Reasonable Doubt - Part 2
The timeline after the fatal lunch raises a question the prosecution never really answered: if this was murder, why didn’t she act like a murderer?
Before we continue, let me be clear: I am not saying Erin Patterson is innocent of a crime. The best-case scenario in this tragic event is that negligence on Erin Patterson's part caused the otherwise needless deaths of three dearly loved and valued community members, and nearly the death of a fourth. That is negligent manslaughter—a serious crime for which Erin Patterson would likely have received a lengthy sentence.
Though I can fully understand how they reached their conclusion, I am arguing that the jury erred in convicting her of murder, and that the media are wrong to portray her as "evil" or as a potential psychopath. I believe there was reasonable doubt. What Erin Patterson is undoubtedly guilty of is lying—but in this country, lying is not a capital offence. And I fear that’s what she was ultimately convicted for.
The timeline
On July 29, 2023, Erin Patterson hosted a meal at her home in Leongatha for her former in-laws Don and Gail Patterson, her estranged husband’s uncle and aunt, and family friends Ian and Heather Wilkinson. She cooked a beef wellington, and within hours, all four guests had become violently ill.
By August 4, three of them were dead.
This five-day period—between the lunch and the deaths—is where the prosecution needed to show that Erin Patterson behaved like a guilty woman. But a close look at that timeline reveals something very different.
Let’s walk through it.
July 29 — The Lunch
The lunch takes place. Erin eats the meal with her guests, and later her children also consume the meal leftovers, though she later claimed to have scraped the mushrooms off their portions. The guests become violently ill that evening. Erin also reportedly experiences some stomach discomfort.
Don and Gail Patterson and Ian and Heather Wilkinson are admitted that night to Korumburra Hospital. Doctors initially suspect a gastroenteritis outbreak. No suspicion of mushroom poisoning is yet raised.
July 30–31 — The Symptoms Worsen
On July 30, the condition of the four guests deteriorates. Don and Gail are transferred to Monash Medical Centre in Melbourne, while Heather and Ian remain at Korumburra Hospital under close observation.
On July 31, Erin presents at Leongatha Hospital with gastrointestinal symptoms. She is admitted and comes into contact with Dr Chris Webster.
At this stage, Erin reportedly tells police and medical staff that she believes the illness may have come from undercooked beef or mushrooms bought from a local shop. Her children, having eaten some of the same food, do not show comparable symptoms.
Importantly, Erin makes no move to conceal or destroy evidence. The beef wellington leftovers remain in her fridge. She is open with hospital staff. There is no indication of flight or evasion.
This is not what a calculating killer would do.
August 1 — The Turning Point
On this day, Erin remained at Leongatha Hospital while her four lunch guests were still critically ill at Korumburra Hospital. It was the day doctors first raised the possibility of Death Cap mushroom poisoning—and the day Erin's behaviour began to change.
This is the moment that, in retrospect and in my opinion, matters most. Because on this day, Erin learns that doctors suspect Death Cap mushroom poisoning—a near-certain death sentence.
According to testimony, it’s only after this revelation that Erin begins to panic. Her story becomes inconsistent. She starts omitting key facts and, crucially, later gets rid of the dehydrator allegedly used to prepare the mushrooms.
This has been widely interpreted as a sign of guilt, and must have been one of the most damning facts in the minds of the jury. But we must ask: guilt of what?
And here’s another possibility worth considering: when Dr. Webster asked Erin where the mushrooms came from, it may not yet have occurred to her what had actually happened. She may have, up to this moment, believed that they were suffering from food poisoning, perhaps the meat that she had used in the Beef Wellington was spoiled and contained bacteria that had poisoned her and her guests.
That moment (the moment she heard the words "Death Cap" and responded "Woolworths") may have been the first time she began to piece it together: that she had, without realising, mixed foraged mushrooms with store-bought ones, and that the foraged mushrooms had included deadly amanita phalloides. If that is true, then this is also the moment panic truly set in.
And that panic manifested immediately. Within hours of the conversation with Dr. Webster, Erin left the hospital against medical advice. Not because she was indifferent to the fate of her guests, but because she was beginning to realise she might have accidentally caused it.
Because everything up to this point suggests Erin believed, perhaps desperately, that her guests were going to recover. Her behaviour is not that of someone trying to cover her tracks in advance, but of someone shocked into panic once the medical prognosis turns fatal.
August 2–3 — The “Cover-Up”
On August 2, Erin is discharged from Leongatha Hospital. It is around this time that she reportedly discards the food dehydrator at the local tip—an action that would later become central to the Crown's theory of intentional concealment. She also begins to change elements of her story.
These inconsistencies were interpreted by the prosecution as indicators of guilt. But they also align with the psychological pattern of a person reeling from shock and desperately attempting to reconstruct a now-horrifying sequence of events.
