Dumped food dehydrator shown to mushroom murder trial
Emily Woods |
Waste workers found a food dehydrator had been dumped at a tip by a woman in the days after a poisonous mushroom lunch was served, a triple-murder trial has been told.
Video of a woman getting out of a red car and pulling a black dehydrator from the boot before she placed it in an e-waste bin inside a green shed was shown to the jury in Erin Patterson’s trial on Wednesday.
Prosecutors claim Patterson disposed of the food dehydrator, which they allege contained death cap mushroom traces, after she served a poisoned beef Wellington to four former in-laws on July 29, 2023.
The 50-year-old mother of two has pleaded not guilty to three murder charges over the lunch, which led to the deaths of Don and Gail Patterson, 70, and Heather Wilkinson, 66.
Patterson claims the poisoning was unintentional and a terrible accident.
Koonwarra Transfer Station operations manager Darren Canty told the jury police contacted him on August 4 about a person who had attended the waste facility two days earlier.
“As a result of that inquiry, I looked at the video footage that we had from that day and made a copy of that footage and passed it on,” he said.
After the footage was played to the court in Morwell, regional Victoria, the jury was shown a photo of the black Sunbeam food dehydrator.
Mr Canty said the woman paid by EFTPOS for the e-waste disposal before she left.
Intensive care specialist Andrew Bersten was the next witness called on Wednesday, with the jury told he had been sent Patterson’s medical records from her presentation at hospital after the lunch.
This included ambulance records that showed Patterson had experienced “five loose bowel actions” between 10am and 11.50am on July 31.
“She was somewhat dehydrated and therefore I thought it was consistent with a diarrhoeal illness,” he said.
Earlier, the first scientist to test the beef Wellington remains said she did not find evidence of death cap mushrooms after examining the food with a microscope.
Mycologist Camille Truong was working on-call for the Victorian Poisons Information Centre on July 31 when she received a call from Monash Hospital toxicology registrar Laura Muldoon.
Four patients had been hospitalised after consuming a meal that contained mushrooms and Dr Muldoon asked for her help to identify the mushrooms, Dr Truong told the jury.
Dr Muldoon arranged to deliver the sample to the Royal Botanic Gardens national herbarium for the scientist to analyse. It arrived about 5pm but Dr Truong said she left work early that day.
A colleague brought the beef Wellington sample to Dr Truong’s home, where she analysed it on her bench under a microscope.
She did not find any death cap mushroom pieces and put the remains into her fridge overnight, Dr Truong told the jury.
The next day she took the sample to the Royal Botanic Gardens where she re-examined it and again found the remnants did not contain death cap mushrooms.
“The mushroom I identified is called a field mushroom … this is the typical mushrooms that you find in a supermarket,” Dr Truong said.
“That is the only mushroom that I found in this food item.”
Defence barrister Sophie Stafford earlier discussed a coronial report about a woman who died in May 2024 after making herself a meal out of mushrooms picked from her garden.
The elderly woman died from death cap mushroom poisoning, the jury was told.
Mushroom expert Thomas May said Victoria’s Department of Health had contacted him about the recommendations, which included that more public health messaging was needed on the dangers of consuming wild mushrooms.
The trial before Justice Christopher Beale continues on Thursday.
AAP
