What sort of person is Erin Trudi Patterson? Why, more to the point, would this outwardly normal mother-of-two, from a small town in rural Australia, decide to brutally kill several of her nearest and supposedly dearest relatives using poisoned beef Wellington?
These were the questions at the heart of the ‘Mushroom Murder’ trial which concluded on Monday with Patterson being found guilty of their cruel and utterly bizarre mass murder.
I’ve been trying to answer them since the autumn of 2023, when I first flew Down Under to report on her arrest.
Back then, the peculiar 50-year-old housewife, who has spent recent weeks twisting, turning and telling endless lies in the witness box, was a more-or-less blank canvas. She’d barely spoken in public, and her friends and family weren’t commenting at all.
Yet I was able to gain a unique insight into what actually made her tick by securing an impromptu tour of her family home.
The date was November 8, and the property was a modern, three-bedroom house on Lyons Street in Mount Waverley, a middle-class suburb of Melbourne, near to where Erin had grown up.
She and her estranged husband, Simon, had bought it a few years earlier, apparently as a metropolitan bolt-hole where their son and daughter, who are now aged 16 and 11, could spend time during the school holidays.
Erin had only just been charged with several murders. My intention, by paying the place a visit, was to knock on the doors of nearby properties to ask residents what they might know about their newly-infamous neighbour.
Erin Patterson arriving in the back of a prison vehicle at Latrobe Valley Magistrate’s Court in Morwell, Australia, last month
Heather and Ian Wilkinson, the aunt and uncle of Erin Patterson’s ex-husband, Simon. Heather died after the deadly lunch while Ian survived after falling seriously ill
Don and Gail Patterson, Simon’s parents, who both died after the lunch, which contained poisonous mushrooms
That was the plan. But it soon became clear that a significantly more exciting opportunity was about to present itself.
Namely, that the Patterson residence had just been listed for sale, via auction, for around $1million (£500k). And that very night, a local estate agent would be holding an ‘open-house’ event at the two-storey, red-brick property.
Now, with the benefit of hindsight, some of what I discovered through Erin Patterson’s keyhole looks very significant indeed.
While most of the downstairs rooms – including the ‘mushroom chef’s’ kitchen – had been emptied and cleaned, making them resemble a show-home, a couple of bedrooms still contained remnants of their occupant’s existence. A walk-in wardrobe was stuffed with children’s teddy bears and toys, and there were also several large Lego models, including one depicting a historic Melbourne street scene.
As we later discovered in court, playing with the children’s plastic toy bricks is one of Erin’s preferred methods of relaxation. Indeed, her son later told the court that she’d spent the evening of July 29, 2023 – the day she poisoned Simon’s parents, Don and Gail Patterson, plus his uncle and aunt, Ian and Heather Wilkinson – ‘building Lego upstairs’ at her country home, in the small rural town of Leongatha, where the deadly lunch had been served.
In a different room, a chest of drawers contained hand-written notes that appeared to detail the itinerary of a planned family holiday to the US.
Travel would turn out to be another of Erin’s favourite hobbies. Before relations with Simon soured, the court learned, she used a portion of her roughly $3m (£1.5m) inherited fortune to pay for family adventures, including road trips around Australia, an African safari, and several visits to New Zealand.
The master bedroom, meanwhile, spoke to a third great lifelong obsession: reading.
Police searching the home of Erin Patterson during their initial investigations into the deaths
One bookshelf was stuffed with religious texts, including at least six editions of the Old and New Testament, plus dozens of bestselling theological screeds by evangelical American preachers, including Schemes Of Satan, which was published in the 1990s and, according to its blurb, tells readers ‘how to tell if someone you love is involved in the occult’.
They most likely reflected Simon’s family connection to the Baptist Church, a Bible-thumping institution where his Uncle Ian (who ate Erin’s beef Wellington but survived) was the pastor, and where Don, Gail and Heather (who all died from the death cap mushrooms in its filling) were prominent volunteers.
