Woman found guilty of killing pastor’s wife, 2 others with poison mushrooms loses appeal, gets life without parole
Erin Patterson, an Australian woman, has lost her appeal against convictions for poisoning a pastor’s wife and two other relatives with death cap mushrooms baked in a beef Wellington. A court has ruled that she will never be eligible for parole.
The Court of Appeal in the state of Victoria last week threw out all seven grounds raised by her lawyers and agreed with prosecutors that her punishment should be increased, according to My Christian Daily.
The 52-year-old now faces life in prison with no prospect of release.
In 2025, a jury found Patterson guilty of murdering Don and Gail Patterson, her former parents-in-law, and Gail’s sister, Heather Wilkinson. She was also convicted of trying to kill Heather’s husband, Korumburra Baptist Church Pastor Ian Wilkinson, who became gravely ill after the meal and recovered.
In July 2023, Patterson served the four guests a meal at her house in Leongatha, Victoria. She had put the death cap mushrooms inside beef Wellingtons, a dish of beef fillet wrapped in pastry.
Ian Wilkinson has said he forgives her.
Patterson's original sentence, handed down in September 2025, was life in prison, with the possibility of parole after 33 years, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported.
Judges Stephen McLeish, Lesley Taylor and Peter Kidd removed that possibility entirely, so her sentence will end only with her death.
Under the earlier terms, Patterson might have been considered for parole in 2056, by which time she would have been in her early 80s.
The three judges wrote that the offending was “extraordinarily cold and calculated.” They added that the criminality was so shocking that setting any minimum term before parole would be inappropriate.
McLeish, who delivered the decision on the court’s behalf, said Patterson planned the killings with care. He said she meant to kill all four guests for almost three weeks, from the day she invited them through the cooking and serving of the meal and during the long suffering and deaths that followed.
Few people convicted in Australia have received life without parole.
Patterson followed the hearing by video link from the Dame Phyllis Frost women’s prison, where she is kept under maximum security. She leaned back as the ruling was read and seemed to stare blankly.
Police investigators, prosecutors and supporters of her estranged husband, Simon Patterson, smiled widely outside the court.
At the appeal hearing in August, prosecutors told the court the murders fell in the “worst category” and asked the judges to remove any chance of parole. They also argued that trial judge Christopher Beale was wrong to find she would probably spend years in solitary confinement because of her notoriety.
At the same hearing, Patterson’s lawyers argued that she did not get a fair trial, the BBC reported. Their main complaint concerned a hotel booking error that housed jurors where prosecutors, journalists and an important police witness were also staying.
The defense had called the arrangement “catastrophic.” The judges found that jurors had no contact with other guests, and while the setup invited speculation, they saw no reason to think a miscarriage of justice had occurred.
The judges also rejected her lawyers’ complaints about evidence from phone towers and the iNaturalist website, the trial judge’s rulings on a memory card of mushroom photos and on Facebook messages criticizing her family, and the conduct of senior prosecutor Nanette Rogers. They found Rogers had questioned Patterson fairly and that the prosecution had not changed its position on motive during the trial.
Patterson has always denied knowing that the mushrooms she served her relatives were poisonous. She has 28 days from the ruling to seek special leave to appeal to the High Court of Australia.
