Erin Patterson raised her chin almost defiantly, giving a sense this was all a grave mistake, that she was not supposed to be there. For lengthy periods during her sentencing she even closed her eyes, a woman seemingly at peace with her fate.
But her hands betrayed her: clasped tightly in her lap, though moving frequently, the thumbs rotating around each other or the fingers on her left hand opening and closing regularly as if to mimic her heartbeat.
Patterson was sentenced to life imprisonment with a non-parole period of 33 years on Monday for the murders of Don and Gail Patterson and Heather Wilkinson and the attempted murder of Ian Wilkinson. When it was over, she walked from the dock, her left hand touching it as she went, before she trailed her right hand along the front of the box for court reporters.
She did not speak, or show any emotion; and then she was gone, into a prison van, out of Melbourne, the city falling away behind her as she made her way to the Gordon unit in the Dame Phyllis Frost centre in the city’s flat and dusty outer west.
She has been held in solitary confinement there for 15 months. Justice Christopher Beale said her notoriety was unlikely to fade any time soon and so her conditions could stay that way for years to come.
It was one of the factors he weighed when considering her sentence. Such an exercise, a 45-minute summary of an 11-week trial – and thousands of pages of evidence besides – gives a clear sense of what the judge considered at the heart of the case.
There is no need for a jury to say why they reached the verdict they did, but Beale made plain what had influenced his decision about Patterson’s sentence. The aggravating circumstances, he found, were the substantial premeditation; her pitiless behaviour after the lunch; the suffering of her victims and those who knew them; and her elaborate cover-up.
“Finally, and most importantly, your offending involved an enormous betrayal of trust,” Beale said.
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“Your victims were all your relatives by marriage. More than that, they had all been good to you and your children over many years, as you acknowledged in your testimony.
“Not only did you cut short three lives and cause lasting damage to Ian Wilkinson’s health, thereby devastating the extended Patterson and Wilkinson families, you inflicted untold suffering on your own children whom you robbed of their beloved grandparents.”
Wilkinson was sitting to Patterson’s left, about as far from her as Beale, his right shoulder resting against one of the four columns that supported the public gallery overhead.
That gallery was full, with those in the front row pressed against the glass in front to try to catch a glimpse of Patterson below.
Some of the best seats in the house, in the jury box, sat empty; but two of the jurors from her trial were in court for the sentence, in the front row on the opposite side of the court to Wilkinson. Sat nearby were Patterson’s only two supporters in court, her power of attorney and a friend.
It is hard to imagine two courtrooms more different than courtroom four in Morwell, the modern multistorey court in regional Victoria where the trial was held, and courtroom four in the Victorian supreme court – the grandest court in the state – where the sentence was delivered.
The energy in the room had not changed, however, and nor for the most part had the cast; a cross-section of members of the public with a ghoulish interest in the case, far more reporters than normal for a murder sentence working on a dizzying array of projects, and those so deeply affected by the events they will never recover.
Beale clipped through the details of what had bought all these people together again, probably for the last time: Patterson’s visit to the website iNaturalist, where sightings and locations of death cap mushrooms had been reported, more than a year before the murders; her lying about health scares; and laying the snare of the lunch invitation. Simon Patterson, her estranged husband, cancelling the night before the lunch via text and Patterson responding – with remarkable prescience, as it happened – that she “wanted it to be a special meal as I may not be able to host a lunch like this again for some time”.
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Beale spoke about the grey and orange plates, about Ian Wilkinson praying for Erin’s health after the meal, about the horror of the days after this lunch, David Wilkinson saying his mother, Heather, felt her “insides were burning” while his father, Ian, had a tortured appearance, with black lips and a gaunt face.
Beale looked at her regularly over the top of his black-rimmed glasses while reading the sentence, occasionally with seemingly pointed emphasis: “deliberately poisoned with death cap mushrooms”, he said, speaking about the individual beef wellingtons she served up on 29 July 2023; “falsely”, he noted, about her claims she fed leftovers of the lunch to her children, both times staring directly at her.
Occasionally Patterson would draw her cheeks in slightly as Beale spoke, as if about to start a pout, before releasing them again.
Almost miraculously, for all that is known about the case – all the social media posts and blog entries, the hours of live crosses and terabytes of podcasts and the pages of books and episodes of television to come – something utterly central to the murders remains unanswered: why did Erin Patterson kill?
“Clearly, the jury was satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that you committed the alleged offences,” Beale said about the absence of a motive in the case.
“Only you know why you committed them. I will not be speculating about that matter.”
Beale said the victim impact statements he considered while arriving at his sentence described her crimes again and again as “senseless”.
Many of those statements also spoke of how the coverage of the case had compounded the grief of the Wilkinson and Patterson families.
Ian Wilkinson made his statement in court last month, where he said “it’s one of the distressing shortcomings of our society that so much attention is showered on those who do evil and so little on those who do good”.
Wilkinson also made an offer of forgiveness to Patterson. Beale said she should heed the words of the man she tried to kill.
“That offer of forgiveness presents you with an opportunity,” Beale said. “You would do well to embrace it in the manner he suggests.”
