New details emerge about what Erin Patterson did just days before she was found guilty of murder

Erin Patterson was so confident she would be found not guilty of murder that she covered her Leongatha home in black plastic tarps for privacy once the trial ended.

However, on Monday afternoon, the mother of two was found guilty of murdering three members of her estranged husband’s family with death cap mushrooms, and will now return to jail.

The black tarps covering her home were installed on June 30 – just one week before the verdict was delivered. 

The property was the site of the beef Wellington lunch served on July 29, 2023, which killed Don and Gail Patterson, and Gail’s sister, Heather Wilkinson.

Only Pastor Ian Wilkinson survived her plot – a blunder Patterson would live to regret, and will now serve time for after also being found guilty of attempting to murder him. 

Seated at the back of courtroom four of the Supreme Court of Victoria, sitting at the Latrobe Valley Magistrates’ Court, Patterson, dressed in a paisley shirt, appeared stunned as her fate was sealed on Monday afternoon. 

Asked to deliver a verdict, the jury foreperson – one of only five women to sit on the original 15-person panel – simply stated, ‘guilty’. 

The verdict produced an audible gasp from those within the packed courtroom, which included members of the Patterson clan.

Patterson will now be taken back down to the Morwell Police Station cells where she had been kept throughout the trial.

They are the cells she had grown to loathe throughout her trial, complaining about being denied a pillow, doona and her computer.

She can expect to spend the next decades of her life caged within the walls of Dame Phyllis Frost Centre in Melbourne’s west alongside a rogue’s gallery of female killers.

On her weekly trips back there, Patterson had come to loathe the Chicken Cacciatore meals provided to her en route because the dish ‘had mushrooms in it’.

Once caged, she can expect to be kept in an isolation cell for her own protection for the foreseeable future due to her high profile and the frailty of her elderly victims.

It can now be revealed Patterson’s two children had continued to see their mother behind bars while she awaited trial, unwilling to accept she could murder their grandparents and aunt.

Patterson could be heard asking about them during breaks in the trial, asking a woman to ensure her now 16-year-old son was given ‘extra hugs’.

Patterson, who took the stand for eight days during her trial, claimed she had not intentionally poisoned her lunch guests. 

She claimed deaths of three members of her estranged husband Simon’s family were a terrible accident, and she may have accidentally included foraged mushrooms in the meal. 

Prosecutors laid out an extensive circumstantial case during the trial in Morwell, regional Victoria, to prove the poisoning event was deliberate.

This included evidence from sole lunch survivor Ian Wilkinson, who said Patterson had served individual beef Wellingtons to her guests on different plates to her own.

The prosecution accused Patterson of telling a series of lies to police, including that she did not forage for mushrooms in the meal and did not own a dehydrator.

She lied about it to public health investigators, who were searching to find the source of poisonous mushrooms after Patterson claimed they may be from an Asian store.

Patterson lied to doctors, nurses and toxicologists while they were trying to identify why her lunch guests were sick and save their lives at hospital.

She revealed for the first time that she enjoyed foraging for wild mushrooms when she was in the witness box, admitting she started mushrooming in 2020 during the pandemic.

‘They tasted good and I didn’t get sick,’ she told the jury about preparing and eating wild fungi for the first time.

After hearing more than two months of evidence, a jury of 14 was whittled down to 12 jurors who retired to deliberate on their verdicts one week ago, on June 30.

They returned after deliberating for seven days with a four guilty verdicts, convicting the 50-year-old woman of three murders and one attempted murder.

Patterson now faces a sentence of up to life in prison.

She will return to the court for a pre-sentence hearing later this year.