Like many troubled characters, Erin craved acceptance. She later told court how, despite being a lifelong athiest, she’d converted to Christianity after experiencing an epiphany on a visit to Ian’s church early in their relationship.
Other texts on those shelves spoke to the obsession that Erin had with true crime – we found out in court that she was a member of various internet forums discussing real-life murder cases. They included The Shack, a novel by Canadian author William Young, about a serial killer named the Little Ladykiller who abducts and kills small children.
Then there was an extensive selection of memoirs about addiction, recovery and mental illness.
At the time, I barely noticed these. But, today, they seem to be the most significant items on display. For having sat through a significant portion of Erin’s ten-week trial, including the seven crucial days she spent testifying, I can say, without the slightest shadow of a doubt, that it’s impossible to understand her bizarre crime without looking at the troubled nature of her personality.
In fact, her behaviour in and out of court reflects a simple truth: beneath her unassuming exterior, there beats the heart of a dangerous narcissist who was capable of committing acts of extraordinary cruelty, without displaying even the slightest ability to feel normal human emotions such as compassion or remorse.
Indeed, it’s impossible to fully understand what drove Erin to brutally murder three close relatives – who died in awful circumstances – without seeking to comprehend the deep psychological flaws that emerged when she was finally subjected to cross examination at Latrobe Valley Magistrates Court in Morwell, the small town two hours from Melbourne.
Like many a sociopath, Erin Patterson mixes fierce intelligence with displays of breathtaking arrogance; she lies casually and extravagantly, and seems incapable of accepting responsibility for even basic personal shortcomings. When she accepts committing a misdemeanour, there’s always some excuse. And given the chance, she’ll seek to blame many of her worst flaws on someone else. If not her estranged spouse, then her parents.
Her mother, Heather Scutter, a university lecturer, was a respected literary critic, while her father, Eitan Scutter, worked in local government. One of two daughters, she grew up in a leafy Melbourne suburb.
The highly poisonous death cap mushroom that was used in the deadly beef wellingtons
On paper, it was a happy and prosperous childhood. Yet in online messages sent years later, Erin described Heather as a ‘cold alcoholic’ who browbeat her father, and described life in the family home as ‘like being brought up in a Russian orphanage where they don’t touch babies’.
In court, Erin claimed to have struggled with low self-esteem from an early age, saying she also developed an eating disorder during childhood. While there was no medical evidence to support this – she’d never sought treatment for bulimia – it would prove central to her defence.
Specifically, the jury was told that she’d made herself vomit by eating most of an orange cake shortly after the lunch at which her guests fell seriously ill. This, they were invited to conclude, was why she didn’t suffer life-changing injuries after the meal.
After completing her education, Erin passed rigorous academic tests to secure a job as an air-traffic controller in Melbourne. Colleagues from the time remember her as an unusual personality – someone who seemed straightforward at first glance, yet struggled to form abiding friendships.
‘Something was not quite right, she was a bit strange,’ one told reporters this week. ‘She would say some weird off-the-cuff things.’ Female colleagues nicknamed her ‘Scutter the nutter’.
Social awkwardness was part of Erin’s DNA – Simon described her as ‘high-functioning’ autistic. And it emerged during the trial that she rarely invited guests to her home for a meal, prior to the day she tried to murder four of them.
Erin’s time as an air traffic controller ended prematurely, after she was caught on CCTV routinely leaving the workplace early while claiming to have completed a full shift. Not long afterwards she was prosecuted for five motoring offences, having tested positive for drink-driving following a crash. But by 2004, she had a new job working as an RSPCA representative for Monash council.
A former neighbour of Patterson said ‘something was not quite right, she was a bit strange’
It was here that she met Simon, a mild-mannered civil engineer. Their friendship developed into romance and, in 2007, they were married in his home-town of Korumburra. The wedding was held at Don and Gail’s home, and Heather and Ian’s son, David Wilkinson, walked Patterson down the aisle. Erin’s parents did not attend the wedding. She told the court that they were on holiday, ‘travelling across Russia’.
Two children came along, a son in 2009, and a daughter five years later. But cracks soon began to appear in the relationship and, in 2015, they had decided to separate.
