An Australian court has dismissed an appeal by “mushroom murderer” Erin Patterson against her conviction and ruled that she should spend the rest of her life behind bars.
A three-judge panel at the Supreme Court of Victoria delivered its ruling on Friday. The justices said that Patterson, who was convicted last year of murdering three of her estranged husband’s relatives with a meal laced with deadly mushrooms, should not have the chance of parole.
“This offending was extraordinarily cold and calculated, and stands to be denounced in the strongest terms,” Justice Stephen McLeish, speaking on behalf of the panel, told the Melbourne court.
“In all the circumstances, after anxious consideration, we have concluded that the case involved such shocking criminality that it is inappropriate to fix a non-parole period.”
Patterson, then 51, was convicted for the murder of her mother-in-law and father-in-law, Gail and Donald Patterson, and Gail’s sister, Heather Wilkinson, by serving them a lunch of beef wellington laced with death cap mushrooms.
She was also convicted of the attempted murder of Ian Wilkinson, Heather’s husband, who survived the meal.
Her crimes involved an “elaborate series of deceptions” including falsely claiming a cancer diagnosis to explain the absence of her two children from the lunch, the judge noted.
The survivor testified that Patterson had told her guests she wanted their advice about what to tell the children about her diagnosis.
Patterson was sentenced to life in prison with a 33-year non-parole period, among the longest terms ever handed to a woman in Australia. She has always denied wrongdoing, saying the deaths were accidental.
Her lawyers had argued that certain evidence should have been kept from the trial, that her cross-examination was unfair, and that placing the jury in the same hotel as other parties to the case compromised the result. Judges found these grounds for an appeal to be insufficient.
She can apply to Australia’s High Court to overturn the verdicts on her sentence and her convictions. The High Court is her last appeal option.
Patterson is only the second woman in Australia to be imprisoned for life without possibility of parole. The first is meatworker Katherine Knight, who was sentenced in New South Wales state in 2001 for the murder a year earlier of her partner John Price, whom she’d stabbed at least 37 times.