It is worth noting that Erin’s sister-in-law Tanya Patterson testified that Erin's first question to her on August 1 had been about the condition of the four guests. That kind of concern undermines the claim that Erin was unmoved by their fate.
This phase of the timeline marks Erin’s first sustained attempt to distance herself from aspects of the meal—likely not out of malice, but out of mounting fear.
Rather than calculated cover-up, her actions appear reactive, emotional, and deeply human.
August 4 — The Deaths and the Narrative Shift
By this point, Don, Gail, and Heather are dead. Ian is clinging to life.
The story breaks publicly, and Erin becomes a national—and international—villain overnight. Media outlets seize on every detail, every inconsistency, every past lie. The narrative takes shape: a scorned ex-daughter-in-law. A deadly lunch. A convenient survival.
But none of that explains why she did it. And more importantly, none of that explains how a woman who supposedly planned this crime in cold blood could execute it so clumsily.
She didn’t destroy evidence in advance. She didn’t fabricate an alibi. She didn’t even leave town.
She cooked a meal in her own home, fed it to herself and her children, and stayed by the phone asking how her guests were doing until someone told her they were dying—and only then did she panic.
That’s not a murder plot. That’s a nightmare.
A Doctor’s Word, a Public Narrative, and a Conflict in Testimony
Much of the Crown’s portrayal of Erin Patterson as cold and remorseless hinged on one moment: her alleged failure to ask how her lunch guests were doing while they lay hospitalised in beds near her own.
That allegation came from Dr Chris Webster, a physician at Leongatha Hospital, who testified that Erin expressed no concern for Don and Gail Patterson or the Wilkinsons during her stay. In his view, that omission spoke volumes.
Dr Webster later went further—in a recorded interview on national television—calling Patterson “evil,” implying her indifference was as damning as any physical evidence.
But as we’ve seen, this version of events is directly contradicted by Tanya Patterson, Erin’s sister-in-law.
There’s a deeper issue here, too: Dr Webster testified that it was Erin’s response to his question—"Where did you get the mushrooms from?"—that led him to decide she was "evil." Her answer? "Woolworths." Whatever one makes of that response, it’s not inherently sinister—it’s a plausible answer in a country where supermarkets sell a variety of mushrooms. Yet Webster seemed to expect a different response entirely—something along the lines of, "How are Don and Gail? How are Ian and Heather?" That expectation is difficult to square with his own professional obligations.
His conclusion—that Erin’s answer made her evil—reveals more about his assumptions than it does about her intent.
Doctors are bound by obligations of patient confidentiality. If Erin had asked about the well-being of her guests, Webster would likely have been legally prohibited from telling her. That makes his criticism not just ethically questionable, but potentially misleading.
It’s also worth pausing on this: a medical professional who provided care to a patient not only publicly described that patient as “evil” on national television—but more critically, by his own admission, he decided she was evil based on just a few minutes of interaction. In those few minutes, Erin gave a confused but plausible answer—"Woolworths"—to a straightforward question about where the mushrooms had come from. That response led Dr Webster to a sweeping moral judgment about her character, one he later repeated to millions. Regardless of Erin Patterson’s guilt or innocence, that’s an extraordinary breach of professional neutrality—and it gave the public permission to abandon any presumption of innocence before a jury had even been empanelled.
Other confusing actions taken by Erin Patterson that undoubtedly influenced the jury such as remotely wiping multiple phones in the days following the lunch I will examine in a future part but there will be no surprise; my argument will be that I can reconcile these actions with panic as well as malicious intent.
We must not confuse silence and lies with murderous intent, nor to elevate one man’s moral outrage over the legal standard of proof. If juries convict based on emotional cues like perceived coldness, rather than facts, then justice becomes just another performance.
Reasonable doubt must be respected, it is fundamental to the rule of law. We should maintain a pragmatic view of this: better for 10 guilty persons to walk free, than a single wrongful conviction be upheld.
The Woolworths comment by the Dr never sat well with me. As if a person who indicates that they foraged the mushrooms must be innocent, and a person who used store bought mushrooms, must be lying and therefore guilty.
I have some knowledge about mushrooms found in Norway where I am from. And both the Death Cap and it's close relative the edible Blusher mushroom is found in Norway also. So I question if she misstook a Death Cap for a Blusher. Because if you are picking mushrooms you need to have the knowledge from somewhere. What did she think she was picking? Althought the 2 is very similar, the Blusher if cut, the flesh turns red, almost pink. The Death Cap's flesh doesn't. And you should know that if you are picking these mushrooms. A mushroom expert eller mycological expert should have been consulted here to assert what she knew or not. And if she had the nessesary knowledge. It is possible she knew how much she could eat to get sick, but not die.
So there is some unanswered questions, the first one should be motive. Too much is assumed and what is assumed is seemingy not questioned. And yes, it seems like unethical methods by the prosecution and this doctor. I understand a working theory when investigating, but it doesn't mean ignoring everything that doesn't fit into that theory.