Review: Vivien Horler

The Mushroom Tapes – Conversations on a triple murder trial, by Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein (Text Publishing)

Many books have been published within weeks of the end of a sensational court case, mostly it would seem to cash in on the public’s ghoulish interest in the subject matter.

The Mushroom Tapes is not one of those, although its subject captured headlines all around the world. There is something about  women killers that evoke a kind of fascinated horror: women are supposed to be caring and nurturing, not cold-hearted murderers.

There is still some interest in women like the SA nurse Daisy de Melker, who was accused of poisoning two husbands with strychnine and found guilty of murdering her son with arsenic. She was hanged in Pretoria Central Prison in 1932, aged 46.

Then there was Marlene Lehenberg who, with a co-accused, killed her lover’s wife in Cape Town in 1974, and was sentenced to death. The death sentence was later commuted.

And of course there was Dina Rodrigues, found guilty in 2007 of masterminding the killing of her lover’s baby by a previous girlfriend. She served a lengthy prison sentence.

The Mushroom Tapes is about what is probably Australia’s most notorious murder trial. It involved a wealthy but middle class woman called Erin Patterson who in 2023 murdered her parents-in-law, as well as her mother-in-law’s sister, by feeding them a lunch laced with death cap mushrooms.

Two potential victims escaped: her husband Simon, who declined Erin’s lunch invitation at the last minute, and Simon’s uncle who did attend the lunch and ate the food but survived. He needed a liver transplant and has health problems to this day.

The Mushroom Tapes is not written by a tabloid journalist – it is by three thoughtful prize-winning Australian women writers, all of whom have won prizes for their work.

Five days after the trial begins, the three women drive from their homes in Melbourne to the Latrobe Valley Law Courts, a regional court complex two hours away, where Erin has elected to be tried.

Between early May 2005 and early July, when the trial ended in three murder convictions and one of attempted murder, the women followed the evidence, sometimes in person, sometimes via television, discussing and recording their reactions.

Right at the beginning they acknowledge: “None of us wants to write about this. And none of us wants not to write about it.”

Based on the evidence, the book explores the relationships of the people involved – Simon and Erin, her attachment to her in-laws Gail and Don Patterson (her own parents were dead) who had welcomed her to the family, and to Simon’s aunt and uncle, Heather and Ian Wilkinson.

Erin and Simon were estranged and Erin appears to have regarded it as a betrayal when her in-laws sided with Simon. But was that enough of a motive to try to kill all four of them, and presumably Simon too, her young children’s father, had he turned up for the lunch?

In the car on the way to the trial, Hooper wonders why people are so fascinated by a female poisoner. Krasnostein replies: “It’s archetypal. Adam and Eve and the apple. It’s throughout myths and fairy tales.”

Hooper says: “These crime stories seem to work as modern folktales. We like it all the more if the characters are clearly good or bad, much as those old tales need a witch.”

Krasnostein says: “If you’ve got delusions about your own power or entitlement – if you expect more from relationships that what’s reasonably attainable – where does all of that take you? Erin’s intelligent. She was well-travelled. She had the money to build her dream home. There’s a gap between grand expectations of life and marriage, and the damp reality of doing the school run in a country town, getting older, mingling with the same small church community – maybe you feel trapped.”

The evidence presents many themes: love, hate, resentment, revenge, money – and of course murder.

In early July 2025, the jury is sent out to consider their verdict. Two days later the lawyers, the media and Krasnostein are eating lunch in a nearby café – where they all had eaten many meals during the trial – when an email arrives to say the jury has reached a conclusion.

She later tells Garner and Hooper: “I was like, ‘What email?’ And then everyone in the café suddenly shot up and there was a scrum round the cash register and the staff were like, ‘No – go. Pay later.’ And then we were all running, like really running to the court. There was no dignity.

“I got in and I sat in the seat directly in front of Erin, in that back pew. She was impassive. I could hear her breathing. It was sigh-gasp-sigh.”

After the first guilty verdict, Krasnostein says she turned to look at Erin. “… and there was no expression on her face beyond mild interest.”

She adds: “Before they took her out? No, no expression. No. You want an expression from me? Fuck you. You’re not getting an expression.”

In late August sentencing proceedings begin. Ian Wilkinson, the survivor and a Baptist preacher, tells the court he feels only half alive without his wife.

Then he says: “I make an offer of forgiveness to Erin. … I bear her no ill will. Now I am no longer Erin Patterson’s victim, and she has become the victim of my kindness.”

In his judgment Judge Beale refers to the “unprecedented media coverage” of the case, and predicts Patterson, 50, is likely to be a notorious prisoner for years to come.

In prison, for her own protection, she is held in isolation, spending up to 22 hours a day alone in her cell. Given these conditions, Judge Beale shows what the authors call a sliver of mercy.

He sentences her to life imprisonment, with a non-parole period of 33 years. She will be 83 when released. Her children will be grown and gone. During their discussions, one of the woman observes that Erin has handed them a sack of stones they will never be able to shed.

After the sentencing the writers join the throng milling about outside the court. They feel a deep “inner breathlessness, an appalling sorrow. Blind horror of murder, cramped horror of a locked cell. How savage we are, and how fragile. And yet, Ian Wilkinson’s offer of kindness – an enlargement of the field.”

I found this a gripping read.

• This book was a gift to me from my family in Australia. It may not be available in SA bookshops, but it is on Kindle.