The Mushroom Tapes

Conversations on a triple murder trial (By Chloe Hooper, Helen Garner, and Sarah Krasnostein, 2025)

Erin Scutter was born in 1974 .  Her mother Heather is said, rather vaguely, to have been an academic (“an expert in children’s literature”) and her father, even more vaguely, “a company director”.  Although her mother is important in this tale, her father is not.

In May, 2025 Erin (now Patterson) was tried for three murders and an attempted murder. Famously, in 2023,  Patterson had invited her estranged husband Simon, his parents, his aunt and his uncle, to lunch at her  house in Leongatha, New South Wales.  Simon declined the invitation the night before, which sparked an angry text from Patterson. It’s no surprise that Simon declined, given that he is said to suspect that  Patterson had tried to poison him three or four times previously. One wonders if he tried to dissuade his relatives from attending. Patterson served individual beef Wellingtons, mashed potatoes and green beans.  Patterson’s lunch was served on a plate which was a different colour from the others.

Within days, three of her guests were dead and the fourth was in a coma. The cause of the illness –  the ingestion of deadly mushrooms – was not in issue. Nor was the source of the poisoning – mushroom duxelles in the Beef Wellingtons. The question was whether Patterson had deliberately or accidentally included the death cap mushrooms. Her behaviour, post-lunch, was suspicious, to say the least. You would have to be a fungal spore living under leaf litter on the forest floor not to know the outcome of the trial, so it is no spoiler to say that Patterson was convicted.

“Renowned writers” Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein worked together to write this discursive  book, travelling between Melbourne and the Latrobe Valley Law Courts. The writers outline Patterson’s unsettled history.  Despite being apparently a gifted student at high school, she tried various careers, sued an employer for unfair dismissal and is reported to have been unpopular in at least one workplace. (It is to be noted, however – in case the detail of her scholastic aptitude came from Patterson herself – that she is an unreliable narrator.) At the time of the lunch she was apparently planning to study midwifery and taking steps toward gastric band surgery. Patterson told her guests that she had cancer, in order to cover her expected near future rapid weight loss. That was a lie. She had previously claimed to have, or was afraid that she had, a whole raft of illnesses.

Erin and Simon married in 2007. Patterson was financially well off, having inherited from her paternal grandmother and mother. Patterson became a Christian, as were most of her in-laws. During the marriage, Erin found Simon to be controlling and his family to be demanding, although, at the trial, she claimed to love them. In the 2020s there were upsetting incidents on both sides and after several reconciliations the Pattersons Ffinally separated in 2015. The two children of the marriage remained with Erin.

Patterson was a member of Facebook groups which discussed true crime. Her relationship with the (mostly) women online seems to have been one of her few “functioning” relationships and she shared personal details (sometimes untrue) with them.

Chloe observes both the journalists and spectator women in the gallery at the court, the women “sitting forward, listening intently. Notebooks open, pens in hand, I kept thinking they could be Erin.”  Chloe asks, “Is our bearing witness actually more high-minded or are we dressing up our own motives.?’” Sarah says, “…we have to look at our own interest in the case. Is it any different from that gleeful, ogling schadenfreude?“

Helen makes an interesting observation about  “public grief” during the trial, then goes on to answer Chloe’s and Sarah’s question in the negative. “It’s a rent in the social fabric and it’s grievous and horrible, but I would hate to think I was just perving. There is that element, of course, but you hope that by the time you’ve got a certain degree of skill as a writer, you can become useful…I think it’s useful work.”

In a scattered fashion, the authors attempt to answer everyone’s questions.  The most pressing one being: why did Patterson do it?

Let’s start with the childhood. Patterson’s was (she says) an unhappy one. “My mum was ultra weird her whole life. We had  a horrible upbringing. Mum was essentially a cold robot. It was like being brought up in a Russian orphanage where they don’t touch babies”. Sarah noticed, “how the choice of beef Wellington links to Erin’s mum – it was a dish she made on special occasions.” Chloe said, “There’s a matricidal quality to killing off your mother-in-law and her sister [another Heather].” The authors surmise that Patterson felt under-appreciated. She had no real friends, no real marriage, low self-esteem and issues with her weight.

Sarah “..Perhaps she was not being respected or recognised the the way she felt entitled to be, or in the way her own mother was.” Her family was “not appropriately grateful”. She was offended by “slights real or perceived , and Erin didn’t get the respect or the love or inclusion she felt was her due…And she started to feel resentful”. The authors ask, “Why is the public fascinated by a female poisoner? It’s archetypal. Adam and Eve and the apple. It’s throughout myths and fairytales.” There is also the mythical and fairytale nature of mushrooms themselves, and their link to Patterson’s mother. Chloe…”…mushrooms often appear in children’s literature. As houses, characters, in potions and having a transformative effect. They grow in the dark, So, it’s strange to me that Erin couldn’t bear her mother and rejected that childhood, and yet this had elements of a fairy story her mother might have read to her…”

Sarah: “I keep thinking about psychological poison – the way the emotions that derive murder grow in darkness. Like mushrooms. All the dark feelings and personality traits we’re taught to hide or be ashamed of lurk there, in our psychic shadow”. Chloe: “the death cap…exists in an ‘obligate relationship’ with oak trees: it is bound to their tree in order to survive. Erin too was introduced into the community and needed this oak-like family in ways which she didn’t fully understand.”

The authors come up with interesting comparisons between the net of fungus underground, society, law and media. They also consider how Patterson could have thought she would get away with it? And surmise that Patterson (who was often described as very intelligent) thought that she was smarter than everyone else, that country hospitals wouldn’t test for death cap mushrooms. Suggesting that Patterson felt angry, betrayed, an outcast, particularly with the family supporting Simon, Sarah says that she may have thought “’Like, I’ll take them away from you, even though they mean this much to me.’ Or maybe they didn’t mean that much to her.”

Her home, for now