‘Primarily what we struggled with over the entire course of our relationship… we just couldn’t communicate well when we disagreed about something,’ Erin said in court.
By this stage, the Pattersons were living in Korumburra. Initially, relations between the estranged couple were cordial. They continued to holiday together and shared custody of the children, while Simon (whose Christian faith was aligned with a belief in the sanctity of marriage) made several unsuccessful efforts to reconcile. But over time, things began to sour.
At the heart of their falling out was money. Erin was, on paper, a wealthy woman. In July 2006, her paternal grandmother, Ora Scutter, had died, leaving Erin a bequest of roughly $2 million (£1m). And when her mother, Heather, passed away in 2019, she and her sister Ceinwen, a volcanologist and cake designer, who was not in court and has yet to comment on recent events, each received another windfall of roughly $1m (£500k).
For many years, Erin had been very generous with the money.
She gave Simon’s siblings interest-free loans to help them buy homes and, following their initial split, agreed to split their assets in half, without involving lawyers. Yet in November 2022, Simon listed himself as ‘single’ on a tax return, meaning Erin was no longer entitled to various tax breaks.
This had an impact on her day-to-day cashflow, so she responded by filing for child support. Soon, they were arguing over school fees and medical bills. Perhaps understandably, Erin felt put out.
The ensuing spat was heavily raked over in court, where it emerged that Don and Gail Patterson had turned down several requests by Erin to intervene. ‘They’re staying out of it. I’m sick of this s**t. I want nothing to do with them,’ she complained to Facebook friends. ‘F*** ’em!’
Of course, many people fall out with their estranged spouses, or feel they have been exploited for money by friends or relatives. What makes Erin different is that she decided to brutally kill them.
Responding to the perceived rejection in such an astonishingly vindictive manner is, self-evidently, highly unusual. Indeed, various criminal psychologists have argued it is likely to be product of an extreme narcissistic personality disorder.
Erin ‘does not see the world the same way as you and me. Her lens is different,’ wrote one such expert, Mary Hahn-Thomsen, in yesterday’s Sydney Morning Herald. ‘The narcissist craves acceptance and will go to great lengths to morph their interests and behaviour to fit in.
‘On the other hand, their reaction to perceived rejection can be excessive and brutal.’
Another psychologist, Xanthe Mallet, speaking on the Mail’s hit podcast, The Trial Of Erin Patterson, said: ‘I have seen cases where people – for example, those with narcissism mixed with a borderline personality disorder – can be led to a place where if they feel wronged, they act like an avenging angel… Patterson had this simmering rage for her ex-husband Simon and felt perhaps as if his family hadn’t supported her. She then transferred some of that rage on them and felt justified in harming them.’
In court, Erin’s apparent inability to understand how other people tick became starkly apparent when doctors gave evidence about her behaviour in the days after the lunch.
One, Dr Chris Webster, told how she failed to realise that she ought to be concerned for the welfare of her children, who according to her, had also eaten the toxic beef Wellington she had made.
‘She wasn’t freaking out about the safety of her children,’ he said. “‘Looking into her eyes, I thought: “I don’t know what planet you’re on, but you’re not on Earth.” If it was an Agatha Christie novel, this is how one of her characters would have done it.’
In an effort to ensure that Simon’s family came to the lunch that fateful day, Erin told them she had cancer. Attempting to explain why she’d lied to her relatives about this, she appeared arrogant and entitled. Her failure to express proper regret about the awful deaths of her relatives seemed, at best cold and at worst downright creepy.
Even when the guilty verdict was handed down, she displayed staggeringly little emotion.
It later emerged that she’d been so convinced that she’d walk free from court she’d hired contractors to erect black tarpaulin around her home in Leongatha, so she could enjoy some privacy in the days after her release.
Presumably, the narcissistic arrogance that led Erin Patterson to commit this bizarre crime also helped her convince herself that she’d get away with it. But the jury saw through this façade and realised that she was a monster hiding in plain sight.
