Aunt Carrie Always Made the Tea
She was a plump, bespectacled great-grandmother who baked, who fussed, who visited the sick and the elderly, and who was beloved across a wide circle of family and in-laws. They called her Aunt Carrie.
She was also, patiently and over years, killing them.
In 1950s Sydney, Caroline Grills poisoned her family with thallium — the active ingredient in a rat poison you could buy over the counter, no questions asked, during the city's rat plague. It was close to the perfect weapon: colourless, tasteless, dissolved in a cup of tea without a trace. And it was cruel. It mimicked ordinary illness on the way to killing you — cramps, numbness, hair falling out in clumps, failing sight — so no doctor thought to test for it. Four deaths in her family over two years were written off as bad luck and old age.
She was caught only when a relative — already half-blind from an earlier dose — sat across from her and watched her hand pass over a teacup. He carried the cup quietly to the kitchen, poured it into a bottle, and handed it to police. The lab found a lethal dose. When detectives told Grills that two exhumed bodies had tested positive, she offered just two words: "Fancy that."
The women she was later locked up with gave her a nickname that stuck. They called her Aunt Thally.
Australia eventually banned the poison. But it couldn't ban the vulnerability she exploited — the trust we place in the people who feed us.
Aunt Thally is one of twelve cases in my new book, The True Crime Verdict Files: Poisoners— the first volume in an ongoing anthology series.
Want to know the day it's released? Register here and I'll email you the moment it's out — and when each new volume lands.
And if you'd like to know more as the series grows, follow me on Goodreads.
A Death That Made No Sense: Meet Kouri Richins
On the evening of 3 March 2022, Kouri Richins had reason to celebrate. She had just secured the property she'd been chasing for months — a partly built mansion in Midway, Utah — with settlement only days away. That night, at her home outside Park City, she mixed a couple of cocktails and carried one through to her husband, Eric, who was already in bed.
By the early hours of the morning, Eric was dead. He was thirty-nine, athletic, with no history of drug use. The autopsy found fentanyl in his blood at roughly five times a lethal dose — illicit, street-grade, swallowed.
For a while now my blog space has been dominated by Australian poisoner, Erin Patterson. You've been patient with my obsession, and I'm grateful. But it's time to cross the Pacific to a new crime. A new poisoner.
In the recent Kouri Richins trial, prosecutors pulled on a number of different threads - there was the money: a house-flipping business the state described as failing, a mountain of debt, and life insurance policies worth more than a million dollars. There was another man. And there was Valentine's Day, weeks before Eric's death, when — prosecutors alleged — a first attempt on his life had already been made and failed. The cocktail Kouri carried to bed that March night, the state argued, was the second.
Then there is the detail has featured in more than one headline.
A year after Eric died, and while the investigation was still open, Kouri published a children's picture book about a boy grieving his father. She promoted it on local television as something she'd written for her own children. Trial testimony told a different story: she had actually paid a ghostwriter to write it.
For me, though, the case turns on the forensics. The digital evidence — search histories, deleted messages, the movement of a phone through a house in the hours that were supposed to have been quiet.
Kouri Richins is where True Crime Verdict Files — Volume 1 opens. The other eleven chapters each take up a different poisoner — twelve cases in all, twelve verdicts, out in late August 2026.
Want to get started on the book before release, and be notified the moment the book lands? Register here for a free bonus chapter: https://www.cherylwarrenauthor.com/bonus
Erin Patterson - The Mushroom Murders Appeal Explained(August 2026)
In 2023, three members of Erin Patterson's extended family died after eating a beef Wellington lunch laced with death cap mushrooms at her home in Leongatha, in rural Victoria. She was the cook, and their daughter-in-law. In 2025 a jury convicted her of three murders and one attempted murder, and she was sentenced to life imprisonment with a 33-year non-parole period - one of the longest terms ever handed to a woman in Australia. The case drew journalists from around the world, and its next chapter is now just weeks away.
On 19 and 20 August this year, the Victorian Court of Appeal will hear the appeal - well, both appeals actually... but more about that soon.
First, let’s look at what an appeal is not. It is not a retrial. No witnesses will be called, no jury empanelled. The court will not re-decide whether Erin Patterson is guilty. Under Australian law an appeal is not an automatic right - her lawyers first had to persuade the court there might have been legal errors worth hearing. The question is quite narrow: whether errors of law or procedure occurred at trial, and if so, whether they were serious enough to have caused a miscarriage of justice.
Ok… now back to the appeals - yes, there are two! Erin Patterson is challenging her convictions and her sentence. At the same time, the Crown is appealing the sentence from the other direction, arguing the 33-year non-parole period was manifestly inadequate - that Erin Patterson should never be released. It is standard for related appeals from the same trial to be heard together.
The defence - Erin Patterson’s legal team raise seven grounds in their appeal. They fall into a few groups.
The most attention has gone to the jury sequestration appeal ground. After the jury was sent out to deliberate, it emerged that they had been accommodated in the same hotel as the lead investigator and two members of the prosecution team. In Erin Patterson’s appeal, her lawyers describe this as a 'fundamental irregularity’ that fatally undermined the integrity of the verdicts, requiring the convictions to be quashed and a retrial ordered so that justice can be seen to be done. At the time of the trial, the judge noted that the jury had a floor to itself, separated from other guests, and there is no suggestion - by either the prosecution or the defence - that any juror spoke to anyone. At a more practical level, the Latrobe Valley, where the trial was held, is a cluster of small regional towns, and the number of hotels able to house a sequestered jury there is limited.
