Orange plate and orange cake – the evidence the jury heardpublished at 08:59 British Summer Time<\/p>\n
08:59 BST<\/p>\n
Erin Patterson has said the deaths were a tragic accident. But over nine weeks, the jury heard evidence suggesting this was a case of murder – and decided so today.<\/p>\n
Here are some of the key details the jury heard.<\/p>\n
An orange plate<\/b><\/p>\n
Ian Wilkinson, who ate the meal but survived, recalled watching Patterson serve the food – five separate beef Wellingtons onto four grey plates – and an orange one for herself. His wife Heather, who died, had commented on this, according to a witness, saying: “I’ve puzzled about it since lunch… Is Erin short of crockery?”<\/p>\n
Patterson had no traces of death cap mushroom poisoning.<\/p>\n
In a police interview, detectives asked her: “We’re trying to understand why you’re not that ill.”<\/p>\n
An orange cake<\/b><\/p>\n
But Patterson had her explanation – she ate too much cake.<\/p>\n
“I ate another piece of cake, and then another piece,” she said, and before she knew it, the cake was gone and she felt overfull.<\/p>\n
“So I went to the toilet and brought it back up again,” Erin told the trial. “After I’d done that, I felt better.”<\/p>\n
Red flags<\/b><\/p>\n
There was also the question of where the mushrooms came from. <\/p>\n
Patterson claimed some were bought dried from an Asian grocery store in Melbourne, but she couldn’t say which suburb, the brand, or provide proof of the purchase. She insisted, however, that she had never picked wild mushrooms.<\/p>\n
Later, after photos showing what looked like death cap mushrooms being weighed on kitchen scales emerged as evidence, Patterson admitted she lied about her foraging hobby, because she was “scared”.<\/p>\n
No clear motive<\/b><\/p>\n
The prosecution did not present a specific motive, which was key to her defence.<\/p>\n
However, in the end, this did not stop the jury from finding Patterson guilty today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Orange plate and orange cake – the evidence the jury heardpublished at 08:59 British Summer Time 08:59 BST…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":244867,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[12,26],"class_list":{"0":"post-244866","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world","8":"tag-news","9":"tag-world"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114811153002418314","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244866","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=244866"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244866\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/244867"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=244866"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=244866"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=244866"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}