydrator, weighed the mushrooms on a kitchen scale, and folded them into a meal for people who loved her. And Justice Beale found she intended to kill Simon too, had he shown up. Five intended victims. And when they started dying, she said nothing. She has never explained it, and she may never explain it. But Ian Wilkinson asked the only question worth asking, which was, quote, foolishness possesses a person to think that murder could be the solution to their problems, especially the murder of people who have only good intentions towards her. A question no one can answer. And with that, that is the end of the mushroom murder case, as always, my heart goes out to the family. And I hope true justice is served, and the prosecutions of Peale goes forward. But let me know what other cases you would like me to dive into. I always read the comments, and until next time, please stay safe out there. And I will see you a bit of a face in the next one. Okay? Bye. [Music] The victims of the murder were born in 2013. They were also in the same place as the victims, that they were able to find the same technique as the victims. They were also able to find the same way as the front-end victims, and then, in the same way, to be able to find the victims, and the victims were also able to find the same way. They were also able to find the same way as the front-end victims, and then, in the same way, to be able to find the same way. I will see you in the next video.