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.