Another group of appeal challenges in Erin Patterson’s appeal relate to evidence the trial judge admitted. This includes the cell tower location data said to place her phone near the townships of Loch and Outtrim after death cap sightings were posted online, and a series of Facebook messages in which she vented about her in-laws. Her lawyers argue this material was irrelevant or unfairly prejudicial - that the jury may have given it more weight than it should have been given. Another of the evidence related appeal grounds runs the other way: that the judge wrongly excluded evidence the defence wanted the jury to see, including certain photos and videos relating to mushrooms found at her home.
A third ground concerns the cross-examination of Erin Patterson. Having chosen to give evidence in her own defence, she was questioned by the Crown prosecutor, Dr Nanette Rogers SC, across five days in the witness box. Her appeal contends that this cross-examination was unfair and oppressive, and that it caused a substantial miscarriage of justice.
The final ground concerns motive. The prosecution opened its case telling the jury there was no evidence of a motive - and then, the defence alleges, implied in its closing address that there was one after all. Her lawyers say that shift caused a substantial miscarriage of justice, and they lean on a feature of the trial that drew wide comment at the time: the jury convicted without a proven motive.
The digital evidence deserves a mention too, because it sits at the centre of the admissibility grounds, and it is the part of the case closest to my own background - information technology. Cell tower records do not track a phone the way a GPS pin does. They show which towers a phone connected to, and an expert draws careful, qualified inferences from the pattern. At trial, the expert himself spoke of possible visits, not confirmed ones, and the judge admitted the data as evidence of opportunity - no higher. The appeal court will consider whether even that was too much.
What will happen at the appeal? A panel of appeal judges will hear the two appeals together. The barristers will put their arguments and answer questions from the bench, and the court will then almost certainly reserve its decision rather than rule on the spot. Judgment could come weeks or months later. The outcomes open to the court span a wide range: it could dismiss every ground and leave the convictions and sentence untouched; it could uphold the Crown's appeal and lengthen the sentence; or, if it finds a ground made out, it could quash the convictions and order a retrial.
I will not attempt to predict the outcome. What I can do is what I set out to do when I wrote Fatal Lunch: separate what has been established from what is merely repeated, and explain the evidence in the order and the context in which it actually exists. When the decision lands, I will publish a plain-English explainer here the same day.
From One Poisoner to Twelve!
When I finished writing Fatal Lunch, I thought I was done with poisoners.
The Erin Patterson case had consumed the better part of a year. One case, one afternoon, one meal - and an extraordinary amount of forensic, legal, and circumstantial detail to untangle. By the time I'd finished, I knew more about death cap mushrooms than any reasonable person should, and I was ready to move on to something different.
That lasted about a week.
The problem with researching one poisoner is that you inevitably stumble across others. And once you start pulling at those threads, you can't stop. A footnote leads to a case from the 1950s. That case leads to a journal article from the 1890s. That article leads to a poison you've never heard of, and suddenly it's one in the morning and you're reading about aconite - a plant so toxic it was named after the saliva of the three-headed dog that guarded the underworld!
That's how my second book was born. Not with a firm plan, but with a question I couldn't put down: what kind of person poisons someone who trusts them?
It's a different kind of crime. There's no confrontation, no weapon in the conventional sense, no moment of physical violence. What there is, every single time, is proximity. A shared meal. A cup of tea. A vitamin. A cocktail made to celebrate good news. Poisoners don't break in. They're already inside. They're already trusted. That's what makes these cases so unsettling - and, if I'm honest, so compelling to research.
The new book is called True Crime Verdict Files: Volume 1 - 12 Disturbing True Crime Stories of Murder by Poison. it's the first book in what will be a solid anthology series. This first book will cover twelve cases, spanning 134 years, four countries, and seven different poisons. Some of the names you'll recognise. Others have been almost entirely forgotten - buried in old newspaper archives and court records that took some serious digging to find.
This book sent me across centuries and continents. I've spent time in digitised newspaper archives from Victorian London, coronial records from 1950s Sydney, and glued to Court TV watching a case that only wrapped up earlier this year. Some of the older cases have gaps - records that were lost, bodies that were cremated before anyone thought to test them, details that conflict depending on who was writing and when. I've been transparent about that in the book. Where sources disagreed, I went with the legal record. Where the evidence is silent, I've left it silent.
But the thing that struck me most wasn't the research challenge. It was the pattern. These cases are separated by decades, by geography, by motive, by method - and yet the architecture is almost always the same. Someone prepares food or drink for someone who loves them. The victim consumes it without suspicion. The symptoms are mistaken for illness. And the person responsible is quite often the one standing by the bedside, looking concerned.
I wrote about that pattern at the end of the Caroline Grills chapter - a woman who poisoned her relatives with thallium in 1950s Sydney — and found myself drawing a direct line to Erin Patterson, the death cap mushroom murderer, seventy years later. Different poison. Different era. Same kitchen. Same betrayal. It felt like the book had come full circle, back to where Fatal Lunch began.
True Crime Verdict Files: Volume 1 is coming soon - I'll share the release date as soon as it's locked in. It's the first volume in the series, with more to follow.
If you'd like to know when it drops, I send occasional updates to my mailing list - no spam, no clutter, just the work. You'll also get a free bonus chapter: a fully researched thirteenth poisoner case that didn't make it into the book.
Sign up here: www.cherylwarrenauthor.com/bonus
Thanks for reading. And thanks, as always, for the support you've given Fatal Lunch. It means more than you know.
Cheryl